Synthesis

and

Hi Yanjun, Shomit, Ri, 

Yanjun’s already seen this table portal project.

Here’s the video of a Portals  project called Table of Content

collaboration between TML and Synthesis  2014-15

The key is that we focus on mating furniture and objects on the table and stay away from video-conferencing.   It’s hard, but how about we try to avoid representing people telematically, at least not use video.    Suren, Seth and I are pursuing a stream on alternatives to ocularcentric thought and technology.  A profound reason is that the heavier the tech we throw into representing people telematically, the more people tend to be glassed-off from one another, resorting to cliche expressions.   Less can be more.

So, let's focus on objects that "exist in two places at once" serving as boundary objects* between not only locations but cultures.

Garrett was a principal member of the team on the Synthesis side, with Evan Montpellier in TML / Montreal.  ( Byron was one of the heroic fellow travellers :)

In this light, Yanjun’ss work with the cafe and our sociological study with Christy take on extra significance.    With Ri and Shomit, let’s strongly pursue the enchantment and theater of objects, with the added dimension of telematic mates, remote doppelgänger glasses, plates, foods and flavors and aromas.

There were many directions and questions left unexplored.   It’d be nice to build "on the shoulders of giants” and get a bit further with present techniques.

Xin We

*   Susan Leigh Star famously introduced this as a more subtle and supple concept in

Xin Wei

NYTimes: Restoring Forests Could Help Put a Brake on Global Warming

[A study led by researchers at ETH Zurich, suggests that] … the planet could support nearly 2.5 billion additional acres of forest without shrinking our cities and farms, and that those additional trees, when they mature, could store a whole lot of the extra carbon — 200 gigatons of carbon, to be precise — generated by industrial activity over the last 150 years.

A handful of countries could make a very big difference. The researchers found that Russia could restore 373 million acres, or 151 million hectares, of forest. That was followed by the United States, with 255 million acres and Canada with 193 million acres.Other large countries like Australia, Brazil and China also have large areas suitable for forest restoration.

( from European Graduate School )

Michel Serres, Ph.D., is a philosopher specialized in epistemology, a professor as well as a writer. He was born on September 1st 1930 in Agen, in the Lot-et-Garonne region in France. Son of a farmer, he first studied at a naval school in 1949. He studied at the prestigious École normale supérieure, starting in 1952 where he also passed in aggregation in philosophy 1955 in Paris. However, from 1956 to 1958 her served in the French navy, even participating in the re-opening of the Suez canal as well as in the Algerian war. Serres is not only an elected member of the prestigious French Academy (March 29th 1990) but he has also received France’s highest decoration, the National Order of the Legion of Honour.

In 1968 Serres defended his dissertation and was granted his doctorate as a result. He went on to teach University-level philosophy in Clermont-Ferrand where he became a friend of Michel Foucault and Jules Vuillemin.

At that time Foucault and him regularly work together on problems that would result in Foucault’s master piece The Order of Things : An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.

After that, he also taught at Vincennes, Paris I (from 1969 on) and Stanford University (from 1984 on) as professor of the history of science. His research not only focuses on the history of science but he is particularly interested in the possible links and interdisciplinarity between so-called hard sciences and social sciences. In fact, he has been instrumental in the popularization of scientific knowledge.

In his book The Parasite (1980 ; Eng. Trans. 2007) Serres wants to remind us how human relations are to society the same as that of the parasite to the host body. The point is that by being a parasite even minority groups can become play a big role in public dialogue.

For example, they can bring the kind of diversity and complexity essential to human life and thought.

Genesis (1982 ; Eng. Trans. 1997) is Michel Serres’s attempt to think outside metaphysical categories such as unity and rational order. He wants to make us hear the « noise, » the « sound and the fury, » that actually are in the background of life and thought. The argument is that although philosophy has been essential to the conception of laws of logic and reason, which themselves have been key to our understanding of ourselves and our universe, one of the most pressing tasks of thought today is to acknowledge that multiplicity and not unity is the order of the day.

Such plurality cannot really be thought, but perhaps it can still be sensed, felt, and heard beneath the illusion of rational order imposed by civilization. Serres gives us here a critique of traditional and contemporary models in social theory as a call for the rebirth of philosophy as the art of thinking the unthinkable.

In Five Senses : A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (1985 ; Eng. Trans. 2009) Professor Serres warns us that the fundamental lessons we must learn from the senses have been marginalized by the scientific age. Indeed, the metaphysical and philosophical systems of the latter have taken over our five senses through the domination of language and the information revolution.

This book is an exploration of the detrimental consequences of such powerful downplaying of the five senses in the history of philosophy of the West. By doing a history of human perceptions he writes in favor of empiricism and against the Cartesian tradition.

He does this by demonstrating the sterility of systems of knowledge separated from the body. Yet data today is more important than sense perception.

Serres makes the point even more strongly by asking the rhetorical question : “What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could ?”

More detailed overview  of iStage attached and in Dropbox.

Also in

Thanks Luke, It’s now in Synthesis/equipment/Space 3.0

+ 

In Great Yarmouth, txOom 2002

(a daughter of my tgarden, tg2001, and grandaunt to sc :)

trapeze-artist-aides strapped visitors of all ages and shapes into harnesses.

they were slung into the air…some laughing like crazy

while we beamed the data from accelerometers sewn into their translucent tails 

to max+nato/jitter+supercollider 

+ 

circa 1990 I saw Project Bandaloop do wonderful aerial work back near Capp Street Theater int he Mission in SF 

during the Street Performance festivals

+ 

there were lots of aerial dance works since there were so many climbers in SF who were also dancers when they weren’t up in the Sierras .

but one of my friends was part of the support team at the tragedy with Sankai Juku  in Seattle a few years before…

+  Einsteins Dream overhead cam looking down 23 feet onto the sand

with  visitors wading as if underwater through the projected ripples to the umbrella:

Thanks Beth for putting together the folders already in Googledrive.

Here’s a snapshot of my own refraction of what I heard and saw…I try to sketch

an aspirational project in anexact terms (to borrow from Deleuze), to see if any of this

resonates, before re-angling and digging deeper….

Of course we will sift together and refine concepts and vocabularies, and 

add contextualizing references  as we sort out different goals and audiences, 

and who pitches what to whom.   I think it is healthy to expect a few distinct 

sets of goals that will have incommensurate requirements on how to navigate toward them…

eg academic studies (amenable to research agencies of states), 

versus practical work (amenable to development funds / ngo's).

Different epistemic cultures / discourse communities will expect different archives and discursive logics.