There’s a 2004 video interview of Katherine Hayles conducted by Arthur Kroker for C-Theory, where she discusses How We Became Posthuman, Writing Machines, and My Mother was a Computer. Her 1999 book traces the posthuman back to the beginnings of computers and cybernetics. Considered differently though, posthuman theory as we encounter it gets some start […]
Category: Posthumanism
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posthuman computer vision
As I have been writing (albeit infrequently) here, my current interest is with the concept of “posthuman computer vision.” It is apparently a term that is not in wide use. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad news for me from a rhetorical perspective. Obviously computer vision has been a field of research for […]
There are no categorical imperatives requiring the use of social media in any way. I.e., we are not under any universal obligation to use social media. We should probably start there. At the other end of the spectrum, I don’t believe it is controversial to assert that social media platforms (and their corporate owners) seek […]
Today there is little need to make a specific reference for the first term in this list. We are in the midst of an impeachment trial over an attempted insurrection. More locally, in my class, we are in the midst of How We Became Posthuman and N. Katherine Hayles’ historical investigation of how we got […]
This is the second in a series of posts about Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman aimed primarily at my students this semester, and this one focuses on chapter three, which traces the Macy Cybernetics Conferences in the 50s and 60s and discusses, among other things, the challenges of observation and the “man in the […]
n.b. I’m teaching a course on media theories and approaches this semester, and this post is, in part, designed for them. Right now, we are reading N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman. This post focuses on Chapter 2. Hayles straightforwardly announces the thesis for this chapter, writing “The contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as […]
There has been a recent flare up of this conversation recently, following an RSA panel on the subject. Jim Brown offers an account of the panel here as well as an earlier post on the matter. Ian Bogost has two posts in response as well. Not for nothing, but here's a post I wrote a […]
One useful thing at HGI for me is playing some new games (new for me anyway). Yesterday I played Passage and Flower. I've inserted a couple videos about the games below. People like to say you need to play Passage before you read about it (it takes about 5 minutes to play), so if you […]
I'm back on readings for my graduate course on Digital Research and Pedagogy: this week, Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual. Massumi's text stirs mixed responses, I think. It is a hard text to swallow for many reasons. For example, he writes It is meaningless to interrogate the relation of the human to the nonhuman […]
I apologize for not being able to avoid the militaristic pun, but it is actually quite appropriate for the hierarchical, even hylomorphic structures we often apply in first-year composition. Thanks to the conversation on my last post, we were able to come around to the significant recognition that the issue of the role of digital […]
Alex Reid 