Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Rodchenko names a new kind of emotionally affective object: the comradely object of socialist modernity. Unlike the commodities he encounters on his visit to capitalist Paris, which elicit a possessive relation that makes the objects into “slaves,” things made in the socialist East will actively promote egalitarian socialist culture. They will replace the pleasure of…
I recently turned in two projects for a grad school class called Emerging Media, which is a graduate seminar that focuses on emerging technological advancements as they relate to the Communication Design industry and design-related fields. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the “emerging technologies” the instructor introduced the class to was generative AI and for…
“The choice, as James Cone insists, is that God must be Black; without that commitment, the universal story is not possible, because Whiteness fails to express solidarity with all – and God’s Blackness is about solidarity. For Cone, ‘The blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition, God’s own condition.’ Whiteness, instead,…
“Whisper whisper whisper.” –Anonymous ASMRtist old pond– frog jumps in. Plop! –Matsuo Bashô “In Whitehead’s analysis of an occasion of experience, the “category of transmutation” (PR 63) describes how the felt qualities of past events are fused into a new event with the consummatory satisfaction of an emergent pervasive aesthetic quality. […] Whitehead’s “satisfaction” is identified…
“Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.” –Whitehead, Process and Reality “An exemplar can exemplify only some of its properties. It brings those properties to the fore by marginalizing, downplaying, or ignoring other…
“Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment,…
“The adoption of fixed settlements also created problems with regard to the status of women. When a hunter-gatherer people took up fixed settlement, in actual practice it pursued its livelihood through fishing or simple cultivation and herding, but it preserved the lifestyle that had existed in the hunter-gatherer phase. In sum, a division of labor…
“All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it… The great stroke of luck for the military class’s terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don’t recognize the militarized part of their identity.” –Paul Virilio, Pure War. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Semiotext(e), 1983. p. 18 We normally don’t think about Paul Virilio while…
Recently, for a grad school class, we were asked to write an essay on a “design pioneer” of our choice for the first half of the summer session. For the second half, the class was asked to create a visual project based on the designer we had chosen. I chose British designer, writer, thinker, and…
This is the introduction to a paper on William Morris I am writing for a MFA class, the rough draft of which I recently submitted. Introduction As generative AI floods our screens with astonishingly strange deepfakes and algorithms continue to commodify creativity, a quiet rebellion has been blooming: Gen Z “Luddites” ditch smartphones for flip…