Reference directory

Title Unearthing Techno-Ecology - On the Possibility of a Technical Media Philosophy of Ecology
Author(s) Tim Barker and Conor McKeown
Year 2015
Extract Studies of media and ecology are often reduced to questions of representation: understanding the cultural mediation of nature means looking to screen based content. However, given recent work in materialist media studies from Doug Kahn, Lisa Parks and Eugene Thacker in particular, a new possibility comes into view.

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Title The Wretched of the Screen
Author(s) Hito Steyerl
Year 2012
Extract Hito Steyerl's essays in this book are a sort of reconnaissance mission, a cartography in the mak- ing of the wasteland of the frozen imagination, but also a cartography of the emerging new sensibility. From this cartography we will know where to move forward to discover a new form of activity that must take the place of art, of politics and of therapy, and that must mix these three different forms into a pro- cess of reactivating sensibility, so that humankind may become capable of recognizing itself again.

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Title HYPEROBJECTS
Author(s) Timothy Morton
Year 2013
Extract A hyperobject could be the very long-lasting product of direct human manufacture, such as Styrofoam or plastic bags, or the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism. Hyperobjects, then, are "hyper" in relation to some other entity, whether they are directly manufactured by humans or not.

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Title Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water
Author(s) Astrida Neimanis
Year 2012
Extract "Hydrofeminism: or on Becoming a Body of Water" was published in "Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice", eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. "Bodies of Water, Human Rights and the Hydrocommons" was published in Topia 21, Spring 2009.

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Title The Stack - On Software and Sovereignty
Author(s) Benjamin H. Bratton,
Year 2015
Extract This book is both technical and theoretical. It is unapologetically interdisciplinary in its perspective and its project; it is a work of political philosophy, and architectural theory, and software studies, and even science fiction. It draws links between technologies, places, processes, and cultures that may exist at different scales but which are also deeply interrelated.

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Title Invisible Cities
Author(s) Italo Calvino
Year 1972
Extract Kublai Khan ekes not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expedi- tions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening 10 the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity Ihan he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.

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Title The Return of the Real
Author(s) Hal Foster
Year 1996
Extract A primary concern of this book, then, is the coordination of diachronic (or historical) and synchronic (or social) axes in art and theory. Out of this concern come the two notions that govern the stories that I tell (in chapters 1 and 7 in particular). The first is the notion of parallax, which involves the appar- ent displacement of an object caused by the actual movement of its observer.

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Title Diary of a Space Zucchini
Author(s) Don Pettit
Year 2012
Extract I sprouted, thrust into this world without anyone consulting me. I am not one of the beautiful; I am not one that by any other name instills flutters in the human heart. I am the kind that makes little boys gag at the dinner table thus being sent to bed without their dessert. I am utilitarian, hearty vegetative matter that can thrive under harsh conditions. I am zucchini - and I am in space.

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Title In Defense of the Poor Image
Author(s) Hito Steyerl
Year 2009
Extract The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

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Title A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Author(s) John P. Barlow
Year 1996
Extract We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

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Title Techno-Ecologies - in New Formations, editorial
Author(s) James Donald and Erica Carter
Year 1989
Extract It has been part of the distinctive project of New Formations to try to understand the cultural forms and lived relations of a world moulded and defined by the accelerating rhythms of technological change, without falling into the euphoria or despair that haunts so many accounts of the 'postmodern condition'.

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Title Vibrant Matter - A Political Ecology of Things
Author(s) Jane Bennett
Year 2010
Extract A dead cat, some oak pollen, and a stick of wood stopped me in my tracks. But so did the plastic glove and the bottle cap: thing-power arises from bodies inorganic as well as organic. In support of this conention, Manuel De Landa notes how even inorganic matter can "self-organize":

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Title Lucius Burckhardt Writings. Rethinking Man-made Environments
Editors Jesko Fezer · Martin Schmitz
Year 2012
Extract The Knights of the Holy Spirit presented Louis XV with a golden cross, studded with diamonds. Diamonds were just what the king was after. He had them removed from the cross and set into the hilt of his sword. When Napoleon came to power, he found this sword among the crown jewels. He liked the diamonds but not the style of the sword. A goldsmith worked a new sword, and set the old diamonds into its hilt. After the Battle of Trafalgar, this sword was given to the Duke of Wellington. To the delight of his wife, Wellington also had the diamonds reworked, this time as a necklace.

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