anzbau's

This space is like a scrapbook to collect an assortment of notes, images and quotes to do with the readings on digital cultures, a module I am currently doing on MSc in E-learning (Uni of Edinburgh).

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'Perambulation stimulates the imagination'
(William Boyd).

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The single-minded commitment to relationality makes it possible to explore strange and heterogenous links and follow surprising actors to equally surprising places. It highlights practices offlimits and uninteresting to non-semiotic approaches. It does this by eroding distinctions in kind, ontological distinctions. In short, the toolkit can be understood as a powerful set of devices for levelling divisions usually taken to be foundational. These are demoted and treated as the effect of translations. Human and non-human, meaning and materiality, big and small, macro and micro, social and technical, nature and culture - these are just some of the dualisms undone by the relationality. Obviously this posthumanism is intellectually radical and often controversial.

Permalink Through what narrative and textual strategies might we materialise the figuration of rhizomANTically becoming-cyborg as crabgrass in the manicured lawn of formal education? From: Gough, N. (2004) RhizomANTically Becoming-Cyborg: Performing Human Pedagogies. Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2004, pp. 253-265.
Permalink Donna Haraway’s Cat’s Cradle as a metaphor for the network idea.
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… my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality …

Permalink David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) writes about Deleuze’s philosphy of becoming in a system theory framework. Deleuze wants to get rid of the Platonic ‘identity’ and replace it with ‘difference’. Deleuze wants to introduce change and complexity as basic subjects in philosophy, where Plato omitted to introduce change and complexity in his (and our) philosophy.I have a feeling that Deleuze’s philosophy is not another weird and weltfremd French philosophy, but that it is worth reading. From: http://connectiv.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/deleuze-and-abundant-information-change11/
Permalink This makes me think of the night sky. We humans look at the panoply of stars, and we select a few with which to structure constellations, pictures and stories. Because from our vantage point the stars seem to shift so slowly — in our lifetimes hardly at all — then we are seduced into thinking that our pictures and stories are eternal. Modern astro-physics has taught us better. The rhizome of the universe is shifting at incredible speeds constantly, and eventually our treasured stories and pictures will no longer map well to reality. The stars will have moved. The challenge of the rhizome is to look afresh at those stars and to create new stories and new pictures. That’s what the rhizome does. From: http://idst-2215.blogspot.com/2011/11/change11-defining-rhizome.html
Permalink Reductionism wants to disentangle the single noodle of my life, stretch it out on an examination tray, name and number the parts, establish the tidy sequences of cause and effect, and finally declare that it understands me. And here’s the thing: it will understand a great deal about me that could not have been understood so easily while I was tangled up in the plate of spaghetti. But it will also lose a great deal, if not most, of the contours, the arcs, the twists and turns, the connections and intersections, the forces and counterforces that truly make my life interesting to me, if not to others. Stretched out on the examination table, washed clean of sauce, separated from all the other noodles, and allowed to harden, the noodle of my life will be reduced to the bare facts. Boring. Reductionism reveals nicely what about me is like other spaghetti noodles, but it hardly captures the unique contours that make me interesting, or me. From: http://idst-2215.blogspot.com/2011/11/change11-defining-rhizome.html
Permalink The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Permalink What is needed is a model of knowledge acquisition that accounts for socially constructed, negotiated knowledge. In such a model, the community is not the path to understanding or accessing the curriculum; rather, the community is the curriculum. In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions. From: Cormier, D. 2008. Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum. Innovate 4 (5).http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=550
Permalink In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target. From: Cormier, D. 2008. Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum. Innovate 4 (5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=550
Permalink “Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope…now they have perfected the cinecamera to penetrate more deeply into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten.” Dziga Vertov 
Permalink “I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I coordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.” Quoted in John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books, 1972, ISBN 978-0140135152
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[Stelarc, Haraway] outline a more systemic and networked model of human-nonhuman relations, in which prostheses are seen as intrinsic parts of the human body. In this view, technology is first of all an environment, or a network of forces and relations, rather than just an external prop.

Permalink We have become creatures that construct tools, artefacts and machines. For me the body has always been a prosthetic body. Ever since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators. We’ve always been augmented by our instruments, our technologies. Technology is what constructs our humanity; the trajectory of technology is what has propelled human developments. I’ve never seen the body as purely biological, so to consider technology as a kind of alien other that happens upon us at the end of the millennium is rather simplistic. From an interview with Stelarc @ http://www.relentlessenergy.com/features/we-are-cyborgs.html
Permalink We’ve been simultaneously zombies and cyborgs; we’ve never really had a mind of our own and we’ve never been purely biological entities. We have a fear of the zombie and an anxiety of the cyborg, but really it’s a fear of what we’ve always been and what we have already become. From: http://www.relentlessenergy.com/features/we-are-cyborgs.html