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Humanities

“Aboard ship! ye philosophers!”
“Aboard ship! ye philosophers!”

Wu Yi

The Sea as Mirror

A genealogy of philosophy in the form of a geology of the diluvial, so to speak. I’ve asked: how does the ocean, as a physical presence, a dynamic relationship, and an unsettling imaginary, challenge and reinvent philosophy as it understands itself to be and defines itself against? The method I’ve hitherto practiced is one simple and well-suited to the purpose: to de-sublimate and re-sublimate the variously over-sublimated layer of sense in philosophy with one’s own being, flesh and blood, and...
  • the sea
  • history of philosophy
  • literary studies
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Current Texts
Humanity is a metahuman concept.

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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  • realism
  • postmodernism
  • artistic practice
  • re-enactment
  • transhumanism
  • art theory

 

Between Segregation, Cooperation, and Craziness
Between Segregation, Cooperation, and Craziness

Sebastian Vehlken

Ghetto Blasts

Even if it became popular in the context of the algorithmitization of the behavior of social insects, the birthplace of the term Swarm Intelligence is in robotics. Even engineers are subject to discourse dynamics: When Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang gave a short presentation on Cellular Robots at a NATO robotics workshop in 1988, that is, on “groups of robots that could work like cells of an organism to assemble more complex parts,” commentators allegedly demanded a buzzword “to describe...
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  • Computer graphics
  • swarm intelligence
  • interdisciplinarity
  • interface
  • robot
Current Texts

Andreas L. Hofbauer

The yoke of being, noteworthy dis-position

It wasn’t nature and its dangers that forced domestication and enabled the economic shrine. Temple and funerary cult, sacrifice and distribution of the meat—for Homer all sacrificial animals were still hieria, holy creatures—and the containment of wildness led to symbolic and socio-cultural change, which became the vector and motor of sedentary, food-producing communities. It wasn’t sheep, goats, or cattle that were domesticated first; it was the zoon logon echon itself that bowed to the self-created yoke of the cult. Why, we don’t know. Beyond this it’s important that unlike plants only very few species of animal can be domesticated, and that this shouldn’t be confused with taming. Economic significance develops as an epiphenomenon. It transforms from possible human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to the distribution of meat in early “Greek” antiquity, then to the obeloi (skewers with varying amounts of meat, as tokens for the priests’ or judges’ portion; even...

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  • money
  • ethnology
  • economization
  • anthropology