Earth in Eclipse - David Abram (2003).pdf (original) (raw)

Ksenia Fedorova, Marc Barasch, Mission to Earth: Terrestrial Proprioception and the Cyber-Sublime

Azimuth (VI), nr. 12, "Technology and the Sublime", ed. by Giulia Rispoli and Christoph Rosol, 2018

Our sense of the self and its relation to its surroundings is being increasingly reshaped by telematic prostheses that expand our felt sense of inhabiting and interacting with the wider environment. Geotagging, Google Earth, biomapping, telepresence, augmented reality (AR), and distributed intelligence are creating new locative sense-perceptions, unprecedented narratives, and new feelings (and praxes) of agency-at-a-distance in the extended environment. The paper considers methods (and effects) of enhancing connectivity and efficacy between a person and his/her surroundings via mapping techniques, storytelling, and social and artistic projects using telecommunication and locative media. Roy Ascott’s question Is there love in the telematic embrace? (1990) underpins others: How might new media platforms potentiate the creative force of the imaginal to produce a measurable change in the world? Can locative media deepen our sense of embeddedness, recreating those ancient reality-maps where selfhood was co-extensive with community and Nature? Might this spur us to address today’s urgent social and ecological challenges? Or will these media further abstract our actual relatedness to the environment, narrowing it to more quantifiable and qualifiable instrumental operations?

THE INTERNET IS NOT A RIVER: SPACE, MOVEMENT & PERSONHOOD IN A WIRED WORLD

second draft. forthcoming chapter in 'Click & Kin: Transnational Identity and Quick Media', eds May Friedman & Silvia Schultermandl. This chapter discusses recent shifts toward 'avatar' online identities from the lens of post-humanist media theory, speculative materialism, cybernetics, and perspectivist multi-naturalism. At its least ambitious, it interrogates qualitative losses in possibilities of personhood, movement and knowledge brought about by quantitative increases in travel, communication, and information technology, and discusses problems associated with the projection of disembodied persons in a simple representational system I term the avatarsphere. Situating this problem within the broader 'ecological error' (Bateson) of node-driven, navigational cartography, I present oppositional stories of non-representational wayfaring (Ingold) in the complex river systems of the Amazon. But my investigation of human-object relations asks broader ontological questions. In theorizing technologically mediated human relationships, I avoid the mistake of presenting a unidimensional world with one kind of human, one kind of technology, and one class of pre-existing non-human objects – a thing sometimes called 'nature' that is either revealed or veiled to human perception. Airplanes, the Internet and credit cards are simply objects created by humans; dominant as they have become in the way humans relate to the world and each other, they reflect as much as they shape a set of specific worldviews articulated by specific humans. Here, I am interested in the possibilities that are offered but also those that are not offered by specific human worldviews. As such, I am preoccupied with the open-ended possibilities about what is real and how to live in the world that are no longer permitted once most of humanity is recruited into a particular ontological regime; in this case that of the avatarshpere. The question posed here is not what kind of 'nature' is the avatarshpere, but what are all the other kinds of natures we do not live in as a result?"

The myth of the Digital Earth between fragmentation and wholeness

2014

Daring predictions of the proximate future can establish shared discursive frameworks, mobilize capital, and steer complex processes. Among the prophetic visions that encouraged and accompanied the development of new communication technologies was the “Digital Earth,” described in a 1998 speech by Al Gore as a high-resolution representation of the planet to share and analyze detailed information about its state. This article traces a genealogy of the Digital Earth as a techno-scientific myth, locating it in a constellation of media futures, arguing that a common subtext of these envisionments consists of a dream of wholeness, an afflatus to overcome perceived fragmentation among humans, and between humans and the Earth.

Inhabiting Digital Worlds. Place, Nearness, Distance

Digital Culture. What's Next? (eds. Armando Rabaça; Bruno Gil; Isabel Clara Neves), 2023

The significance of notions such as digital worlds and spaces remains vague despite their common use in digital humanities, and the extent to which these are bound up with our relation to place and the world is often disregarded. The aim of this article is to clarify the philosophical underpinnings of these concepts, identify the problematic aspects of our relation to digital technologies, and explore the possibility of developing a topological reflection on our being in digital environments. In drawing from the 20th-century German thinker Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of place and technology, the article problematizes the modern conception of the world as a mere spatial network and outlines the phenomenological boundaries of digital spaces. By giving particular attention to explaining the ontological and hermeneutic meaning of the notion of distance, the article elucidates the interplay between nearness and remoteness and arrives at three correlated meanings of distance.