----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
figures like Alvin Lucier's physics mentor Edmond Dewan. And I get the core point about the natural history of media, and the ways in which what gets called "technology" as a human endeavor, is necessarily embedded in these natural strata -- geophysical energy, electromagnetic forces, and so on.
Another strategy is to shift to scale-independence when considering EM radiation -- or, more precisely, the idea that EM energy underlies all scales of 'reality' as it is perceived by our body-systems as well as by all the 'hearing', 'seeing' and other sensory instrumentation that we deploy to provide us information about reality that our bodies cannot directly sense. Another words, the nature of reality as we can model it here in words is provided by EM radiation. And, ultimately, it is that narrow band of EM radiation that we can directly perceive through which we determine our complete impression of reality -- analog signals (energy) received by our embodied configuration of energized matter.
Furthermore, we are comprised by the fields and flows through which we perceive: talk about the fish's conception of water!
Technology may be framed as an applied re-configuration of energy (EM) flow -- applied by humans who are themselves re-configurations of energy flows that Life has 'imposed' on the cosmos.
As I explore in my dissertation, "The Regime of Amplification", the re-configurations are essentially the application of evolved protocols that direct EM (energy) flows. From this point of view, widely divergent 'systems' -- bio-systems, techno-social systems, self-organizing systems, geo-systems -- may be more powerfully comprehended in their continuity with wider phenomena (their complete embeddedness to all that surrounds them). No phenomena is singular or unitary except by abstraction.
Consider asking the question, from an old Cartesian pov: Where in the universe is a 'space' that is not 'infused' with electromagnetic energy, or is not comprised of EM energy?
The answer is a null set: and this is what unifies all the chapters in Douglas' book ...
Cheers, John -- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD taking Manhattan as Berlin isn't possible right now http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
