Tomorrow I return to New York to visit family and see two lectures, “Uncomputable,” by Taeyoon Choi and Alexander Galloway. I like Galloway’s thoughts about data- // Data comes from the Latin dare, meaning to give. But it’s the form that’s most interesting. First of all, it’s in the neuter plural, so it refers to “things.” Second, data is a […]
These days I keep thinking that the goal of psychiatry shouldn’t be to know the mind, but to nurture it. About how important that distinction is. Despite the seeming connection to my research, I don’t use the work of N. Katherine Hayles, most because I think there’s immanent humanism in her “posthuman.”This is the same […]
Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk at the Human Futures and Intelligent Machines summit at Virginia Tech. Some slides, in progress, below: Check out the program: http://o-culus.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Human-Futures-and-Intelligent-Machines-Agenda1.pdf and a link to the livestream: https://virginiatech.zoom.us/my/tech4humanity Here’s an excerpt from an essay I worked on last summer (currently still in an embryonic stage..) which includes some of the ideas […]
Today is my birthday. It’s also my brother’s birthday (we’re twins) and my cat’s. She’s 2. I am 29. I thought a little about getting older today. All I have to say is that I’m happier at age 29 than I was at 19, but probably not happier than when I was 9. When I […]
Recently I’ve discovered some overlaps between various works of contemporary psychedelic scholarship. Over the summer I started reading Nicolas Langlitz’s book Neuropsychedelia and came across the work of Chris Letheby not long after (when he himself reached out to me after an introduction I made on a grad student listserv… +1 for email networking). Letheby co-authored a philosophical paper […]
In November, I’m presenting a paper tentatively titled “The Electric Kool-Aid Turing Test” at this conference in Brighton, England. My argument is that emerging paradigms in research on the use of psychedelic drugs as psychotherapeutic tools problematize machine learning. To be more specific: the recent resurgence of psychedelic drug research has, generally, privileged quantitative and empirical […]
Re-reading Walter Benjamin’s “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction” — good to remember this, from the epilogue, as fascist tendencies are (again) emergent: “The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses […]
Putting the finishing touches on my Fall 2017 syllabus. I teach an overview of twentieth century comparative literature, with some forays into art history and media theory. An overarching theme of the course is the impact of technology on art and lit in the twentieth century. Our third and final unit specifically focuses on digital culture. Here are the […]
“Everybody keeps talking about how the world is ending, but I see it differently” — Circuit des Yeux 2016 was good to me, and I am glad it’s 2017. This will be a great year, I can feel it.
My doctoral program has released the call for papers for its annual conference — see below: *** Across disciplinary boundaries, the 2017 ASPECT graduate conference seeks to address articulations of aesthetics, politics, and ethics within contested temporalities. Graduate students of any level and irrespective of disciplinary affiliation are encouraged to submit abstracts of approximately 300 words based on […]
