Intercultural Approaches between Europe and China via Art? -/- Two landscapes from different cultures, Europe and China, that are both considered masterpieces are the focus of a study by Martina Sauer. To what extent are they each perceived as beautiful? Can the differences in aesthetic understanding tell us something about the respective cultures? Do the results have the potential to contribute to intercultural rapprochement between Europe and China? The possibility that these ideas can be fruitful for intercultural connections and understanding, (...) and for a re-evaluation of the interaction between humans and nature, is considered and analysed using the tools and theory of vitality semiotics (VS). -/- The task is examined by taking up premises from the philosophy of emotions by Sabine A. Döring, from the art history by Heinrich Wölfflin, from the infant research by Daniel N. Stern and from the empirical research in neuroscience on vitality forms by the research group around Giacomo Rizzolatti. -/- Cf. Martina Sauer, Vitality Semiotics: The Ever Beautiful and Its Potential for an Intercultural Approach: In Atmospheric Design and Everyday Aesthetics, edited by David Brubaker & Zhuofei Wang [Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 12, 2024]: 1-11. (shrink)

The phenomenology of atmospheres is recently gaining attention in debates on situated affectivity. Atmospheres are defined as holistic affective qualities of situations that integrate disparate affective forces into an identifiable and unitary gestalt. They point to a blurred, pathic, relational, and pre-individual form of experience which has been described in terms of ecological affordances. Despite its relevance in diverse areas of research such as architecture, phenomenological psychiatry and aesthetics, a thorough analysis of the phenomena of affective atmospheres from an enactive-ecological (...) perspective is missing in the literature. This article aims at clarifying how and to what extent affective atmospheres can be accommodated into ecological-enactive understandings of the environment in terms of affordances. To do so, I review four perspectives on ecological affordances – the gibsonian account, the relational account, affective affordances, and the Skill Intentionality Framework (SIF) – and contrast them with the ontological and epistemológical principles that ground the phenomenology of atmospheres. I argue that only the field perspective developed in SIF is compatible with the phenomenology of atmospheres. From this perspective, affective atmospheres can be understood as phenomenological counterparts of context sensitivity, that is, as the holistic and pathic background feelings that make certain affordances more salient than others. As a conclusion, the analysis in this article shows the potential of the phenomenology of atmospheres to enrich the ecological-enactive cognition framework. It also highlights the opportunity to construct a situated understanding of affectivity that is informed by phenomenological perspectives. (shrink)

From Traditional Sports and Games (TSG) we have not only learned different ways of living time as well as inhabit space and a particular mode of practicing sports and games from distinct cultures, but also promoting universal dialog among people. TSG presents sustainable and ecological references for living needed even before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nowadays, environmentally friendly policies and production methods must be taken more seriously. TSG may reveal a path to sustainable development, considering our corporeality and (...) cultural diversity. TSG are expressions of human groups that historically reproduce their way of life-based on modes of social cooperation and specific forms of relationship with nature, traditionally characterized by sustained environmental management. The purpose of this article is to discuss how TSG promotes intercultural dialog with a focus on sustainability, and how it empowers people and creates equality among its players. We understand that TSG can break socio-cultural barriers. For this study, we considered data from a Brazilian experience of TSG’s Festival held at a public school in the city of São Paulo (Brazil), organized in collaboration with our study group. Data consists of observations recorded in pictures and films during the processes of organization, preparation, implementation, and evaluation of a TSG Festival, held in a public school in São Paulo, Brazil from the years of 2017 and 2018, with the participation of 800 students from the first to the ninth grade of elementary school, aged between 7 and 17 years. The first step in our analysis is taken from a dynamic called “Talking Circles,” where researchers registered dialog about experiences and used specific literature about TSG, from a philosophical perspective. The team and students from our study group that organized these events were invited to participate in four different Talking Circles. Approximately 20 people participated in each one of these meetings. Recurrences that emerged from these Talking Circles are presented in the results and explored afterward. What does this experience–from bodies in movement, artistic or sporting, or both–teach about intercultural dialog and empowerment? Such gestures indicate a cultural heritage and corporeal wisdom that allows humans to face new encounters and understanding in peace, recognizing humanity common to all of us, regardless of our origins. Ethical and aesthetical results of such dialog reveal possibilities to be explored in our relationship with different cultures and the environment, providing points of sustainable development through TSG. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

Education ecology is a new crossover research field in network age. Its research content can be either microscopic classroom teaching or macro educational ecology research on teaching and culture. The university music classroom is a special kind of ecology. The reason why this is special is that compared to natural ecology, the classroom ecology of university music has a unique relationship between the environment and the subject. The classroom is ecological and becomes the logical prerequisite (...) for ecological research in the classroom. In the Internet age, as the most advanced teaching medium, it has become the need for the development of the new era. The Internet era has broadened the channels and scope of people's access to information and greatly enriched the information resources. The design of teacher's music teaching should have sustainable development. It is no longer a pursuit of only the answer. It must consider the students' multiple ways of learning and must leave room for students to practice independently. Guides help students continue to explore musical arts. This article mainly conveys the innovation of the traditional teaching “learning” and “learning” dichotomy to form an interactive and harmonious classroom ecosystem. The interaction between various factors has handled according to the principles of educational ecology, combined with the development of network technology and Cultivate students' enthusiasm for learning, self-study ability and practical ability, to improve the effectiveness of university music teaching. (shrink)

A fact of life for farmers, hunter-gatherers, and fishermen in the rural parts of the world are that crops fail, wild resources become scarce, and winds discourage fishing. In this article we approach subsistence risk from the perspective of "coexistence thinking," the simultaneous application of natural and supernatural causal models to explain subsistence success and failure. In southwestern Madagascar, the ecological world is characterized by extreme variability and unpredictability, and the cosmological world is characterized by anxiety about supernatural dangers. Ecological (...) and cosmological causes seem to point to different risk minimizing strategies: to avoid losses from drought, flood, or heavy winds, one should diversify activities and be flexible; but to avoid losses caused by disrespected spirits one should narrow one's range of behaviors to follow the code of taboos and offerings. We address this paradox by investigating whether southwestern Malagasy understand natural and supernatural causes as occupying separate, contradictory explanatory systems (target dependence), whether they make no categorical distinction between natural and supernatural forces and combine them within a single explanatory system (synthetic thinking), or whether they have separate natural and supernatural categories of causes that are integrated into one explanatory system so that supernatural forces drive natural forces (integrative thinking). Results from three field studies suggest that (a) informants explain why crops, prey, and market activities succeed or fail with reference to natural causal forces like rainfall and pests, (b) they explain why individual persons experience success or failure primarily with supernatural factors like God and ancestors, and (c) they understand supernatural forces as driving natural forces, so that ecology and cosmology represent distinct sets of causes within a single explanatory framework. We expect that future cross-cultural analyses may find that this form of "integrative thinking" is common in unpredictable environments and is a cognitive strategy that accompanies economic diversification. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present. A simple example is how an animal can relate to a food source while only sensing a pheromone, or how an agent can relate to beer, while only the refrigerator is directly sensorily present. Certain cases in which something is absent have been characterized by others as requiring ‘higher’ cognition. An example of (...) this is how during the design process architects can let themselves be guided by the future behavior of visitors to an exhibit they are planning. The main question is what the sociomaterial environment and the skilled agent are like, such that they can relate to each other in these ways. We argue that this requires an account of the regularities in the environment. Introducing the notion of general ecological information, we will give an account of these regularities in terms of constraints, information and the form of life or ecological niche. In the first part of the paper, we will introduce the skilled intentionality framework as conceptualizing a special case of an animal’s informational coupling with the environment namely skilled action. We will show how skilled agents can pick up on the regularities in the environment and let their behavior be guided by the practices in the form of life. This conceptual framework is important for radical embodied and enactive cognitive science, because it allows these increasingly influential paradigms to extend their reach to forms of ‘higher’ cognition such as long-term planning and imagination. (shrink)

Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference offers a powerful intervention to the field of climate justice scholarship by addressing a neglected aspect of the field of climate justice, namely systemic racisms. Building on the work of Black feminist theorists, the work develops an ecointersectional approach designed to reveal the depth and complexities of racial climates overlooked even in the environmental justice literature. The book’s conception of ecological indifference underscores the disposition of seeing the environment as a resource for human consumption and enjoyment, (...) a resource that is usable, fungible, disposable, and without intrinsic worth or standing. The many examples in the book offer new insights demonstrating that systemic racisms emerge out of and give rise to environmental degradation; that is, they are often mutually constitutive. The ecointersectional analyses provided throughout the book reveal that ecological indifference and climate injustice are two sides of the same coin. Three distinctive but interrelated domains in which the intersections between systemic racisms and ecological indifference are manifest are identified: (1) differential distribution of harms/benefits due to systemic racisms, (2) racist institutions and practices fueling or causing environmental degradation, and (3) the basic social structures that generate environmental degradation being the same ones that generate systemic oppression of certain groups of people. One of the aims of Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference is to underscore that any effort to protect the environment must also be a fight against systemic racisms and other forms of systemic inequity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ch'an/Zen-Catholic Dialogue Spreads a "Welcome Table" at the 2009 Annual MeetingFrancis V. TisoA retreat program designed by the participants in the ongoing Ch'an/Zen-Catholic Dialogue explored the dialogue of religious experience and the dialogue of life, set amid the redwoods of Guerneville, California. The 28–31 January 2009 meeting was cochaired by the Rev. Heng Sure of the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery and the Institute for World Religions, Berkeley, California, and by (...) Most Rev. John C. Wester, Bishop of Salt Lake City, Utah.Sr. Mary Ann Donovan of the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, led an experience of lectio divina based on John 15:1–17, Jesus's simile of the vine and the branches. Rev. Victoria Austin of the San Francisco Zen Center gave an "encouragement talk," which would typically be delivered to Zen retreatants. She referred to the Gospel passage, noting: "We don't prune the vine because it is dead, but because it has the capacity to be fruitful. We don't purify the mind to get rid of dirt, but to return to the mind's original purity, which is the source of our conscience and is the true life within us." Rev. Jan Chosen Bays of Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon observed that "Vows make our life energy more focused, keeping us from losing purpose and meaning. Vows prune away unnecessary things. When we ask for help with the challenge of being faithful to our vows, we call up and encounter unexpected sources of support and 'grace.' "The Ch'an Buddhist presentation focused on meditation experience, which was described as "recovering the natural state of the mind." Prof. Martin Verhoeven of the Pacific School of Religion pointed out that in meditation "we are returning to the origin, not moving forward to 'gain something.'" Linking ethical engagement with contemplation, he said, "When the mind of a meditator is motivated to act out of genuine compassion, its action is accurate and correct. Action is neither driven nor obstructed by ego or sentiment." These comments resonated with Rev. Heng Sure's presentation on the statement on the environment from the recent Gethsemane III conference "Simple and Sufficient," in which Buddhist and Christian monastics embraced an ecologically valid way of life. Urging the group to notice the connections between contemplation and ethical action, Bishop John C. Wester commented: "This [End Page 145] work embodies mercy by lifting people up; it embodies justice as it arises out of our common humanity."Because of the financial challenges that all three sponsoring institutions are facing, it was decided to conclude formal sponsorship of the Ch'an/Zen-Catholic Dialogue with this meeting. However, participants agreed to work together to reconstitute the dialogue regionally. A steering committee was designated to undertake new logistical arrangements and to draft a narrative of the previous seven years of dialogue for posting on our respective websites. Bishop Wester summarized the convictions of participants, both Buddhist and Catholic, by observing: "It is impossible not to be affected by this experience. Dialogue in this atmosphere has had an impact on my own way of ministering to others. I feel that my faith, sensitivity, compassion, and reverence have been enhanced by participating in these meetings."Participants in the 2009 dialogue meeting included Rev. Heng Sure, Berkeley Buddhist Monastery; Bishop John C. Wester, Salt Lake City; Dr. Snjezana Akpinar, Dharma Realm Buddhist University; Rev. Gigen Victoria Austin, San Francisco Zen Center; Rev. Jan Chozen Bays, Great Vow Zen Monastery; Sr. Phyllis D'Anna, SND, Zen Center, Palo Alto; Sr. Mary Ann Donovan, SC, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley; Dr. Ron Epstein, Dharma Realm Buddhist Association; Mrs. Lorraine Moriarty, Society of St. Vincent De Paul; Bhikshuni Heng Jiao, City of 10,000 Buddhas; Bhikshuni Heng Liang, City of 10,000 Buddhas; Rev. Canon Francis Tiso, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; Rev. James Massa, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; Rev. Thomas W. Devereaux, Diocese of Santa Rosa ecumenical and interreligious officer; Dr. Martin Verhoeven, Pacific School of Religion; and Ron Brown, observer (Cloverdale, California). [End Page 146]Francis V. TisoUnited States Conference of Catholic BishopsCopyright © 2009 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

In past decades, the subject atmosphere and mood has gone beyond the physio-meteorological and psychological scopes and become a new direction of aesthetics which concerns two sides of the same phenomenon. As the primary sensuous reality constructed by both the perceiving subject and the perceived object, atmosphere and mood are neither a purely subjective state nor an objective thing. Atmosphere is essentially a quasi-object pervaded by a specific affective quality and a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our outer life (...) experiences, while mood is a quasi-subject pervaded by specific objective quality and thus a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our inner life experiences. A practical dimension is thereby, from the outset, embedded in the consideration of both concepts. This is mainly characterized by actions and, correspondingly, ethical aspects, which concern the design and creation of atmosphere and thus the triggering of mood through works of art. Here, on the one hand, the process of artistic formation, long neglected in the European tradition, is given prominence as an aesthetic practice, and on the other hand, an interactive dialogue is effectively established between the artist, the work and the viewer. Due to the fact that atmosphere and mood, both as in-between, emphasize the interaction of the perceiver and the perceived from two sides, here the decisive question is: in what kind of environment do we live or participate and in what way do we experience it? The focus of aesthetics is now not on the conventional issue whether the environment is beautiful or gives us a sense of beauty, but on how the environment influences our feeling of being there (Befinden) through our own sensuality. Such an approach would contribute to a critical transformation in aesthetic methodology, namely from the ontological and/or epistemological what to the phenomenological and anthropological how. -/- The tension between atmosphere and mood, as revealed here, opens up a large space for exploring a new understanding of aesthetics. On this basis the special issue pursued to diversify this discussion on an international level. (shrink)

The book consists of 6 chapters. Chapter One explains the reason why SLA researchers should study the language learning environment in space: population movements associated with internal and external migration and social mobility such as the circuits of commodity production and distribution create much space, in which language learning environment become diverse and uneven. With the spatial perspective, we can fully understand the interactions between language learners and the world or environments.In Chapter Two, by introducing the brief history of Critical (...) Spatial Theory, the author wants to tell us one of the key ideas in the theory: the social production of space, which views space as the product of the social relations of its era. Based on it, the author adds that the production of languages is an integral aspect of the production of space on a global scale. It can help us to understand how social mobility shapes language learning environments. From this perspective, the local environments in which languages are learned are outcomes of the production of space under the influence of mobility. It reiterates the key view that the global mobilities of physical objects (people, goods and information) produce space.In Chapter Three, the author introduces the mainstream views held by modern linguistics: languages are conceptualized as objects in the space. They hold that the spatiality of language is given by providing correct writing systems and standardized rules for various languages. Influenced by mainstream conception of language from modern linguistics, SLA tends to regard languages as self-contained objects in space. However, this view neglects the relation between language and the learning environments. The author holds that the distribution and circulation of languages and their varieties in geographical space produce the spatiality of language, which clears the ground for an environment or object-as-space view of language in Chapter Four.In Chapter Four, the author develops an alternative "objects-as-space" view and introduces three concepts to illustrate spatiality of language: flat ontology, assemblage and mobilities. The concept of flat ontology helps explain what language is and how it comes into being in the world; From assemblage perspective, the author develops the idea that everything is an object, so are human beings and languages. Language (the non-physical object) interacts with various physical objects, forming the language-bearing assemblage. This assemblage is the form of spatiality of language. The mobilities theory explains how language-bearing assemblages develop or change on a global scale because of social mobility, emphasizing the importance of learning environment in SLA. All in all, the author outlines how language makes its way into physical space in the form of assemblages, or assemblages of assemblages.Chapter Five centers on language learning environment. First, the author explains the relation between language learners and their learning environment from an ecological view: the learner is a part of the language learning environment, and second language learning is a spatial interaction between the learners and the semiotic resources provided by environment. Then, the author discusses language environment from two different perspectives. From an 'individual' perspective, environments are assembled by individuals from the spatial resources available; from an 'areal' view, environments are shaped both by local circumstances and global circulations of language-bearing assemblages. Meanwhile, the author also discusses other language environments like the multilingual city and online resources. What the author hopes to develop in this chapter is an environment perspective that grounds the contexts of language learning in space, which helps the readers think about language learning from a spatial perspective.Chapter Six contains three parts. In the first part, it outlines the work of a number of researchers from sociolinguistics and the contribution they made to the spatial theory. In the second part, the author wants to tell us how the idea of language learning environment emerges from his own research. The last part discusses the four main researching routes (areal studies, studies of individuals learning in settings, studies of the construction of individual learning environment and design-based studies) that might influence SLA research on language learning environments and some research methods. The book is in alignment with several recent "turns" occurring in the field of SLA, such as "social turn" (Block, 2003) and "multilingual turn" (May, 2014), both of which bring to the fore the social aspects involved in language learning. While the first "turn" accentuates the role of social context in shaping and influencing learner cognition, the latter highlights how the physical multilingual world remold language learning experiences, and how the mental multilingual world helps raise learners' language awareness, and facilitates their successful construction of an identity of legitimate multi-language users. The book under review joins up the two "turns" in acknowledging that language learners are persons-in-context with organic interaction with social learning environment (Ushioda, 2021). This view has research and pedagogical implications. From the point of doing research, spatial perspectives, advocated in the book, afford huge research potentials for both language teachers and (instructed) SLA researchers to conduct situated investigations, exploring the complex and dynamic nexus between language learners and their surrounding environment (not restricted to people) that play a part in their learning experience, and thus gaining insightful understanding of how individuals and learning contexts are coupled with each other, how they evolve together, and how they constitute an ecosystem that generates affordances, facilitating or constraining language learning. Pedagogically speaking, the spatial perspectives encourage language teachers to hold an ecological view of language teaching and learning, directing their attention to the individuality of each language learner and their complex, dynamic and multifaceted relationality with other learners and the physical realities, rather than solely focusing on the abstract systems (e.g., the development of cognitive aspect). This holistic view allows language teachers to take measures to address concrete questions emerging in and out of the classrooms, and stimulates them to design and experiment with pedagogical interventions that help to create a favorable environment for language learning. This view also invites language teachers to take learner agency into account (Xu & Long, 2020) and to design pedagogical activities that enable learners to take agentive actions to adapt their environments as they actively create and seek their own language learning opportunities, making the world their own (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In turn, teachers' agency-enabling activities will ultimately help learners to autonomously access a range of resources in this new affordance-rich era to improve their language skills, and thus become more independent in their pathway to life-long learning.Beside the above benefits, the book is also theoretically and methodologically friendly. In illustrating the role of space in SLA, the author invokes a plethora of theories from such disciplines as sociology, sociolinguistics, psychology, etc. This orientation helps readers to build a transdisciplinary framework to capture the multi-layered nature of SLA, and to acquire a nuanced understanding of how language learning is influenced by multiple scales of environmental factors. Methodologically, the author proposes several specific methods that are especially apt to investigate language learning environment. These methods, together with the theoretical foundation laid by the book, will definitely help researchers and language teaching practitioners to further delve into the complex interplay between context and language learners.Admittedly, the book is not without weaknesses. It spends most of its words on illustrating the importance of physical environment in SLA. Another essential component, the virtual environment is insufficiently referenced and discussed. This lacking is undoubtedly a regret the book leaves with us, especially in these years of pandemic, where language learning in virtual spaces is becoming a norm.All in all, the book is an invaluable contribution to the field of SLA, and is worthy of recommending to language teaching practitioners, researchers, and postgraduates in applied linguistics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.2 (2005) 36-57 [Access article in PDF] "Being With": The Resonant Legacy of Childhood's Creative Aesthetic Lori A. Custodero Teachers College, Columbia University Introduction...enrichment of the present for its own sake is the just heritage of childhood....1In this paper, the qualities of artistic pursuit exemplified in the musical play of children and the compositional processes of adults provide a context for exploring how "being (...) with" influences teaching and learning. Specifically I propose that "being with" music generates a sense of the aesthetic as we both transform musical materials — timbres, pitches, rhythms, phrases, harmonies — and are transformed by our experiences with them, and that "being with" others as we partake in musical activity often broadens and deepens that experience. In many ways, this is an exploration into why childhood matters, how it functions as a mirror for our adult lives as we experience and revel in the seemingly miraculous moments of aesthetic insight, where the familiar is welcomed with fresh perception and the addition of novelty is greeted as the solution to a previously unfathomable problem. It is also about why children matter, as our responses to their ways of being connect and transform us as adults. In this piece, recorded observations of children's musicality are juxtaposed with first-person accounts of adults' creative processes, revealing contributions to our understanding of artistry-in-action as it is manifested in both the musical and the pedagogical. The Aesthetic in Childhood and Adulthood To be "in the moment" is to encounter the aesthetic — fully engaged in an activity for which one's individual contributions are perceived as vital, aware of surprise relationships between seemingly disparate phenomena, and enveloped by sensory messages of color, sound, and movement meeting personal criteria for beauty. Such experiences exemplify features of artistry, an approach defined by openness to possibility and orientation toward discovery, where cues emanating from involvement in activity are clearly interpreted and utilized, and reflection is an ongoing process informing action. Characterized by a sense of wonder and ability to imagine and invent, the creative worlds of young children have provided a source of artistic genesis cited by composers, performers, psychologists, and educators.2Edith Cobb's thoughtful, groundbreaking account of the relationship between childhood and artistry, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, was introduced by Margaret Mead, who highlighted the work's thesis: "that in the imaginative experiences of childhood could be found the essential kernels of the highest forms of human thought."3 The legacy of childhood is universal to our existence; in acknowledging its contributions to ontological and cultural artistry, we can both connect personal histories across the [End Page 36] lifespan and identify characteristic trends across a spectrum of aesthetic rendering.4One trait common to both the child and the creative adult is a focused attentiveness to perceived affordances, that is, materials and human resources accessible in the environment. Acting upon and with these resources,children and artists become aesthetic agents as sensitivity to both experience and milieu combine to produce relevant and innovative outcomes.5 These two interactive dimensions have been described in interviews with composers I have interviewed as "being with the moment" and "being with yourself and at the same time with another" and are operating in the musical play of children, as noted in this description recorded by a mother/student: On Thanksgiving Day, we had a family gathering of sixteen people, five of whom are under the age of eight years. Three-year-old Louise is thrilled to be with her female cousins, who all dress up in ballet-type frilly costumes in order to put on a "show" for the family. Cousin Lily, now eight years old, assumes the role of pianist, while Louise, and five-year-old cousin Amy creatively dance to Lily's improvised accompaniment. Their movements are directly related to Lily's playing, in her fluidity and well as "jumps!" Here, family members serve as catalysts for creative activity — costumes and musical instruments in the environment... (shrink)

J. Baird Callicott et al. have argued that Aldo Leopold developed a descriptive technique that has something in common with phenomenology and that it would not be farfetched to explore A Sand County Almanac as a kind of Heideggerian clearing in which usually unnoticed beings come to light. They further suggest that Leopold describes animal others as fellow subjects who co-constitute the world and that through his method of observation, description, and reflection Leopold reveals a “multi-perspective experience of a common (...) environment” that discloses an inter-species intersubjectivity comparable to Husserl’s more formal descriptions of intersubjectivity. I shall argue that the similarities between Husserl and Leopold are stronger and deeper than Callicott et al. suggest. Husserl’s method is designed to expose what has been hidden by “ideological positivism,” while Leopold’s method is designed to reveal what has been concealed by what he labels “conventional physics. Both agree that what we might today call a “scientistic worldview” denies, devalues, and dismisses subjectivity, meaning, and value from rational discourse. In Husserl’s view this leads to cultural crisis and barbarism, while in Leopold’s view it leads to ecological catastrophe. For Husserl the only alternative is a cultural renewal rooted in a rethinking of the dominant scientistic worldview while for Leopold the alternative lies in the construction of a new ethical system. These two alternatives are deeply compatible. Finally, I will discuss the ways in which Husserl’s understanding of the intentionality of our subjective experiences and Leopold’s integration of the evolutionary and ecological kinship of humans and non-humans with the social sciences have important implications for the possibility of intercultural understanding and dialogue and thereby allow us to overcome the thesis of incommensurability that denies the possibility of meaningful intercultural understanding and dialogue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.4 (2006) 77-88 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]The Aesthetic Appreciation of Environmental Architecture under Different Conceptions of EnvironmentAllen CarlsonIntroductionIn what is in retrospect easily recognized as one of the three or four truly groundbreaking essays in environmental aesthetics, Francis Sparshott distinguishes a number of different ways of conceptualizing our relationships to our environments. Such different conceptualizations, he argues, deeply influence the ways in which (...) we aesthetically experience both environments and the things that occupy them. 1 It follows that understanding of, and thus education about, our environmental conceptualizations are of the utmost importance to our aesthetic appreciation. In this article I follow up some of Sparshott's insights by considering the ways in which a number of rather common conceptualizations of environments relate to what is an increasingly important feature of our built environments—what is commonly referred to as "environmental architecture." In doing so, I hope to make clear how aesthetic education concerning these common conceptualizations is vital for the appreciation of not only environmental architecture but the whole of our built environment.Initially, however, some clarifications are in order. First, due to the emphasis in environmental architecture on environments in general, there is, within this area of concern, somewhat of a shift away from the idea of architecture as a fine art. Traditionally, architecture, along with painting, sculpture, poetry, and music, was regarded as one of the five founding art forms of the so-called modern system of the arts. 2 And, although architecture, given its utilitarian dimensions, has often been the poor sister of the famous five, some individuals nonetheless regard it essentially as a fine art. 3 However, given my focus on environmental architecture, I here pay equal attention to what is known as "vernacular architecture." [End Page 77]Second, the phrase "environmental architecture" refers to architecture and architectural practices that are typically promoted as "working with the environment" or as being "environmentally friendly." Such characterizations bring to mind ideas such as ecological design, sustainable development, and green architecture. They are associated with design and building practices that rely on renewable energy and materials, stress recycling and efficient use of resources, and attempt to maintain the long-term integrity of both natural and human environments. Consequently, whether exemplified in the fine art of architecture or in the vernacular, such design and building practices point initially to the ecological and, more broadly, the ethical issues associated with architecture, which are best approached within environmental ethics or traditional ethical theory. 4 Although these ethical matters are of the greatest importance, I here primarily address, as noted, aesthetic issues involved in environmental architecture.Aesthetics and Environmental ArchitectureThe aesthetics of environmental architecture, as the ethics of environmental architecture, concerns most generally the relationships between structures and their environments, and especially the environmental effects of the former on the latter. Of course, unlike ethics, which in the case of architecture considers the environmental benefits or harms brought about by design and building practices and the resultant structures, aesthetics focuses first and foremost on appearances, on that which is perceived by the senses. As is well known, the discipline takes its name from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning "of sense perception." However, to recognize that aesthetics is concerned with appearances is not necessarily to relegate it to the realm of the superficial. Even though, since the aesthetics of environmental architecture considers the relationships between structures and their environments, it initially focuses on the appearances of such relationships, it need not be restricted to questions of whether such relationships are simply "pleasing to the eye" or "pretty." Rather, the basic question in the aesthetics of environmental architecture is whether structures reside in their environments such that they appear as they should. By this I mean that they and their environments are related in such a way that the structures appear appropriate or proper within their environments. 5An emphasis on whether structures appear appropriate within their environments immediately moves the matter beyond simple appearances. This is because... (shrink)

This paper presents a blueprint for an ecological cognitive architecture. Ecological psychology, I contend, must be complemented with a story about the role of the CNS in perception, action, and cognition. To arrive at such a story while staying true to the tenets of ecological psychology, it will be necessary to flesh out the central metaphor according to which the animal perceives its environment by ‘resonating’ to information in energy patterns: what is needed is a theory of resonance. I offer (...) here the two main elements of such a theory: a framework and a methodology. (shrink)

Forms characteristic of the earth itself are inherent in the design of man. Man's being emerged out of a cosmic matrix whose morphic aspects man himself expresses. These forms and their functional interrelationships are the very conditions of consciousness. This paper proposes that the relationship between human consciousness and its complete environment should be the subject matter of an emerging discipline, the ecology of consciousness. Constructs useful in the ecology of plants and animals should be coordinated to psychological (...) constructs. These coordinating constructs should be based upon study of the most pervasive morphic regularities at the biophysical level. An analysis of the design of man suggests many possibilities, especially when one considers the known neurophysiological and biochemical conditioners of consciousness. Educational (experiential) strategies for the transformation of consciousness should also be explored. These might include the manipulation of variables such as volume, duration, and intensity of sensory stimulation, including various combinations of modalities. A systematic effort should be made to state the fundamental problems to which a scientific ecology of consciousness might address itself. New methods must be devised. A preliminary program for an ecology of consciousness is proposed. (shrink)

According to current opinion in western psychopathology, depression is regarded as a disorder of mood and affect on the one hand, and as a distortion of cognition on the other. Disturbances of bodily experience and of social relations are regarded as secondary to the primarily 'inner'and individual disorder. However, quite different concepts can be found in cultures whose members do not experience themselves as much as separate individuals but rather as parts of social communities. Disorders of mood or well-being are (...) then conceived less as intra-psychic, but rather as bodily, interpersonal, or atmospheric processes. On this background, the paper describes depression as a disorder of intercorporeality and interaffectivity. After developing these phenomenological concepts, it analyses depression as a 'detunement' of the resonant body that mediates our participation in a shared affective space. Instead of expressing the self, the body is turned into a barrier to all impulses directed to the environment. This impairs particularly the patient's interaction with others, resulting in a general sense of detachment, separation, or even segregation. Moreover, the restriction of the lived body also corresponds to the triggering situations of depression, namely experiences of a disruption of social bonds. Thus, intercorporeality and interaffectivity are presented as crucial dimensions for an ecological and non-reductionist view of depression. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and DeedsSteven HeineBuddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds. Edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryūken Williams. Cambridge: Harvard University Press and the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 1997. xlii + 467 pp. Paper $19.95.Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryūken (...) Williams, is the first book in the series on "Religions of the World and Ecology" edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. The book series is an outgrowth of a series of conferences held from 1996 to 1998 at the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, funded primarily by the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation in addition to a variety of other sources. Each volume of the series is to be edited by Tucker along with a specialist in the respective tradition. By the time this review appears, several other volumes will have been published, including books on Hinduism and Confucianism. The aim of the series is to examine the similarities and differences in the attitudes of world religions to ecological issues in an era in which "[f]rom resource depletion and species extinction to [End Page 136] pollution overload and toxic surplus, the planet is struggling against unprecedented assaults … [that are] aggravated by population explosion, industrial growth, technological manipulation, and military proliferation heretofore unknown by the human community" (p. xv). The series editors hope to stimulate "scholars of religion to respond as engaged intellectuals with deepening creative reflection" (pp. xxx-xxxi) rather than remain as seemingly uninvolved armchair observers of the ongoing environmental crisis.Buddhism may be a likely candidate for the first religious tradition to be examined in the book series because it appears to have a special affinity with environmental concerns and causes for several reasons. The basic Buddhist philosophy of karmic causality and dependent origination stresses the interdependence of all sentient beings who participate in transmigration throughout the six realms; the nonduality of humans and nature; and the moral retribution that awaits those who violate the sanctity of existence. This nondualistic worldview is enhanced, especially in Mahāyā na Buddhism in East Asia, by interaction with the organic cosmology of indigenous Chinese religions based on yin-yang ideology, and the result is a pantheistic notion that, according to Lewis Lancaster, asserts that "(t)he rocks, trees, lotuses, streams, mountains—all have Buddha-nature" (p. 13).Furthermore, in recent years some Buddhists have been among the leading voices trumpeting the need for ecological awareness and action. For example, the Council of All Beings, a ritual in which one places oneself as in a trance in the position of another species in order to appreciate the impact of ecological decline on it, was designed by Buddhists and has become popular among environmentalists of all persuasions. Also, there are several examples of Buddhist movements establishing environmentally sustainable rural communities in America, and the group known as "engaged Buddhists," many of whom are associated with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, have consistently led protests against the misuse of nuclear power and a host of other issues. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that there has always been another side of Buddhism, which after all is largely a monastic tradition for home-leavers—a side that is hermetic, withdrawing, and socially and environmentally disengaged and, at times in history, corrupt, at least as a by-product of benign neglect.The question is, which side of Buddhism will prevail in the discourse concerning environmental issues? Will it be the one emphasizing how to analyze and act on the ecological crisis based on the inseparability of all forms of existence? Or will it be the face of Buddhism that may appear disconnected with and neglectful of current social issues in focusing exclusively on the individual quest for enlightenment or, as was the case in medieval China, on the growth of powerful, independent temple complexes? While several of the contributions to the volume rather uncritically celebrate the former side of Buddhist discourse, the more constructive essays make it clear that a notion of Buddhist engagement with the environment... (shrink)

PurposeTo present a generic empowerment ecology framework to guide the operation of Future Centers and to empower Future Center visitors to respond to the challenges facing them and develop and implement innovative solutions.Design/methodology/approachAn in‐depth case study was conducted in Be'er Sheva PISGA Future Center in the educational sector in Israel. Visits to a further 20 Future Centers around the world and a literature review helped to generalize the key findings and develop and validate the framework further.FindingsAlthough empowerment is not (...) always explicitly discussed in Future Centers, it is an important underlying philosophy. The framework developed in this research helps to ensure empowerment issues are systematically addressed and contains four perspectives: operating principles; resources; supporters and processes. These combine to form the empowerment ecology.Research limitations/implicationsThe empowerment ecology framework has been developed from observation predominantly in one Future Center. It should now be more fully tested and validated in other Future Centers.Practical implicationsThis paper provides a framework to help Future Center practitioners and other future oriented working environments stakeholders to explicitly address empowerment issues.Originality/valueThis paper provides a detailed description of the operation of a regionally focused Future Center in the educational sector. The paper presents a novel empowerment ecology framework for use in facilitated user‐centered collaborative working environments, such as Future Centers. (shrink)

Hybrid techniques and perceptual technologies that merge the physical and the virtual dimensions of reality are generating a conceptual and experiential working space to reconfigure relationships between the perceiver and the perceived. We are entering a new perceptual paradigm where form, content, and context are merging, generating radical new types of spatial construction. Through the development of hybrid spatial technologies we can now hack the individual’s sense of space and relationship to the world (transforming the subject/object relationship). How can we (...) develop and use emerging spatial technologies to reconfigure spatial perception? Can we adapt and transform the dominant perceptive regimen, which is still based on the Cartesian split (subject-object separation)? We continue to see ourselves as separated from the environment and still need to digest the new changes brought about by hybrid techniques and methodologies that are shaping these new dimensions of space. How adaptable is our perception? The ability to alter our understanding of space provides us with a new form of spatial (self) control; sub-merging identities. What are the biological risks? What are the limits of stretching the perceptive range of the body? This article will examine these questions as an opportunity to humanise technology and create a ‘Human Centric Hybrid Literacy’. We will examine which technologies, techniques and navigation methodologies are being used by artists, technologists and designers to enable this new era of spatial augmentation and perceptual adaptation. Some examples include macroscopic navigation, 360 degree vision, new types of perspective (including third and fourth person perspectives) and reverse engineering. The role that hybrid space plays in the construction and transformation of perception through the practice of context engineering will be examined. Context engineering (Smith, 2013) is understood as an ‘intermediality’ practice for the engagement and augmentation of perception; giving us control over our senses, allowing us to adjust them in real time. Context engineering creates a new economy where we focus less on transforming content (as the primary activity), and more on how we can make our own perception the ‘content’. (shrink)

Ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that the best explanation for a large share of cognition is nonrepresentational in kind. In both ecological psychology and enactivist philosophy, then, the task is to offer an explanans that does not rely on representations. Different theorists within these camps have contrasting notions of what the best kind of nonrepresentational explanation will look like, yet they agree on one central point: instead of focusing solely on factors interior to an agent, an important aspect of cognition (...) is found in the link or coupling between an agent and the external world. This link is fluid, dynamic, and active in a variety of ways, and we do not need to add any internal extra something in the perception-action-cognition process. At the same time, even devout defenders of ecological psychology and enactivism recognize that plenty happens inside an agent during cognition. In particular, no one denies that the brain plays an important role. What, then, is the role of the brain if it’s not in the game of representing the environment? One possible option is to describe the brain as a resonant organ instead of a representational organ. In this paper we consider the history of resonance in more detail. Particular focus will be placed on two different sets of approaches that have developed the concept of resonance: a representational reading of resonance and a nonrepresentational, dynamic account of resonance. We then apply these accounts to a case study on music performance, specifically in the context of standard tonal jazz. From this application, we propose that a nonrepresentational resonance account consistent with both enactivism and ecological psychology is a viable way of explaining jazz performance. We conclude with future considerations on research regarding the brain as a resonant organ. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Daoism, Practice, and Politics:From Nourishing Life to Ecological PraxisEric S. Nelson (bio)I. Daoism's Multiple ModelsManhua Li, Yumi Suzuki, and Lisa Indraccola have offered evocative insights, questions, and alternatives in their contributions concerning the arguments of Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (Nelson 2021). The present brief response and sketch of the book will not address every point in their essays, but I will strive to reply, directly and indirectly, (...) to their primary concerns.First, it should be noted that I take a pluralistic conception of 'Daoisms' as my point of departure. This is necessary since Daoist studies have been hampered by overly ahistorical and one-sided definitions that prioritize one philosophical or religious moment (such as skepticism or mysticism) in historically complex and varied transmissions that encompass a multiplicity of texts and perspectives. Due to the fact of the plurality of incompatible kinds of Daoism in Chinese antiquity and in subsequent history, my text considers a range of early Daoist and Daoist-related perspectives in the context of their potential consequences for environmental philosophy, ethics, and politics. Consequently, my approach is primarily philosophical without limiting any text to being exclusively philosophical, religious, or rigidly committed to one perspective, which would be untrue to the sources themselves.Second, examining distinctive tendencies (modifying Graham 1989 and Liu 1994) in the Daodejing 道德經, the Zhuangzi 莊子, and related texts enables us to articulate distinctive and conflicting ecological, ethical, and political paradigms. In place of constructing a mythologizing ideological construction of 'Chinese culture' and Daoism as intrinsically 'Green', a familiar essentializing tendency that has provoked skepticism regarding the very possibility of Daoist environmental philosophy, my book provides a different 'critical Daoist' strategy. This alternative entails that Daoist exemplars can be deployed as therapeutic models in the present, while at [End Page 792] the same time confronting their ideological codifications and uses. Early Daoist sources have roamed on long intercultural journeys. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi have provided elements for European thinking about civilization, technology, and nature from Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger (Nelson 2017) to Peter Sloterdijk's 'Euro-Taoism' (Sloterdijk 1989) to contemporary progressive Green movements (Joshi 2022) and even ecofascism (Lubarda 2020). Similarly, in the current Chinese context, Green Daoism has both critical and authoritarian ideological functions in visions of 'ecological civilization' (shengtai wenming 生態文明) (Schönfeld and Chen 2019) and fears of a 'green leviathan'. Accordingly, it is not accidental that my anarchistic and participatory democratic interpretation of one key thread, which I call 'ziranist' and clarify below, in early Daoist and Wei-Jin mysterious-learning (xuanxue 玄學) discourses, has led to the most intense discussions and controversies about this book. These include the contributions by Li, Suzuki, and Indraccola that propose questions and alternative possibilities concerning agency and responsiveness, authority and self-determination, freedom and fate, and adaptation and intervention, as well as purposive techniques and anti-purposive uselessness.Third, this hermeneutical strategy points toward the tertiary aspect of our preliminary definition of Daoism. It does not primarily name a philosophical theory or a religious worldview. It concerns shifting, overlapping, and diverging ensembles of discourse and practice. This is not the vague ahistorical idea of 'a way of life' but rather refers to how philosophy is enacted through a specific configuration of—to adopt early Greek expressions—logos as dis-course (e.g., argumentation, hermeneutics, logic, rhetoric), ethos (e.g., comportment, orientation, a way of dwelling), and praxis (practices of the self, with others, and with things and nature). Thus, the Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi collections can be analyzed textually and conceptually as having multiple threads (drawing on a variety of authors and sources) that form constellations in the received texts with better and worse historical, practical, and conceptual readings. My interpretive strategy in this discussion, which does not exclude other approaches, is that these texts express forms of practical instead of merely speculative philosophy. They are suggestive of an ethos of relational freedom, irreducible to rules and techniques, which dismantles hypostatized experiential and linguistic fixations, including moralistic fixations, in order to freely encounter the myriad things and enact and practice the dao in one's own singular way.'Critical Daoism', therefore, serves as a pluralistic, diagnostic, and practical designation... (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

I argue that the concept of an epistemic interface is a useful one to add to the epistemic ecology toolkit in order to enrich our investigations concerning the complex epistemic phenomena arising on social media. An epistemic interface is defined as any informational interface (be it technical, human or institutional) that facilitates the transfer of epistemic goods from one epistemic environment to its outside, be that another epistemic environment or a person. When assessing the kinds of epistemic environments emerging (...) on social media platforms, we should not only look at their epistemic health or hostility as environments, but also look at how these environments interact with each other, at their interfacing. I show that several epistemic problems specific to social media such as epistemic bubbles, echo chambers and epistemic flooding can be understood also in terms of faulty epistemic interfacing, which adds a layer of complexity to the discussion. The paper proposes two criteria for healthy epistemic interfacing: preserving the flourishing of epistemic agents, and preserving in some form the value of epistemic outcomes as these cross the environment to the outside world. These criteria should give rise to specific norms and design requirements for healthy interfacing, but such norms will need more empirical work before these get formulated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Sharing BreathJody Sperling (bio)My work as choreographer dwells on the inseparability between breath and atmosphere. There are no firm boundaries between the air we breathe in, the air surrounding us, and the air enveloping the planet. This is as true for air as it is for water—there is only one global ocean, although by convention we divide the seas into named regions. When you move through the ocean (...) of air enveloping you, you displace it and create dynamic unseen wakes in your midst.Beginning with my dance, "Turbulence" (2011),1 I sought to visualize such patterns of air disturbance into kinetic sculptural forms. To do so, the six dancers deployed Loie Fuller-style costumes, disquieting the air and materializing its gyrations. An early innovator of performance technology, Fuller danced in robes fashioned from hundreds of yards of silk with embedded wands that extended her body's motion into space. Serendipitously introduced to Fuller's work in 1997, I became seduced by the genre for the way it imbues the doer with an expanded sense of self. Whirling in the Fuller-style garments, I felt, and still feel, integrated into the atmosphere as an eddy or gust.With "Wind Rose" (2019),2 a collaboration with composer Matthew Burtner, I focused on making the connections between breath and wind palpable. Wind is said to be the breath of the planet, a driver of earthly life. A windrose is a meteorological tool that graphically represents wind speed, direction and variability at a particular time and place. I thought, what if I designed choreography with the intention not to create human motion, but in order to create a windrose—an atmospheric snapshot—in the performing space? At the start of "Wind Rose," the five dancers stand shoulder to shoulder and circle the stage so as to forge a human turbine. As the dancers accelerate their cyclonic motion, they push a swelling air wave towards the audience.For another section, I choreographed eight motions, each of which was connected with a sound. The sounds were made either by the dancers whipping their Fuller-style costumes through the air or by the dancers' breathy vocalizations. Matthew took my eight sound-breath-moves and composed a fugue. The dancers perform this music-motion score so that [End Page 155] they stir up a breeze pattern—a fugue that can be felt, as well as seen and heard.Wind has been changing along with climate. Locally, winds are becoming more chaotic. Globally, the high winds are slowing down and the polar jet stream is becoming wonky. But we are not in the habit of listening to the changing winds. One of the root causes of climate inaction has been a deep disconnect between people and their atmosphere. Many among the privileged live out their lives in climate-controlled habitats. Recently, though, even wealthy nations and the elite are starting to feel the heat. These days, no matter how deeply you bury your head in the sand, your butt will still get scorched.As a way of grappling with life in the Anthropocene, I have been formulating an open inquiry called ecokinetics. I conceived ecokinetics as a choreographic corollary to ecoacoustics, an environmental mode of music composition pioneered by Matthew Burtner, my long-time musical collaborator. According to Matthew, "ecoacoustics embeds environmental systems into musical and performance structures using new technologies" (Burtner). Ecokinetics asks, how can we relate human movement to environmental systems? How can choreography (aesthetically patterned human motion) illuminate, echo, expand upon the movement vectors present at a site and help us better understand local ecologies? How can dance entwine with media technologies to embody the processes of natural systems? Ecokinetics is part personal movement practice, part pedagogical tool, and part performance methodology.In its essence, ecokinetics repudiates the separation of humans from nature, a pervasive Colonialist mindset that needs constant undoing. In order to make progress on climate change, we must feel—truly and deeply—that we are part of the planet and not apart from it. This is the opposite of what the billionaires' space club aims to accomplish. Bezos, Branson, and Musk, et al. view distance from Earth as a... (shrink)

The main notion of this article is that the blurring of the limits between offline and online dimensions of knowledge and experience, in addition to the manipulation of genes, neurons, atoms and bits, is dissolving the distinction between subjectivism (i.e. idealism) and materialism (i.e. objectivism and realism). As a consequence, in the moistmedia (from Ascott) ecology in which we are increasingly immersed, a radical kind of experience of matter, time, space and self is emerging. In this form of experience, (...) the blending of subjectivist and materialist approaches help in overcoming the classical Cartesian polarity: we feel part of an extended reality, and we feel this extended reality in ourselves by combining bodies, points of view and multiple senses with digital layers of everything. The article proposes these research questions: Which are the main factors that shape the change toward a moistmedia ecology resulting from the impact of the manipulation of genes, neurons, bits and atoms? Which transformation is being shaped in relation to the previous model of experience? What are the features of the new forms of materiality, sensitivity and action? How artists are putting themselves at risk in the moistmedia ecology? The hypothesis is that a hybrid kind of interval is opening between different layers of reality: analogue versus digital; nature versus culture; here versus there; past versus future; I versus others; and human versus non-human. In this recombination process, a third dimension of reality – that I call ‘radical reality’ – emerges in the moistmedia ecology. This article will analyse the radical experience (Wilson) in moistmedia environments by crossing the five dimensions (matter, space, time, identity and action) with the practices of manipulation of genes, atoms and bits using examples from art and design. This crossing shows the basic dimensions and sub-dimensions of the ‘Model of Radical Experience’ to reveal the nature of this third dimension between subjectivism and materialism, which is explored by artists who put themselves at risk in the turbulent zone between the physical and the digital. (shrink)

In recent years, more and more mines have been left idle, and the formed mine wasteland has become a visual pollution of the urban landscape, and the study of landscape design of mine parks has become a focal topic. To address this issue, the sample of this study was selected from Xuzhou Anran Mountain Quarry Abandoned Quarry, to enhance the ecological environment and landscape value of the site through the sample's naturalistic style design and performance. The goal of the study (...) is to explore the innovative design and performance of naturalistic style in the landscape of Xuzhou abandoned quarry park. Methods of this study: observation forms, questionnaires and interview forms, relevant cases and other research methods were used to analyse the overview of mine transformation in China, the landscape characteristics, ecological status and problems of Xuzhou mine wasteland. The design strategy of naturalistic style in the landscape of Xuzhou mine park is proposed.The results of the study show that (1) mine rehabilitation. China's big cities have more mine rehabilitation, and the proportion of cases in small cities is relatively small. (2) Characteristic aspects. Abandoned mines in Xuzhou are characterised by serious ecological damage and chaotic and dilapidated site landscapes. (3) Design strategy. It should be carried out from the ecological restoration and management of the site environment, the aesthetic expression of naturalistic landscape, and the use of natural elements and natural materials. In addition, through the in-depth analysis of the sample landscape design, the originally desolate abandoned mine was transformed into a naturalistic style landscape space, adopting ecological and cultural strategies. The results of the study contribute to the ecological and economic development of the region, and also provide theoretical and practical guidance for the rehabilitation of other mines in China. (shrink)

Human performance in natural environments is deeply impressive, and still much beyond current AI. Experimental techniques, such as eye tracking, may be useful to understand the cognitive basis of this performance, and “the human advantage.” Driving is domain where these techniques may deployed, in tasks ranging from rigorously controlled laboratory settings through high-fidelity simulations to naturalistic experiments in the wild. This research has revealed robust patterns that can be reliably identified and replicated in the field and reproduced in the lab. (...) The purpose of this review is to cover the basics of what is known about these gaze behaviors, and some of their implications for understanding visually guided steering. The phenomena reviewed will be of interest to those working on any domain where visual guidance and control with similar task demands is involved. The paper is intended to be accessible to the non-specialist, without oversimplifying the complexity of real-world visual behavior. The literature reviewed will provide an information base useful for researchers working on oculomotor behaviors and physiology in the lab who wish to extend their research into more naturalistic locomotor tasks, or researchers in more applied fields who wish to bring aspects of the real-world ecology under experimental scrutiny. Part of a Research Topic on Gaze Strategies in Closed Self-paced tasks, this aspect of the driving task is discussed. It is in particular emphasized why it is important to carefully separate the visual strategies driving from visual behaviors relevant to other forms of driver behavior. There is always a balance to strike between ecological complexity and experimental control. One way to reconcile these demands is to look for natural, real-world tasks and behavior that are rich enough to be interesting yet sufficiently constrained and well-understood to be replicated in simulators and the lab. This ecological approach to driving as a model behavior and the way the connection between “lab” and “real world” can be spanned in this research is of interest to anyone keen to develop more ecologically representative designs for studying human gaze behavior. (shrink)

This paper proposes different approaches to design, referring to gambiarra practices and artifacts and their relation to complexity theory, evoking critical theorists that take undecidability into account in order to link gambiarra to operations that breed complexity and responsibility. The word gambiarra comes from Brazilian slang and describes an intervention or artifact meant to provide a provisory solution to an unexpected event or crisis. This kind of alternative design differs radically from conventional design because it does not come from formally (...) trained, engineer-minded, projects. Instead, it lacks control, stability and durability. As it offers no permanent solution, it opens room for further accidents and is messy, especially if compared to a conservative model for creation that praises human predominance, soundness and efficiency. Therefore, gambiarra often has negative connotations that this analysis aims to challenge, by relating it to principles of complexity theory. Complexity theory is a transdisciplinary field for research aimed at the organization of living systems, with a vast understanding of networks and what life and govern are. It gathers insights from different disciplines to explore the interconnectivity between individuals, their systems and environment. It unveils how ambivalent information/noise relationships are fundamental for the increase of diversity in a system. It also displays the intelligent dynamics resulting from seemingly insignificant neighborhood relations that collectively make it possible to adapt and continuously change structures. With that in mind, the “deficient” aspect of gambiarra becomes more valuable, as it hints at a potential to generate new information and structures beyond entropic models that perpetuate the same logics across time. Michel Serres’s information theory presented in the book The Parasite is brought up in comparison to gambiarra, in order to explore the potential of interdependent ambiguous relationships that may not fit in dominant forms of discourse. Concomitantly, Vilém Flusser’s notion of responsibility reinforces the argument that a fabric of dynamic differences can emerge out of mutual engagement and indeterminacy. Underlying, this paper concerns with drafting ecological discourses and practices that can embrace contradictions and the plurality of worlds, noticing complex phenomena that have been pushed to the margins, while also decentralizing from hegemonic models. It questions the predominance of the prevailing design paradigm in the search for non-eurocentric and non-anthropocentric human-environment relationships and forms of provision of human needs. (shrink)

This article discusses multisensorial aesthetic experience of environmental materiality via a craft process. The locally situated study investigates the interrelations of humans and environment through soil. In focus is how craft practitioners use their material sensitivity to reflect the idea of interdependency in the context of the contemporary environmental discourse. This is done through presenting an artistic research project in which craft is used to explore the human imprint in a particular geological environment, the Venice Lagoon. The case study Traces (...) from the Anthropocene: Working with Soil combines environmental research methods of contaminated soil and artistic research in the field of ceramic art. Craft making provides an embodied way to engage with the local environment. The cultural value and environmental disruption of the lagoon area forms a context for reflecting the aesthetic experience to better understand how we are active participants, in continuous flux with our material environment. (shrink)

Much work in care ethics and disability studies is concerned with the flourishing of human animals as an independent species. As a result, it focuses on how the built environments and the social structures that produce them restrict and exclude us. This paper addresses this problem and provides tentative first steps towards sketching an account of ethics that is structured around the interdependent nature of human and more than human life. I argue that our embodied existence places us in a (...) shared condition of vulnerability with all forms of life on earth. This allows us to conceive of caring as an essential condition of the sustainability and well-being of social and ecological life systems. To this end, I discuss the notion of anthropocentrism – and the attendant notion of Anthropocene – and argue that the conception of human animality that underwrites it posits a disembodied and homogenous ‘anthropos’ that is equally responsible for and equally affected by unsustainable social systems. Further, I examine the debate that opposes realist and constructivist accounts of nature, and I argue that it is inadequate to look at nature through the lenses of the predatory social systems that are responsible for ecological injustices in the first place. (shrink)

In recent years, more and more mines have been left idle, and the formed mine wasteland has become a visual pollution of the urban landscape, and the study of landscape design of mine parks has become a focal topic. To address this issue, the sample of this study was selected from Xuzhou Anran Mountain Quarry Abandoned Quarry, to enhance the ecological environment and landscape value of the site through the sample's naturalistic style design and performance. The goal of the study (...) is to explore the innovative design and performance of naturalistic style in the landscape of Xuzhou abandoned quarry park. Methods of this study: observation forms, questionnaires and interview forms, relevant cases and other research methods were used to analyse the overview of mine transformation in China, the landscape characteristics, ecological status and problems of Xuzhou mine wasteland. The design strategy of naturalistic style in the landscape of Xuzhou mine park is proposed.The results of the study show that (1) mine rehabilitation. China's big cities have more mine rehabilitation, and the proportion of cases in small cities is relatively small. (2) Characteristic aspects. Abandoned mines in Xuzhou are characterised by serious ecological damage and chaotic and dilapidated site landscapes. (3) Design strategy. It should be carried out from the ecological restoration and management of the site environment, the aesthetic expression of naturalistic landscape, and the use of natural elements and natural materials. In addition, through the in-depth analysis of the sample landscape design, the originally desolate abandoned mine was transformed into a naturalistic style landscape space, adopting ecological and cultural strategies. The results of the study contribute to the ecological and economic development of the region, and also provide theoretical and practical guidance for the rehabilitation of other mines in China. (shrink)

themes among the essays resurface and resonate. Though our request for essays was broad and open-ended, we found that topics such as seeing, authenticity, interpretation, wholeness, care, and dwelling ran as undercur rents throughout. Our major hope is that each essay plays a part in revealing a larger whole of meaning which says much about a more humane relation ship with places, environments and the earth as our home. Part I. Beginnings and directions At the start, we recognize the tremendous (...) debt this volume owes to philosopher Martin Heidegger (1890-1976), whose ontological excavations into the nature of human existence and meaning provide the philosophical foundations for many of the essays, particularly those in Part I of the volume. Above all else, Heidegger was regarded by his students and colleagues as a master teacher. He not only thought deeply but was also able to show others how to think and to question. Since he, perhaps more than anyone else in this century, provides the instruction for dOing a phenomenology and hermeneutic of humanity's existential situation, he is seminal for phenomenological and hermeneutical research in the environmental disci plines. He presents in his writings what conventional scholarly work, especially the scientific approach, lacks; he helps us to evoke and under stand things through a method that allows them to come forth as they are; he provides a new way to speak about and care for our human nature and environment. (shrink)

This article discusses the factors that confer a contemplative atmosphere to the village of Girilayu and stimulate local artisans to create batik motifs that contain symbolic philosophical meanings that confer ethical values to batik making while adapting to contemporary design and technological processes. Since 2016, Mbok Semok batik has struggled to preserve local traditions and patterns that stimulate contemplation in its designs. The paper is based an ethnographic approach involving data collection from Girilayu batik artisans; later analyzed using a phenomenological (...) approach in order to describe the correlation between design and contemplative philosophical meaning in Mbok Semok. Thus, the paper functions as an example of the need to articulate local ethical practices with technological change in a way that grounds harmony in human relationships with the environment and the supernatural beyond. (shrink)

For enactivists and pragmatists alike, sense-making is a systemic process of bringing the organism and environment into reciprocity. Steiner (2023) distinguishes enactivism from pragmatism by arguing that intention is compatible with enactivism but not pragmatism. After reviewing Steiner’s analysis, I consider its ontological consequences and phenomenological implications which I suggest cause problems for both enactivism and pragmatism, but in two different ways. Intention is consistent with the idea of an autonomy of sense-making but reveals its latent subjectivity – which sits (...) uncomfortably with an enactivist account. The absence of intention implies the existence of states of supra-subjective consciousness but lack of such accounts is troublesome for pragmatism. Next, I introduce Material Engagement Theory. I emphasise its affinity to pragmatism and describe its role in developing clayful phenomenology, an experiential way of investigating creative practice from the perspective of the process. A case-study of a sculptural project illustrates how action, creating a construction-site atmosphere as it goes, gathers diverse materials and elements to itself: wood, clay, plaster, steel, a sculpted skull, a painting, a wall, tree trunks, scaffolding, neolithic sculptures etc. These elements draw themselves into rhythmical associations that resonate with others that are formed through and by sculptural gestures and these go onto form further gestural patterns. The project shows how a creative situation creates a sense of affective purpose by and through the act of creating itself. (shrink)

There are inconsistencies in the treatment and attitudes of human beings to animals and much confusion in thinking about what are appropriate conditions for using and keeping animals. This article outlines some of these considerations and then proposes guidelines for designing animal management systems. In the first place, the global and local ecological effects of all animal management systems must be considered and an environment designed that will not rock the biospherical boat. The main points to consider are the interrelatedness (...) of living things with each other and the environment, the self-sustaining nature of ecosystems, and the importance of diversity in the stability and maintenance of ecosystems. These can and should be taken into account when assessing animal management. They are illustrated by examples of companion/urban dogs, as well as farm, zoo, and circus animals. The environment must also be considered from the point of view of the ethological needs of the animals. There are two possible approaches to this: (1) the reductionist approach, illustrated by the choice experimental tests; and (2) a holistic, evolutionist approach that concentrates on the degree of behavioral restriction and the identification of distress. The assessment of an animal's ethological needs, and thus the ethological soundness of an environment, must take into account the species needs (communication system, species-specific characteristics of the brain receptors and cognition) and the individual's needs (his past experience). The behavioral effects of domestication and how distress can be assessed are discussed. Different ethical positions toward animals and their treatment are briefly outlined, and it is argued that, provided animals are in ecologically and ethologically sound environments, their use by human beings is ethically acceptable. The animal-human association should be characterized by symbiosis—mutual benefit—rather than a parasitic or exploitative relationship—employer to employee, rather than master to slave. (shrink)

This article proposes to reconceptualize the Hungarian photographer, artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy’s (1895–1946) inter-war call for a ‘new vision’ in order to grasp how artists presently experiment with photography and adjacent new technologies to explore the environmental, ecological and elemental dimension of media themselves. For Moholy-Nagy, photography represented a new way of seeing and experiencing the increasingly industrialized and automated world and a means of expanding our sensory perception. Drawing on recent scholarship of elemental media theory, I adapt Moholy-Nagy’s (...) interest in the materiality of photography and the atmospheric and medial dimensions of light itself to an environmentally attuned notion of ‘new visions’. Exemplified with discussion of recent works by Emilija Škarnulytė, Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag, I show how a number of contemporary artists likewise scrutinize photography’s (understood in an expanded way) material basis and atmospheric qualities to explore new forms of image-making, including CGI and synthetic aperture radar images, fitted to reflect the accelerated automation and ecological precarity that mark the early twenty-first century. (shrink)

Over two decades ago, Davids et al. (1994) and Handford et al. (1997) raised theoretical concerns associated with traditional, reductionist, and mechanistic perspectives of movement coordination and skill acquisition for sport scientists interested in practical applications for training designs. These seminal papers advocated an emerging consciousness grounded in an ecological approach, signaling the need for sports practitioners to appreciate the constraints-led, deeply entangled, and non-linear reciprocity between the organism (performer), task, and environment subsystems. Over two decades later, the areas of (...) skill acquisition, practice and training design, performance analysis and preparation, and talent development in sport science have never been so vibrant in terms of theoretical modeling, knowledge generation and innovation, and technological deployment. Viewed at an ecological level of analysis, the work of sports practitioners has progressively transitioned toward the facilitation of an evolving relationship between an organism (athlete and team) and its environment (sports competition). This commentary sets out to explore how these original ideas from Davids et al. (1994) and Handford et al. (1997) have been advanced through the theoretical lens of ecological dynamics. Concurrently, we provide case study exemplars, from applied practice in high-performance sports organizations, to illustrate how these contemporary perspectives are shaping the work of sports practitioners (sport ecology designers) in practice and in performance preparation. (shrink)

Enactive and ecological approaches to cognitive science both claim a “mutuality” between agents and their environments – that they have a complementary nature and should be addressed as a single whole system. Despite this apparent agreement, each offers criticisms of the other on precisely this point – enactivists claiming that ecological psychologists over-emphasise the environment, while the complementary criticism, of agent-centred constructivism, is levelled by ecological psychologists at enactivists. In this paper I suggest that underlying the confusion between the two (...) approaches is the complexity of agency, which comes in different forms, at different scales or levels of analysis. Cognitive science has not theorised the relationship between these different forms in a sufficiently disciplined manner, and a task therefore remains of finding a way to map the complex territory of agency. (shrink)

Human ecology - the study and practice of relationships between the natural and the social environment - has gained prominence as scholars seek more effectively to engage with pressing global concerns. In the past seventy years most human ecology has skirted the fringes of geography, sociology and biology. This volume pioneers radical new directions. In particular, it explores the power of indigenous and traditional peoples' epistemologies both to critique and to complement insights from modernity and postmodernity.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Resonance and Response:Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and Ecological EthicsMatthew Williams-WyantIntroductionThe contributions of Dewey and Merleau-Ponty exhibit a kinship rarely seen in philosophy. This uncanny similarity between two thinkers who shared no known direct contact and were separated by an ocean becomes less mysterious considering their shared situation and approach grounded in lived experience. For Dewey, the denotative-empirical method is a means to study things "on their own account" (Experience and Nature, (...) LW 1:14). Through selective emphasis, the inquirer is open within primary experience to the expressive movement of the object of inquiry. Merleau-Ponty's notion of interrogation seeks a similar aim in motivating Being to creatively express itself. In the act of expression, the reverberations of nature emerge, as Dewey notes, in "a perfect integration" of substance and form (Art as Experience, LW 10:114). The resonances of nature qua reverberations in turn resonate—evoke qualitative, non-cognitive meanings—between the inquirer and the selected object of inquiry establishing a resonance between our conceptions of the concrete world. The similarity between Dewey and Merleau-Ponty, then, is due to their attunement to this resonance.Perspective—the situated, lived context through which each person is attuned—prevents a one-for-one mapping of Dewey's thought onto Merleau-Ponty and vice versa.1 However, the resonance between these two thinkers establishes a complementary approach to ethics. In this paper, I argue that the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and the philosophy of Dewey, when read together, provide a clear path from an aesthetic point of departure to a genuinely ecological ethics. The aesthetic foundation of Dewey's denotative-empirical method benefits from Merleau-Ponty's notion of interrogation grounded on his discussion of the body. In turn, Dewey's ethical contributions give voice [End Page 40] to the implicit ethics present but never explicitly formulated by Merleau-Ponty. The result is an ethical relation of responsiveness that accounts for the plurality of values and the porous, ever-changing boundaries between nature and human activity.1. The "Problem" of ExperienceA genuinely ecological ethics, one founded on the intertwined relation between human activity and nature, requires an approach that avoids the epistemological traps common to many philosophical positions. In framing interrogation as a necessary revision to traditional philosophical approaches, Merleau-Ponty indirectly addresses this concern.For Merleau-Ponty, interrogation is a response to a specific situation raised through the inadequacies of previous modes of philosophical inquiry; namely, reflection, dialectic, and intuition. Each of these perspectives employs a view from above—a "pensée de survol"—resulting in an insurmountable break between our knowledge of the world and the world itself. In attempting to overcome our everyday naïveté through philosophical understanding, the philosophies of reflection "replaces the 'world' with the 'Being-thought'" (Visible and the Invisible 43). In doing so, it remains naïve to the presuppositions that accompany any mode of philosophy that analyzes Being as if the observer were not already caught up in the movement of being. Dialectical philosophy has often been encumbered by formulations that mistake the fluidity of the dialectic itself for a rigid set of stages marked by complete and exhaustive concepts such as Fichte's thesis-antithesis-synthesis or Sartre's Being and Nothingness (Visible and the Invisible 94). According to Merleau-Ponty, it forgets, or ignores, the openness of meaning as it intertwines with others and transcends its previous moment. Finally, philosophical inquiries grounded in intuition run the risk of bifurcating, and ultimately reifying, fact and essence rather than seeing these two aspects as abstract moments, or dependent parts, of concrete existence (Visible and the Invisible 113).Dewey recognizes a similar problem when philosophers emphasize the need for a definition of experience. If our approach to philosophical inquiry was done correctly, we would not see experience as an epistemological stumbling block, but see it for what it is, our point of access to the world. This is what the denotative-empirical method attempted to show.2 For Dewey, traditional theories on the interaction between human activity and nature "are really elaborations of the same sort of assumptions … assumptions which first make a division where none exists, and... (shrink)

The Tang Dynasty is renowned for its cultural richness and openness to external influences, which significantly impacted the aesthetics of its costume designs, as depicted in contemporary murals. This paper explores the intricate clothing patterns and shapes featured in Tang Dynasty murals, utilizing high-definition microscopic analysis to uncover the profound artistic and symbolic significance embedded within these garments. The study reveals that the clothing patterns are predominantly linear and elongated, with wide cuffs and streamers, while the shapes primarily encompass triangular, (...) rectangular, and oval forms. These elements are executed in a palette of predominantly white, red, blue, and brown, using predominantly lightweight materials like silk, indicative of both aesthetic appeal and functional design. This research delves deeper into the philosophical and religious symbolism of these designs, examining how these ancient motifs influence modern fashion clusters and contribute to contemporary clothing design. The findings suggest that Tang Dynasty apparel exhibits a sophisticated interplay of form and function, enriched with philosophical and religious connotations that resonate with modern design principles. This historical continuity not only deepens the cultural and symbolic dimensions of contemporary fashion but also enhances brand identity and competitive edge in today's global fashion markets. By tracing the lineage of these artistic characteristics from ancient murals to modern clothing collections, this paper highlights the enduring influence of Tang Dynasty aesthetics on modern fashion, suggesting that ancient art forms can provide significant insights into contemporary design practices, especially in the context of enhancing philosophical and religious expressions within the fashion industry. (shrink)

The bioclimatic architecture is still fascinating to all of us. The lack of energy that the world is facing nowadays is forcing architects and engineers to implement smart solutions benefiting at the maximum from nature itself without considering the primary sources of energy that the world is actually using. Bioclimatic design has the roots in history, despite the fact that little attention has been paid to it throughout history. It is important to understand how natural systems operates, creating closed or (...) semi-closed systems that mirror the ecological systems on Earth. The components of bioclimatic design deal mostly with: climate type and requirements; adaptive thermal comfort; vernacular and contextual solutions; tools and assessment methods; microclimate; sun path; wind; rain; passive and active systems and responsive forms. The aim of the bioclimatic design is to improve the natural environment through the utilization of clean energy and renewable energy system; to reduce the need for energy for heating purposes; and to reduce the energy for cooling proposes, air conditioning and lighting. Furthermore, bioclimatic design involves changes in regulation, improves the house comfort, and also improves urban quality of life. Bioclimatic buildings also include the use of building elements such as walls, windows, roofs, and floors, in order to collect, store, and distribute solar thermal energy and to prevent overheating. The aim is to manage the energy flows providing comfortable conditions during the entire year and the entire day. Minimization of thermal losses and utilization of climatic conditions (climate; microclimate, sunrise) are other important issues to consider. According to many studies, the best orientation for a building in order to maximize the heat gain during winter is east–west and the primary façade should face south. Sustainability is mostly an outcome, rather than a goal or a process. The aim of all designers is to reduce the ecological footprints and to improve the quality of life. The energy sustainability and the use of natural resources must be an integral part of a sustainable development. Nowadays, there are softwares that are developed in order to carry out environmental assessment tools and standards, in order to draw conclusions about internal thermal comfort; uncomfortable times in the building during the entire year; the need for shading devices and their dimensions; energy use, energy cost, etc. Simulations are essential in the design process. Examples chosen as case studies participate to have a better insight into the overall approach of the bioclimatic design. Applying the principles of bioclimatic design remains still a challenge in redefining the perfect bioclimatic house. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 224–228 Introduction Jamie Allen Thierry Geoffroy’s conceptual, event- and environment-based art practice has generated over two-decades of definitional activity around what he terms “format art.” The works re-galvanize the energies of a syndicatable, open and atmospheric arrangement, of varying specifics dependent on context, participants and environment. With formats like the Emergency Room, Biennalist, and the Critical Run, Geoffroy endeavors to imbricate art and artist in the most exigent and current of social, political and mediatised spectacles. The result (...) seems to plant us at a triangulation of the configurations proposed by Alan Kaprow, Andrea Fraser and Alan Abel. Geoffroy plays up a guileless innocence (at times sporting the “Naive Blue Helmet”) as he interviews spectactors at the 2012 dOCUMENTA13 exhibitions in Kassel, Germany. What he evokes is a declamation of the appropriative, unenthusiastic, cool inclinations of the mainstream art festival, the profligate biennial (triennial, quadrennial, etc.) circuit and national and global ideological cultural-engines. In propositional artifacts, definitional articles and direct transmissions from Geoffroy’s Emergency Room field office at dOCUMENTA13, the masking of an emergency is here questioned: Can an art show like dOCUMENTA be dangerous? —JA Is dOCUMENTA designed to make people cry about something and not make them see something else? Is the contemporary a distraction from the present? Can art in delay have any impact with today? Do we learn anything by seeing art shows reflecting on history? Could 860,000 visitors have been intoxicated by an apathic gaze than keep them away from reacting? Why is dOCUMENTA proud of having recieve no critic? Why is proximity less important? Why was dOCUMENTA in Kabul? Can weapons designed to kill protesters sold to a repressing regime be contradictory to the support of the Arab Spring? Is the contemporary like a flea market to avoid to debating the important topics of today? Can art be in advance of the broken arm, and avoid accident? Is the goal of dOCUMENTA to create a revolution or to entertain? Is dOCUMENTA betterly done than Disney Land? Is it better to watch Fox News for two years or to go to dOCUMENTA for two days? If a curator, curating a contemporary art show about war, forgets to debate about the weapons factories next door, should it be considered as a professional mistake? Is it OK to employ philosophers to promote vodka? Is navigation a threat? Can an art show like dOCUMENTA be dangerous? Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel author of the month Global Art and the Museum @ZKM: " THE NEXT DOCUMENTA SHOULD BE CURATED BY A TANK " Link to Emergency Room Dictionary < /a> "COOLNESS" from the EMERGENCY ROOM DICTIONARY by COLONEL MUSIC Biennalist at dOCUMENTA 13 "TIRED" from the EMERGENCY ROOM DICTIONARY by COLONEL MUSIC Link to " APATHY " (from the Emergency Room Dictionary ) AWARENESS MUSCLE [fr. muscle de la conscience ] In the same sense memory can be trained, an awareness muscle can be developed by an effort. To develop the awareness muscle, the artist has to reduce his gesticulations. When an artist is busy the artist is not very aware the artist is occupied. A daily training is necessary But how to train? Scanning the news in a critical way could be one exercise. Daily debating politics with others could be another. Looking at other point of views usually produces significant improvements. Fighting prejudice is an excellent exercise. Many other forms of training could also produce beneficial effects for the awareness muscle. Continuous and daily training is important. For instance rewinding and slow motioning what has been absorbed getting away the sugar from the propaganda machines talking to everyone excercise comparatif critical run. If not daily trained the awareness muscle can degrade into atrophy To develop the awareness muscle requires will-power Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel. (shrink)

In the recent history of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, the notion of habit has been reduced to a stimulus-triggered response probability correlation. In this paper we use a computational model to present an alternative theoretical view (with some philosophical implications), where habits are seen as self-maintaining patterns of behavior that share properties in common with self-maintaining biological processes, and that inhabit a complex ecological context, including the presence and influence of other habits. Far from mechanical automatisms, this organismic and self-organizing (...) concept of habit can overcome the dominating atomistic and statistical conceptions, and the high temporal resolution effects of situatedness, embodiment and sensorimotor loops emerge as playing a more central, subtle and complex role in the organization of behavior. The model is based on a novel “iterant deformable sensorimotor medium” (IDSM), designed such that trajectories taken through sensorimotor-space increase the likelihood that in the future, similar trajectories will be taken. We couple the IDSM to sensors and motors of a simulated body and environment and show that under certain conditions, the IDSM forms self-maintaining patterns of activity that operate across the IDSM, the body, and the environment. We present various environments and the resulting habits that form in them. The model acts as an abstraction of habits at a much needed sensorimotor “meso-scale” between microscopic neuron-based models and macroscopic descriptions of behavior. Finally, we discuss how this model and extensions of it can help us understand aspects of behavioral self-organization, historicity and autonomy that remain out of the scope of contemporary representationalist frameworks. (shrink)

Can on-line ‘place-based learning’ be more than a facsimile or ritual? Using a phenomenology of my pandemic practice, I investigate the meaning of ‘place-based learning:’ entertaining Aristotle’s seminal thought on place as a container to venture into contemporary phenomenological inquiries where places and things are not only conceptually implicated by each other, but immanent and potentially powerful elements in learning experiences. Bonnett’s (2021) ecologizing of education shows that authentic forms must be embodied and emplaced in order to open learners to (...) the more in situ, deeply-contextualized and yet ‘transcendental’ and ‘ecstatic’ reception of the more-than-human realm of nature (as what comes-forth, phusis). But this Heideggerian narrative with which I resonate poses challenges for students and place-based educators. Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach, itself modelled on place-based investigation of language (our ‘home city’), draws me back from metaphysical inclinations to dwell constructively on ordinary discourses rooted in educational practices. (shrink)

Walking is an activity that always unfolds within a certain landscape. Tim Ingold has used the notion of “taskscape” to denote pragmatic uses of terrain. Whilst walking, we come to intersect with a variety of taskscapes. As Julia Tanney has highlighted, formal language can only get us so far when thinking about spontaneous, non-theoretical and non-representational activities. Borrowing Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between “knowing that” and knowing how”, I argue for a concept of walking that does not privilege intentions. When somebody (...) walks, they melt into a taskscape not entirely of their own design. Mind is inherently ecological. It is enacted within a certain ecology, and is actually inseparable from its environment. Mind is the sum of intelligent enactments. According to the position I seek to advance in this article, walking may be approached in an object-oriented manner. Each form of behavior composes an enactment that meshes with a certain ecology, what W. Teed Rockwell has called a “behavioral field.” Mind is the inherently relational enactment of a set of behavioral dispositions which are always already enmeshed within a field. When these dispositions enter what, following Markus Gabriel, may be called “fields of sense”, mind and walking become independent objects in their own right. (shrink)

Mathematical modeling can ground communication and reciprocal enrichment among fields of knowledge whose domains are very different. We propose a new mathematical model applicable in biology, specified into ecology and evolutionary biology, and in cultural transmission studies, considered as a branch of economics. Main inspiration for the model are some biological concepts we call “eco-phenotypic” such as development, plasticity, reaction norm, phenotypic heritability, epigenetics, and niche construction. “Physiology” is a core concept we introduce and translate differently in the biological (...) and cultural domains. The model is ecological in that it aims at describing and studying organisms and populations that perform living, intended as a thermodynamic, matter-energy process concerning resources gathering, usage, and depletion in a spatiotemporal context with given characteristics, as well as with multiplication and space occupation. The model also supports evolution, intended as a dynamics including cumulative change in the features of unique organisms that are connected into breeding populations. The model is then applicable to the economics of cultural transmission in which individuals form their attitudes and patterns of behavior under a complex system of influences derived from their “cultural parents”, other members of the society, and the environment. On the side of biology, an innovative goal is to integrate in a single model all the eco-phenotypic concepts as well as both evolution and ecology. On the side of cultural transmission, eco-phenotypic modeling seems more appropriate in capturing some aspects of cultural systems which are modeled away in the earlier framework based on Mendelian population genetics. (shrink)