I gave a paper at the Manchester Metropolitan University conference on ‘Deleuze and the event’ that was held earlier this year and the organisers have videoed all the papers, a practice they have had for a while now as part of their online journal A/V.  A dvd came through the post this morning with copies of all the papers in video format, which is cool since I can now see those papers I missed on the day.  Here is my own paper (in mov format) - and here on iPo in mp4 format.  These are ‘direct download’ links, so right click and save-as or do whatever it is you do on your system.  You can view a streaming versions here.  Comments of course welcome.

teaching the machine

There’s this peculiar video that’s on YouTube at the moment, an excellent example of contemporary pedagogy in many ways, called ‘The machine is Us/ing Us’. It’s gathered nearly 2 million hits and since it’s only about 4 minutes long, probably most of those people have watched it. There’s a beautifully slick feel to the way the video performs itself. It’s about the ‘Web 2.0′ (the new ’social web’) and it makes use of the text inputs we make on the ‘net all the time to mix and edit between them, presenting its ideas as the video progresses.

The main thesis seems quite basic, though one that needs to be kept in mind perhaps, and that is that the new forms of communication are not, in fact, communication but connection. They do not allow the easier flow of some pre-existing material but in fact constitute new material, new connections and new flows (even though they also might allow the easier flow of existing material). It seems reasonably positive, reasonably human, reasonably thoughtful. In effect I agree with what Michael Wesch says (the maker of the video and assistant professor of anthropology at Kansas Sate University). I also applaud his skill and ability to produce this piece. There was, however (of course there’ll be a ‘however’ ;-) one phrase that occurred that stuck in my mind and which seemed, how shall I say it, strange. It seemed, at the very least, strange. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favourite pieces by Burroughs is the short Ah Pook discussion of time, death, control and the ‘ugly american’. I showed it to my Introduction to Philosophy class this week, at the start of the lecture, then came across it again on Muli Koppell’s blog ‘Methods and Black Squares‘ blog. The brief film animation that is famously associated with this Burroughs piece is below, though it misses out (at least in this version) Bryon Gysin’s all purpose nuclear bedtime story from the end, which I’ve previously heard attached to Ah Pook as a kind of coda.

Read the rest of this entry »