Art and Cosmotechnics

Author: Yuk Hui
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452963991
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
In light of current discourses on AI and robotics, what do the various experiences of art contribute to the rethinking of technology today? Art and Cosmotechnics addresses the challenge of technology to the existence of art and traditional thought, especially in light of current discourses on artificial intelligence and robotics. It carries out an attempt on the cosmotechnics of Chinese landscape painting in order to address this question, and further asks: What is the significance of shanshui (mountain and water) in face of the new challenges brought about by the current technological transformation? Thinking art and cosmotechnics together is an attempt to look into the varieties of experiences of art and to ask what these experiences might contribute to the rethinking of technology today.

Cosmotechnics

Author: Yuk Hui
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000396363
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
This volume is initial reflections on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West. Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

The Question Concerning Technology in China

Author: Yuk Hui
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0995455007
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics. Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought. Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal. This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization? In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

On the Existence of Digital Objects

Author: Yuk Hui
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452949921
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Book Description
Digital objects, in their simplest form, are data. They are also a new kind of industrial object that pervades every aspect of our life today—as online videos, images, text files, e-mails, blog posts, Facebook events.Yet, despite their ubiquity, the nature of digital objects remains unclear. On the Existence of Digital Objects conducts a philosophical examination of digital objects and their organizing schema by creating a dialogue between Martin Heidegger and Gilbert Simondon, which Yuk Hui contextualizes within the history of computing. How can digital objects be understood according to individualization and individuation? Hui pursues this question through the history of ontology and the study of markup languages and Web ontologies; he investigates the existential structure of digital objects within their systems and milieux. With this relational approach toward digital objects and technical systems, the book addresses alienation, described by Simondon as the consequence of mistakenly viewing technics in opposition to culture. Interdisciplinary in philosophical and technical insights, with close readings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Simondon as well as the history of computing and the Web, Hui’s work develops an original, productive way of thinking about the data and metadata that increasingly define our world.

Recursivity and Contingency

Author: Yuk Hui
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786600544
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
This book is an investigation of algorithmic contingency and an elucidation of the contemporary situation that we are living in: the regular arrival of algorithmic catastrophes on a global scale. Through a historical analysis of philosophy, computation and media, this book proposes a renewed relation between nature and technics.

Art and Cosmotechnics

Author: Yuk Hui
Publisher: EFLUX ARCHITECTURE
ISBN: 9781517909536
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Byung-Chul Han

Author: Steven Knepper
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509561005
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
Byung-Chul Han is one of the most important living philosophers, renowned for his critiques of the digital age. In response to the idea that new technological devices expand our freedom, he argues that they lead to burnout and self-absorption and that we must redevelop contemplative practices which slow us down and open us up. He has brought to his thought forms of deep cosmopolitanism developed from both Zen Buddhism and a renewed Romanticism. This book is the first critical introduction to Han’s body of work. Knepper, Stoneman, and Wyllie explore Han’s rich oeuvre to date and his incisive contributions to a range of disciplines, including critical theory, media studies, political philosophy, and aesthetics. They unpack his key terms and illustrate his concepts with a range of examples, revealing how the critiques of the “achievement society” and burnout, which have earned Han a global audience, build on his earlier accounts of power, violence, and mood. This broader view addresses the most frequent criticisms of Han and makes a compelling case that he is not only an insightful diagnostician of the present moment but one whose interpretation of both Western and Eastern traditions offers wisdom for navigating the now acute problems of modernity. This lively book is essential reading for anyone getting to grips with Han’s extraordinary work.

Relationality

Author: Arturo Escobar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350225983
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
This important new book argues that at the root of the contemporary crisis of climate, energy, food, inequality, and meaning is a certain core presupposition that structures the ways in which we live, think, act and design: the assumption of dualism, or the fundamental separateness of things. The authors contend that the key to constructing livable worlds lies in the cultivation of ways of knowing and acting based on a profound awareness of the fundamental interdependence of everything that exists – what they refer to as relationality. This shift in paradigm is necessary for healing our bodies, ecosystems, cities, and the planet at large. The book follows two interwoven threads of argumentation: on the one hand, it explains and exemplifies the modes of operation and the dire consequences of non-relational living; on the other, it elucidates the nature of relationality and explores how it is embodied in transformative practices in multiple spheres of life. The authors provide an instructive account of the philosophical, scientific, social, and political sources of relational theory and action, with the aim of illuminating the transition from living within seemingly ineluctable 'toxic loops' of unrelational living (based on ontological dualism), to living within 'relational weaves' which we might co-create with multiple human and nonhuman others.

Music and Joy

Author: Daniel K. L. Chua
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300280270
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
From Confucius to Saint Augustine and Beethoven to the blues, a rediscovery of the joy that is music In this revelatory book, Daniel K. L. Chua asks a simple question: Is music joy? For Chua, the answer is a resounding yes—music is a lesson in joy that teaches us how to live well. But to hear this ancient knowledge, he says, we have to attend to a music that is so much greater than our greatest hits. Drawing on extensive sources, from the Confucian classics to the writings of Saint Augustine, Chua’s book is a globe‑trotting, time‑traveling, mind‑boggling journey to rediscover the joy that is music. Using examples from Beethoven to the blues and from philosophy and theology to music theory, Chua updates the relation between music and joy and argues for its relevance in the face of our many political and environmental crises. He opens our ears to a music that is the very definition of joy for today’s troubled world.

Machine and Sovereignty

Author: Yuk Hui
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452972109
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Developing a new political thought to address today’s planetary crises What is “planetary thinking” today? Arguing that a new approach is urgently needed, Yuk Hui develops a future-oriented mode of political thought that encompasses the unprecedented global challenges we are confronting: the rise of artificial intelligence, the ecological crisis, and intensifying geopolitical conflicts. Machine and Sovereignty starts with three premises. The first affirms the necessity of developing a new language of coexistence that surpasses the limits of nation-states and their variations; the second recognizes that political forms, including the polis, empire, and the state, are technological phenomena, which Lewis Mumford terms “megamachines.” The third suggests that a particular political form is legitimated and rationalized by a corresponding political epistemology. The planetary thinking that this book sketches departs from the opposition between mechanism and organism, which characterized modern thought, to understand the epistemological foundations of Hegel’s political state and Schmitt’s Großraum and their particular ways of conceiving the question of sovereignty. Through this reconstruction, Hui exposes the limits of the state and reflects on a new theoretical matrix based on the interrelated concepts of biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity. Arguing that we are facing the limit of modernity, of the eschatological view of history, of globalization, and of the human, Hui conceives necessary new epistemological and technological frameworks for understanding and rising to the crises of our present and our future. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.