Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies – II

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Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies – II

by Debashish Banerji

To continue with our reflections on the regime of technology or what I have called the universal desiring machine of techno-capital (Techo-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies I), let us dwell for a moment also on the “traditional” understanding of Marx, one which Postone is at pains to distinguish himself from, since this version also meshes in its own way with the goals of the Enlightenment and may debatably show itself to be be identical with the techno-utopia of Hegel/Teilhard/McLuhan, and pushing in its own ingenuity, the self-same mythology with the same structural order of frozen time (teleology).

Among Marx’s own internal narratives, this could very well be one of his spectral alternates, since Hegel was more than an influence in his thinking. The “traditional” version then is that products are produced by concrete labor and “originally” for their concrete and (subjectively) specific use-value(s) in the self-consumptions of communities. But the process of marketization is one of the necessary birth of history, of the journey of capital as abstract use value of commodity translating labor now also abstracted for the universalization/globalization of human exchange. This process of the materialization and terrestrialization of human labor is mediated for competitive self-advantage by a “middle” class, the bourgeois, a mediation that accumulates capital privately and fuels the processes of the production and consumption of unbounded increasing surplus – the exploitation of labor and of nature, the production of technology, the production of knowledge and the production of desire. But the internal contradiction in this system between the use and abstract value of the product and the subjective concreteness and objectified abstraction of labor (these two sets of contradictions mapping into one another as necessary translations, since it is labor which translates into the value of  product) drives the dialectic of inexorable necessity towards the “justice” of pure unmediated translations, a global order which achieves the end of history in the completed identity of abstract/concrete exchange/use producer/consumer as the self-representation  of collective humanity in the form of the international union of labor through the political organ of the World State.

The traditional view of Marxist revolution is that of human intervention in accelerating the inherent rationalization of this process by the overcoming of the mediation of the bourgeois and his competitive privatization of capital through a collective organization of the proletariat and its direct ownership of the means of production and the products and control over their consumption, distribution and exchange through nation-states and eventually, the world-state. The mythology of this narrative should not be lost on us. This is the Sacrifice of the originary Unified Body of collective Man in the Symbol, pure communities of the Symbolic Age of humanity, Satya Yuga, consuming their own production, but now driven to the reconstitution of the dis-membered body through acts of exchange, leading logically (since the hidden Subject of this leading is the Logos, who makes Himself visible only through His adjectival quality, logic) to the terrestrialization of Universal Value (which is Universal Justice) in the reintegrated Body-Politic of International Labor as the unmediated self-determining producers/consumers of their own labor/produce of use/exchange (each of these opposition-pairs being now realized identities in consciousness). Marxists, of course, will shudder at this mythologization, since they will say it is exactly the Geist, Spirit of Hegel which Marx rejected in materializing his dialectic in the collective human body and its material processes of  production and consumption, with the proletariat as its real Subject. But be that as it may, why the process of history should take this logical form, of a loss of “innocence” through private selfishness and the transformation of individual selfishness to universal justice and finally of the revelation in universal justice of Universal Love, were it not for the immanence of the Logos, the Word of God made flesh hidden in the heart of human history, whatever may be its manifest actors and their motivated/material acts, is difficult to comprehend. The subsumption of the Chrisian mythos in the Hegelian vision of the Enlightenment undergoes a second level of secularization in the “traditional” narrative of Marx, but cannot divorce itself from the source of its necessity in its Origin.

Where Postone questions this version is in the centrality of its “original sin,” since this will determine also the totality of its apotheosis in the “end of history.” According to Postone, for the later Marx this is not an act of selfishness but one of self-alienation. The decision to produce not for self-consumption but for exchange produces not merely the mediation of economic and more fundamentally, social relations (the transformation of the habitus) by the layer of the “middle class” but by another layer of immanent mediation, which becomes more and more manifest through the historic process as the “true subject” and beneficiary of this history – the layer of alienation itself materializing and universalizing itself as Technology - Technology as Logos or Logos as Technology, which no revolution of the proletariat or overcoming of the bourgeois can displace, produced out of the dismembered body of the sacrifice of collective Unity in the Symbolic Age of Innocence, the shining Bio-Robotic Cow of Universal Plenty, its mechanical udders vibrating with the fatal fascination of alterity, cannibalizing its producers into its own alienated Substance. Marx’s mature view of the “end of history” then for Postone is not the apotheosis of labor and the utopia of Universal Love but the totalitarianism of Technology as the regime of alienation, his revolution not a revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeois but an immanent revolution of human production and consumption against technicity, the technologized consciousness-structures of the alienated social habitus, of commodified social relations. In this version, Marx visioned Hegelian Universal Enlightenment as a mistake and his own narrative is a historical explanation and critique of Hegel. In this view, Hegel mistook a non-human Universal Spirit (Geist) as the progressively materializing and rationalizing Subject of History because he himself was embedded within the structural temporality of modernity, which was already marked by its endemic alienation. This ojectified alienation, rationalizing itself materially as Technology is what Hegel mistook as Spirit.

But granted that this is a possibility, can Hegel/Teilhard/McLuhan be dismissed so easily? Can the Enlightenment and the fascination of its mythos be  negativized unequivocally? After all, the Aurobindonian narrative sounds surprisingly similar to some ears as the Hegelian one; many there are who read the regime of globalization as the materialization of the Brahman, even of that specially mystifying Aurobindonian term, the Supermind. And Postone’s Marx and his attribution of self-alienation at the “origin” of modern history – how does this history realize itself universally – I mean how did it even get this far, what processes of chance or necessity or combination of the two took local phenomena of exchange and turned it into the globalizing world-market, whose ontology (hauntology, as Derrida will tell us in his Specters of Marx) is technicity? Was it perhaps the Hegelian Zeitgeist, Time-Spirit, the Heideggerean disclosure of Being in the horizon of modern Time, the Foucauldian inexplicable epistemic change? And what does it portend for the future destiny of the human at the end of its history? Or can its history be aborted and transformed through immanent revolution, as Postone suggests (but never makes practically concrete) in his text?

What are the dimensions of the Enlightenment narrative and where does Sri Aurobindo fit into it or where does it fit into Sri Aurobindo, if we are to be more audacious or is there a radical misfit between the two? Where is the inadequacy in “Catholicism” which Arthur Kroker invokes to explain McLuhan’s failure or is it some other kind of inadequacy, in the heart of the Enlightenment ideal and that of its proponents who see subsumed and hidden in it the track or trace, footsteps of the Holy Spirit of archaic ages?

What indeed, is the Enlightenment ideal and where do we stand in its realization today? Put simply, the onto-theological ideal of the Enlightenment is the universalization of Divine Reason, the Rationality or Intelligence of the Universe as the common property of Humanity on earth – not the property of any one person but of Humanity as a whole, for its access and use. Enlightenment brings liberation, this was the belief, and a universalized Enlightenment will bring universal liberation through the terrestrialization of the properties of Divinity (or as Divine Reason equated with Divinity) being accessible to all humans. The prime properties of such a realized divinity would be the Omnisicience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence of the Divine Reason within unversal access. Today, the virtual universalization of satellite technology, telecommunications and intercontinental travel have effectively non-localized our experience of the world, we can almost be “present” at any point on the earth at any time. Is this not Omnipresence? The proliferation of electronic archives and incredible information density of storage systems are making all the history of textual and multimedia expression and discursivity of the earth available to the access of all human beings at the push of a button. Is this not Omniscience? And Technology today makes it possible to give life and take life universally – we are on the verge of being able to overcome every natural deterrent to food production and to regenerate human organs and we can blow out the world at the push of a button. Is this not Omnipotence? So where did we go wrong or did we? And is there anything else that Sri Aurobindo can give us here – or is this indeed also the Aurobindonian mythos, the terrestrialization and universalization of Supermind as the Vedic Cow of Human Plenty?

These are questions worth reflecting on and bringing into alignment with the Neo-Vedantic teleology (if it can be called that) of Sri Aurobindo.

Ghosts of Things Dead by Richard Hartz

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Sri Aurobindo c. 1920

Ghosts of Things Dead

Richard Hartz

Change is sweeping over the world as never before. Modern man with his technological wizardry is like the sorcerer’s apprentice conjuring up forces beyond his control. One of the most common reactions to runaway change is to cling to the past – but not often to what was best in the past. Meanwhile the higher faculties that once played a role in the guidance of life are marginalized or trivialized. Philosophy has been reduced to an academic specialization. Spirituality is represented by little more than popular travesties of the disciplines bequeathed by the mystics of the ages. Religions have survived and partially reversed the process of secularization, but in a globalized world they divide the human race instead of uniting it. Most of them have split into rapidly growing conservative camps and slowly declining liberal ones.

The rise of fundamentalism, especially, seems to indicate a widespread inability to adapt to the current pace of change. The roots of many of the movements labelled fundamentalist can be traced to the nineteenth century; but it is in the last few decades, and most noticeably since the end of the Cold War, that they have taken the world by surprise as a major factor in religion and politics. This phenomenon has been extensively studied within a rationalistic framework, where fundamentalism is seen as a challenge to secular modernity. Scholars working within this framework have contributed much valuable research and analysis. But it might be worthwhile to consider the problem from a less Eurocentric angle.

An alternative approach to understanding the radical changes occurring in the world today could draw inspiration from the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, with its uniquely balanced synthesis of Eastern and Western perspectives. I will confine myself to examining a particularly relevant insight that recurred and was developed in his writings in various contexts over at least a forty-year period, indicating its importance in his worldview. It was first formulated even before he ended his brief but eventful career as a leader of the Indian freedom struggle and left British India for the French colony of Pondicherry, where he wrote his major works in relative seclusion. His essay “The Process of Evolution”, published in September 1909 in the weekly magazine Karmayogin, begins with the observation: “The end of a stage of evolution is usually marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evolution.”[1] This concept of the “recrudescence” of things that have to be left behind in the psychological and spiritual development of humanity could, I suggest, shed light on the recent upsurge of fundamentalism.

Let us first see how Sri Aurobindo explains the general tendency of human evolution to be punctuated by apparent reversals which, far from undoing the results of the forward movement of Time, serve to expose and undermine the counter-evolutionary forces and create conditions favorable for their elimination. We will then be in a position to look at fundamentalism from a new point of view, less as a reaction to and contradiction of modernization and secularization than as a phase in the difficult progress of the human race from our infrarational beginnings toward a destiny that must include the fulfilment not only of our rational tendencies but of our deepest spiritual impulses.

To begin with, we have to note Sri Aurobindo’s use of the word “evolution” itself. Evolution is, of course, a Western term strongly associated with modern science and has no exact pre-modern equivalent in India or elsewhere. In the essay from which I have quoted, “evolution” has little to do with Darwin and much in common with the broad idea of progress – but the idea of progress is also often said to be a modern Western innovation. Sri Aurobindo’s conception of progress, though, differed significantly from that of the European Enlightenment. In his view, the triumph of reason over unreason, however necessary as a stage, cannot be the final goal of human progress since the reasoning intellect is not our highest possible faculty. In support of this view he appealed to the spiritual traditions of India.

Sri Aurobindo begins his essay, “The Process of Evolution”, with a discussion of individual psychological transformation using the Sanskrit terminology of Yoga. It is only two-thirds of the way through the essay that he makes the transition to a consideration of social and political evolution with the statement: “The law is the same for the mass as for the individual.”[2] The application of Yogic principles to the collective process allows him to formulate a theory of social progress and its vicissitudes that is equally indebted to Eastern and Western thought and experience. This original synthesis leads him to some striking perceptions, as when he writes: “A determined movement of reaction is evident in many parts of the world…. The attempt to go back to the old spirit is one of those necessary returns without which it cannot be so utterly exhausted as to be blotted out from the evolution.”[3]

Sri Aurobindo’s practice of an intensive Yogic discipline seems to have repeatedly confirmed this principle on the level of personal experience. Again and again he found that the stubbornness of the difficulties encountered when one tries to transform one’s nature with any thoroughness did not prove that it was impossible, but was due to the complexity and integrality of a process that has to deal not only with the surface of our being, but with forces of which we are not normally aware. In an entry in his diary, the Record of Yoga, on November 17, 1913, he generalized with regard to certain types of defects that when they show themselves “in exaggerated sensations out of all proportion to the reality” behind them, it is always a sign of their “failing power & approaching exhaustion; for the hostile forces, conscious of the failure, gather up & exhaust in an illegitimate endeavour all the forces which, properly used, might last for a longer season than that actually allotted to them.”[4] This observation was made in a limited context, but appears to have been deliberately phrased with a much wider application in mind.

In the next few years, Sri Aurobindo wrote most of his major works and published them serially in the monthly philosophical review, Arya. In some of these writings such as The Ideal of Human Unity and The Psychology of Social Development (later published in a revised form as The Human Cycle), he came back to the subject of collective progress and developed it in much greater depth than in his earlier essays in the Karmayogin. He was optimistic about humankind’s potential, but realistic about the obstacles to its realization. In June 1918, near the end of The Ideal of Human Unity, he wrote:

This material world of ours, besides its fully embodied things of the present, is peopled by… powerful shadows, ghosts of things dead and the spirit of things yet unborn. The ghosts of things dead are very troublesome actualities and they now abound…. Repeating obstinately their sacred formulas of the past, they hypnotise backward-looking minds and daunt even the progressive portion of humanity.[5]

Sri Aurobindo went on to speak not of the “ghosts of things dead” but of the “spirit of things yet unborn”. But thirty years later, in his final revision of The Ideal of Human Unity, he added “A Postscript Chapter” to bring the book up to date after the Second World War. Early in this chapter, which was to be one of his last writings, he returned to much the same point as he had originally made as far back as 1909. Reaffirming, in effect, the principle that “[t]he law is the same for the mass as for the individual”, he observed:

As in the practice of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to raise up the psychological possibilities which are there in the nature and stand in the way of its spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate them, even, it may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done, so too Nature acts with the world-forces that meet her on her way, not only calling up those which will assist her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those that she knows to be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot but start up to impede her secret will. This one has often seen in the history of mankind; one sees it exampled today with an enormous force commensurable with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done. But always these resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than they have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover.[6]

One of the most significant developments in the sixty years since this was written has been the outbreak of so-called fundamentalist movements all over the world. While Sri Aurobindo did not exactly predict that this would occur, he recognized the danger of “the repetition in old or new forms of a past mistake” with regard to religion, including the possibility of what he called graphically “some revival of blind fanatical obscurantist sectarian religionism”.[7] If this was one of “the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done”, perhaps Nature was wise to call it up “so as to finish with” it.

Today the revival of religious intolerance and obscurantism that seemed no more than a possibility when Sri Aurobindo mentioned it is an all too familiar reality commonly designated by the convenient, though problematic, label “fundamentalism”. The word itself has been the subject of much inconclusive debate. This is partly because it was coined in the context of early twentieth-century Protestant Christianity, but is now generally extended far beyond its original scope. According to some scholars who question the value and appropriateness of the term, fundamentalism is “just a dirty 14-letter word… levelled by liberals and Enlightenment rationalists against any group, religious or otherwise, that dares to challenge the absolutism of the post-Enlightenment outlook.”[8] But Malise Ruthven points out:

Words have a life and energy of their own that will usually defy the exacting demands of scholars…. Whatever technical objections there may be to using the F-word outside its original sphere, the phenomenon (or rather, the phenomena) it describes exists, although no single definition will ever be uncontested. Put at its broadest, it may be described as a religious way of being that manifests itself in a strategy by which beleaguered believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identities as individuals or groups in the face of modernity and secularization.[9]

Whatever problems there may be with defining the word and deciding where to apply it, fundamentalism is very much with us. Moreover, it is part of an even more widespread resurgence of religious conservatism of which fundamentalism is an extreme case. The former secularization theorist Peter Berger notes this in The Desecularization of the World, published in 1999 after he realized that the data contradicted his previous views about the inevitable decline of religion under the impact of modernization. As he observes: “On the international religious scene, it is conservative or orthodox or traditionalist movements that are on the rise almost everywhere.” Among sociologists of religion this startling development has given rise to what Berger calls ironically “the last-ditch thesis” of secularization theory. As he paraphrases it, what this thesis maintains is: “Modernization does secularize, and movements like the Islamic and the Evangelical ones represent last-ditch defenses by religion that cannot last: eventually, secularity will triumph….” Berger himself finds this thesis “singularly unpersuasive”.[10]

Now, this version of secularization theory has something in common with Sri Aurobindo’s assertion that there “is no place for rigid orthodoxy, whether Hindu, Mahomedan or Christian in the future. Those who cling to it, lose hold on life and go under….”[11] Sri Aurobindo would agree with the secularization theorists that the orthodox religiosity that has been making a comeback – perhaps because it provides a sense of security in a time of uncertainty – is a reversion to unsustainable traditionalism and its show of strength is a bluff. The main difference between his view and the secularization thesis is that according to Sri Aurobindo, what will prevail in the end is not secularity but spirituality. At first sight this may seem more far-fetched than secularization theory itself. Yet it is actually less vulnerable to the principal criticism that Berger directs at his own former colleagues.

Berger explains the reasons that led him and other scholars to change their minds about secularization theory:

The religious impulse, the quest for meaning that transcends the restricted space of empirical existence in this world, has been a perennial feature of humanity. (This is not a theological statement but an anthropological one – an agnostic or even an atheist philosopher may well agree with it.) It would require something close to a mutation of the species to extinguish this impulse for good. The more radical thinkers of the Enlightenment and their more recent intellectual descendants hoped for something like this, of course. So far it has not happened, and as I have argued, it is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. The critique of secularity common to all the resurgent movements is that human existence bereft of transcendence is an impoverished and finally untenable condition.[12]

Sri Aurobindo would have approved of most of this statement, though for reasons that are neither theological nor anthropological and might not be acceptable to an atheist. But according to him, it is not the revival of past orthodoxies or the invention of new ones that will lead humanity to the transcendence for which it yearns. He keenly appreciated the role of the European Enlightenment and went so far as to write: “A temporary reign of the critical reason largely destructive in its action is an imperative need for human progress.”[13] But he saw this as only a stage, and one that we are now preparing to leave behind – though it might be unwise to try to do so prematurely, before its work is complete. A theme that pervades Sri Aurobindo’s writings is the irresistible forward march of Time towards a goal that is beyond anything we can now conceive or imagine and perhaps will always recede into infinity. In one of his earliest published essays he wrote:

In all movements, in every great mass of human action it is the Spirit of the Time, that which Europe calls the Zeitgeist and India Kala, who expresses himself…. When the Zeitgeist, God in Time, moves in a settled direction, then all the forces of the world are called in to swell the established current towards the purpose decreed. That which consciously helps, swells it, but that which hinders swells it still more, and like a wave on the windswept Ocean, now rising, now falling, now high on the crest of victory and increase, now down in the troughs of discouragement and defeat, the impulse from the hidden Source sweeps onward to its preordained fulfilment. Man may help or man may resist, but the Zeitgeist works, shapes, overbears, insists.[14]

Notes

[1]  Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, vol. 13 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo(Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998), p. 33.

[2]  Ibid., p. 35.

[3]  Ibid., p. 36.

[4]  Sri Aurobindo, Record of Yoga (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2001), p. 316.

[5]  Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998), p. 294.

[6]  Ibid., pp. 310–11.

[7]  Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga: Part One (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971), p. 198.

[8]  Malise Ruthven, Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5.

[9]  Ibid., pp. 5–6.

[10] Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 6, 12.

[11] Letter of 23 February 1932, published in Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, vol. 52, no. 1 (February 2000), p. 80.

[12] Ibid., p. 13.

[13] Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998), pp. 26–27.

[14] Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p. 29.

Integral Anthropology and World Religions by Debashish Banerji

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Integral Anthropology and World Religions

By Debashish Banerji

Transcript of a talk given at the conference on Spirituality Beyond Religions, Auroville, January 2010

The term Integral Anthropology is my own coinage.  I introduce this term so that we may contemplate the idea of an integral definition of the Human, an all-round locus of the Human which is integral.  But in introducing this term I would also like to foreground from the very beginning human helplessness at grasping the dimensions of the integral.  An integral anthropology is something  very inviting, indeed  something that we’ve been invited to in our modern age. From a certain viewpoint, it is, perhaps, the very meaning of the Modern Age. But it is also something paradoxical, something aporetic, that brings us face to face with our helplessness.  So, to initiate our contemplation, I’d like to invoke two images . The first one is related to what has been called the Sacrifice of Purusha.  The Sacrifice of Purusha is an idea that comes to us from the Veda, from the Indian tradition, but it is not restricted to the Indian tradition.  It may be thought of as an anthropological deep structure.  We encounter it, for example, in Greek mythology as the dismemberment of Poseidon and the dismemberment of Dionysius.  This idea of something whole, something complete, something integral, which subjects itself to limitation, to fragmentation, to its opposite, subjects itself completely so that it becomes that :  this is the notion of the Sacrifice of Purusha.  I’d like to introduce this through an image which might seem facetious, but I found it to be very profound.  It is the old Nursery Rhyme :

“Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall.

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men

Could not put Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

The second image I’d like to invoke also relates to Integral Anthropology.  It is taken from the Gita.  This is what is known as the Vishwarupa Darshan.  The Gita synthesises all that has gone before in Indian spiritual thought, and it weaves these ideas around two conceptual categories through much of its discourse. These are Sankhya and Yoga.  These two categories are repeatedly referenced, and the Gita builds its own  integration around the ideas of Sankhya and Yoga, showing them both to  belong to one spiritual realisation. Yet there is a profound chasm between these two.  One, Sankhya, pushes in the direction of Knowledge, in the direction of the Static, of the Akshara Brahman, the Immutable Purusha ;  the other, Yoga, pushes towards the Way of Works, towards the knowledge of will, of right and  wrong, of the thing to be done – kartavyam karma – and the Purusha that is dynamic in time, that is mutable – Kshara Purusha.  The Gita integrates these, ultimately, through something that has not been introduced before in Indian spiritual thought:  the idea of the Avatar, the Divine embodied in human form.

In its climactic episode, when Arjuna says to Krishna, “Show me who you are”, he bestows upon him a special faculty of vision which he calls the Divine Sight.  This bestowal enables Arjuna to see what no human being can see, and what he sees is paradoxical beyond his power of envisioning.  He is bewildered.  He sees that which has no beginning and no end, that which encompasses all time – past, present and future – that  which is formless, and yet that which has assumed all forms. Every form that has ever been taken in the past, that exists in the present and that may be imagined in the future – stands out in front of Arjuna in the body of this one person.  This paradoxical image is something that Arjuna cannot bear.  It makes him plead with Krishna and say, “Revert back to your four-handed cosmic form for I cannot behold you like this.  It is beyond my capacity.”  And the vision is withdrawn from him.

These are the two images that we would do well to contemplate if we are to think  Integral Anthropology.  Now to return to the other term:  World Religions.

Before there was World Religions, there were religions and there were worlds. Each religion had its own world.  Religions were formed, due to some divine revelation or divine realisation, experience, something from beyond, received by someone or some few and then propagated in terms of wholeness, completeness, in the name of integrality.  Each of these religions provided a cosmos, a cosmos made up of many worlds, not only visible worlds, but invisible worlds, organised hierarchically with some core foundations of what Reality is, with some image of the human and his place in this cosmos, and with a trajectory which that cosmos and / or that human followed as a path towards some end.  Now, these religions spoke in the name of the Whole, the Truth, the Absolute.  But as a matter of fact they arose out of the fragmentary, they caught a partial glimpse, some a little bigger and some a little smaller, and they tried to capture their reality along what I think of as three axes, or three varieties of the life of religion.

I would like to enumerate these lives of Religion. First comes the life of thought in religion, what is called Theology.  The life of thought in religion proceeds to state what Reality is, based on what has been experienced by somebody but often expressed by a variety of people who are not that somebody who had that experience.  Therefore to the life of thought in religion, there is a double vacuum at the centre :  first a vacuum of partiality, and second, a vacuum of inexperience.  This results in what some post-modern thinkers, such as  Jacques Derida, have called Supplementarity :  the teaching has a hole which calls for supplementation.  An incessant flow of words, of commentaries, of apologetics, of various kinds of justifications for the central tenets of the religion issue forth of necessity, so that what was postulated as the core of the religion   becomes completely obscured over time, so that one forgets to ask what were the causes, what is the scope, what constitutes the integrality of that religion.  It continues to build.  Part of this supplementality is beyond thought – it goes into the need for a following.  To hide its vacuum it needs to gather more and more people to bolster its image of being the Truth. Of course, one may say, from a certain viewpoint, that all religious teachings may be subject to this effect of supplementarity. Theology, in its statement of a central dogma, at best subjects the infinite to a perspectival distortion, which is the trap of language, coin of the mind. This is why Martin Heidegger, who coined the term onto-theology, which means the philosophy of being, ontology, treated as a theology or religion, cautioned about the problem of “naming” God, and sought a language where Being would be presented “under erasure.” There may be other solutions to this problem of Theology. If Theology could be taken as figure only, as an aid to mystical experience, perhaps the need for supplementation can be avoided. Instead of searching for justification, it then becomes secret doctrine, flexibly available to a community of mystics. But this solution is an esoteric one and suffers from the problem of all secret societies in pre-modern times, the maintenance of secrecy through power, the formation of a cultic order.

The second such life is the life of feelings in religion.  Religions make themselves accessible to human beings through mythologies.  Mythologies are of various kinds, and I won’t go into a detailed description of how mythologies work, in what various ways they proceed – a little contemplation will show us how mythologies bring  religion close to our feelings so that we are willing to live for it and die for it.  Mythologies create conscience in the follower, a symbolic system which subsumes the human in a virtual reality. The human then lives this reality as integral truth. We are willing to take up arms for it and kill for it, to withhold life and give life.

The third form of life in religion is the life of power in religions.  Religion attracts power.  The hunger for power in religion is much greater even than politics, because this is divine politics, the politics of the Infinite.  It attracts those who wish to lay claim on the invisible, in the lives of human beings, the “sacred darkness” which surrounds our existence.  If mythologies create conscience, Power is needed to keep conscience in place.  Human beings become inculcated into a certain belief, and there are official and unofficial priests around us to make sure that we don’t stray from those beliefs or from the flock of believers.  The excesses that have resulted from this condition are well known to us in the modern world.  In Europe this led to what is called the Dark Ages, a period of obscurantism and terror in the name of Religion.

The story of World Religions begins only after we acknowledge the fact that the Dark Ages caused the Modern Age to spring forth in a way that wanted to exclude or, at least, marginalise the life of religion from the world.  Instead of religions with worlds it wanted us to realise that there is one world, the earth, and one people, the human race.  And as for its dealings with religion, it had little place for it and created its own dogma, refusing the  invisible, that which bounds our little moment on this earth, that which is hidden before our birth and after our death.  Hence, we proceeded into this modern secular world and created our academies that gave us knowledge of this world and, at the centre of this world, of the human being that occupies it.  This knowledge of the human being comes to us through what are called the Human Sciences.  Human sciences, psychology, sociology, history, culture studies, most of all, anthropology, give us the wide scope of the definition of the human.  Part of the drive of the Modern Age, based in the European Enlightenment, is to arrive at such a knowledge of what is the human, and we applied the universal method of modernity, Science, to study this question empirically through the manifestations of humanity wherever it is available on our planet.

But, though religion was marginalised in the process, it did not die.  It didn’t die because to every religion there was a truth.  That truth was the truth of the experience that lay at its centre:  the spiritual realisation that somebody had, the intuitions that human beings carry within themselves that it is possible to know something outside of the bounding limits of the world as our senses perceive.  And so religions continued, though given a secondary place in our modern world.  Today we see modernity reaching its culminant phase in a global world that it has encompassed and made one in its own terms.  But along with that we find also the rise of religious fundamentalism in this world, – the religions that have asserted themselves, beyond the power of their previous scope, to exert their universality, their supposed integrality, their partialities turned into hegemonic world-dominating discourses in competition with the global world of modernity.

This is the story of religion in the modern world.  But when we speak of world religions it is another possibility of modernity that meets our gaze.  Through the history of the modern academy, Religion has made its entry in other ways into the study of the human.  The human sciences have done something remarkable and unprecedented for human beings all over the world.  It has created the Idea of the Human.  This is the sense in which Michel Focault says that discourse is productive. Discourse produces ontologies, forms of being. Today, we have a sense of the human — almost a species sense — which we never had before the academy put forward the idea of the human sciences.  Perhaps one always had access to such an idea through inner contact with a universal consciousness. In this sense, “humanity” as a whole was seen as the children of immortality and announced as such by the Vedanta.  But in the mass, the idea of the human, the intuition of the human, is available to humanity in a more concrete way today than ever before.  Into this field, that which was excluded is seeking its return.  One may see that return always present through modernity as an undercurrent, the undercurrent of spirituality even in the modern academy.  Perhaps it begins in the post-Kantian phase with German Transcendentalism, followed by English Romanticism, French Symbolism, and American Transcendentalism of the late nineteenth century.  But it is only around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century that something emerges which we might call a Post-Secular Humanism, the beginning of a new definition of humanism, a spiritual humanism, the beginnings of what may be called an integral anthropology.

We may speak of certain prominent names that have inaugurated this phase.  We may speak  of Vivekananda, and the address he gave at the Parliament of World Religions in 1893.  There are other figures of this kind arising out of India in the early twentieth century that have spoken in the language of the West and have brought the message of an experience of the Spirit, not bounded by the lives of theology or mythology, or authority,  but available to all human beings as an unmediated reality.  Sri Aurobindo comes most prominently to mind as one of these figures, who has perhaps given us some of the clearest indicators to guide us to an integral anthropology. The same year that Vivekananda was giving his speech in 1893 in Chicago, Sri Aurobindo was returning from England to India.  We also have figures like Rabindranath Tagore and Ananda Coomaraswamy who have left their mark in making this subjective life of the spirit available to mankind as a whole.  But also, this turn of the century opens up to the modern academy the systematic study of  world religion.  Two of the major figures I would like to refer to in this regard are both Americans.  One is Richard N Bucke, who wrote a book called Cosmic Consciousness in 1901. The book was inspired by an experience, on  which he wrote in the third person due to a sense of impersonality that had entered his consciousness.  He writes :

All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around, as it were, by a flame-coloured cloud.  For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city.  The next he knew that the light that the light was in himself.  Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe.  Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning flash of the Brahmic splendour,  which has ever since lightened his life.  Upon his heart fell one drop of Bhrahmic bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven.  Among other things he did not come to believe he saw and knew that the cosmos is not  dead matter but a living presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that the foundation principle of the world is what we call Love, and that the happiness of everyone in the long run is absolutely certain.  He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous months, or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught.

This quote is interesting in that the author uses the term “Brahmic” to mediate his experience, giving evidence to the transmission of Vedantic knowledge to the American mind by this time.   It also gives the gist of Bucke’s vision of Cosmic Consciousness as an emergent property for a humanity of the future.  He says, “The human race is in the process of developing a new kind of consciousness, far in advance of ordinary human self-consciousness which will eventually lift the race above and beyond all fears and ignorances, the brutalities and bestialities which beset it today.”

1901-1902 is also the year of the publication of a major work, one may say, the foundational text of world religions, of comparative mysticism, and of one might call the subjective science of the future.  This is William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience.  In this work, James characterizes all mystical experiences by four features. It’s interesting that James  first characteristic of mystic experience is stated in terms that may almost be taken out of the description of his experience by  Richard Bucke Bucke says of his experience that he had an exaltation “followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe.”    The first of James’ characteristics is ineffability.  Ineffability refers to an excess beyond any possibility of description.  There is always more to it than can be described. This excess is another aspect of the supplementarity we find with onto-theology, but for an inverse reason.  Here we find that supplementarity can result, not merely from a vacuum of experience, but from an overwhelming excess of experience. The experience has  so much to it,  that one may  describe it without ever exhausting it.  This distinction leads to an important difference in the quality of supplementarity between onto-theology and the expression proper to the ineffability of mystical experience. The first exists to increasingly hide the hollowness at its center; the latter to increasingly reveal the inexhaustible plenitude at its center. These lead, naturally, to two very different kinds of language practices.

The second factor is enumerated by James is Noeticism.  This term has risen to popularity in more recent  times through Edgar Mitchell’s founding of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.  Noeticism, as James describes it, is the sense of significance, the profound sense of meaning which is self-evident.  This is the key part to the idea of Noeticism, that it does not look for evidence to prove it.  One who has the experience bears the burden of self-evidence.  This is its noetic aspect.

The third characteristic James gave to mystical experience is Transience, that  it is not permanent, it occupies a period of time.  Now, this characteristic has been contested in later literature by people who have written about  transformation of consciousness. This implies the possibility of  moving from temporary altered states of consciousness to transformed ontologies, changes of being which are permanent.  As a more recent yet seminal contributor to the idea of world religions, Huston Smith has put it, what we seek are not altered states but altered traits. Hence, transiency refers to the sporadic nature of mystical experiences, but this need not encompass the totality of mystical realisation.

The fourth factor that James introduces is Passivity. By this he means that mystical experience comes unexpectedly, though one may prepare for it through a sustained discipline.  This is related to an old debate between “gradualism and sudden enlightenment.”  The conclusion here  is that mystical experiences can be prepared through gradual discipline, disciplinary preparation, but they come unbidden, suddenly, unpredictably, in that way.

To these categories by William James, modern thinkers of what is called the Perennial Philosophy School, have added one more. This is Non-dualism.  They say that mystical experience is characterized by a loss of distinction between subject and object.  Even if there is some continuity or persistence of that distinction, there is simultaneously an  overcoming of that distinction.

This Perennial Philosophy school is itself part of a long historical lineage which can be traced to these developments at the turn of the 19th/20th century in America.  These turn-of-the-century intellectual movements could be considered as marking the moment for the introduction of mystic studies into humanism in the modern academy, and leading to what we call religious studies today.  Religious studies is not really a study of religions but an appropriation of religions into the field of comparative mysticism as part of a humanistic discipline, leading to an integral anthropology.  The figures that I’d like to name in this regard are of course very well known :  Aldous Huxley marks a very important punctuation mark in this lineage, and I’d like to present a quotation from Huxley which relates centrally to our contemplation.  Huxley’s book Perennial Philosophy was, of course, deeply influenced by Vedantic thought, – perhaps it is the term Sanatan Dharma that he is translating as Perennial Philosophy though the latter term comes to us from Liebniz.  Huxley writes,

 The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence is unitive knowledge of the Divine ground, the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to die to self and so make room, as it were, for God.

Other major figures in the lineage leading to world religions as an academic discipline in our time would include names such as Joseph Campbell, Mercia Eliade, Huston Smith – to whom the idea of world religions is most closely associated in its present form – and in contemporary times, Robert Forman and Carol Armstrong. In effect, these figures have helped to bring the investigation of world religions or comparative mysticism into the academic mainstream as a legitimate extension of our ongoing attempt to define the human in its fullness, an endeavour that may be thought of as a goal of the modern Enlightenment and called by the name Integral Anthropology.

Now, a word of caution that relates to the two contemplations I began with.  And for this, I would like to introduce two considerations, a quotation from Aldous Huxley and a classification from Robert Forman.  In his book Perennial Philosophy, Huxley gives us a quotation from the thirteenth century Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck.  He says (Ruysbroeck says):

The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind.  Each possesses it whole, entire, and undivided, and all together not more than one alone.  In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life.

Forman is a contemporary religious study specialist of the Perennial Philosophy School.  He says mystical experiences revolve around a direct encounter with some fundamental underlying reality.  The differences between mystics’ accounts of their experiences are viewed in the Perennial model to be based on cultural interpretations that take place after the event.  They are only flavours of non-separateness, and he introduces three such flavours.  One is what he calls Theism, another is Monism, and the third is the Nothingness School.  Theism relates, as we may imagine, to all the devotional schools, Christianity, Vaishnavism, etc.  Monism relates to Advaita Vedanta, Neo-Platonism, Islam or Judaism. The best example of the Nothingness School is, of course,  Buddhism.

The reason one needs to  interject a caution here is that the Perennial Philosophy School, though it really gives us a new entry into a non-secular or post-secular spirituality, is also marked in a way by a hierarchism.  This hierarchism places a formless Monism at the peak of all mystical realization. It bears the impress of the mental enterprise of system building, which is the very method of the Enlightenment.  Another well-known contemporary exponent of such a hierarchism in out times, in a related field, that of Transpersonal Psychology, is Ken Wilber, who could also be considered a Perrenialist. Such a hierarchism is not new.  It also belongs strongly to the history of Indian Spiritual Thought.

Perhaps the father of this hierarchism is the 9th c. Indian spiritual philosopher, Shankara.  In modern times it has revived, and, been amplified, due to certain aspects of modernity, linked to the nation idea.  What is known as Hindutva today, which some people refer to as Neo-Vedanta arises from this very kind of hierarchising of the various spiritual realisations possible under a pyramid that ends with the experience of the Formless.  So it is that all the various schools of Vedanta, which, in fact, show the inexhaustibility of the Vedantic experience, — Dwaitadwaita Vedanta (dualistic non-dualism), for example, or Vishishtadwaita Vedanta (qualified non-dualism) – various subtleties of experience, are all given their place but ultimately clubbed as secondary stages in a succession that will end with Shankara’s Monism,  Kevaladvaita the realization of Formless Spirit, after which one can drop the ladder and forget about the “preceding stages” because they have no further meaning.

This kind of hierarchism is dangerous.  Particularly connected with nationalism it leads to the notion of world hegemony in a new form, a form that portends not very good things for a spiritual future.  There is another kind of danger that has not yet arisen but whose stirrings are felt around us, particularly in circles related to Sri Aurobindo.  It’s the Religion of Integral Philosophy. This is not a hierarchism in which an inclusivistic structure established itself through stages. It is rather a horizontal inclusivism, an integral theory in which all mystical experiences, the bases of all religions are structured together and the whole, named or unnamed, is held up as the Integral Anthropology. In thinking of an Integral Anthropology, this caution is something we need to take to heart. To understand this,  I draw attention once more to the two images with which I started, the image of the Vishvarupa and that of the fallen Humpty Dumpty.  First, the Viswarupa: The fulfilment that Sri Aurobindo shows us in the Supermind is one in which the One and the Many co-exist.  Integrality means that the Many express the One and are the One.  If one creates a theory of stages that tries to encompass this idea, then we end up with a mental construct which loses the essential paradoxicality of integrality demonstrated so powerfully in the Viswarupa.  Integrality is paradoxical.  For the One and Many to co-exist in experience, a jump in human consciousness is necessary.  Integral Anthropology cannot be premised on a static structure of the human, because the integral escapes from the grasp of the human. If an Integral Anthropology is to take any inspiration from the paradigm of integrality envisioned by Sri Aurobindo, is must recognize too the essence of the human as an unfinished entity, a rope thrown between the beast and the superman, as per Nietzsche, “a transitional being” as per Sri Aurobindo.  The structures of integrality do not exist in the human being.  Or, if some hold to the faith that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have already laid those unprecedented structures, they are far from human experience and have yet to be established in a generalized form in humanity.

To create an integral theory that makes it appear as if such an eventuality exists at the top of the spiritual pyramid is even more dangerous than Neo-Vedanta.  Unfortunately, an integral religion, an integral theory, has its stirrings around us.  It is here that it is necessary for us to revisit the image of Humpty Dumpty, and the irreversible pathos of his Fall, which is the human condition.  This contemplation should lead us to humility, to helplessness, to aspiration and surrender, for the recognition of the fact that the goal towards an integral anthropology includes a discontinuity, which it is not within human hands to bridge.  It is through the Grace of a Higher Power that that bridge can be built.  And in the meantime post-secular spirituality must grow in its variety, in its multiplicity, in its comparative nature, through comparative studies, if through a structuralism, then even more through a post-structuralism, and out of that must arise a subjective science.

Supermind/Superfold

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We would like begin to explore here certain affinities between what Gilles Deleuze refers to as Superfold and what Sri Aurobindo earlier in the 20th century called Supermind, while being especially mindful of their differences in epistemic and cultural setting. This introductory post includes definitions of fold and superfold from the Deleuze Dictionary by Simon Sullivan – with links to other interesting articles- as well as an excerpt from the appendix of his book on Foucault by Gilles Deleuze in which he elucidates the disappearance of man in the emergence of a new form of that is neither God nor man that emerges from the superfold. We begin with an excerpt from Debashish’s new forthcoming book on Sri Aurobindo’s The Record of Yoga.

 

1) By Debashish Banerji

(From his Forthcoming Book on The Record of Yoga)

Gilles Deleuze introduced the idea of the fold to theorize the integral relationship between the “inside” and the “outside” of living beings. Instead of seeing beings as autonomous, he views the collective reality of each type of being as a life on a fold of pure immanence. Such an “enfolded” existence implies an internalization by each “monad” of the cosmic entirety following specific principles which characterize the ontology of its type of experience. Subject and cosmos thus integrally exist in each other and the nexus of internal and external forces determines the universal reality of cosmos for the subject. The reconfiguration of this relationship between internal and external forces results in an “unfolding” and possible “refolding.” Existing unquestionably on a fold marks the existence of non-human beings, but humans are characterized by critical and creative subjectivity which allows them to “deterritorialize” the fixity of the relation between subject and fold. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this variously as “nomadology,” “lines of flight,” “becoming-other” and “making a body without organs.”

In the appendix of his book on Foucault, Deleuze relates Foucault’s prediction of the erasure of the human with Nietzsche’s supeman-making project and his own thinking about the fold. Making it an occasion to think of the future of human subjectivity, he develops here the idea of the superfold, as the fractal ground natural to superman. The superfold is neither a fold nor an unfolding in the sense in which Deleuze conceptualized internal-external relations in the human case. It is instead an ontology of immanence with a protean creativity capable of an “unlimited finite.” Superman represents the forces of subjective interiority which internalize the capacities of the superfold and give it monadic expression. Deleuze’s intuition of the superfold as the ontological future towards which the human moves is also related to the emergence of the technologies of molecular biology, silicon based information theory and new capacities of language use. All these technologies portend possibilities of deconstruction and creative reassemblage which approach the most basic building blocks of life (genetics), matter (information), and mind (signification/language).

An “unlimited finite” is a capacity characteristic of the fulfilled potency of what Deleuze calls transcendental empiricism, which could also be nominated as a divine materialism. It implies that every fine point in space and “moment” of time is a creative actualization of infinity. Superfold is the cosmic medium potent with such a possibility and superman is the individualized subjectivity which can express this capacity as its native mode of existence. Superfold contains the triple folds of genetic handling (life capacity), silicon and nanotechnological handling (material capacity) and  language handling (mental capacity). Superman for Deleuze, then, is the master of the triple folds of gene, silicon and language, the creative consciousness which can manipulate these forms of nature at its most basic level, manifesting infinity through their finite conditions of space-time expression. There is no habitual fixity to such a form of creative consciousness, or even if there is persistence of forms or logical development of forms, the ontology is one of pure freedom and the deployed will of omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience at play in the finite conditions of the cosmos.

Though expressed in material terms and related to contemporary technologies of unprecedented fundamental ubiquity, Deleuze’s superfold can well be thought of as close or analogous to Sri Aurobindo’s supermind, the medium which holds unity and infinity as its conscious properties everywhere and is the nexus between the infinite and the finite in its absolute immanence. So too, the relation between superfold and superman in Deleuze is analogous to the relation between supermind and superman in Sri Aurobindo, in that the latter term in each doublet represents the subject with interiority proper to the being and full creative expression of the capacities of the first term.

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Next: several interesting articles on related themes and links to articles by Simon Sullivan.

2) From: The Deleuze Dictionary

Definition: ‘Fold’

by Simon Sullivan (links)

Although appearing throughout Deleuze’s work, the fold is particularly mobilised in the books on Foucault and Leibniz. In each case then the fold is developed in relation to another’s work. We might even say that these books, like others Deleuze has written, involve a folding – or ‘doubling’ – of Deleuze’s own thought ‘into’ the thought of another. We might go further and say that thought itself, enigmatically, is a kind of fold – the folding inside of what Deleuze calls the ‘forces of the outside’.

Specifically the concept of the fold allows Deleuze to think creatively about the production of subjectivity, and ultimately about the possibilities for, and production of, ‘non-human’ forms of ‘subjectivity’. In fact on one level the fold is a critique of typical accounts of subjectivity – those that presume a simple interiority and exteriority (appearance and essence, or surface and depth) – for the fold announces that the inside is nothing more than a fold of the outside. Deleuze gives us Foucault’s vivid illustration of this relation – the Renaissance madman, who, in being put to sea in a ship becomes a passenger, or ‘prisoner’ in the interior of the exterior – the fold of the sea. In Deleuze’s account of Foucault this picture becomes increasingly complex. There is a variety of modalities of folds – from the fold of our material selves, our bodies – to the folding of time, or simply memory. Indeed subjectivity might be understood as precisely a topology of these different kinds of folds.

The fold in this sense is also the name for one’s relation to oneself (or, the affect of the self on the self). The Greeks were the first to discover, and deploy, this technique of folding, or of ‘self mastery’. They ‘invented’ subjectivation – the self-production of one’s subjectivity. Subsequent cultures have invented their own forms of subjectivation, their own kinds of foldings, for example Christianity, and of course it might be said that our own time has its own folds – or even that it requires new ones. This gives the fold an explicitly ethical dimension, but also a political one, for as Deleuze remarks the emergence of new kinds of struggle inevitably also involves the production of new kinds of subjectivity, new kinds of fold (Deleuze has in mind the uprisings of 1968).

As for Deleuze’s Foucault, so for his Leibniz: the fold names the relationship – one entailing domination – of oneself to (and ‘over’) ones ‘self’. Indeed one’s subjectivity for Deleuze- Leibniz is a question of mastery – a kind of Nietzschean mastery – over the swarm of one’s being. This can be configured as a question of ownership, or of folding. To ‘have’ is to fold that which is outside inside. In the Leibniz book we are offered other diagrams of our subjectivity. For example the two floored baroque house. The lower floor, or the regime of matter, is in and of the world – receiving its imprint as it were. Here matter is folded in the manner of origami. Caverns containing other caverns, which contain still more caverns. The world is superabundant, like a lake teaming with fish, with smaller fish between these fish, and so on ad infinitum. There is no boundary between the organic and the inorganic here; each is folded into the other in a continuous ‘texturology’.

The upper chamber of the baroque house is closed in on itself, without window or opening. It ‘contains’ innate ideas, the folds of the soul – or what we might call, following Guattari, the incorporeal aspect of our subjectivity. And then there is the fold between these two floors. This latter fold is like one’s style in the world, or indeed the style of a work of art. It is in this sense that the upper chamber paradoxically ‘contains’ the whole world folded within itself. This world is one amongst many ‘possible worlds’ each as different as the beings that ‘express’ them. The world of a tick for example is different to that of a human, involving as it does just the perception of light, the smell of its prey and the tactile sensation of where best to burrow. This is not the tick’s representation of the world but the latter’s expression – or folding in – of it. As with the book on Foucault the later parts of the Leibniz book attend to future foldings. Deleuze calls attention to the possibility of a new kind of harmony – or fold – between the two floors of our subjectivity. This new kind of fold involves an opening up of the closed chamber of the upper floor and the concomitant affirmation of difference, contact and communication. We might say here, in an echo of the Foucault book, that these new foldings are simply the name for those new kinds of subjectivity that emerged in the 1960s – in the various experiments in communal living, drug use, and sexuality – as well as in the emergence of new prosthetic technologies.

References:
Deleuze, Gilles (1988), Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1993), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

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The Deleuze Dictionary: Excerpt from Fold+Art+Technology

by

Simon Sullivan

In his appendix to the book on Foucault Deleuze continues his meditation on the fold – but looks to the the future. If the fold is the operation proper to man, then the superfold is synonymous with the superman – understood as that which ‘frees life’ from within man. The superman is in charge of the animals (the capturing of codes), the rocks (the realm of the inorganic) – and the very being of language (the realm of affect ‘below’ signification). This new kind of fold no longer figures man as a limiting factor on the the infinite (the classical historical formation), nor positions him solely in relationship to the forces of finitude – life, labour and language (the formation of the nineteenth century). Rather, in this new kind of fold man is involved in what Deleuze terms an ‘unlimited finity’. It is a fold in which a ‘finite number of components produce an infinite number of combinations’. This is the difference and repetition of Deleuze – or what we might term his fractal ontology. We might also say that it is the radical discovery of ‘man’’s potential – the revolutionary activation of immanence.

This ‘superfold’ will however still involve relations with an outside. In fact, for Deleuze, it will be the result of three ‘future’ folds: the fold of molecular biology – or the discovery of the genetic code; the fold of silicon with carbon – or the emergence of third generation machines, cybernetics and information technology; and the folding of language – or the uncovering of a ‘strange language within language’, an atypical and asignifying form of expression that exists at the limits of language. As with the other two this is a fold that opens man out to that which is specifically non human – forces that can then be folded back ‘into’ himself to produce new modalities of being and new means of expression.
The first two folds above involve the utilisation of technology in the production of new kinds of life and new kinds of subjectivity. They might produce dissenting, politically radical subjects: Donna Harraway’s cyborgs or Hardt and Negri’s ‘New Barbarians’ for example. But they might equally produce simply ‘new’ commodified and alienated subjectivities – or even more deadly military assemblages. It is in this sense that the third fold above is crucial. It is a fold that breaks down – or deviates from – dominant signification, counteracts order words or simply foregrounds language – and life’s – affective, intensive, and inherently creative nature. This amounts to saying that the first two folds must themselves be stammered by the third.

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From the Appendix of his book on Foucault by Gilles Deleuze:

“It is obvious that any form is precarious, since it depends on relations between forces and their mutations. We distort Nietzsche when we make him into a thinker who wrote about the death of God. It is Feuerbach who is the last thinker of the death of God; he shows that since God has never been anything but the unfold of man, man must fold and refold God. But for Nietzsche this is an old story , and as old stories tend to multiply their variants Nietzsche multiplies the versions of the death of God, all of them comic of humorous, as though they were variations on a given fact. But what interests him is the death of man. So long as God exists- that is, so long as the God-form functions-then man does not exist.

But when the Man-form appears, it does so only by already incorporating the death of man in at least thre ways. First, where can man find a guarantee of identity in the absence of God? Secondly by Man-form has itself been constituted only within the folds of infinitude; it places death within man(and has done so, as we have seen, less in the manner of Heidegger than in the manner of Bichat, who conceived of death in terms of “violent death”) Lastly, the forces of finitude themselves mean that man exists only through the dissemination of the various methods for organizing life, such as the dispersion of languages or the divergences in modes of production, which imply that the only critique of knowledge is an ontology of the annihilation of beings (not only palaeontology but ethnology)

What does Foucault mean when he says there is no point in crying over the death of man? In fact has this form been a good one? Has it helped to enrich or even preserve the forces within man, those living, speaking or working? Has it saved man from the violent death? The questions that continually returns is therefore the following: if the forces with man compose a form only by entering into a relation with forms from the outside, with what new forms will emerge that is neither God nor Man? This is the correct place for the problem which Nietzsche called “the superman”

It is a problem where we have to content ourselves with very tentative indications if we are not to descend to the level of cartoons. Foucault unlike Nietzsche, can only sketch in something embryonic and not yet functional. Nietzsche said that man imprisoned life, but the superman is what frees life within himself, to the benefit of another form, and so on. Foucault pro-offers a very peculiar piece of information: if it is true the 19th century humanist linguistics was based on the dissemination of languages, as the condition for a “demotion of language” as an object, one repercussion was the less that literature took on a completely different function that consisted, on the contrary, in “regrouping” language and emphasizing a “being in language” beyond what it designates and signifies, beyond even the sounds. The peculiar thing is that Foucault, in his acute analysis of modern literature, here gives language a privilege which he refuses to grant to ife or labour: he believes that life and labour, despite a dispersion concomitant with that of language, did not lose the regrouping of their being. It seems to us, though, that when dispersed labour and life were each able to unify themselves only by somehow breaking free from economics or biology, just as language managed to regrouped itself only when literature broke free from linguistics.

Biology had taken a leap in molecular biology, or dispersed life regroup in the genetic code. Dispersed work had to regroup in third-generation machines, cybernetics and information technology. What would be the forces in play, with which forces within man would then enter into a relation? It would no longer involve raising to infinity or finitude but which a finite number of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations.  It would be neither the fold nor the unfold that would constitute the active mechanism but something like the “Superfold” as borne out by the folding proper to the chains of the genetic code, and the potential of silicon in third-generation machines, as well as by the contours of a sentence in modern literature, when literature “merely turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity.

This modern literature uncovers a “strange language within language” and, through an unlimited number of superimposed grammatical constructions, tends towards an atypical form of expression that marks the end of language as such (here we may cite such examples as Mallarme’s book, Perguy’s repetitions, Artaud’s breaths, the agrammaticality of Cummings, Burroughs and his cut-ups and fold-ins, as well as Roussel’s proliferations, Brisset’s derivations, Dada collage, and so on) And is this unlimited finity or superfold not what Nietzsche had already designated with the name of eternal return?

The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic compnents which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier. In each case we must study the operations of the superfold, of which the “double helix” is the best known example. What is the superman? It is the formal compound of the forces within man and these new forces. It is the form that results from a new relation between forces. Man tends to free life, labour and language within himself. The superman, in accordance with Rimbaud’s formula, is the man who is even in charge of the animals ( a code that can capture fragments from other codes, as in the new schemata of lateral or retrograde) It is man in charge of the very rocks, or inorganic matter ( the domain of silicon). It is man in charge of the being of language ( that formless, mute, unsignifying region where language can find its freedom even from whatever it has to say). As Foucault would say, the superman is much less than the disappearance of living men, and much more than a charge of concept: it is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its previous two forms.”

 

 

Talk to Me by Paola Antonelli

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Paola Antonelli

(an essay from the current exhibit at the New York Museum of Modern Art)

And a fascinating Ted Talk of her previous MOMA exhibit: Design and the Elastic Mind

Talk to Me

Paola Antonelli

Whether openly and actively or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us. They do not all speak aloud: some communicate in text, diagrams, and other graphic interfaces; others empathetically and almost telepathically, just keeping us company and storing our memories; still others in sensual ways, with warmth, scent, texture. Objects populate our homes and our lives; buildings and places have identities and characters; cars and airplanes speak and listen; virtual worlds beckon us; London’s Tower Bridge and artist Marina Abramović’s chair even send tweets. 1

That objects—everything that humans build, at all scales (fig. 1), from the spoon to the city, the state, the web, buildings, communities, systems, and artificial realities—have meaning is nothing new.2 It has been true for eons, since long before late-twentieth-century design prophets such as Donald Norman, after decades of functionalist preaching, had an epiphany and declared the era of “emotional design” to be upon us.3 The bond between people and things has always been filled with powerful and unspoken sentiments going well beyond functional expectations and including attachment, love, possessiveness, jealousy, pride, curiosity, anger, even friendship and partnership—think of the bond between a chef and his knives. Philosophy has studied humans’ relationships with objects throughout history and from multiple angles, but the relatively young field of design has taken to it slowly. After all, design’s first preoccupation following the technological and aesthetic earthquake of the industrial revolution was to bring visual discipline and intellectual rigor to the cacophony of formal experiments ushered in by the new manufacturing capabilities. This was often achieved by suffocating objects’ excessive expressiveness and irrational side, qualities equated by some with decoration, as in Adolf Loos’s well-known 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime.”4

The push toward formal reduction and functionalism did not deter the great modern architects from imbuing minimal shapes with maximum pathos. But in the hands of mainstream practitioners and instructors, twentieth-century clichés such as “form follows function,” the modernist motto originally uttered in slightly different form by Louis H. Sullivan, and “design is problem solving” (about which more later) have been responsible for a great deal of soulless and lobotomized design and architecture.5 While a belief in sentient and self-reflective buildings was kept alive by architects such as Erich Mendelsohn and Frederick Kiesler, philosopher-architect Rudolf Steiner, and even psychologist Carl Jung, design, still lacking a cohesive theoretical backbone, did not even acknowledge the need for a position on the matter.6

 

Finally, in the 1960s, the course of design changed in that era’s confluence of political and social turmoil, technological breakthroughs, and cultural shifts. In the minds of visionary architects and designers, buildings and cities began to breathe, walk, plug in, and talk, as did objects. The 1960s were also an important decade for the digital revolution: the foundations were laid for what we today call interface and interaction design, and the seeds were planted for several groundbreaking innovations of the 1980s. It was also in those years that semiotics and structuralism, especially the work of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, achieved worldwide prominence, contributing to the formation of a new theory of design. All these forces joined to make the communication between people and objects a mandatory element of the design process.

In contrast to the twentieth-century triumph of semiotics, which looked down on communication as nothing but a mechanical transmission of coded meaning, the twenty-first century has begun as one of pancommunication—everything and everybody conveying content and meaning in all possible combinations, from one-on-one to everything-on-everybody. We now expect objects to communicate, a cultural shift made evident when we see children searching for buttons or sensors on a new object, even when the object has no batteries or plug. Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects thrives on this important late-twentieth-century development in the culture of design, which can be described as a shift from the centrality of function to that of meaning, and on the twenty-first-century focus on the need to communicate in order to exist (fig. 2). From this new perspective, all objects occupy a unique position in material culture, and all of them contain information beyond their immediate use or appearance. It is not enough for designers today to balance form and function, and it is also not enough simply to ascribe meaning. Design now must imagine all its previous tasks in a dynamic, animated context, as Khoi Vinh points out. Things may communicate with people, but designers write the initial script that lets us develop and improvise the dialogue.

Rules of Engagement

In our relationship with objects, as in any relationship, indifference is the worst offense and laziness the worst sin. Endowed with more and more complex behaviors, objects from refrigerators to mobile phones to income tax websites have become particularly touchy and moody (fig. 3); our relationship with computers sometimes approaches codependence. Objects have become as complex and demanding interlocutors as people, as Jamer Hunt laments in his essay, so it seems logical to apply the rules of human communication to them, too. In checking the five axioms of human communication, developed by psychologist and philosopher Paul Watzlawick, against our experience of communication with objects and systems, we find some interesting insights and parallels, in particular in his first, third, and fifth axioms.7

The first axiom tells us, “One cannot not communicate.” Any kind of gesture, behavior, and attitude can and will be interpreted as communication. In e-mail, for example, responding immediately to a message creates a particular subtext, as does not responding at all; a congratulatory message sent “reply all” can be interpreted as displaying presence and authority or else insecurity, and an ill-advised response by a person who received only a blind copy reveals…something else.

The third axiom says, “The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners’ communication procedures.” Communication, Watzlawick posits, is cyclical, with each partner believing that he or she is simply responding to the other; some of the most common problems of the digital era arise from the cycle of amplification and reaction that marks our text exchanges, something that serial e-mail gaffers and awkward users will be familiar with. The problem is acute enough to require the invention of ToneCheck, developed by Lymbix, an emotional spell-check for e-mail messages that alerts the writer to excessive displays of anger, sadness, or insensitivity.8

The fifth axiom, “Inter-human communication procedures are either symmetric or complementary, depending on whether the relationship of the partners is based on differences or parity,” reminds us that the relationship between people and objects is not always complementary in the expected proportions, and hardly ever symmetrical. Power imbalance has worried generations of thinkers who have predicted a somber world in which machines are more intelligent and therefore more powerful than human beings. This event, known as “the Singularity,” was first mentioned by computer scientist and writer Vernor Vinge in a speech in 1993. “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence,” he said. “Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”9 Author and futurist Ray Kurzweil reiterated the omen in 2005, saying that it would take place by 2045; writer Adam Gopnik has argued that the Singularity happened a long time ago, when we first delegated some of our important skills to machines.10 Whichever timeline we believe—if we believe it at all—the test proposed by computer scientist Alan Turing to determine a machine’s ability to demonstrate human intelligence, including empathy, the serendipitous powers of distraction and humor, and creativity, has yet to be passed.11 In 2011 a computer called Watson beat the two sturdiest human champions of the television quiz show Jeopardy!, but designers cannot count on CPUs—whether as mighty as Watson’s or as nimble as an iPad’s—to know how to behave like real people.

Under these complex circumstances, new branches of design practice have emerged that combine old-fashioned attention to form, function, and meaning with focus on the exchange of content and affect between user and used. Communication design focuses on delivering messages, and it encompasses most graphic design, signage, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three-dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design, which is sometimes brought under the more generic and functionalist rubric of user-experience design, delineates the behavior of products and systems, as well as the experience that people will have with them. Information or visualization design includes the maps, diagrams, and visualization tools that filter and make sense of the enormous amount of information that is more widely available than ever before. Critical design is one of the most promising and far-reaching new areas of study, using conceptual scenarios built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors. Its disciples are experts in “What if?”

Predigital, Digital, and Postdigital Affairs

In 1907 Guido Gozzano, an Italian poet, wrote “L’amica di nonna Speranza” (Grandma Speranza’s friend), an unassuming and touching poem that described in loving detail dozens of “good things of awful taste” from his grandmother’s apartment.12 Empty candy boxes, a cuckoo clock, a stuffed parrot: the scene is at the same time sad, dusty, and alive with the sound of intimacy. It is just one of many literary examples of the close relationship between people, objects, and places. Rob Walker’s Significant Objects project reminds us of Gozzano’s nostalgic inventory.13 Walker has launched a number of projects devoted to things, buildings, cities, and their personal biographies, whether real or imagined, including “Consumed”, his weekly column devoted to our relationships with brands, which ran in the New York Times Magazine from 2004 to 2011. For Significant Objects he handpicked objects from thrift stores and other treasure troves and paired them with great writers—including Nicholson Baker and Jonathan Lethem—who endowed them with stories.

The postdigital design movement is an extreme expression of this romantic attachment to physical things. It is made up of technologically savvy designers and artists who prefer the innocence of old-fashioned objects, such as the London-based Newspaper Club: sexy geeks who declare themselves to be “about ink on newsprint” and will help anybody publish a newspaper. 14mdash; In 2010 James Bridle, one of the club’s founders, published a compendium of Wikipedia entries on the Iraq War, collected between December 2004 and November 2009, in twelve classically bound, encyclopedia-style volumes, because “physical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples’ attention on.15

This project makes a crucial point: in an era when so many mediums and channels are available, the key to effective and elegant communication is choosing the right one, the right interpreter. The most recent technology, in other words, may not be the most appropriate. Transmedia storytelling, a technique for telling stories on multiple platforms—such as a combination of television, Internet, and mobile text—is not a novelty anymore, and a few years have gone by since the first college application submitted on video made news. Our fever about virtual and augmented reality has subsided, as Kevin Slavin points out in his essay. Sometimes the best way to say it is still with flowers.

In 2009, in “The Demise of ‘Form Follows Function,’” Alice Rawsthorn wrote that “the appearance of most digital products bears no relation to what they do”; often—and especially after the first coming of the iPod, in 2001—these products are handsome, minimal boxes that perform a large number of functions.16 Since machines have become more or less standardized in shape, and since materials, finishes, and colors do not provide enough distinction, designers have had to resort to an old human trick: a face. We expect our smart objects to communicate their complexity as well as their instructions in a clear and engaging way through their interface. Interfaces not only provide thresholds onto explanation and response, instruction and information, but also personalities. The term is commonly used to indicate the point of contact and communication between a machine and a human being; lately it has expanded to include communication with and access to wider systems and infrastructures such as cities, public services, territorial and metaphysical networks, and virtual worlds. The term has come to be identified with the digital era, but interfaces existed long before the digital revolution, for example in every clock and watch face and in the dashboards designed by masters such as Henry Dreyfuss and Rodolfo Bonetto.

In the computer world the term is shorthand for GUI (graphical user interface), HMI (human-computer interface), or HCI (human-computer interaction) and represents one of the most important and active areas of contemporary design, technology, and cognitive science. Its history arcs from its mechanical ancestors, well described by Alexandra Midal, to its graphic breakthrough in the late twentieth century, using a pointing device and icons that relied on analogies to the objects normally found in an office (desk with files and folders, trash bin, calculator, alarm clock), to the most recent gestural interfaces.17 Some well-known milestones in the development of interfaces are the stuff of legend: Doug Engelbart’s invention of the mouse and hypertext and his use of networked computers for collective activity in the second half of the 1960s; Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, and Dan Ingalls’s first GUI, developed at Xerox PARC and used in the Star computer in 1981; Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs’s commercial GUI, which appeared in the Lisa (1983) and Macintosh (1984) computers; and Marc Andreessen’s 1993 Mosaic, the GUI that made the World Wide Web really available to the wide world. Interfaces represent a new dimension of our existence, a space in which we all spend a considerable amount of our time on earth. Even those who call themselves Luddites and profess virginal innocence from the temptations of networked technology are at least guilty of interacting with ATMs or ticket-vending machines. ATMs, among the most universal of interfaces (fig. 4), are represented in Talk to Me by two examples, a functional unit designed by Barclays, the bank that originally introduced the ATM in 1967, and a new system developed by IDEO for the Spanish bank BBVA.

To help the public feel comfortable with advanced technology, designers often rely on the strategy of incorporating instinctive traits and appealing to our instinctive reactions, such as in computer interfaces in which items are moved around by hands and fingers or by being blown on or even shaken. These new technologies have already found widespread commercial application and have made their way into culture: Jeff Han’s multitouch screens, which debuted in 2006, were used by CNN anchors to cover the US presidential elections in 2008, and John Underkoffler’s gestural interface, called g-speak, which he has been working on since 1996, was made famous by the movie Minority Report (2002).18 Other examples include the multitouch screens of Apple’s iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010), and the gestural interfaces used in Guitar Hero (2005), Nintendo Wii (2006), and Microsoft Kinect (2010). With ever more-sophisticated movement- and voice-recognition software, objects are being transformed from tools into companions, and buildings from enclosed shelters into open environments.

The hardware supporting the interface—whether it is the physical shape of a computer or the chassis of a car, a robot, an ATM, or a self-service check-in kiosk—is equally significant. In choosing a sympathetic body for a mechanical mind, designers, engineers, and scientists are ever wary of the theory of the uncanny valley (fig. 8), which posits that people cannot feel empathy for machines that look almost like real humans.19 The diagram that gives the theory its name shows these awkward examples in a dip that looks like a valley: on its left are playful, cartoonish, fictional creatures, such as AIBO, Tamagotchi (fig. 10), and stuffed animals, and on the right are healthy, real human beings. One of the most famous examples from the valley is the Japanese Repliee Q1Expo, introduced at the 2005 Aichi Expo, which was modeled after a young Japanese woman but seemed more like a Madame Tussauds wax figure come to life. The theory also applies to voices: the warnings delivered in an airplane cockpit are recorded in a human voice to effectively alert the pilots with real human urgency that they can trust; the (usually female) voice is affectionately known as Bitching Betty. Voice operation is one of the elements of interaction that is being the most thoroughly studied, from in-vehicle communication systems for cars, with their obvious safety advantages, to dictation software. Every talking object becomes an entity, immediately taking on a more important role. When there’s a voice, there’s a conversation.

But voice and human- or petlike appearance are not necessary for a powerful interaction to take place. Some objects express themselves subtly and intensely using abstract interfaces, such as the breathing light on Apple’s white iBook G4 (2004) (unfortunately abandoned in later models because it lacked bedside manner, keeping the owner awake while the computer slept). Apple’s mastery of metaphors, in both hardware and software, is one element of the company’s effective interaction design. The iPad calls up a nearly atavistic memory of the acts of writing and drawing on a tablet, which is offered as a counterbalance to overwhelmingly key-based technology—just what we need; Apple was similarly shrewd back in 1984 with the Macintosh 128K, whose domesticated presence (like a little dog sitting patiently on its master’s desk) and expressive interface built on analogies and metaphors (smiling computer, trash bin, folders, question mark, little bomb) were just what we needed to comfortably integrate technology into the home.

Interfaces for the People

Interfaces, whether on smartphones or facades, whether composed of pixels, LEDs, or neon tubes, are laid on the surfaces of objects, spaces, and buildings but provide them with communicative depth and dynamism. Portable devices such as wristbands, sensors, and implants use interfaces that let individuals monitor themselves and be monitored by others at a distance, a very helpful way for elderly people to keep their doctors and family up-to-date on their well-being. Some websites are interfaces publicizing knowledge at different scales and with different consequences, from digital water coolers where employees rate their employers to the world-destabilizing force of WikiLeaks. Any device that receives and sends texts can call on flash mobs to commit acts of civil disobedience, but the same interfaces can be used for acts of civil responsibility, such as activating a tsunami-alert service or mapping emergency areas. Interfaces can amplify or reduce communication to human scale, whether, for example, bringing the government to the individual or the individual to the government.

We can now design the face we wish to present to the world. Where in the past we relied on family name, academic pedigree, business cards, looks, and accomplishments to augment our naked social selves, today we have the additional option of offering our riches to the world with blogs, personal websites, Flickr streams, Facebook and other social networks, and avatars. With these interfaces we think we can control the way we are perceived by the world (although things do not always work out as planned; reports are increasing of job applicants being rejected because their personal pages revealed information that didn’t match the wholesome image they brought to their job interviews). By contrast, some interfaces disrupt this facade, encouraging people to let go of control and reach out to others in serendipitous ways. An app called Situationist, inspired by the Situationist International (a group of European artists and political agitators in the 1950s and ’60s), connects willing participants, alerting them to each other’s proximity using geotags, and delivers instructions for situations both intimate and friendly, and political and subversive (fig. 5).20

When interfaces allow users access to networks and systems, users can connect, acquire, and exchange information. At the local level, interfaces can help people share car rides and homegrown vegetables, provide support for the elderly, and find company. At the global level, people can hook their energy-monitoring systems into a local grid and contribute to data-aggregation projects that raise awareness of energy-consumption. A well-designed network or system can be a potent way to deliver an important message, such as sex columnist and activist Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, prompted by a rash of suicides by gay teenagers in 2010. The project began modestly, with a video of Savage and his partner posted to YouTube, and quickly gathered steam to include video testimonials by hundreds of people, including celebrities and politicians such as President Barack Obama, encouraging lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teenagers to see past the oppressive atmosphere of intolerance and hatred that they live in—that is, to tap into an international network of hope and acceptance.21

A great deal of communicative experimentation takes place in cities, which, because of their density, are the perfect testing ground (fig. 6). City (1988), William H. Whyte’s great observation of the physical interactions among people, cars, buildings, and a city’s other animate and inanimate inhabitants, would benefit from an update to include the additional layer of exchange now provided by digital

technology.22 New buildings talk in ways no one could have imagined in the analog years. In “Living Skins: Architecture as Interface” (2006), critic Peter Hall cited the Blinkenlights project (2001, fig. 7) as a pioneer in massive-scale urban communication: members of the Chaos Computer Club installed 14mdash;4 bright lights in the front windows of the top eight floors of Haus des Lehrers, a building on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, transforming the facade into a giant computer screen. Using mobile phones, passersby could play Pong or send images to be rendered on the very low-res, very big, very dramatic screen.23

The city talks to citizens, and citizens certainly talk back. Several municipalities, New York among them, have set up services to enable people to communicate with the local government via phone and web. In New York that system is called 311, after its phone number. Pitch Interactive, a visualization design company, created an analysis of 34,522 complaint calls to 311 (2010, fig. 8)—a colorful depiction of the pet peeves of New Yorkers. Several countries have set up nationwide systems; in March 2010 Gordon Brown, then the United Kingdom’s prime minister, announced a plan to endow every citizen with his or her own web page, in order to give them improved access to government benefits, information, and services.24

Design has a whole new set of clichés to deal with; postdigital design, in its embrace of the analog, expresses a fatigue not only with the medium but also with the forms of digital technology, and the apparent rejection of aesthetics expressed by hackers is an aesthetic ideology in itself. This accusation has also been leveled at Google, whose antistyle has been channeled and crystallized in many contemporary interfaces and has set a template for the DIY physical-design movement. Technological progress always brings formal innovation, which starts as creative flair but may soon degrade into routine. Thus the groundbreaking elegance of Braun, since the 1950s, or Apple, since the 1990s, can become mannered if this approach is not reinvented every time, an easy formal recipe for displaying zeitgeist sensitivity.

Talk to Me is an opportunity to anchor design’s new dimension and highlight innovative interfaces that can inform designers in the future. Whether they use the skin and shell of objects as an interface or animate them from within, designers are using the whole world to communicate and are set on a path that is transforming it into an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom. Now that the technological means are widely available, designers have become sophisticated enough to modulate them with a sensitive touch. They have matured past the first moments of irrepressible and immoderate enthusiasm for the new medium and have learned to wear technology, instead of letting technology wear them. It can be difficult to keep perspective on the magnitude and scope of all the interactions we engage in or witness or hear about; design is flowing into politics, philosophy, science, and religion in ways both ancient and new. The predigital Arecibo message was one such metaphysical venture, a string of digits launched in 1974 from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and transmitted via FM radio waves to a star cluster twenty-five thousand light-years away—a shout out into the void, a soaring attempt to talk to creatures whose essence we can’t even imagine.

Design and design-related experiments are propelling us further and further into the unknown. Interfaces have been proposed that help us communicate with God; a Taoist prayer hall went electronic;25 an app has been created for Catholic confession; the young designer Marguerite Humeau has been resuscitating long-extinct prehistoric creatures by resuscitating their voice boxes (fig. 9); and designers Jon Ardern and Anab Jain, with their evocative multidimensional camera, have attempted to embody Hugh Everett’s many-worlds theory in an object that adds to the cinematic tradition of The Matrix (1999), Lost (2004-10), Fringe (2008-ongoing), and Source Code (2011), to name just a few.26

It might seem that design has abandoned its tested, grounded, functionalist territory to venture into an ambiguous universe where its essence is confused and a crisis of identity arises—is the 5th Dimensional Camera art or scientific modeling? Is Humeau’s work creative paleontology? Are Sputniko!’s devices contributing to interpretive anthropology? Is Pachube mere coding and infrastructure engineering? Not at all. I claim them, with their powerful visions and their focus on knowledge and awareness, as design, and I praise their radical functionalism. Ambiguity and ambivalence—the ability to inhabit different environments and frames of mind at the same time—have become central to our cultural development. They are qualities that embody the openness and flexibility necessary for embracing diversity, and they are critical to the questioning and imagining that are the preferred methods of inquiry. Communication is at the nexus of all these necessary human features: the most crucial function for design today.

1 The Tower Bridge can be followed at @towerbridge, and Marina Abramović’s chair at @marinaschair. The latter is the chair the artist used in The Artist Is Present, a performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, over the course of the exhibition Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, March 14-May 31, 2010, in which Abramović sat when the Museum was open, and viewers were invited to sit silently, one at a time, in front of her.

2 “Dal cucchiaio alla città” (From the spoon to the city) is a slogan coined by Italian architect and critic Ernesto Nathan Rogers to describe the Milanese architectural and design process, which at the time encompassed all scales—and still does, unfortunately to a lesser extent. There is some disagreement about when Rogers said this; Deyan Sudjic notes that Rogers wrote something very much like it in a 1952 editorial for Domus. Sudjic, The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), p. 34.

3 Donald Norman’s Emotional Design (New York: Basic Books, 2005) proposed the not-so-groundbreaking thesis that emotions play a big part in the way we relate to objects.

4 Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen,” 1908, published in English as “Ornament and Crime,” in Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1998), pp. 167. In it he wrote, “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use.”

5 “Form ever follows function.” Louis H. Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 57 (March 1896): 403-9; republished in Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: Dover, 1979).

6 Carl Jung dedicated thirty years of his life to building a house in Küsnacht, on the lake of Zurich. He equated the building of a house with the building of self, as he explained in Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken, ed. Aniela Jaffé (Düsseldorf: Walter Verlag, 1971); published in English as Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, reprint ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 225.

7 Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and Don D. Jackson, “Some Tentative Axioms of Communication,” in Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), pp. 48-71.

8 ToneCheck was listed in the New York Times’s 2010 Year in Ideas, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/19/magazine/ideas2010.html#Emotional_Spell-Check.

9 Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” presented at the VISION 21 Symposium, Westlake, Ohio, March 30-31, 1993, www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Singularity/sing.html. For those readers who have caught echoes of earlier literature, Vinge clearly refers to Isaac Asimov and his laws in this speech.

10 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005); Adam Gopnik, “Get Smart,” The New Yorker, April 4, 2011, pp. 70-74.

11 Alan Turing first described the test in “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 59, no. 236 (October 1950): 433-60, mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/LIX/236/433.full.pdf+html.

12 Guido Gozzano, “L’amica di nonna Speranza,” in La via del rifugio (Turin: Renzo Streglio, 1907). Author’s trans.

13 Significant Objects, significantobjects.com/about. The project is currently on hiatus and will reappear in book form in 2011, published by Fantagraphics Books. In one of the project’s phases I provided about ten objects for writers. I consider Rob Walker to be a Talk to Me soul mate; in a blog post, the curatorial team dubbed him the Object Whisperer. wp.moma.org/talk_to_me/2010/09/the-object-whisperer-an-interview-with-rob-walker.

14 Newspaper Club, www.newspaperclub.co.uk/about.

15 “On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography,” The Blog of James Bridle, booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography.

16 Alice Rawsthorn, “The Demise of ‘Form Follows Function,’” New York Times, May 30, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/arts/01iht-DESIGN1.html.

17 Jean-Baptiste Labrune, Jamie Zigelbaum, and Hiroshi Ishii, “From PreHistoric Interfaces to NearFuture Interactions,” www.slideshare.net/jb.labrune/user-interface-history-to-near-future. This slide show is concise and incisive but, as the authors are all part of the MIT Media Lab, rather MIT-centric.

18 Until recently, commercial screens could sense only a single finger at a time.

19 See “Crossing the Uncanny Valley,” The Economist, November 18, 2010, www.economist.com/node/17519716. Masahiro Mori first published his theory in “The Uncanny Valley,” trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato, Energy 7, no. 4 (1970): 33-35.

20 Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967); published in English as The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, reprint ed. (New York: Zone Books, 2008).

21 It Gets Better Project, www.itgetsbetter.org.

22 William H. Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Doubleday, 1988).

23 Peter Hall, “Living Skins: Architecture as Interface,” Adobe Design Center Think Tank, n.d., www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/livingskins.

24 “Every Citizen to Have Personal Webpage,” Telegraph, March 20, 2010, www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7484600/Every-citizen-to-have-personal-webpage.html.

25 “Taoism Goes High Tech,” Wall Street Journal (blog), February 14, 2011, blogs.wsj.com/hong-kong/2011/02/14/taoism-goes-high-tech.

26 The many-worlds theory, one of quantum theory’s most cinematic offshoots, postulates that what is happening in this universe becomes, in other universes, a branch from which other events and other branches sprout.

 If you click on the following link you will be able to view the individual projects listed below:

Link to: The Works

 

  • (En)tangled Word Bank
    Wilderness Downtown Passage Brushing Teeth Helix Hyperreal Everyday Life PIG 05049 When Sea Levels Attack! Spore Dwarf Fortress Visualizing Lisbon's Traffic - 7am, 10am, and 6pm
  • 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama
    Newsmap BackTalk US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage The 2009 Feltron Annual Report When Sea Levels Attack! Doodlebuzz Ushahidi Walk the Solar System They Rule Hello World!
  • 911 Command Center Radio Control Application
    What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Allianz Arena skin Southwark Circle Garden Registry TrashTrack BakerTweet Chromaroma Graffiti Taxonomy BackTalk US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage
  • Allianz Arena skin
    911 Command Center Radio Control<br /> Application What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC BakerTweet Graffiti Taxonomy Hide & See EyeWriter GlowCap Word Lens Hi, A Real Human Interface Here & There
  • Amae Apparatus
    Bat Billboard Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe Phantom Recorder Situationist BBC Dimensions EyeWriter GlowCap Communication Prosthesis Portrait<br /> Series (Cyclist, Actress, Chef, Craftsman,<br /> Midwife, Politician, Model) Level Expressions Dispatcher
  • Analog Digital Clock
    Hand from Above Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress Kageo LittleBigPlanet Avatar Machine Export to World
  • Angelus Novus 2.0
    Hand from Above Continuity Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress Kageo SimCity 2000; SimCity 3000 The 5th Dimensional Camera
  • Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe
    Bat Billboard The 5th Dimensional Camera BBC Dimensions Oystercard Meltdown Good Things Should Never End E. Chromi Hand from Above Export to World Here & There Augmented Reality Cookie
  • ANTIWARGAME
    They Rule Transportation Town Garden Registry GoSkyWatch Planetarium Newsmap Walk the Solar System Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe BackTalk Augmented Reality Cookie Exit
  • Artificial Biological Clock
    Disclosure Case from the Genetic<br /> Heirloom series Phantom Recorder Me Against the Machine Becoming Critter BugPlug They Rule Situationist GlowCap Swallow-Signaling Pill Tentacles 1.0
  • Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D
    Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Suwappu N Building façade Walking Papers Nearness Immaterials: Ghost in the Field Southwark Circle Garden Registry Nearest Tube and Nearest Subway
  • Augmented Reality Cookie
    Avatar Machine Hand from Above Augmented Reality Flash Mob Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress Kageo The 5th Dimensional Camera LittleBigPlanet Analog Digital Clock
  • Augmented Reality Flash Mob
    LittleBigPlanet Export to World Hand from Above Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress Kageo Avatar Machine Analog Digital Clock
  • Augmented Shadow
    Hand from Above Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress Kageo LittleBigPlanet Avatar Machine Analog Digital Clock
  • Autoreverse
    Terminal Double-Taker (Snout) Tengu Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series Strangle Poise Lamp from the Red Goods<br /> collection Technological Dreams Series: no 1, Robots Models Me Against the Machine PhoneBook Tweenbot Botanicalls
  • Avatar Machine
    BBC Dimensions Augmented Reality Cookie Suwappu Hand from Above Augmented Reality Flash Mob Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress Kageo The 5th Dimensional Camera
  • BackTalk
    TrashTrack US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Ushahidi Walk the Solar System They Rule Hello World! What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Exit
  • BakerTweet
    Good Things Should Never End Southwark Circle Garden Registry What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Allianz Arena skin Graffiti Taxonomy Homeless City Guide 911 Command Center Radio Control<br /> Application Prayer Companion
  • Barclays ATM Animations
    BBC Dimensions Roly Poly GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use littleBits BUG 1.3 Out of the Box PhoneBook Suwappu Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media
  • Bat Billboard
    Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe The 5th Dimensional Camera BBC Dimensions Oystercard Meltdown Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo EyeWriter Nearness
  • BBC Dimensions
    The 5th Dimensional Camera Suwappu Bat Billboard Sharkrunners Walking Papers prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Helix Hand from Above Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media
  • be-B Braille Education Ball
    Touch Hear Hide & See Word Lens Hi, A Real Human Interface Rubik's Cube for the Blind Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Kaoiro Bees and Dogs from bzzzpeek website
  • Becoming Animal
    The Disgusted Object Tentacles 1.0 Lucy from Back, Herebelow, Formidable (the rebirth of prehistoric creatures) Check Mate Bees and Dogs from bzzzpeek website Crowbot Jenny We Tell Stories Hi, A Real Human Interface PhoneBook Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D
  • Becoming Critter
    Hari & Parker Expressions Dispatcher Devices for Mindless Communication Phantom Recorder Artificial Biological Clock Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive<br /> and Gesundheit Radio from the<br /> Attenborough Design Group project Situationist Amae Apparatus Level Call Me, Choke Me
  • Bees and Dogs from bzzzpeek website
    We Tell Stories Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Bat Billboard Crowbot Jenny Level Touch Hear be-B Braille Education Ball Rubik's Cube for the Blind
  • Berlin, City Smell Research
    Nearest Tube and Nearest Subway Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Gotham Guide PDPal Here & There Southwark Circle Garden Registry SMSlingshot What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Media Surfaces: The Journey
  • Beyond the Fold
    Wablog Lucy from Back, Herebelow, Formidable (the rebirth of prehistoric creatures) Kontrol Squiggle Mojibakeru Soundrop MO musical objects from the Interlude<br /> project monome grayscale sixty four Menstruation Machine–Takashi’s Take Tenori-on
  • BirdBox
    PhoneBook Mr. Smilit Pachube Transgenic Bestiary Wifi Dowsing Rod Luka Live Eyepet Swype GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use Me Against the Machine
  • BIX Communicative Display Skin
    Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media City Tickets SMSlingshot Dead Drops N Building façade Chromaroma The Lost Tribes of New York City Change by Us Swype
  • Botanicalls
    Helix Square littleBits Walking Papers Muttering Hat Talk to Yourself Hat Pachube BugPlug Tweenbot Sharkrunners
  • Broken White dinnerware
    Hari & Parker The Things We Keep Swype Me Against the Machine Cubelets Sifteo Cubes PhoneBook Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive<br /> and Gesundheit Radio from the<br /> Attenborough Design Group project Momo Mr. Smilit
  • Brushing Teeth
    (En)tangled Word Bank PIG 05049 The Messenger Wilderness Downtown Passage El Sajjadah The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption From Mouth to Mouth Sidetrack
  • BUG 1.3
    Sifteo Cubes littleBits Wifi Dowsing Rod Roly Poly GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use Cubelets BugPlug Out of the Box Botanicalls Nearness
  • BugPlug
    Cubelets Sifteo Cubes Botanicalls Momo Roly Poly Artificial Biological Clock Swype Me Against the Machine littleBits BUG 1.3
  • Call Me, Choke Me
    Expressions Dispatcher EyeWriter GlowCap Swallow-Signaling Pill Devices for Mindless Communication Disclosure Case from the Genetic<br /> Heirloom series Phantom Recorder Situationist Muttering Hat Talk to Yourself Hat
  • Change by Us
    prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo The 5th Dimensional Camera Walking Papers Dead Drops MyBlockNYC.com Locals and Tourists, New York<br /> and London The 2009 Feltron Annual Report City Tickets Helix Nearness
  • Check Mate
    Becoming Animal The Disgusted Object Lucy from Back, Herebelow, Formidable (the rebirth of prehistoric creatures) Touch Hear Kontrol Squiggle be-B Braille Education Ball Rubik's Cube for the Blind Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad
  • Chromaroma
    BBC Dimensions Helix The Big Red Button Walking Papers prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Locals and Tourists, New York<br /> and London Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Tate Trumps What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC
  • City Tickets
    BBC Dimensions Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Walking Papers prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Bat Billboard Helix The Big Red Button Suwappu Chromaroma
  • Communication Prosthesis Portrait Series (Cyclist, Actress, Chef, Craftsman, Midwife, Politician, Model)
    Muttering Hat Talk to Yourself Hat Earshell Amae Apparatus Level Short++ Crowbot Jenny Situationist EyeWriter GlowCap
  • Continuity
    Spore Dwarf Fortress SimCity 2000; SimCity 3000 BBC Dimensions Hand from Above When Sea Levels Attack! BackTalk Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie GoSkyWatch Planetarium
  • Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence series
    Swype Me Against the Machine Tweenbot Nearness Tio Double-Taker (Snout) Talking Carl Tengu Immaterials: Ghost in the Field Strangle Poise Lamp from the Red Goods<br /> collection
  • Crowbot Jenny
    Bat Billboard Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe Menstruation Machine–Takashi’s Take BBC Dimensions Amae Apparatus Strangle Poise Lamp from the Red Goods<br /> collection Hand from Above Bees and Dogs from bzzzpeek website Kageo Export to World
  • Cubelets
    Sifteo Cubes BugPlug Momo MetroCard Vending Machine Doodlebuzz Digital Remains Swype Me Against the Machine littleBits BUG 1.3
  • Dead Drops
    MyBlockNYC.com N Building façade prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo TrashTrack Homeless City Guide City Tickets Change by Us Hand from Above Walk the Solar System Export to World
  • Devices for Mindless Communication
    Expressions Dispatcher BBC Dimensions Bat Billboard Amae Apparatus Suwappu Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Good Things Should Never End EyeWriter Phantom Recorder
  • Digital Remains
    The Messenger Wilderness Downtown PostSecret Cubelets Sifteo Cubes Doodlebuzz El Sajjadah The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Prayer Companion The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions
  • Disclosure Case from the Genetic Heirloom series
    Phantom Recorder Artificial Biological Clock Me Against the Machine Call Me, Choke Me Expressions Dispatcher Devices for Mindless Communication Situationist Muttering Hat Talk to Yourself Hat EyeWriter
  • Doodlebuzz
    Suwappu BBC Dimensions Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Newsmap US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Chromaroma When Sea Levels Attack! What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC
  • Double-Taker (Snout)
    Tengu Pachube Hand from Above Tweenbot Botanicalls Hungry Hungry Eat Head Good Things Should Never End Walking Papers Helix Tio
  • Dwarf Fortress
    Spore Hand from Above Continuity Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Kageo SimCity 2000; SimCity 3000 LittleBigPlanet Avatar Machine
  • E. Chromi
    BBC Dimensions Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media The 5th Dimensional Camera Bat Billboard Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe Here & There Suwappu Expressions Dispatcher Devices for Mindless Communication
  • Earshell
    Muttering Hat Talk to Yourself Hat Communication Prosthesis Portrait<br /> Series (Cyclist, Actress, Chef, Craftsman,<br /> Midwife, Politician, Model) Level Situationist EyeWriter GlowCap Swallow-Signaling Pill Tentacles 1.0 Amae Apparatus
  • El Sajjadah
    Happylife The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption Sidetrack PostSecret The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions Helix Digital Remains Swype Me Against the Machine
  • Exit
    Windmaker BackTalk US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Newsmap Walk the Solar System They Rule prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Locals and Tourists, New York<br /> and London PDPal
  • Export to World
    BBC Dimensions The 5th Dimensional Camera Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe Good Things Should Never End Hand from Above Bat Billboard Augmented Reality Flash Mob LittleBigPlanet Hungry Hungry Eat Head Helix
  • Expressions Dispatcher
    BBC Dimensions Devices for Mindless Communication Bat Billboard EyeWriter Amae Apparatus Suwappu Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Good Things Should Never End Call Me, Choke Me
  • Eyepet
    The Haunted Book; Le Monde des montagnes Hand from Above Suwappu Kageo Hungry Hungry Eat Head Doodlebuzz Hello World! Tree Listening at Royal Botanic<br /> Gardens, Kew, England;<br /> Tree Listening at Fermynwoods,<br /> Northamptonshire, England Power to the Point Windmaker
  • EyeWriter
    Graffiti Taxonomy GlowCap Hand from Above Helix Swallow-Signaling Pill Amae Apparatus Call Me, Choke Me Expressions Dispatcher Phantom Recorder Hide & See
  • Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive and Gesundheit Radio from the Attenborough Design Group project
    Strangle Poise Lamp from the Red Goods<br /> collection Hari & Parker Expressions Dispatcher Devices for Mindless Communication Transgenic Bestiary Becoming Critter BugPlug Tweenbot Botanicalls Momo
  • From Mouth to Mouth
    The Messenger The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Prayer Companion PostSecret Talking Ring Wilderness Downtown Passage El Sajjadah Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption Sidetrack
  • Garden Registry
    Transportation Town Southwark Circle What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Walking Papers Graffiti Taxonomy Homeless City Guide ANTIWARGAME Hello World! Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D TrashTrack
  • GE ecomagination: Home Appliance Energy Use
    Out of the Box Swype littleBits BUG 1.3 Tweenbot MetroCard Vending Machine Barclays ATM Animations The Future of Self-Service Banking Tio Pachube
  • Gentrification Battlefield
    Walking Papers prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Southwark Circle Garden Registry What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC TrashTrack Visualizing Lisbon's Traffic - 7am, 10am, and 6pm Chromaroma 911 Command Center Radio Control<br /> Application The 2009 Feltron Annual Report
  • GlowCap
    The 2009 Feltron Annual Report prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo BBC Dimensions Helix EyeWriter Swallow-Signaling Pill Nearness Immaterials: Ghost in the Field Sifteo Cubes Situationist
  • Good Things Should Never End
    BBC Dimensions Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe Hand from Above Spore Wilderness Downtown LittleBigPlanet Newsmap Export to World Hungry Hungry Eat Head Bat Billboard
  • GoSkyWatch Planetarium
    Walk the Solar System They Rule BackTalk ANTIWARGAME US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Newsmap Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe BBC Dimensions Chromaroma
  • Gotham Guide
    PDPal Southwark Circle Garden Registry Nearest Tube and Nearest Subway What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D MyBlockNYC.com Walking Papers prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Berlin, City Smell Research
  • Graffiti Taxonomy
    EyeWriter What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Southwark Circle Garden Registry Homeless City Guide Helix PDPal SMSlingshot Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Wilderness Downtown
  • Hand from Above
    Hungry Hungry Eat Head Good Things Should Never End BBC Dimensions Kageo Export to World Suwappu Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels
  • Happylife
    El Sajjadah They Rule The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption Sidetrack PostSecret The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions Helix Digital Remains PIG 05049
  • Hari & Parker
    Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive<br /> and Gesundheit Radio from the<br /> Attenborough Design Group project Becoming Critter Momo Mr. Smilit Transgenic Bestiary Broken White dinnerware Cubelets Sifteo Cubes BugPlug PhoneBook
  • Helix
    Botanicalls BBC Dimensions The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Passage Export to World prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Chromaroma Graffiti Taxonomy Sleep is Death Nearness
  • Hello World!
    BackTalk US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Ushahidi They Rule Tree Listening at Royal Botanic<br /> Gardens, Kew, England;<br /> Tree Listening at Fermynwoods,<br /> Northamptonshire, England Southwark Circle Garden Registry What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Walk the Solar System
  • Here & There
    BBC Dimensions Nearness Immaterials: Ghost in the Field Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media The 5th Dimensional Camera Bat Billboard Suwappu E. Chromi Legible London
  • Hi, A Real Human Interface
    EyeWriter Wilderness Downtown Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Hide & See Word Lens Phantom Recorder Hand from Above Touch Hear be-B Braille Education Ball Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count
  • Hide & See
    Word Lens Hi, A Real Human Interface Touch Hear be-B Braille Education Ball Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Bat Billboard Allianz Arena skin 911 Command Center Radio Control<br /> Application
  • Homeless City Guide
    Southwark Circle Garden Registry What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Graffiti Taxonomy Dead Drops Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D MyBlockNYC.com Walking Papers prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo BakerTweet
  • HomeSense Research Kit
    The Big Red Button Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media BBC Dimensions Suwappu Nearness Immaterials: Ghost in the Field Tweenbot Pachube Double-Taker (Snout)
  • Hungry Hungry Eat Head
    Hand from Above Export to World LittleBigPlanet Good Things Should Never End Kageo Suwappu Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels
  • Hyperreal Everyday Life
    Mr. Smilit Passage (En)tangled Word Bank Helix Hand from Above Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress
  • Immaterials: Ghost in the Field
    Nearness BBC Dimensions Here & There Bat Billboard Oystercard Meltdown Double-Taker (Snout) HomeSense Research Kit The Big Red Button Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Chromaroma
  • Ink Calendar
    Swype Me Against the Machine HomeSense Research Kit The Big Red Button Cubelets Sifteo Cubes BugPlug Momo MetroCard Vending Machine Nearness
  • JetBlue interface
    MetroCard Vending Machine Swype The Future of Self-Service Banking GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use Me Against the Machine Cubelets Sifteo Cubes BugPlug Tweenbot Momo
  • Kageo
    Hand from Above Hungry Hungry Eat Head Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress LittleBigPlanet Avatar Machine Analog Digital Clock
  • Kaoiro
    Bat Billboard Touch Hear be-B Braille Education Ball Rubik's Cube for the Blind Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Hide & See Bees and Dogs from bzzzpeek website Crowbot Jenny
  • Kontrol
    Squiggle MO musical objects from the Interlude<br /> project monome grayscale sixty four Tenori-on Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Mojibakeru Beyond the Fold Soundrop
  • Legible London
    Here & There prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Locals and Tourists, New York<br /> and London PDPal SMSlingshot Nearest Tube and Nearest Subway What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC MyBlockNYC.com Berlin, City Smell Research TrashTrack
  • Level
    Situationist Muttering Hat Talk to Yourself Hat GlowCap Communication Prosthesis Portrait<br /> Series (Cyclist, Actress, Chef, Craftsman,<br /> Midwife, Politician, Model) Swallow-Signaling Pill Tentacles 1.0 Earshell Amae Apparatus Expressions Dispatcher
  • Little Black Box. Empathy Box
    EyeWriter GlowCap Tentacles 1.0 Amae Apparatus E. Chromi Personal Health Assistant Short++ Phantom Recorder The Disgusted Object Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption
  • LittleBigPlanet
    Good Things Should Never End Augmented Reality Flash Mob Export to World Hand from Above Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress Kageo Avatar Machine
  • littleBits
    BUG 1.3 Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Graffiti Taxonomy Helix EyeWriter Wifi Dowsing Rod Roly Poly Hand from Above GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use Cubelets
  • Locals and Tourists, New York and London
    prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Walking Papers PDPal Here & There What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Legible London MyBlockNYC.com TrashTrack Chromaroma Graffiti Taxonomy
  • Lucy from Back, Herebelow, Formidable (the rebirth of prehistoric creatures)
    Here & There Mojibakeru Beyond the Fold Becoming Animal Wablog BBC Dimensions Amae Apparatus E. Chromi Expressions Dispatcher Devices for Mindless Communication
  • Luka Live
    The 5th Dimensional Camera Tentacles 1.0 Change by Us Situationist GlowCap Swallow-Signaling Pill Level Phantom Recorder Artificial Biological Clock Southwark Circle
  • Me Against the Machine
    Phantom Recorder Artificial Biological Clock Disclosure Case from the Genetic<br /> Heirloom series Swype Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series HomeSense Research Kit The Big Red Button Ink Calendar Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe E. Chromi
  • Media Surfaces: Incidental Media
    Media Surfaces: The Journey Suwappu Walking Papers BBC Dimensions Here & There prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo SMSlingshot Doodlebuzz City Tickets E. Chromi
  • Media Surfaces: The Journey
    Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Suwappu Walking Papers BBC Dimensions Here & There prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo SMSlingshot Doodlebuzz City Tickets E. Chromi
  • Menstruation Machine–Takashi’s Take
    Bat Billboard Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe Crowbot Jenny BBC Dimensions Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive<br /> and Gesundheit Radio from the<br /> Attenborough Design Group project Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media E. Chromi Expressions Dispatcher Devices for Mindless Communication
  • MetroCard Vending Machine
    JetBlue interface Swype Cubelets Sifteo Cubes Momo The Future of Self-Service Banking GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use Me Against the Machine BugPlug PhoneBook
  • MO musical objects from the Interlude project
    Wablog Tenori-on Kontrol Squiggle Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Soundrop monome grayscale sixty four The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions GlowCap Nearness
  • Mojibakeru
    Lucy from Back, Herebelow, Formidable (the rebirth of prehistoric creatures) Kontrol Squiggle Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Beyond the Fold The Disgusted Object Hide & See Wablog
  • Momo
    Tweenbot Botanicalls Double-Taker (Snout) Cubelets Sifteo Cubes BugPlug Good Things Should Never End MetroCard Vending Machine Hari & Parker Swype
  • monome grayscale sixty four
    Kontrol Squiggle MO musical objects from the Interlude<br /> project Tenori-on Walk the Solar System HomeSense Research Kit Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Mojibakeru
  • Mr. Smilit
    Hyperreal Everyday Life PhoneBook Hari & Parker Technological Dreams Series: no 1, Robots Models Me Against the Machine Cubelets Sifteo Cubes Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive<br /> and Gesundheit Radio from the<br /> Attenborough Design Group project Momo MetroCard Vending Machine
  • Muttering Hat
    Talk to Yourself Hat Botanicalls Communication Prosthesis Portrait<br /> Series (Cyclist, Actress, Chef, Craftsman,<br /> Midwife, Politician, Model) Earshell Level Situationist EyeWriter GlowCap Swallow-Signaling Pill Tentacles 1.0
  • MyBlockNYC.com
    prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Dead Drops Locals and Tourists, New York<br /> and London Homeless City Guide Change by Us Gotham Guide PDPal Here & There Southwark Circle Garden Registry
  • N Building façade
    Dead Drops Kageo EyeWriter Nearest Tube and Nearest Subway Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Berlin, City Smell Research TrashTrack BakerTweet
  • Nearest Tube and Nearest Subway
    Berlin, City Smell Research Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Gotham Guide PDPal Here & There Southwark Circle Garden Registry SMSlingshot What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Media Surfaces: The Journey
  • Nearness
    Immaterials: Ghost in the Field Here & There Bat Billboard Oystercard Meltdown Double-Taker (Snout) HomeSense Research Kit The Big Red Button Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption Helix
  • Newsmap
    US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Doodlebuzz Walking Papers Walk the Solar System Good Things Should Never End What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC They Rule prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions
  • Notepad
    Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Bat Billboard The Disgusted Object Hide & See Bees and Dogs from bzzzpeek website Word Lens We Tell Stories Hi, A Real Human Interface BackTalk
  • Out of the Box
    Double-Taker (Snout) GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use BBC Dimensions EyeWriter littleBits BUG 1.3 Suwappu Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Barclays ATM Animations
  • Oystercard Meltdown
    Bat Billboard Double-Taker (Snout) Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe Botanicalls Nearness Square Immaterials: Ghost in the Field littleBits BUG 1.3 Cubelets
  • Pachube
    BBC Dimensions Double-Taker (Snout) Chromaroma Transgenic Bestiary Wifi Dowsing Rod PDPal Wilderness Downtown Hand from Above GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use littleBits
  • Pad.ma
    Newsmap Analog Digital Clock Walk the Solar System BBC Dimensions Sleep is Death VoteEasy GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use N Building façade Pachube Hand from Above
  • Passage
    Sleep is Death Helix Hyperreal Everyday Life (En)tangled Word Bank Hand from Above Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress
  • PDPal
    What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Graffiti Taxonomy Locals and Tourists, New York<br /> and London Gotham Guide Here & There Southwark Circle Garden Registry SMSlingshot Nearest Tube and Nearest Subway
  • Personal Health Assistant
    E. Chromi Swype Newsmap Walk the Solar System EyeWriter GlowCap Little Black Box. Empathy Box Amae Apparatus Phantom Recorder Artificial Biological Clock
  • Phantom Recorder
    Disclosure Case from the Genetic<br /> Heirloom series Artificial Biological Clock Me Against the Machine Amae Apparatus Expressions Dispatcher Devices for Mindless Communication Hi, A Real Human Interface Situationist EyeWriter GlowCap
  • PhoneBook
    Mr. Smilit Level Phantom Recorder Hi, A Real Human Interface Me Against the Machine Cubelets Sifteo Cubes Momo MetroCard Vending Machine Barclays ATM Animations
  • PIG 05049
    The Messenger The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Prayer Companion (En)tangled Word Bank PostSecret The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions Brushing Teeth Happylife Helix Talking Ring
  • PostSecret
    The Messenger The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Prayer Companion The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions Helix Talking Ring Digital Remains BackTalk Dead Drops
  • Power to the Point
    Wilderness Downtown When Sea Levels Attack! Suwappu The Haunted Book; Le Monde des montagnes Hello World! Tree Listening at Royal Botanic<br /> Gardens, Kew, England;<br /> Tree Listening at Fermynwoods,<br /> Northamptonshire, England The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Double-Taker (Snout) Windmaker Eyepet
  • Prayer Companion
    Roly Poly The Messenger The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Sidetrack PostSecret Talking Ring Bat Billboard BakerTweet GlowCap Swallow-Signaling Pill
  • prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo
    Walking Papers BBC Dimensions Change by Us City Tickets MyBlockNYC.com Locals and Tourists, New York<br /> and London The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Helix HomeSense Research Kit PDPal
  • Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count; Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count
    Graffiti Taxonomy The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Bat Billboard EyeWriter BackTalk What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama
  • Roly Poly
    Prayer Companion littleBits BUG 1.3 BugPlug Botanicalls Barclays ATM Animations Tio Wifi Dowsing Rod Bat Billboard BakerTweet
  • Rubik’s Cube for the Blind
    Touch Hear be-B Braille Education Ball Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Kaoiro Hide & See Bees and Dogs from bzzzpeek website Bat Billboard Crowbot Jenny
  • Sharkrunners
    Helix Augmented Reality Cookie Botanicalls Momo Kageo The 5th Dimensional Camera Avatar Machine BBC Dimensions Hand from Above Continuity
  • Short++
    Communication Prosthesis Portrait<br /> Series (Cyclist, Actress, Chef, Craftsman,<br /> Midwife, Politician, Model) Tentacles 1.0 Strangle Poise Lamp from the Red Goods<br /> collection Muttering Hat Talk to Yourself Hat Little Black Box. Empathy Box Earshell Amae Apparatus E. Chromi Level
  • Sidetrack
    Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption BBC Dimensions Nearness Double-Taker (Snout) Immaterials: Ghost in the Field Tio Suwappu Prayer Companion The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions Media Surfaces: The Journey
  • Sifteo Cubes
    Cubelets BUG 1.3 Square Double-Taker (Snout) BugPlug Momo Good Things Should Never End Walking Papers prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo GlowCap
  • SimCity 2000; SimCity 3000
    Spore Continuity Dwarf Fortress BBC Dimensions Hand from Above When Sea Levels Attack! BackTalk Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie GoSkyWatch Planetarium
  • Singing Chair
    Lucy from Back, Herebelow, Formidable (the rebirth of prehistoric creatures) The Lost Tribes of New York City The Messenger Wilderness Downtown Passage El Sajjadah The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption From Mouth to Mouth Sidetrack
  • Situationist
    Level GlowCap Swallow-Signaling Pill Amae Apparatus Expressions Dispatcher Devices for Mindless Communication Square Phantom Recorder The Messenger Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People
  • Sleep is Death
    Passage Helix Augmented Reality Flash Mob LittleBigPlanet Newsmap Walk the Solar System Export to World Tentacles 1.0 Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series Hand from Above
  • SMSlingshot
    What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Chromaroma Graffiti Taxonomy PDPal Here & There Southwark Circle Garden Registry Nearest Tube and Nearest Subway
  • Sneezing Bus Stop
    Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Walking Papers Tate Trumps Tweenbot Botanicalls Sidetrack Tio Double-Taker (Snout) Talking Carl Tengu
  • Soundrop
    MO musical objects from the Interlude<br /> project Tenori-on Kontrol Squiggle Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Beyond the Fold Wablog monome grayscale sixty four Menstruation Machine–Takashi’s Take Hi, A Real Human Interface
  • Southwark Circle
    Garden Registry What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Walking Papers Graffiti Taxonomy Homeless City Guide Hello World! Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D TrashTrack BakerTweet Visualizing Lisbon's Traffic - 7am, 10am, and 6pm
  • Spore
    SimCity 2000; SimCity 3000 Dwarf Fortress Hand from Above Continuity Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Kageo LittleBigPlanet Avatar Machine
  • Square
    Botanicalls Nearness Immaterials: Ghost in the Field Oystercard Meltdown littleBits BUG 1.3 Cubelets Sifteo Cubes BugPlug Tweenbot
  • Squiggle
    Kontrol MO musical objects from the Interlude<br /> project monome grayscale sixty four Tenori-on Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Mojibakeru Beyond the Fold Soundrop
  • Strangle Poise Lamp from the Red Goods collection
    Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive<br /> and Gesundheit Radio from the<br /> Attenborough Design Group project Double-Taker (Snout) Tengu Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series Technological Dreams Series: no 1, Robots Models Autoreverse Short++ Me Against the Machine PhoneBook Tweenbot
  • Suwappu
    Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media BBC Dimensions Hand from Above Export to World Doodlebuzz The Haunted Book; Le Monde des montagnes Walking Papers Pachube The Things We Keep
  • Swallow-Signaling Pill
    GlowCap Situationist EyeWriter Level Call Me, Choke Me Expressions Dispatcher BakerTweet Prayer Companion Roly Poly VoteEasy
  • Swype
    Square Me Against the Machine MetroCard Vending Machine The Future of Self-Service Banking Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series HomeSense Research Kit The Big Red Button JetBlue interface Ink Calendar Newsmap
  • Talk to Yourself Hat
    Muttering Hat Botanicalls Communication Prosthesis Portrait<br /> Series (Cyclist, Actress, Chef, Craftsman,<br /> Midwife, Politician, Model) Earshell Level Situationist EyeWriter GlowCap Swallow-Signaling Pill Tentacles 1.0
  • Talking Carl
    Tweenbot Botanicalls Tio Double-Taker (Snout) Tengu Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series Swype GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use BugPlug Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive<br /> and Gesundheit Radio from the<br /> Attenborough Design Group project
  • Talking Ring
    The Messenger The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Prayer Companion PostSecret Hand from Above From Mouth to Mouth The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions Helix Digital Remains PIG 05049
  • Tate Trumps
    Botanicalls Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Walking Papers Helix Southwark Circle Garden Registry Dead Drops What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC MyBlockNYC.com prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo
  • Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People
    Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Bat Billboard Hi, A Real Human Interface PostSecret Hide & See MO musical objects from the Interlude<br /> project Bees and Dogs from bzzzpeek website Word Lens We Tell Stories
  • Technological Dreams Series: no 1, Robots Models
    Mr. Smilit Double-Taker (Snout) Tengu Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series Strangle Poise Lamp from the Red Goods<br /> collection Autoreverse The Disgusted Object Me Against the Machine PhoneBook Tweenbot
  • Tengu
    Double-Taker (Snout) Tweenbot Botanicalls Tio Talking Carl Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series Strangle Poise Lamp from the Red Goods<br /> collection Technological Dreams Series: no 1, Robots Models Autoreverse Me Against the Machine
  • Tenori-on
    MO musical objects from the Interlude<br /> project Kontrol Squiggle Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Soundrop monome grayscale sixty four Hi, A Real Human Interface Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Mojibakeru
  • Tentacles 1.0
    Double-Taker (Snout) Level Short++ Luka Live Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Becoming Animal Walking Papers Sleep is Death Situationist Muttering Hat
  • Terminal
    Autoreverse Wifi Dowsing Rod GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use littleBits BUG 1.3 Out of the Box Barclays ATM Animations Tio Pachube Transgenic Bestiary
  • The 2009 Feltron Annual Report
    PostSecret EyeWriter Wilderness Downtown The Messenger Prayer Companion The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions Helix Talking Ring Change by Us BackTalk
  • The 5th Dimensional Camera
    BBC Dimensions Luka Live Bat Billboard Export to World Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe Suwappu Here & There Augmented Reality Cookie Avatar Machine Sharkrunners
  • The Big Red Button
    HomeSense Research Kit Chromaroma Swype Me Against the Machine Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media City Tickets Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption Ink Calendar Spore
  • The Disgusted Object
    Notepad Becoming Animal Avatar Machine Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series Technological Dreams Series: no 1, Robots Models Kontrol Squiggle Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Mojibakeru
  • The Future of Self-Service Banking
    Swype MetroCard Vending Machine JetBlue interface GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use Me Against the Machine Cubelets Sifteo Cubes BugPlug Tweenbot Momo
  • The Haunted Book; Le Monde des montagnes
    Suwappu Eyepet Hand from Above Kageo Hungry Hungry Eat Head Doodlebuzz Hello World! Tree Listening at Royal Botanic<br /> Gardens, Kew, England;<br /> Tree Listening at Fermynwoods,<br /> Northamptonshire, England Power to the Point Windmaker
  • The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions
    When Sea Levels Attack! The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption Sidetrack PostSecret Helix Nearness Immaterials: Ghost in the Field The Messenger Good Things Should Never End
  • The Lost Tribes of New York City
    Dead Drops Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media N Building façade City Tickets Change by Us BIX Communicative Display Skin Lucy from Back, Herebelow, Formidable (the rebirth of prehistoric creatures) Singing Chair Here & There
  • The Messenger
    The 2009 Feltron Annual Report Wilderness Downtown PostSecret Walking Papers prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Prayer Companion Talking Ring Digital Remains PDPal Situationist
  • The Night of the Living Dead Pixels
    Hand from Above Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie Spore Dwarf Fortress Kageo LittleBigPlanet Avatar Machine Analog Digital Clock Export to World
  • The Things We Keep
    Bat Billboard Oystercard Meltdown Helix Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe Nearness Broken White dinnerware Immaterials: Ghost in the Field Swype Me Against the Machine littleBits
  • They Rule
    ANTIWARGAME Walk the Solar System BackTalk GoSkyWatch Planetarium US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Newsmap Hello World! Chromaroma Exit
  • Tio
    Visualising Household Power<br /> Consumption Sidetrack Tweenbot Botanicalls Nearness Double-Taker (Snout) Talking Carl Tengu Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series Immaterials: Ghost in the Field
  • Touch Hear
    be-B Braille Education Ball Hide & See Word Lens Hi, A Real Human Interface Rubik's Cube for the Blind Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Kaoiro Bees and Dogs from bzzzpeek website
  • Transgenic Bestiary
    Bat Billboard Suwappu Expressions Dispatcher Oystercard Meltdown Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive<br /> and Gesundheit Radio from the<br /> Attenborough Design Group project Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media BBC Dimensions Devices for Mindless Communication Pachube
  • Transportation Town
    Garden Registry ANTIWARGAME Hello World! Continuity When Sea Levels Attack! BackTalk Spore GoSkyWatch Planetarium US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama
  • TrashTrack
    BackTalk What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Chromaroma Southwark Circle Garden Registry Dead Drops Walking Papers prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Visualizing Lisbon's Traffic - 7am, 10am, and 6pm Graffiti Taxonomy
  • Tree Listening at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England; Tree Listening at Fermynwoods, Northamptonshire, England
    Hello World! BackTalk US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Ushahidi VoteEasy Southwark Circle Garden Registry What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Graffiti Taxonomy
  • Tweenbot
    Botanicalls Momo Talking Carl Tio Double-Taker (Snout) Tengu Cross-fire from the Natural Occurrence<br /> series Swype GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use BugPlug
  • Typographic Links
    The 2009 Feltron Annual Report The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions When Sea Levels Attack! Kontrol Squiggle Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Mojibakeru The Disgusted Object
  • US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage
    What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC BackTalk 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Doodlebuzz Ushahidi Walk the Solar System They Rule Hello World! EyeWriter Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count
  • Ushahidi
    BackTalk US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Walk the Solar System Hello World! TrashTrack Export to World They Rule Tree Listening at Royal Botanic<br /> Gardens, Kew, England;<br /> Tree Listening at Fermynwoods,<br /> Northamptonshire, England Square
  • Virtual Free Runner
    N Building façade Hand from Above Continuity Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie Spore The Night of the Living Dead Pixels Dwarf Fortress Kageo SimCity 2000; SimCity 3000
  • Visualising Household Power Consumption
    BBC Dimensions Helix Bat Billboard Walking Papers prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo The Big Red Button Suwappu Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Nearness
  • Visualizing Lisbon’s Traffic – 7am, 10am, and 6pm
    Southwark Circle Garden Registry What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Walking Papers TrashTrack Chromaroma City Tickets Dead Drops Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D MyBlockNYC.com
  • VoteEasy
    BackTalk US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Ushahidi Hello World! Tree Listening at Royal Botanic<br /> Gardens, Kew, England;<br /> Tree Listening at Fermynwoods,<br /> Northamptonshire, England BakerTweet Prayer Companion GlowCap Swallow-Signaling Pill
  • Wablog
    MO musical objects from the Interlude<br /> project Beyond the Fold The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions GlowCap Nearness Immaterials: Ghost in the Field Newsmap Walk the Solar System City Tickets Lucy from Back, Herebelow, Formidable (the rebirth of prehistoric creatures)
  • Walk the Solar System
    Newsmap They Rule BackTalk GoSkyWatch Planetarium US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Ushahidi Chromaroma City Tickets ANTIWARGAME
  • Walking Papers
    BBC Dimensions prettymaps, Beijing, Manhattan, and Tokyo Media Surfaces: The Journey Media Surfaces: Incidental Media Change by Us Southwark Circle Garden Registry What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D Wilderness Downtown
  • We Tell Stories
    Bees and Dogs from bzzzpeek website Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Bat Billboard Crowbot Jenny Level Touch Hear be-B Braille Education Ball Rubik's Cube for the Blind
  • What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC
    US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage Southwark Circle Garden Registry Graffiti Taxonomy Walking Papers TrashTrack Chromaroma Homeless City Guide 911 Command Center Radio Control<br /> Application EyeWriter
  • When Sea Levels Attack!
    Good Things Should Never End The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions Continuity BackTalk Spore GoSkyWatch Planetarium US Federal Contract Spending in 2009 vs. Agency-Related Media Coverage 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama Dwarf Fortress SimCity 2000; SimCity 3000
  • Wifi Dowsing Rod
    littleBits BUG 1.3 Pachube Transgenic Bestiary Terminal Roly Poly Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D GE ecomagination: Home Appliance<br /> Energy Use Cubelets Sifteo Cubes
  • Wilderness Downtown
    The Messenger Graffiti Taxonomy Digital Remains Pachube Good Things Should Never End Locals and Tourists, New York<br /> and London (En)tangled Word Bank PostSecret Double-Taker (Snout) Southwark Circle
  • Windmaker
    Exit Animal Superpowers: Ant and Giraffe Good Things Should Never End Hand from Above Augmented Reality Flash Mob Augmented Reality Cookie ANTIWARGAME Spore GoSkyWatch Planetarium The Night of the Living Dead Pixels
  • Word Lens
    Hide & See Hi, A Real Human Interface Touch Hear be-B Braille Education Ball Rap Almanac Visualization of 50 Cent’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count;<br /> Rap Almanac Visualization of Jay-Z’s Career from Hip-Hop Word Count Notepad Taxi Hand Sign Shape Lingo for Blind People Bat Billboard Allianz Arena skin 911 Command Center Radio Control<br /> Application