Our understanding of our capacities, potentials and identities is informed in profound ways by the technological
matrix in which our projects are conceived and developed. Recognizing the potential for bio-technological
intermingling of self, mind, body and world has implications with regard to the environments and institutions within
which we must solve our problems, build our lives and freely engage in our projects. However, just as the law lags
behind the complicated new realities of the Internet, our theoretical constructs lag behind the increasing and
accelerating interpenetration of mind, body and technology. In this course, I would like to explore the issues
involved in this process.
Poslední úprava: BLACKMAMBA (14.06.2011)
Our understanding of our capacities, potentials and identities is informed in profound ways by the technological
matrix in which our projects are conceived and developed. Recognizing the potential for bio-technological
intermingling of self, mind, body and world has implications with regard to the environments and institutions within
which we must solve our problems, build our lives and freely engage in our projects. However, just as the law lags
behind the complicated new realities of the Internet, our theoretical constructs lag behind the increasing and
accelerating interpenetration of mind, body and technology. In this course, I would like to explore the issues
involved in this process.
Sylabus -
Poslední úprava: BLACKMAMBA (14.06.2011)
By using tools, we humans can extend and augment our experiences, allowing us to explore new spaces of cognition, perception and action that might otherwise prove invisible. For example, a blind man learns to use his cane until it eventually feels like an extension of his body and senses. Similarly, written language may be thought of as a cognitive tool which provides a new medium for the communication of ideas and the construction of thoughts.
Certain tools become so well incorporated and integrated with our lives and projects that they become transparent in use. Other tools, by contrast, keep getting in the way, requiring skills that do not come naturally to the biological organism, and thus remain opaque.
Our rapidly changing technological world is filled with a dizzying web of new tools, some which have become or are becoming transparent, and others which remain opaque. Moreover, the Internet is connecting distant points in space with virtual and physical links which make possible perception and action at a distance.
Well-fitted, transparent technology - with rich, fast and reliable interfaces - can function like a part of the user and transform what we feel we are capable of doing, where we feel we are located and what kinds of problems we can solve in many interesting ways. However, by making tools permanently invisible and relegating them to the status of unconscious neural events, we risk limiting and perhaps stunting our own capacities for creatively taking up our projects.
Hopefully, as we open ourselves to new spaces of cognition, perception and embodiment, we will be free to deal with our life projects in new, autonomously defined ways. But it is difficult to recognize the full potential and implications for such cognitive/corporeal symbiosis. The aim of this course is to investigate these implications.
Literature:
Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
Menary, Richard, ed. The Extended Mind
Goldberg, Ken, ed. The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody
Poslední úprava: BLACKMAMBA (14.06.2011)
By using tools, we humans can extend and augment our experiences, allowing us to explore new spaces of cognition, perception and action that might otherwise prove invisible. For example, a blind man learns to use his cane until it eventually feels like an extension of his body and senses. Similarly, written language may be thought of as a cognitive tool which provides a new medium for the communication of ideas and the construction of thoughts.
Certain tools become so well incorporated and integrated with our lives and projects that they become transparent in use. Other tools, by contrast, keep getting in the way, requiring skills that do not come naturally to the biological organism, and thus remain opaque.
Our rapidly changing technological world is filled with a dizzying web of new tools, some which have become or are becoming transparent, and others which remain opaque. Moreover, the Internet is connecting distant points in space with virtual and physical links which make possible perception and action at a distance.
Well-fitted, transparent technology - with rich, fast and reliable interfaces - can function like a part of the user and transform what we feel we are capable of doing, where we feel we are located and what kinds of problems we can solve in many interesting ways. However, by making tools permanently invisible and relegating them to the status of unconscious neural events, we risk limiting and perhaps stunting our own capacities for creatively taking up our projects.
Hopefully, as we open ourselves to new spaces of cognition, perception and embodiment, we will be free to deal with our life projects in new, autonomously defined ways. But it is difficult to recognize the full potential and implications for such cognitive/corporeal symbiosis. The aim of this course is to investigate these implications.
Literature:
Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
Menary, Richard, ed. The Extended Mind
Goldberg, Ken, ed. The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet
