Grant Morrison describes his growing up through comics books as a Manichean affair: “It was an all-or-nothing choice between the A-Bomb and the Spaceship. I had already picked sides, but the Cold War tension between Apocalypse and Utopia was becoming almost unbearable” (p. xiv). Morrison’s first non-comic book, Supergods (Spiegel & Grau, 2011), is one-half… Continue reading Return to Cinder: Supergods and the Apocalypse
I used to solve the Rubik’s Cube — competitively. I never thought much of it until I, for some unknown reason, was recently compelled to tell a girl that story. I now know how nerdy it sounds. The girl and I no longer speak. Some of the things I grew up doing, I knew were… Continue reading For the Nerds: Bricks, Blocks, Bots, and Books
Thinking about our own minds often seems so pataphysically impossible as to be useless and silly, but, to paraphrase Steven Johnson (again), trying to understand the brain is trying to understand ourselves. By contrast, trying to expand and enhance it seems much easier. You can expand your mind without really understanding how it happens. There… Continue reading Expanding Minds: Books on Hacking Your Head
With the recent finding that ants’ social networks are similar to our online social networks, “insect media” sounds like less of a metaphor and more of a direct analogy, but Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) is much more than either. He hedges from writing metaphorically… Continue reading We No Longer Have Roots, We Have Aerials: Insect Media
Writer, filmmaker, instigator, and revolutionary, Guy Debord is probably best known for his involvement with the Situationist International (McKenzie Wark calls him their “secretary”) and their concepts of the dérive and détournement, the former of which is one of the core ideas of psychogeography, and the latter of which went on to define the culture jamming… Continue reading Guy Debord: When Poetry Ruled the Streets
