Publishers emphasise the continued value of the customary audiobook, read by a single narrator, as well as its appeal to listeners. (Many youngish adults recall with fondness Stephen Fry’s rendition of the “Harry Potter” books.) Yet the reason modern iterations impress is that they draw from a well of 21st-century technological innovation and creativity alongside a venerable tradition of oral storytelling.
“I.C.E. vehicle” (pronounced “ice”) is similar. I.C.E. is short for internal combustion engine, a modifier that was superfluous until electric cars came on the scene. Like meatspace, it’s what the journalist Frank Mankiewicz called a “retronym” — a new term that’s invented for something old because the original term has become ambiguous, usually because of some development such as a technological advance.
A new book from TASCHEN, Dig It!: Building Bound to the Ground, looks at how humans have carved and dug into earth’s surface by offering a visual survey of architectural projects that “merge building and ground.” Such merging, the book argues, counteracts a long and destructive history of domination and separation from the surface (a.k.a. the natural landscape or unbuilt environment). It takes the Back to the Land movement literally, not just getting back to the land but into it.
In his 1964 lecture “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Martin Heidegger proposed that philosophy’s historic function of providing a unified account of the world was growing obsolete. Cybernetics, the postwar scientific research on technical systems, was outperforming philosophy in this traditional role. Influencing everything from art and sociology to computation and neurobiology, this ambitious new discourse envisioned the relationship between a system and its environment as a series of feedback loops determined by communicative exchange. Deemed capable of accounting for everything from a cell’s interaction with its surroundings to the economics of human labor, cybernetics presented a more coherent metaphysical system than Plato or Hegel could have imagined.
While clearly impressed with these advances, Heidegger’s proclamation of the “end of philosophy” comes with a major warning. Though cloaked in the organic language of growth and spontaneity, this new mode of scientific inquiry risks a colonizing attitude toward human beings and the natural world. The technological ethos of postwar scientific advancement, for Heidegger, threatens to reduce even the arts to mere “regulated-regulating instruments of information” wielded for power and profit. For this reason, as Yuk Hui suggests in his new book, Art and Cosmotechnics, Heidegger turns to artists like Cézanne and Paul Klee, seeking to uncover a more ethical relation between human life, art, and nature.