Dear empyricists, and special hello to Chris
this thread is really stimulating - was weaving the inevitable
mekhane into a text a couple of weeks back when it cropped up here
like a Deux ex Machina - and now the animism thread.
The archaic world of puppets - manipulated objects - and automats -
self-moving objects - and all the hybrid entities that span the
continuum between those two categories seems to me to offer useful
insights into our notions of live/ness. Gaze as giver of life - le
report de la vie, as we say in French.
For me, it is this propensity to read life and live:li:ness into
things that connects the most ancient effigies and totems, to those
strange creatures our prosthetised eyes are revealing in outer space
- Saturn's moons or the capsule that relates them to us - and at
"non"human scales on earth, as in the shaping of nanomolecular
surfaces. Mixes here of computational display and obdurately
physical entities and terrain - as exemplified by our being able to
follow Opportunity getting out of a rut on some distant planet.
With thanks for the discussion and lively ideas
best wishes
sjn