[-empyre-] No. 1, Day 4, Week 2

[John Hopkins]

> figures like Alvin Lucier's physics mentor Edmond Dewan.  And I get the core
> point about the natural history of media, and the ways in which what gets
> called "technology" as a human endeavor, is necessarily embedded in these
> natural strata -- geophysical energy, electromagnetic forces, and so on.

Another strategy is to shift to scale-independence when considering EM radiation 
-- or, more precisely, the idea that EM energy underlies all scales of 'reality' 
as it is perceived by our body-systems as well as by all the 'hearing', 'seeing' 
and other sensory instrumentation that we deploy to provide us information about 
reality that our bodies cannot directly sense. Another words, the nature of 
reality as we can model it here in words is provided by EM radiation. And, 
ultimately, it is that narrow band of EM radiation that we can directly perceive 
through which we determine our complete impression of reality -- analog signals 
(energy) received by our embodied configuration of energized matter.

Furthermore, we are comprised by the fields and flows through which we perceive: 
talk about the fish's conception of water!

Technology may be framed as an applied re-configuration of energy (EM) flow -- 
applied by humans who are themselves re-configurations of energy flows that Life 
has 'imposed' on the cosmos.

As I explore in my dissertation, "The Regime of Amplification", the 
re-configurations are essentially the application of evolved protocols that 
direct EM (energy) flows. From this point of view, widely divergent 'systems' -- 
bio-systems, techno-social systems, self-organizing systems, geo-systems -- may 
be more powerfully comprehended in their continuity with wider phenomena (their 
complete embeddedness to all that surrounds them). No phenomena is singular or 
unitary except by abstraction.

Consider asking the question, from an old Cartesian pov: Where in the universe 
is a 'space' that is not 'infused' with electromagnetic energy, or is not 
comprised of EM energy?

The answer is a null set: and this is what unifies all the chapters in Douglas' 
book ...

Cheers,
John

-- 
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Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
taking Manhattan as Berlin isn't possible right now
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
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