Interconnectivity
I enjoyed my first week of Electronic Arts: Vision and Sound. When I signed up for uni, this was exactly the kind of teaching and learning that I expected, and I'm very happy about the class in that (and every other) aspect so far. A lot of different subjects came up, and for this journal I'm writing from the notes I took in class and may miss a few comments that David Shea made, as he talks a lot in his lectures — not a bad thing!
I absolutely agree with the concepts of interconnectivity and reframing information that were presented in class. Often, people stick to their fields of expertise, knowledge, and where they are comfortable, ending up deeply misunderstanding or missing important details. Biomimicry is a perfect example. In engineering, the sonic-boom issue with trains moving through tunnels in Japan was fixed by one engineer taking inspiration from diving birds. The solution was a mix between two fields — biomimicry and engineering. Another example: stopping dirt accumulating on building exteriors, based on the surface design of lotus leaves. We're talking about biomimicry later on in the course, so I won't touch on it here. Everything is intersectional.
The conversations on intersectionality brought me to Marxist philosophy — some propose that intersecting issues share the same baseline problems. Sexism cannot be truly removed under a class system; imperialism implicitly creates police oppression at home, in the 'boomerang theory.' These are otherwise unrelated ideas that, from an intersectionalist viewpoint, become much more connected than you'd think. Separating ideas makes them easier to sell to wider groups. A major in Roman history often won't touch on WW2 or how Nazi propaganda used the fall of Rome to justify its own actions — framing Rome's collapse as a failure of leadership rather than a failure of the system itself.
Transhumanism also came up in my notes after David mentioned it. Technological determinism is important here: you shouldn't predict the cultural impact of a technology from the technology itself. The printing press didn't cause the rebirth of the church — it came at a time when that was going to happen anyway and boosted the culture as a tool. Similarly, transhumanist tech — mechanised joints, prosthetics, improved sight — becomes a reflection of its cultural environment, not the culture itself. The atomic bomb is not evil; what is evil is using that bomb. Tech bros suck, but teaching culture to engineers might help us use technology for good.
A recent study that I read connected geology, slavery, and voting patterns in America. Areas with high groundwater density hosted farms that used slaves, and those areas now strongly vote right-wing — the families that owned slaves didn't grow out of their culture of bigotry. Generalised, of course, but it's further evidence that teaching different fields together is incredibly important, even when we don't yet know why, supporting David's point.
On this assignment, David said 'graphic design, not essays'. I know I'm kind of writing an essay right now, but I want to make it more interesting — hopefully on a website on Neocities, or in Second Life. Maybe both. I'm already having ideas about mixing real life and the virtual, to home in on ideas about the new age of unreality we're moving into.
I think there's a link between the modern anti-art propaganda movement on social media and being against connectivity. Especially with the amount of 'AI Jesus' flooding the internet, there's almost a link between faith and the pure strength of scale — electronic anti-humanism. Maybe that should be my end-of-semester essay.
Finally, I kept thinking of Serial Experiments: Lain. At its core, it has two ideas: 'What is real, if we only experience everything through secondary sources?' And: 'Everyone, everywhere is always connected.' With these, it explores the internet through its protagonist and has a horror, Lynchian aesthetic — never fully explaining what happens. In its virtual world 'the Wired', implied to be from aliens, the story touches on a theology of virtual environments where wires and computers are gateways into a separate realm of reality, and the 'real world' becomes the fake one. A really good series. I might make my end-of-semester presentation on that.