17/12/2023
My new book is out: The Digital, a Continent? Nature and Poetics, Vol. 1 of Architectonics Books, a multivolume work in the Applied Virtuality Books Series, published by Birkhäuser / de Gruyter. It is open access, available here:
https://lnkd.in/dXXnfh93
I am grateful for the two endorsements this book has received:
"Through a captivating style, expression rich in erudition and beauty of language, Vera Bühlmann unravels the universe of the digital planetary plane as a complex metaphysics of the new era in a perpetual state of recursion to the ancients and their mathematical “theorein” as if experienced for the first time, discovered as newborn yet always already primeval."
—Katarina Kolozova, Professor of Political Philosophy, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje
"With poetic imaginaries and theoretical inventiveness, Vera Bühlmann presents us an architectonic of digital continentality as a new way to understand the world, whereby code is conceived as percolating universality, where reason leaks and accumulates into continental plates as poetics overflows mathematics and mathematics contains poetics, as myth exceeds natural science and natural science exceeds myth, according to a “without principality” as the very principle of reason."
—Yuk Hui, Professor of Philosophy, Erasmus University, Rotterdam
The chapters in this book initially grew out of work undertaken for a European Research Council Grant proposal in 2018/19, entitled “Digital Continent.” Its subtitle was “Metaphysics of Copiousness, Architectonics in the Meteora: A 21st Century Citizen Science Treatise on the Conditio Humana in the An- thropocene.” The grant proposal was not successful, and I would frame many things differently today. But the scope and promise I had set out still frame, virtually so, the chapters collected here.
Book Abstract: The author discusses a natural philosophy way of thinking about digital technology that draws on the optics and sensibility of new materialism. In doing so, Nature and Poetics uses photosynthesis and nuclear fission as examples of processes that are as artificial as they are natural, to explain how digital technology can be seen in the paradigm of a "natural communication" - a communicative physics. The book explores the idea that metaphors keep ideas and things moving and make them graspable beyond a strict nature-culture distinction, and that poetical and rhetorical ideations help to measure and proportion thought of the world. The author concludes: we can better understand ourselves and digital technology by looking at how there is coding in the natural world too, and by developing ideations of how energy, form, and intellect are in play together in multiple ways in an architectonics of world.
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Die Autorin erörtert eine Denkweise über digitale Technik, die sich auf den neuen Materialismus stützt. The Digital, a Continent? verwendet dabei beispielhaft die Photosynthese und die Kernspaltung als ebenso künstliche wie natürliche Prozesse, um zu erklären, wie die digitale Technik im Parad...
