Disclaimer The thoughts expressed in this blog posts are my own and as such do not reflect on any one person at TAG. My intention is not to restrict or depreciate TAG, nor to cause anyone undue harm. Like Latour’s Observer, I am but one voice trying to make sense of what could potentially be Read More
In their anthropological study of a tribe of scientists, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar speak of the methodological problems involved with drawing conclusions from observation. A key component is the familiarity of the observer to the evidence being observed: “it is important that testing be carried out in isolation from the circumstances in which the Read More
I am a dramaturg. … (what does that mean?) … In their book Dramaturgy and Performance Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt explain that, “the more precise and concise one tries to be [in defining dramaturgy], the more one invites the response ‘Yes, but…’. Although dictionaries and encyclopedias offer apparently clear explanations, these are insufficient Read More
The photos above are connected, not by geographical location or photographer, but rather by hashtag: #liveauthentic. A quick Google search will yield endless images tagged as such, most of them highly-curated and (ironically) inauthentic in their likenesses. The spare, wholesome, outdoorsy aesthetic seen in these photos has had an influence on numerous aspects of commodity culture Read More
Since no one seems to have written about the power dynamics and agency of cellphones, I thought it would be interesting for me to bring it up. Cellphones are a relatively recent invention (if by recent I mean 42 years old with the first IBM Simon “smart phone” introduced in 1992 and the first iphone Read More
The gif is ubiquitous. And it’s a mess. A relic from the dial-up web, it was one of the first image formats on the web. It’s become an essential part of the language of online communication, and it’s become a form of art it own right, it’s even bleeding into other forms of media (see PBS Idea’s Read More
For the last few weeks we’ve been talking about assemblage, objects, infrastructures and articulations. But we’ve also been talking about bodies. It seems impossible to escape perceiving, feeling and thinking about the world from our subjective, human position, even when we employ object oriented ontology to level the playing field between humans and things, as we did this Read More
Conceptual Poetry is a mode of contemporary writing best explained to the uninitiated through a close reading of its title: Poems or pieces of “text” are constructed and constrained by and through a centralising conceptual idea. Conceptual Poets take ideas, imaginings, and thoughts and then enact them—either in extremely literal ways or in extremely abstract ways. Read More
Death Grips’ is a difficult music group to describe but many like to call them an “experimental hip hop group”, a category seemingly contrived for a group that resists classification through their mixing of different genres. Although the assignation of a genre is sometimes reductive, the “experimental” part is apt for describing the expansive nature Read More
Photograph “Nebunul” Preamble to the Probe On Stories Everything in life can be told as a story. We live our lives serving willingly or unwillingly as protagonists of our and others’ stories, unbeknownst to us that even in the most mundane of acts, such as drinking our morning coffee, for example, we are passive or Read More