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Reading Wind Diffractively: Elemental Chiasmus as Theory and Method
Wind itself, many have noted, is invisible. In both the archive and the field, we encountered the difficulty of getting wind into view ourselves, foregrounded by the many strategies developed to capture wind with the help of various proxies, instruments, and representations. Facing this difficulty, we here draw together work from elemental media theory and feminist new materialism to develop a novel theoretical and methodological approach to wind we call “elemental chiasmus.” We begin by acknowledging wind’s ephemeral nature. Instead of delineating wind as a definite object, we argue that wind is momentarily stabilised and rendered legible when it metaphorically “diffracts” through other elemental media. Across three sections, we trace different practices of elemental mediation which provide wind with a specific shape: In “Aeolian sensing,” we highlight past and present practices of atmospheric sensing which give wind horizontal and vertical shape by diffracting through particulate matter, sound, and electromagnetic waves. In “Aeolian geology,” we undertake an elemental reading of John Muir’s field notes to highlight his application of elemental chiasmus in making sense of both long-term geologic change and short-term changes in wind and weather. In “Aeolian art,” we finally turn to the artistic work of Leonardo Da Vinci and Vincent Van Gogh to demonstrate how their related strategies of linear disegno and pastose capture wind by diffracting it through water and oil. Viewed together, wind “comes to matter” or accrues meaning through an iterative and open “diffractive reading” across elements; a method we call elemental chiasmus.
Journal Article
(De)constructing Dasein in Cyberspace
Human beings are ontological designers. We build the tools, and then the tools reshape our identities. The ontological status in an electronically mediated world always implies a referential whole, a “totality” that endows “language”, “events,” and “actions” with meaning and significance. The ontological discourse is all about the chain of signifiers; surprisingly, the events of appropriation by which the being is (un)folded depend on a synchronic axis. The twist is that the axis can only be visible on a diachronic background. Questions of the existence of a digital being are always associated with the notions of time and space. Being-in is different than being in as it is located in the “now.” The spatiality of “now” in cyberspace is essential as this “now” talks about the forms of time—past, present and future of Dasein via the unconscious. Each post we share, and each comment we put on cyberspace opens the possibilities for new ways of thinking—a thinking pattern involves the other avatars through the interplay of who they are and what they experience in “the desert of the real” (Zizek, 2001, p. 13). Thus, the function of the “in-between” becomes différance, and in this act of deferral emerges the prospect of “poíēsis.” Bernard Stiegler, in his book Techniques and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998, p.140), describes that the epiphylogenesis of man “[b]estows its identity upon the human individual: the accents of his speech, the style of his approach, the force of his gesture, the unity of his world.” Identity is like a (un)concealed truth, a whole of potentialities yet to be discovered but never arrive at the ending. Language is a special equipment to understand the notions of identity, especially in the Heideggerian world, where “essence” precedes “existence”. That is why we refer to beings in their connection to other beings. To know why and how they connect to other beings and even to the digital “spectre” (in Derridean understanding), we must revisit the Lacanian understanding of lack and Freud’s tripartite structure of the human psyche. The subject splits in the course of its striving to fulfil the lack forged by the desire of others. Therefore, the signifying chain is an automata—a lifeless network of signified jouissance in the virtual world. Lacan’s Seminar XI is primarily taken up for its potential to radically suspend Heideggerian questions of the primary meaning of Being. Therefore, this paper shall explore the genealogy of the “essence” of a digital being taking up multiple roles in a true post-human world by highlighting the newly emerged socio-cultural avenues cohabited with artificial intelligence and human beings—a world where the matrix disguises itself in its simulation. Keywords: Dasein, Unconscious, Simulacra, Cyberspace, Lacan
Journal Article
Digital and postdigital art: from aesthetics of a subject to the ontology of an object
The study highlights the increasing diversity of digital and postdigital art along with its rising or even defining influence on various phenomena and spheres of sociocultural reality. Based on ideological attitudes and value orientations, the media reality, through the ontologization of digital and postdigital art, becomes a social model of understanding reality and social life, while organizing communication, interpretation of meanings, and translation of ideas in a special way. In counterpoint to the scientific, technocratic paradigm, which in many respects dominates the digital and postdigital realm, the digital and postdigital space simultaneously becomes an arena for the revival of archaic consciousness. The essential and content foundations and aspects of the digital and postdigital manifest the categorical, conceptual, and essential ideas of art in general. They interact with the social, cultural, political, as well as geographical and topological, environments to the point of creating new cultural, social, symbolic, and material phenomena, hybrid and transformed forms. The essence of beauty is accessed through representations, mediated by symbolic, semantic, and essential agents. The study addresses specific aspects of digital art from the standpoint of materialistic approaches, postmodern concepts, network theories, and social constructivism. Particular attention is paid to the ontologization of art objects in the framework of object-oriented philosophy. Art objects acquire their ontological status from their own authenticity and gain their reality from the outside. Digital and postdigital art combines the immanent with the transcendent, which makes its objects possible or necessary, perceivable or real. Digital and postdigital art is marked by duality and ambivalence, which form a holistic unity in the aspects of object-subject relations and the social and non-human sections of reality.
Journal Article
Radical Duality
\"Radical Duality\" is a practical approach based on my own ontology beyond arguments of “eternal return” (Deleuze) and speculative realism. In this ontology, I find the philosophical idea of “the Time after that” an extremely creative concept of time, a concept that is emblematic of capitalism’s dynamism. Within this artistic practice, then, three elements, “Media,” “Theme,” and “Method” define creative acts, thus correlating to each other. Any medium used for creative activities is a variable (in this piece, just sound). “Method” is a factor which strongly describes the characteristics of a creator. This, in turn, poses questions about relations. “Method” determines the relations between media, and “Media” change themselves according to “how these media relate to each other,” so every artist should think about “what the meaning of the relating is.”For myself, the relation is “a multiplicity of radical duality which consists of the discrete and the continuous.” For this piece, I first made a patch with MAX/MSP. In this patch, then, I created two primitive faders ― “the discrete” and “the continuous” ―, whose values affect the whole sound. Additionally, I made four more faders ― “continuation of discreteness”, “discreteness of continuation”, “continuation of continuation”, and “discreteness of discreteness” ― whose values change various parameters of this complex patch. Also, I quoted Franz Schubert’s 7th symphony and JS Bach's “Dona nobis pacem” for expressing a “bottomless void” as \"Theme\", where the story progresses from hardship to relief. Since “Radical Duality” treats media as variables, those variables do not have to be limited to music. We can treat visuals, concepts, digital content, bodies, photos and so on as media, then change these forms completely, defining new relations each time.
Journal Article
The furniture of the world : essays in ontology and metaphysics
\"Seventeen essays make up the body of this anthology. Most of the authors are Latin Americans (although some of them work in other regions), and thus we might say that this volume is, in a very approximate sense, a showcase of recent Latin-American ontology and metaphysics. The remaining authors-Pierre Aubenque, Barry Smith, Lorenzo Peنna and James Hamilton-are distinguished teachers who have had important contacts with the Latin-American philosophical community, The articles in this anthology address some of the central questions in ontology and metaphysics: the possibility of a science of being (Aubenque), the different possible approaches to ontology (Hurtado), the recent application of ontology to informatics (Smith), guise theory and its Leibnizian antecedents (Herrera), the reduction of space and time to phenomenological properties (Rodrâiguez Larreta), the Newtonian ontology of space and time (Benâitez and Robles), the relation between truth and the so-called \"truth-makers\" (Rodrâiguez Pereyra), the ontological position of the Pyrrhonic skeptic (Junqueira Smith), the limits and difficulties of metaphysical realism (Cabanchik, Pereda), the defense of physicalist or emergentist positions regarding the mental (Pâerez), the metaphysical nature of persons (Naishtat), the ontology of cultural entities (Peنna), political ontology (Nudler), the relation between ontology and literature (Hamilton), the ontology of art (Tomasini). Some of the works (e.g., those Aubenque and Robles) approach the question from a historical perspective: others examine the most recent philosophical literature on the problems focalized (e.g., those by Pâerez and Rodrâiguez Pereyra), and others offer new approaches (e.g., those of Rodrâiguez Larreta, Peنna or Nudler) to a specific problematic area.\"--Publisher's website.
Book
OWL2Vec: embedding of OWL ontologies
Semantic embedding of knowledge graphs has been widely studied and used for prediction and statistical analysis tasks across various domains such as Natural Language Processing and the Semantic Web. However, less attention has been paid to developing robust methods for embedding OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies, which contain richer semantic information than plain knowledge graphs, and have been widely adopted in domains such as bioinformatics. In this paper, we propose a random walk and word embedding based ontology embedding method named OWL2Vec*, which encodes the semantics of an OWL ontology by taking into account its graph structure, lexical information and logical constructors. Our empirical evaluation with three real world datasets suggests that OWL2Vec* benefits from these three different aspects of an ontology in class membership prediction and class subsumption prediction tasks. Furthermore, OWL2Vec* often significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in our experiments.
Journal Article