"The cyborg vision of gender as changing and changeable was radically new. Her (Donna Haraways -red) map of how information technology linked people around the world into new chains of affiliation, exploitation, and solidarity feels prescient at a time when an Instagram influencer in Berlin can line the pockets of Silicon Valley executives by using a phone assembled in China that contains cobalt mined in Congo to access a platform moderated by Filipinas"
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"So when I see massive solar fields and wind farms I feel conflicted, because on the one hand they may be better than fracking in Monterey County - but only maybe. Because I also know where the rare earth minerals required for renewable energy technologies come from and under what conditions. We still aren't doing the whole supply-chain analysis of our technologies."
-Donna Haraway on Truth, Technology, and Resisting Extincion
Image found on searching "cobalt mining" on Google Images.
One of my favourite tracks of Aphex Twin is Ptolemy. As an assignment to re-mediating I thought of remaking this track in Sonic Pi, as the song felt like multiple sounds looping in different ways. With the question of when do you create something new in our minds I thought of my art history teacher that said that even an abstract painting of Rothko isn't abstract. That in a sense there doesn't exist abstractism because we will always have a memory or a feeling with everything we create. So in this thinking there is no possibility to create something new. On the other hand when I started thinking of using Sonic Pi to try to recreate the track I know it would always be creating something "new" because I could never recreate this song (me; technically with this program)
Always intrigued about the strange names Richard David James comes up with I looked up the meaning of Ptolemy on Wikipedia, I found a connection between the Ptolemaic system*, loops, the song and using Sonic Pi with live loops. When I read the interview with -Donna Haraway on Truth, Technology, and Resisting Extincion I started thinking about we as humans, knowing the loops and systems we live in and how to interfere with this but also don't know exactly in what ways things have influence on things because we just cant see everything around us.
We can see the world we live in as a loop. Looping around the sun every year. Ptolemy saw this a little different. He had this egocentric ;) way of seeing our blue marble as the center of the world and everything looping around us. Which is quite logical as we didnt had the technical possibilities to see it otherwise. Just as Donna Haraway explains that even though it feels good to see solar panels emerge all around us we do not see all the materials mined being used for an ecological energy change. We do see changes on our environment but not further than that**
Although the world and all the systems we know are in a way looping they also have contact between these other loops while they loop. We can see the world as a simple model of planets looping around. Seeing one year as 365 days but we can also see it as the earth orbiting around the sun in 365.256363004 days, with seasons shifting, islands moving slowly centimeters and things running out of space, out of resources.
*In astronomy, the geocentric model (also known as geocentrism, often exemplified specifically by the Ptolemaic system) is a superseded description of the Universe with Earth at the center. Under the geocentric model, the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets all orbit Earth.[1] The geocentric model was the predominant description of the cosmos in many ancient civilizations, such as those of Aristotle in Classical Greece and Ptolemy in Roman Egypt. Geocentric Model - Wikipedia
**NIMBY, an acronym for the phrase "not in my back yard",[1][2] or Nimby,[3] is a characterization of opposition by residents to proposed developments in their local area, as well as support for strict land use regulations. It carries the connotation that such residents are only opposing the development because it is close to them and that they would tolerate or support it if it were built farther away. The residents are often called Nimbys, and their viewpoint is called Nimbyism. Nimby, Wikipedia
