Comments on: Notes on Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology

By: Alien Phenomenology | Ian Bogost

Alien Phenomenology | Ian Bogost — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 16:15:01 +0000

[…] Review by Darius Kazemi […]

By: DropN, or: Why7?

DropN, or: Why7? — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 02:01:36 +0000

[...] was going to write a long-winded essay, but instead opted for a bit of carpentry instead. This program lets you change two key numbers in Drop7: the 7 itself, so central to the [...]

By: Darius Kazemi

Darius Kazemi — Wed, 09 May 2012 22:35:18 +0000

I specifically have some notes on activism. From some notes for a lecture I gave:

For example, someone’s years of veganism are a form of what Latour calls “composition” — in this case, the gradual composition of an ethos over time. Social activism in general is a form of carpentry or perhaps also composition. If you build what Hakim Bey calls a Temporary Autonomous Zone, you’re engaging in a form of “hyperbolic thinking” as opposed to “critical thinking” — let’s create a society in this local area that already accepts certain tenets of a philosophy to be utterly true.

By: Kunzelman

Kunzelman — Wed, 09 May 2012 22:32:25 +0000

I had the same feelings about carpentry. I’m pretty sure that everything, even basic writing, is “doing” philosophy in that it acts in the world, shows new ways of being and seeing, etc. Also, what about activism–constructing the self in such a way as to make the living body an object that does philosophy.

By: Darius Kazemi

Darius Kazemi — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:48:38 +0000

Not sure what you mean by “construction of the engine alone is millions of people and so many years deep” — you can build a small game engine from scratch for, say, a simple web browser game and still encounter all the ontological issues that you would building the Unreal engine.

By: Nick LaLone

Nick LaLone — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:44:10 +0000

“How do we perform applied ontology without being a god? One answer is to settle for being a demiurge. The practice of building a videogame engine is one way to perform applied ontology.”

I really liked this bit but I wonder about the amount of people involved to get such a thing to market. I mean, construction of the engine alone is millions of people and so many years deep not to mention how much an engine and knowledge of a programmer limits the possible actions that can be taken within it.

It would seem to me that the practicer of ontology would be the general population and it is the job of the social science to examine the glimpses of metaphysical reasoning that create ontology…only that too is limited and almost for the exact same reason.

Complicated…