Topical Videos
THE ISTER (link to torrent download) - The Ister is a 2004 film directed by David Barison and Daniel Ross. It was inspired by a 1942 lecture course delivered by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, published in 1984 as Hölderlins Hymne »Der Ister«. Heidegger's lecture course concerns a poem by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin about the Danube River. The film The Ister travels upstream along the Danube toward its source, as several interviewees discuss Heidegger, Hölderlin, and philosophy. The film is also concerned with a number of other themes, including: time, poetry, technology, home, war, politics, myth, National Socialism, the Holocaust, the ancient Greek polis, Sophocles, Antigone, Agnes Bernauer, Edmund Husserl, the 1991 battle of Vukovar, and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
Betrayal of Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul from Jesus Radicals on Vimeo.
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
Other websites, blogs, and essays:
Technological Paradigm in Ancient Taoism - Heidegger, Winner, and Ellul's critiques of Western technology focus on a notion of efficiency that subordinates to itself all non-instrumental values. An alternative conception of efficiency is proposed based on the Taoist theory of non-action (wu-wei). The ancient Taoist text, The Chuang Tzu, reveals a type of efficiency that is effective, resourceful, and entrepreneurial. It is a form of action which has an intimate rather than alienated relation to technology, and which is sensitive to the ethical and aesthetic values that Heidegger and Ellul claim are excluded from the Western conception of efficiency.
Theory of Technology - Studies of human artifacts as cause and consequence of socio-cultural development. (Lots of links)
Next Nature - Despite the global awareness of our fragile relationship with nature and the countless projects initiated to restore the balance, almost no one has asked the question: What is our concept of nature? And how is our relationship with nature changing?
Posthuman Destinies - The sense of the end of an epoch hangs strongly over our times, whether in the hegemonic notion of the end of a Hegelian world history, the culminant rational godhood of the Enlightenment or the exploding apocalyptic millenarianism claiming sectarian fulfillments from every direction of the earth. The age of science and technology uniformalizes the world today under the sign of neo-liberal globalization. Multinational capitalism streams through nation-states constructing its control apparatus, a omniscient panopticon, poised to fulfill the prophecy of the modern knowledge academy – the human sciences dictating a universal anthropology and psychology based on behaviorism and the market, configuring world populations as standing reserve and increasingly as appendages of fantastically efficient machineries, meshed together in finer and more invisible systems aspiring to the condition of integrality.
Journal of Evolution and Technology - A peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies
