Vincent Callebaut Architectures is designing entirely new spiritual spaces. Many of his recent designs are buildings that function as eco-technology. They integrate with the multiple environments that overlap in our cities: human, mechanical and Gaian.

This video, which was sent to me by Alberto Duarte of City College, CUNY – depicts the genesis of a new life form following the interaction of nature and a megalithic structure.

Venetian Snares – Szamar Madar from David OReilly on Vimeo.

It’s time to develop a reasoned argument for the rights of spirituality.

This is free-writing in this post, a list of ideas:

* Spirituality is a right.

* In the mode of historical pursuits of social justice struggle a new cafeteria-style liberation theology must be written.

* All states of consciousness, even those which do not directly obviously produce capital, must be allowed, protected and encouraged.

Interview with Davis during Loris Gréaud’s Cellar Door installation.

Reading Spiritual robots: Religion and our scientific view of the natural world by Robert M. Geraci

Great way to phrase this, could be done without calling cuneiform chicken scratch, but…

“The chicken scratch of Sumerian bureaucrats had blossomed into an oracular delivery mechanism for the Word of God, one powerful enough to trigger the speck of essence within — and to prove that humble infotech may, in time, boot up the sacred self.” Pg 42

Related earlier section: “In Preface to Plato, the scholar Eric A. Havelock argues that the realm of the forms may also have revealed itself to Plato through the alphabet. Havelock points out that the etymological root of the term idea, which also gives us the word video, has a visual connotation.” Pg 34

Etymology of “idea” is idein, Greek: to see.
So, what if you can ‘show’ more directly? Do video and image have a greater ability to “boot up the sacred self?”

Both quotes from TechGnosis.

“Every time culture succeeds in revolutionizing its cybernetic technologies, in massively widening the bandwidth of its thought-tech, it invites the creation of new gods.” quoted by Erik Davis in Techgnosis, pg 37

The full paragraph:

“How do we reconcile the rationalism of utopian vision with the obvious irrationalism of postmodernism generally, and of cyberpunk/cyberfiction in particular? Gibson’s vision of cyberspace is dystopian, despite its desultory sensuality. How did American culture move so quickly from a postmodern vision of hell to a celebration of this technology not-yet-invented? It seems self-evident that utopian longings are part of a larger and more complex perception of massive change made imminent by a technological breakthrough. Every time culture succeeds in revolutionizing its cybernetic technologies, in massively widening the bandwidth of its thought-tech, it invites the creation of new gods. The invention of the phonological alphabet in the South Sinai in the fifteenth century b.c.e. almost certainly made the idea of an abstract monotheistic God thinkable for the first time. But along with such revolution comes inevitable apocalyptism, with its duality New World/End of the World. In other words, the utopianism of cyberspace predictions can only be understood as an attempt to tame, to rationalize, a more massively transcendent perception of metaphysical intrusion, the collision of the irrational future with the present.”

Porush, David
Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s SnowCrash
Configurations – Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 1994, pp. 537-571

I had the great pleasure of reading Phil Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) last week. I’m now about to finish The Unteleported Man (1966). Pot-Healer is an extraordinary story of a divine life form from another world (yes, it’s Dick, you probably could have assumed that much) who recruits artisans, scientists and engineers from all over universe to assist in the raising and reconstruction of an ancient temple now buried under the sea. I just can’t bring myself to spoil it for you, so – I’ll save the analysis for later and leave this post as is…go read it!

At the Humanoid Robotics Group at M.I.T., a robot’s “humanoid” qualities can include fallibility and whininess as much as physical traits like head, arms and torso. This is where our cultural images of robots as superhumans run headlong into the reality of motors, actuators and cold computer code.

the article…

How much storage do you have on you right now?

In 2005, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori issued a brief article, On Uncanny Valley, which proposes an amendment to his original graph of familiarity vs. appearance (human likeness). He adds “something more attractive and amiable than human beings in the further right-hand side of the valley.” I’ve created this figure as a sketch of this expanded notion of Mori’s valley.

I’ve been working on completing a paper I began in Jenna Tiitsman’s Cinema and Religion course at Hunter College which explores the numinous potential of replicants in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner.

Cyborgs challenge the praxis that has traditionally divided human and machine (and companion/slave, animal/food, creator/creation, etc.). In doing so, they threaten to disrupt those “certain dualisms” that Donna Haraway suggests “have been persistent in Western traditions.” Like cyborgs, the replicants of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are situated outside the human/machine polarity. By threatening binary systems and insisting on an identity of plurality, replicants and cyborgs are granted access to a sanctuary in which they can interface with the numinous place of origin; the place Jenna Tiitsman describes as the chaotic “territory of creation.”

The following paper in progress (and this research blog) is a journey of exploration to map the cyborg sanctuaries in that chaotic territory of Tiitsman’s “creative becoming.” To situate these emergent conceptual-crossroads within more familiar cognitive spaces with supernatural access, I refer to them as the temples of cyborgism.

Download a draft of the paper here: Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism

Update: a newer pre-print is available here: Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism