Search results for ""Author Mark Kingwell""

Anxiety about non-human intelligent machines is a longstanding theme of cultural production and consumption. Examples range from tales of golems and Frankenstein’s monster to the evil overlord scenarios of contemporary film and television franchises: Star Trek, the Alien series, and the Terminator sequence, as well as Her, Black Mirror, Blade Runner, Ex Machina, and many other less mainstream cultural artifacts. The source of this anxiety is clear. Non-human conscious entities may turn out to be superior to any biological form of life, allowing a stride across human ambition in a moment dubbed “the Singularity” by AI insiders. This is the turning point when non-human entities advance and reproduce in a manner that surpasses and subjugates biological forms of intelligent life. Although today’s artificial intelligences fall notably short of this level of sophistication, Mark Kingwell argues that we are already more than human in important ways, and likely to become more so as time goes on. In Singular Creatures Kingwell plumbs the depths of cultural and political meaning in the apparent transition to posthuman life. Our immersion in technology, now comprehensive to the point of invisibility, has altered forever what it means to be alive. The politics of posthumanism flow directly from our own situation, at once dependent on technology and afraid of its effects on current and future experiences.More than a century after playwright Karel Čapek coined the word robot – rooted in the Czech robota, meaning “servitude” or “drudgery” – in his 1920 allegory about the alienation of forced labour leading to a violent workers’ revolt, Čapek’s central question continues to haunt us. Can humans and their own creations co-exist in a new cyberflesh world, or is a struggle for superiority inevitable? Singular Creatures is an attempt at sketching the field before any deadly battle is joined.

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With COVID-19 comes a heightened sense of everyday risk. How should a society manage, distribute, and conceive of it? As we cope with the lengthening effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic, considerations of everyday risk have been more pressing, and inescapable. In the past, everyone engaged in some degree of risky behaviour, from mundane realities like taking a shower or getting into a car to purposely thrill-seeking activities like rock-climbing or BASE jumping. Many activities that seemed high-risk, such as flying, were claimed basically safe. But risk was, and always has been, a fact of life. With new focus on the risks of even leaving the safety of our homes, it’s time for a deeper consideration of risk itself. How do we manage and distribute risks? How do we predict uncertain outcomes? If risk can never be completely eliminated, can it perhaps be controlled? At the heart of these questions—which govern everything from waking up each day to the abstract mathematics of actuarial science—lie philosophical issues of life, death, and danger. Mortality is the event-horizon of daily risk. How should we conceive of it?

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Adventure is always escapist and often utopian, yet we find solidarity with others and Kafkaesque existential rabbit holes within the words we use to celebrate high-flying escapades. Even when adventures are small in the cosmic scope, the terminology of thrilling exploits promotes a life lived at a high pitch. This go-to glossary for the philosophical explorer delves into these contradictions and insights through more than five hundred terms, from A-OK to zoom. Semiotician Joshua Glenn sourced terms from Shakespeare, military and biker jargon, hip hop and surfer slang, survivalist and gamer subcultures, comic books, extreme sports, and beyond to ask questions about meaning and selfhood. This diverting survey, paired with copious illustrations by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth, is introduced by Mark Kingwell in a thought-provoking essay.The Adventurer’s Glossary extends the entertaining and incisive critique found in the trio’s previous books, The Idler’s Glossary and The Wage Slave’s Glossary. This third instalment turns its lens to the language of risk, excitement, and journeying into the unknown, taking readers on their own semantic adventure.

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Almost everything that landscape architects design is ultimately for a community. Community can be the boon or bane of a project, and oftentimes both. LA+ COMMUNITY aims to explore how, over time, each of us moves in and out of multiple communities, shaping them as they shape us, and in turn shaping our landscapes and cities. We ask how different disciplines construct different ideas of community and how those communities are anchored in space and time, whose interests they serve, and what traces they leave. And we examine how — in this pluralistic, fragmented, and fluid world — designers can meaningfully engage with communities. Contributions from: Anne Whiston Spirn reflects upon her personal and professional journey through her long-term engagement with the Mill Creek community in the West Philadelphia Landscape Project. Architect and cofounder of the DisOrdinary Architecture Project Jocelyn Boys discusses how designers and policy-makers make assumptions about the "ordinary user" of public space and explores ways of understanding and improving how people with disabilities engage with such spaces. Historical geographer Garrett Dash Nelson contemplates the conceptual and practical slippages between understanding community in both its geographical and sociological forms, and what this means for designers seeking to give spatial form to the concept of community. A multi-perspective Q+A with BIPOC designers, educators, and artists Kofi Boone, Julian Agyeman, Hanna Kim, Alma du Solier, Jeffrey Hou, Melissa Guerrero, and Kat Engleman confronts the enduring practices of spatial injustice and the need for new processes, engagement, and outcomes for a racially and culturally inclusive future. Philosopher and author Mark Kingwell considers the literal ins and outs of the question “What is community?” in the midst of a global pandemic. Landscape architect Kate Orff speaks about the ways in which she uses community activism and different practices of engagement to drive better design outcomes. Criminologists James Petty + Alison Young open our eyes to the rise of hostile architecture and criminalisation of homelessness in public space. Designer Chrili Car reflects on lessons learned from working with a self-organised community in a remote village in northern Ghana to masterplan long-term local sustainability and greenbelt projects. Ecologist Jodi Hilty, President and Chief Scientist of the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, speaks about the realisation of this visionary wildlife-corridor project spanning 3,200 km, two countries, and hundreds of different communities and interests. Historic preservationist and planner Francesca Russello Ammon teases out the contradictions in the canonical urban renewal success story of Philadelphia’s Society Hill. Landscape architect Jessica Henson gives us the inside story on the intractably complex socio-political and ecological task of master planning a 51-mile swath of the Los Angeles River with a diverse range of user communities. Michael Schwarze-Rodrian recounts the extraordinary achievements of the Emscher Landscape Park in Germany’s Ruhrgebiet, where over the last 30 years a working-class community facing the trauma of transition to a post-industrial economy has been sustained by the medium of landscape, without the forms of displacement or gentrification typically associated with high-end greening. Urban planner and author of Just Sustainabilities Julian Agyeman elucidates what the culturally inclusive design of public space entails. Architect Mario Matamoros delivers a stinging critique of the way in which developers and designers in the Honduran city of Tegucigalpa dupe the public with cynical community consultation so as to anesthetise the possibility of dissent, and Sara Padgett Kjaersgaard interviews the CEO of the Federation of Traditional Owner Corporations, Paul Paton and landscape architect Anne-Marie Pisani about working with Indigenous communities in Australia to help facilitate self-determination and connection to their lands.

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