This class is organized in terms of a double progression addressing both
- the evolution of the relationship between technologies
and cultural elaboration where each feeds on the other as human imagination
produces new technologies with unpredictable consequences that then become
the material basis for further elaboration. Thus we move from
- agricultural tools and irrigation as the basis for
the development of cities and states
- literacy as useful for further development and opening
new possibilities
- the industrial revolution as an intellectual and practical
problem for philosophers, poets and capitalists
- the latest technologies and the new dilemmas they
make for humanity
- the evolution of theoretical approaches to the study of the relationship
between technology and culture
- from the more marxist and determinist
- to the more idealist
- to the more current attempt to bridge the two by emphasizing
the openness of constraining systems and thus their enabling as well
as disabling characters
- from positive/negative feedbacks and broken/homeostatis to "evolutionary feedback" and the transformation of the system.
Specifically, the class
- starts with 3 sessions of introduction setting the general
framework developing theoretical foundations, methodological grounding, and practical consequences for people
- continues with 2 sessions each dedicated to the four classical issues
- the (agri-)culturing of human ecology on the earth
- literacy and the development of new ecologies of discourse
- industrial machines as art and problems
- bombs and amniosyntesis as contexts for individual
action