Psyberspace

This page is one of several on the site that offer a good reference to aspects of the digital environmnet. This page looks at questions of time, space and place in the digital era.

Good Stuff

The intro to this site is here in full:

In a talk that Terence gave at Wetlands Preserve in 1998, he said:

“The other night I searched (the Web) for ‘self-transforming elf machines.’ There were 36 hits! It surprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. I’ve used the phrase for DMT, ‘Arabian hyperspace.’ So I thought of this, and then I searched it, ‘Arabian hyperspace,’ in quotes. And it took me right to a transcript of the talk in which I’d said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. I’m very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.”

In the spirit of that last sentence, I decided to post here the transcriptions, given to me by a friend, of a lecture series that Terence presented on alchemy. I do not know where or when the lectures were given. Note: I have not edited the transcriptions at all– they are exactly as I received them.

As you read these lectures, please send prayers for Terence’s safe passage to the other shore. For some of Terence’s thoughts on death, click here and here.

Links to lectures follow.

We have been making a CD of all the best pix from the horse treks. Thinking about making a calendar etc. I am also wanting to be more fluid in my blogging. I am loving the images. Want to make more. Flow them in here…

You Are Cyborg – Wired Meet Donna Haraway and you get a sense of disconnection. She certainly doesn’t look like a cyborg. Soft-spoken, fiftyish, with an infectious laugh and a house full of cats and dogs, she’s more like a favorite aunt than a billion-dollar product of the US military-industrial complex. Beneath the surface she says she has the same internal organs as everyone else – though it’s not exactly the sort of thing you can ask her to prove in an interview. Yet Donna Haraway has proclaimed herself a cyborg, a quintessential technological body. (See “The Cyborg Ancestry.”) The picture was taken from the Women in Philosophy Gallery by Karla Tonella.

My palm images in a Gallery

Reverse Transcript – Hyperlink to Donna Haraway Now there is an interesting idea… links to people who cite… daypop does that of course, but here it is to Donna Haraway. I might make one to walter 🙂

I have only linked to this in passing before, but I refer to this essay frequently at the moment and recommend it wholeheartedly. So here it is again. And some quotes:

McLUHAN: Because all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self- protective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what’s happening to it. It’s a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media- induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.

This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety, which in turn has been transformed into its Doppelgänger — the therapeutically reactive age of anomie and apathy. But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us — indeed, compelling us — to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious, toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own bodies. We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at large. Until the present era, this awareness has always been reflected first by the artist, who has had the power — and courage — of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world.

But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage — that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists.

On a totally different note. I like to listen to Radio NZ. AM seems to be hard to get. I got this little antique today, it does the trick! I can record off it too onto the PC, sounds OK. Amazing how older stuff works far better for this than new. Got the picture off ebay where it was far cheaper than in the antique radio shop, but I needed the service!

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