Henri Bergson

philosopher · 17 mentions across 4 readings

In this course

Henri Bergson appears as a philosophical touchstone for vitalism—the doctrine that living systems possess an élan vital or creative life force irreducible to mechanical explanation—which the course readings invoke to theorize organic and semi-organic entities (fungi, necromophs, Weinbaum's creatures) that exceed simple categorization. Deleuze and Guattari's critique of vitalism in excerpt [1] positions Bergson's concept as foundational but ultimately insufficient for thinking material consequences and embodied agency, making him essential historical context for how contemporary theory grapples with life, animation, and the boundary between organism and mechanism central to AI and cybernetic thought. His influence threads through discussions of emergence, self-organization, and the creative potential of matter itself—concerns that haunt the intersection of biology, technology, and aesthetics this seminar explores.

Mentioned in 4 readings

Ben Woodard

from Slime Dynamics

7

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Stephen Zepke

Art as Abstract Machine

6

“probe-heads” (têtes chercheuses, ATP, 190/232)—steering the world on its “creative flight” (ATP, 190/233). The abstract machine is therefore both vital and material, it exists, Deleuze and Guattari write, as the “life proper to matter as s…What then, to ask the question of aesthetics, are the conditions of this experience? This question calls to account another of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical interlocutors: Kant. Unlike Nietzsche, Spinoza and Bergson however, Kant is …Expression and construction are the doubled dimensions of art as abstract machine. The abstract machine expresses the autogenetic and infinite processuality of its real conditions (the infinite, a cosmic world), which appear as the construc…

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Claudia Jacques

Human-Computer Interaction Design and the Cybersemiotic Experience

3

The advent of the mechanical age gave rise to enhanced aesthetic perceptions of space and time intrinsically connected along a continuum and represented by linear perspective positioning the viewer as an observer outside the frame and exper…If you abolish my consciousness … matter resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers. In short, try first to connec…Ascott, R. (2007). In E. A. Shanken (Ed.), Telematic embrace: Visionary theories of art, technology, and consciousness by Roy Ascott. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ascott, R. (2008). Editorial: Cybernetic, technoetic, syncretic…

Yuk Hui ChatGPT

or the Eschatology of Machines - Journal #137

1

Cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert Wiener around 1943, was developed by a group of scientists and engineers who attended the Macy Conferences on cybernetics in the late forties and early fifties. Cybernetics was intended to be a universa…