diffraction

A very useful foil to the thinking of David Abram.

Kabir sings of the body as an instrument of measurement, a balance, scales. How can musical apparatus be an instrument in the sense of a sc...

The sarod, or indeed any musical instrument, is a perfect example of co-evolutionary technology. I was just thinking of the length of the st...

This is what I was doing a couple of months ago. Terrible time lag, this blog has... Anyway the organizer's idiosyncratic but lively re...

Feeling a tremendous rush of energy from the satisfaction of being able to do something that had seemed completely mysterious or impossible....

Language consists of grunts, tics, gestures, tones, melodies, flourishes, as much as discrete words. Sounds are fuzzy haloes of meaning rath...

January 11th. That's when the wind got knocked out of this blog. That was my first sarod lesson. It was like discovering a whole landsca...

http://www.csl.sony.fr/index.html

'Atau Tanaka is researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) Paris, spanning cultures and encompassing domains of artistic exp...

(from Dene Grigar's course blog on 'Language, Text and Technology') This image of a horse, from the Caves of Lascaux located in...

Dene Grigar's book 'New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways In and About Electronic Environments' (with John Barber, Hampton P...

My last post was on Makar Sankranti. This is on Maha Shivaratri . The long night which belongs to ascetics, tantrics, fakirs, all those who ...

January 14th/15th has been pious, festive and cosmic. I'm glad to be living in a country which is so conscious of astronomical movements...

I've been thinking recently a lot about how to make an image of the literate, symbolic scene overlaid, underlying, or embedded in the ...

Here's a course description I've just written for students at Srishti. Start teaching next week. Technologies may be considered very...

Writing is an invaluable aid to memory. But it can also be misleading. Over the weekend I've been working on a konnakol pattern beginnin...

In The Vital Machine, scientist-historian David Channell says, 'One of the most important issues facing us as we move toward the twenty-...

The ultimate lonely desolation is to be surrounded by nothing but reflections of my self and my own creations. Such a psychosis is the oppos...

Being a percussionist is a contemplation of transferability of skills. Knowledge exchange occurs within one's own body. Practicing konna...

A couple of people expressed an interest in the Tagore-Einstein conversation I referred to in my talk at HP on Monday. So here are a few lin...

What actually happens when I learn? Repetition is like the burning in of a brand. The hand that slaps taalam on my knee rubs away some fibre...

I've decided to look a little more closely at konnakol , the South Indian spoken rhythm performance. It pulls together many of the theme...

Where is the sensor in a lift door that warns it of an obstruction? Just now, someone ran up to the lift at the last moment and waved his ha...

Three stone cutters were asked about their jobs. The first said he was paid to cut stones. The second replied that he used special technique...

I felt something clarifying during Ashoke Chatterjee's speech at Srishti's Graduation Ceremony last night. I've always had an am...

Have been learning about Schilling's theorem and population dynamics today. Here's some impenetrable (to me) notation which I like t...

Here's something suggested by Shekhar as a very useful resource in thinking about global consciousness. http://www.avatarepc.com/index.h...

One of the most significant ideas I've heard in the last few weeks came from a conversation with Rama who sits in the next cubicle to me...

This morning the toughened, bidi smoking, sun-blackened rickshaw driver cracked into a beaming grin and starting waving inanely. I thought h...

Paper sensitive to pressure and movement begins to look like cloth. And a moving scroll begins to look like a roll of fabric. Could designs ...

Talking with Shekhar a question arose about evolutionary models of growth or progress. Survival of the fittest or collaboration/symbiosis? I...

Watching Sivamani at the Bangalore Hubba in Palace Grounds I realized that music - perhaps particularly percussion - displays clarity of tho...

I just stumbled upon something I wrote years ago. Before I was as internet and communications savvy as I am now. Reminds me of a hypertext p...

One of the technologies they're exploring here is 2D bar graphs printed along the bottom of a page of text (like US tax forms and Driver...

Am focussing in gradually on something interesting. It's emerging as a core concern out of all sorts of seemingly disparate elements. Ba...

I worry that I might be an anti-technologist. That I might be here under false pretences. I feel suspicious of my own fascination with gadge...

Here's Ellie Epp, the Canadian film maker and philosopher on writing a journal http://www.sfu.ca/~elfreda/work%26days/work%26days.html

Chomping at the bit I've placed in my own mouth. I'm the rider and the horse here. So where shall we go? Feels like it's time to...

Have been looking at the Tamil alphabet today, in which the Gesture Keyboard has been developed. The curliness of it is striking. Forests of...

A significant factor in the appeal of Bohm's vision was the promise that Dialogue could increase and enrich corporate activity – in part...