Technological World-Pictures: Cosmic Things and Cosmograms

Martin Heidegger’s notion of things as gatherings that disclose a world conveys the “thickness” of everyday objects. This essay extends his discussion of things—part of a sustained criticism of modern technology—to technological objects as well. As a corrective to his totalizing, even totalitarian, generalizations about “enframing” and “the age of the world‐picture,” and to a more widespread tendency among critics of modernity to present technology in only the most dystopian, uniform, and claustrophobic terms, this essay explores two species of technical object: cosmic things and cosmograms. The first suggests how an ordinary object may contain an entire cosmos, the second how a cosmos may be treated as just another thing. These notions are proposed as a basis for comparison and connection between “the industrial world” and other modes of ordering the universe

The Prophet and the Pendulum: Sensational Science and Audiovisual Phantasmagoria Around 1848

During the French Second Republic—the volatile period between the 1848 Revolution and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état—two striking performances fired the imaginations of Parisian audiences. The first, in 1849, was a return: after more than a decade, the master of the Parisian grand opera, Giacomo Meyerbeer, launched Le prophète, whose complex instrumentation and astounding visuals—including the unprecedented use of electric lighting—surpassed even his own previous innovations in sound and vision. The second, in 1851, was a debut: the installation of Foucault’s pendulum in the Panthéon. The installation marked the first public exposure of one of the most celebrated demonstrations in the history of science. A heavy copper ball suspended from the former cathedral’s copula, once set in motion, swung in a plane that slowly traced a circle on the marble floor, demonstrating the rotation of the earth

Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science

The Renaissance genre of organological treatises inventoried the forms and functions of musical instruments. This article proposes an update and expansion of the organological tradition, examining the discourses and practices surrounding both musical and scientifi c instruments. Drawing on examples from many periods and genres, we aim to capture instruments’ diverse ways of life. To that end we propose and describe a comparative “ethics of instruments”: an analysis of instruments’ material configurations, social and institutional locations, degrees of freedom, and teleologies. This perspective makes it possible to trace the intersecting and at times divergent histories of science and music: their shared material practices, aesthetic commitments, and attitudes toward technology, as well as their impact on understandings of human agency and the order of nature

Introduction: Audio/Visual

“A/V” seems to belong to the always-already obsolete. Even at the height of the craze for “audiovisual aids” in the mid-twentieth century, its association with the humble schoolroom and the “A/V geek” gave the acronym an air of the outmoded. Overtaken, in quick succession, by “multimedia” and “new media” at the end of the century, the audiovisual seems all the more rudimentary, remedial rather than remediated, or simply a minor component of larger media systems

Choses cosmiques et cosmogrammes de la technique

Les choses peuvent évoquer et même contenir tout un cosmos : c’est la thèse de Martin Heidegger dans certains de ses écrits tardifs, qui parlent des choses en tant que « rassemblements ». Mais son analyse des choses s’inscrit dans une critique soutenue de la technologie et de l’« époque des conceptions du monde ». Dans cet article, je considère les objets techniques, eux aussi, comme des « choses cosmiques » à la Heidegger. Pour contrebalancer ses généralisations totalisantes, voire totalitaires, sur l’« arraisonnement », ainsi qu’une tendance, assez largement répandue parmi les critiques de la modernité, à ne présenter la technologie qu’en termes dystopiques, uniformes et claustrophobes, je propose le concept de « cosmogramme » : un objet concret qui cherche à résumer l’ordre du cosmos. Les cosmogrammes des sciences et de la technique occidentales peuvent servir de base à la comparaison et à la connexion du « monde industriel » avec d’autres manières d’organiser l’univers.Martin Heidegger’s notion of things as gatherings which disclose a world conveys the “thickness” of everyday objects. Though part of a sustained criticism of modern technology, this essay extends his discussion of things to technological objects as well. As a corrective to his totalizing, even totalitarian, generalizations about “enframing” and “the age of the world-picture,” and to a more widespread tendency among critics of modernity to present technology in only the most dystopian, uniform, and claustrophobic terms, this essay explores two species of technical object: cosmic things and cosmograms. The first suggests how an ordinary object may contain an entire cosmos, the second how a cosmos may be treated as just another thing. These notions are proposed as a basis for comparison and connection between “the industrial world” and other modes of ordering the universe

Emmanuel Grimaud et Zaven Paré, Le jour où les robots mangeront des pommes : conversations avec un Geminoid

C’est un carnet de voyage dans « la vallée de l’étrange », the uncanny valley, que proposent les auteurs de ce livre. L’expression est tirée d’un texte de 1970 du roboticien japonais Masahiro Mori dans lequel il explique que, dans un premier temps, plus les objets ressemblent aux humains, plus ils peuvent nous sembler familiers et aimables (c’est la différence, par exemple, entre des robots industriels et des poupées). Mais, à un certain point, une ressemblance très forte – comme celle des ca..

A novel computational framework for deducing muscle synergies from experimental joint moments

Prior experimental studies have hypothesized the existence of a “muscle synergy” based control scheme for producing limb movements and locomotion in vertebrates. Such synergies have been suggested to consist of fixed muscle grouping schemes with the co-activation of all muscles in a synergy resulting in limb movement. Quantitative representations of these groupings (termed muscle weightings) and their control signals (termed synergy controls) have traditionally been derived by the factorization of experimentally measured EMG. This study presents a novel approach for deducing these weightings and controls from inverse dynamic joint moments that are computed from an alternative set of experimental measurements—movement kinematics and kinetics. This technique was applied to joint moments for healthy human walking at 0.7 and 1.7 m/s, and two sets of “simulated” synergies were computed based on two different criteria (1) synergies were required to minimize errors between experimental and simulated joint moments in a musculoskeletal model (pure-synergy solution) (2) along with minimizing joint moment errors, synergies also minimized muscle activation levels (optimal-synergy solution). On comparing the two solutions, it was observed that the introduction of optimality requirements (optimal-synergy) to a control strategy solely aimed at reproducing the joint moments (pure-synergy) did not necessitate major changes in the muscle grouping within synergies or the temporal profiles of synergy control signals. Synergies from both the simulated solutions exhibited many similarities to EMG derived synergies from a previously published study, thus implying that the analysis of the two different types of experimental data reveals similar, underlying synergy structures