Covid and Literature February 10th, 2024 at 2:30PM Past Event Watch the video » Fractured: Covid 19 – Memento Mori vs. Memento Vivere; “COVID-19 Betrays America’s Cult of Curdled Optimism”; This Exquisite Loneliness; The Lonely Stories; 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed; The Quarantine Tapes; these titles were all attempts by our panelists to endure and make sense of the Pandemic. … read more »
The Effects of Media February 24, 2024 at 2:30PM Past Event Watch the video » What are the effects of media today? What exactly is “social” about social media? How do media shape reality? Are developments in AI changing media as we understand communications technologies? Sixty years ago, the Canadian Professor of English and Media, Marshall McLuhan published the unexpectedly popular volume Understanding Media (1964), which would go on to establish a vocabulary addressing these questions — a vocabulary and set of ideas that scholars continue to grapple with to this day.… read more »
Touch as the Ur-Sense: From Presence to Poesy March 9th, 2024 at 2:30PM Past Event Watch the video » “Now the touch only is common to all animals.” Agrippa The very notion of sentience, with its root in feeling, cannot be understood without some reference to sensation. And sensation itself has at its bare core a “something” we feel. The response to that feeling is the mark of life: “quickening” upon touch is how we distinguish the animate from the inanimate. … read more »
A ≠ B → Taste & Discernment March 23rd, 2024 at 2:30PM Past Event Watch the video » Where life begins to distinguish the edible, the nutritious, the appealing, from the insipid, the poisonous, and the disgusting; this is where taste and discernment come into being. From a bag of Cheetos to Michelin 3-star fare we cover a lot of ground, yet financial means alone fails to account fully for the popularity of both ends of this culinary spectrum.… read more »
Discovering the What and the Wherefore: Scents and Sensibility April 13th, 2024 at 2:30PM Past Event Watch the video » As the first sense to engage the world “remotely”, beyond the boundary of an organism’s body, olfaction delivers news from “over there”. But whereas it adumbrates a space beyond, what kind of space, what sort of world does it proffer? Smell engages the world as a series of pathways laid out on gradients.… read more »
Striking a Chord: Hearing and Space April 27th, 2024 at 2:30PM Happening Today! Watch the video » Vibration sense is one component of touch. Refinements of this sense, and in some animals the emission of vibration – typically from the vocal cords – has evolved to echolocation, to clicks, grunts, roars and to speech. The vibration of one special membrane, the ear drum, creates that wonderful interface that enables us to appreciate and locate sounds in 3-dimensional space and to discern what the source of that sound is.… read more »
Synthetic Consciousness: Seeing and Believing May 11th, 2024 at 2:30PM Future Event “The Aleph was probably two to three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it . . .” – JL Borges Our eyes move. They rove and they direct attention. Indeed, vision and our ability to focus attention more generally are intimately intertwined.… read more »