User Profile

Fionnáin

fionnain@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years ago

I arrange things into artworks, including paint, wood, plastic, raspberry pi, people, words, dialogues, arduino, sensors, web tech, light and code.

I use words other people have written to help guide these projects, so I read as often as I can. Most of what I read is literature (fiction) or nonfiction on philosophy, art theory, ethics and technology.

Also on Mastodon.

This link opens in a pop-up window

Fionnáin's books

Currently Reading (View all 9)

Buchi Emecheta: The  Bride Price (1976, Allison & Busby) No rating

First edition hardback

This has been on my list for years, since reading another of Emecheta's books. I got a copy from the library recently but it turne out to be an 'Oxford Reader's Copy' with the language very simplified and the story made more central.

While I support increasing reader access to literature, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with reducing the artistic complexity of an author like Buchi Emecheta. But that's maybe a debate worth having. In any case, I didn't enjoy it, so sent it back and got this edition with the original text instead.

Michael Marder, Luce Irigaray: Through Vegetal Being (Hardcover, 2016, Columbia University Press) No rating

Then we are alone in nature because our relation to life has become objectified, notably by naming and integrating all beings into a whole, so that we can no longer be in communion with them. Furthermore, through our way of constructing the world, we have separated all living beings from one another and deprived them of the link(s) between them, that is, of a source of life, which has more to do with breath and touch than with sight and whatever description and reproduction. Hence, our world looks like a sort of museum composed of inanimate things invested with our projections.

Through Vegetal Being by , (Page 85)

From Luce Irigaray chapter 14: 'From being alone in nature to being two in love'

Michael Marder, Luce Irigaray: Through Vegetal Being (Hardcover, 2016, Columbia University Press) No rating

We must learn how to look at a tree, not to perceive its present form in order to re-present it mentally and fix it by naming it. Rather, we must gaze at its being as living and changing. Now we designate a birch with the same name in the spring, the summer, the autumn and the winter, although this name refers to forms, colors, and even to sounds and to odors, which are absolutely different according to the time of the year, not to say that of the day. Using the same name to allude to the birch at any time, we remove it from its living presence and deprive ourselves of our sensory perceptions to enter into presence with it. However, is it not the mode of presence that our culture taught us to consider the truth? — a truth that asks us to give up our living perceptions. How could we, then, care about life, ours and that of the world?

Through Vegetal Being by , (Page 49)

From Irigaray, chapter 7: Cultivating our sensory perceptions

Michael Marder, Luce Irigaray: Through Vegetal Being (Hardcover, 2016, Columbia University Press) No rating

In reality, the summer and even the autumn are preferred to the spring in the West, probably because our culture is a masculine one and the stress is put on production, through which man can compete with nature. Instead of celebrating and helping the natural growing and blooming, he endeavors to do better than nature itself thrugh his fabrication (e.g., Aristotle, Physics, B1). He tries to master the natural potential to substitute his own power for that of nature. He thus parlyzes the natural life and production by adapting them to his own plans instead of letting nature grow in accordance with its rhythms and its fecundity. More and more, he strives to intervene in this process, to force nature to produce more and at an accelerated artificial rhythm.

Through Vegetal Being by , (Page 38)

Luce Irigaray's section, chapter 5, Living at the Rhythm of the Seasons

Ngọc Tư Nguyễn, Nguyễn An Lý: Water (Paperback, 2024, Major Books)

Winner of the PEN Translates Award 2024

At the heart of this watery ‘chronicle’ is …

Overlapping stories with many voices

I discovered this strange book on the shelf of a bookshop and picked it up on a whim. It's a novel by Ngọc Tư Nguyễn, who I understand is a celebrated novelist in Vietnam. The story takes place in a realm that is slightly surreal, with each chapter bouncing to a different character's first person narrative, each with a very different voice and perspective.

How one affects another is hard to gauge, as the motivations for each character is very different. In one chapter a person has left a tap running that has flooded a valley (and seems almost destined to flood the whole world) where the narrator in a chapter shortly following this has accidentally escaped from prison and is slowly becoming a mouse. So preoccupied is the latter with their own predicament, they seem to pass little heed of other events.

The thread that binds all the stories …

Jane Prophet, Helen V. Pritchard: Plants by Numbers (Hardcover, 2023, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc)

This open access book takes a queer, feminist, and decolonial technoscience approach to the ecologies …

Thoughtful artistic research with plants

Plants by Numbers is an edited compilation of fourteen chapters by artists and researchers who work with plants. In most cases, the plants are collaborators or contributors, and are also part of developing anti-colonial or critical narratives, using the human-plant relationship to highlight or critique human behaviours. Great credit is due to the editors, as this carefully curated selection is made up of voices that are so careful to not unintentionally exclude or diminish many peripheral voices. Throughout the book, space is repeatedly given over to these voices, and I was really grateful for this.

As in any collection of essays, there are some that resonated less with me and some that are standout. Co-editor Jane Prophet's personal chapter on colonialism, ethics and trees is one of the best chapters, as is Amy M Youngs' thoughtful works with plants and people. Sina Seifee's project on the trees of Tehran is …