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Welcome to artbyakacooper aka Katherine Fishburn
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Current Projects (please sample, but do not reproduce w/o my permission):The Question Concerning Technology (art & poetry installation)
Artist’s
Statement: The Question Concerning Technology Nine
years after the end of World War Two, the famous—and soon to be
infamous—German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote an essay entitled “The
Question Concerning Technology,” in which he asked, as philosophers are wont
to do, What is the essence of technology? Looking back today at this essay, we
have a perspective unavailable to his first readers. Most particularly, we know
now that Heidegger was more than a little enamored of Hitler’s politics. For
many, this knowledge makes it impossible for them to find value in Heidegger’s
work, an understandable but unfortunate attitude as it discourages if not
inhibits the debate his work demands. His work demands debate not just on its
intellectual merits but on its ethical foundation and consequences. Heidegger
framed his question this way: The world is racked by pain. Much of the pain and
destruction that plagues the world results from our habit of seeing the world
and its inhabitants as raw material waiting to be used to serve human needs and
desires. He called this utilitarian view of the world, “the enframing.” In
effect, the enframing sets us apart from the world; that is, it alienates us
from both our physical and our social environment. Rather than seeing the beauty
in nature, we see only oil reserves that we can tap to run our machines. Rather
than seeing fellow human beings in illegal immigrants, we see only cheap labor
that provides us with inexpensive produce. In effect, we see these workers as we
see our machines. To
convert the raw material of the natural world into useful products, humans
employ different forms of technology. Thus technology can be said to manipulate
the world for our purposes. But there is no way to avoid technology; our
sophisticated and innovative use of technology is part of what distinguishes us
as humans. Given
this, how can we end the pain and alienation that result far too often from our
current use of technology? One way is to question our penchant for enframing the
world, as Heidegger urges and as do, for example, the major conservation
agencies. But in Heidegger’s essay at this point, one can see the shadow cast
by his politics, as he turns our attention not to the actual victims of the
genocide he so willingly embraced but to its unnamed perpetrators; he does this
without even naming the Holocaust. Nevertheless, his basic idea is meritorious
and does not preclude our attending to actual victims of enframing, even if he
himself could not attend to them. Another
is to inquire, as Heidegger does, if technology itself cannot teach us something
about ourselves and our relationship to the world we live in. Heidegger’s
approach is basically an etymological one; that is, he traces back to the Greeks
the origin of the word “technology” and finds, if he goes back far enough,
that technology and poetry (or art) share a common etymological root: one that
means “to reveal that which would otherwise remain hidden.” Just as the
poets can bring to light hidden emotions, technology can bring to light not just
the hidden workings of our body (as do X-rays, CT scans and MRIs) but the hidden
relationships we have with the world and the hidden attitudes we have toward it.
The essence of technology, then, is
not the utilitarian aspect of technology that manipulates the world but the
poetic one that reveals the world to us. These
are the ideas that have inspired my show as I seek to expand our understanding
of technology, our relationship to it, and what it reveals. The show itself is
technological: I used brus (also see
poetry and painting selections above, which are part of my installation)
Physical Chemistry
(a collection
of poetry that is inspired by the natural sciences)
sample
poem from working manuscript:
Achieving
Entropy with world enough and time to steal another poet’s line entropy will claim us all but what of those of us who wish to author entropy ourselves— not simple-minded anarchists intent merely to wreak havoc in the streets and on the state but artists— those who would achieve the impossible and with our senses still in gear our purpose clear our skills ground exactly to the task create with our own two supple hands an entropic object not one that mirrors entropy as ancients once thought art to mirror nature but an independent object that is in and of itself entropic
The Pain That Bears My Name
(book-length autobiographical ms about being a dyadic body by sharing my
experiences with pain with others to ease their own)
selection from working manuscript:
Preface
From the beginning, I have been closely acquainted with pain. I have known and defined myself through pain. At fifty-seven, I no longer ask why. Or, as the narrative voice in Toni Morrison’s novel of inexpressible pain, The Bluest Eye, puts it: “since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” But, as her novel makes clear, one cannot approach the how of pain head on; one can only approach it downwind, with cunning, stealth and indirection. Much of what I discuss in the following pages relies on memory—the memory of pain that I have incorporated into my very being. Although I have many memories of my youth that have been constructed for me by family narratives and hundreds of old photographs, the memories I claim here as my own are those that are remembered in my muscles and tissues. They are evident in how I carry my body and how I interact with the world. But even embodied memory is subject to change. Each time I put my memories into words, I modify them and therefore myself, however minimally. The past, as the philosophers would remind us, is never past—it is continually recreated in every moment (and movement) of the day. Because we are born into history, the past is also future: it is what awaits us as individual human beings. My past—my future, my body-self is pain. I am tempted to concede at the start that in my experience with pain, I have been more fortunate than others, for I have not suffered the unremitting agony of fibromyalgia, endometriosis, advanced cancer or that of a phantom limb. Yet I do not think it instructive or worthwhile to engage in a comparative ranking of pain. Each of us suffers; each of us suffers individually. Each of us understands our pain differently. I speak only for myself when I say that my pain has been my tutor—instructing, correcting, constructing and re-constructing my sense of being an embodied self. While others have tried to tame or otherwise control the beast of pain that has ravaged their lives, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche who called his pain “dog,” I have not had that impulse. Although I certainly have often wished my pain to end, I have not seen it as somehow distinct from me. Although I have known pain all my life, the pain itself has taken many forms. It has been a shape-shifter. And as it has found different parts of my body-self to inhabit, it has changed who I am. It has changed my relationship to the world. As David Morris might put it, the presence or the sensation of pain has been constant in my life, but the experience of my pain has varied as has its location. Some pain has been intolerable (although I have survived to witness its effects on me), some has been a minor nuisance. Whatever its form and whatever its strength, however, it has shaped who I am in the world. That is to say, my pain has had meaning to me. Whether by chance or by training I am someone who finds meaning in everything. I believe that the condition of human being arises from, among other capacities, the capacity we have for understanding, in the deepest sense of the word. I also believe that we, as humans, are born with an innate knowledge of our interconnectedness, an interconnectedness that we can recover (or recuperate) by attending to the meaning of pain and suffering. What I seek to do here, therefore, is bring to light the meaning of pain that I have experienced. Although I often contextualize my own experiences within the more general socio-historical circumstances in which they occurred, I do not presume to speak here for anyone except myself. In offering my own life as witness, I hope more simply to help others understand the meaning of their individual experiences with pain. The names we give pain may be the same (cancer, Crohn’s disease, heartbreak) but each of us experiences pain differently. In writing this book, I take as my model and my inspiration Arthur W. Frank, who offers compelling testimony of his own encounter with testicular cancer and heart disease in his life-narrative At the Will of the Body (1991). I wish also to acknowledge that while my spouse has neither witnessed nor shared all of the episodes of pain I recount here, those he has witnessed he has indeed shared. Without him, nothing. This, then, is my pain narrative. |