The Practice of Light

Gratefully acknowledging the Sächsiche Landesbibliothek- Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (the delightfully abbreviated SLUB) for the beautiful engraving of Wenzel Jamnitzer's geometric figures from the 1568 Perspectiva Corporum Regularium

the cover of The Practice of Light is now set, with a publication date of September this year. I just saw the endorsements, which genuinely brought a tear to my eye. Eight long years in the making, and many many people to thanks. Very much looking forward to turning it out into the world to see what you all make of it.
As some of you know, this was long called "Glory: The Practice of Light". MIT's marketing people, after some hard work, persuaded me that the risk of attracting neo-con religious types (and driving away the more militantly secular) wasn't worth the candle. "Glory" is still how I think of it: somehow we polytheists have to recapture the high ground from organised religion.

Great Typos #1

"Apple have resorted to building biomass generating pants" Proof-reading i an essential part of the creative endeavour

Landscape, fim and political aesthetics

from a paper given at the Screen conference in Glasgow last weekend. After a glorious weekend of thinking landscape, we spent a glorious day in it: at the summit of Ben Nevis, the highest peak in the UK

Critique founded on the ecological principle of the interconnectedness of everything is by that token necessarily and permanently incomplete. That very incompletion demands that we rethink the premises of much of our aesthetics, most notably the autonomy of the artwork and what we can hope to understand of the freedom of its subject. As Freud remarked of the work of mourning, when it is complete, 'the ego becomes free and uninhibited again' (1984: 253). But if, as in Deseret, that work is aesthetically and politically undone, we have two options: either an inhibited withdrawal from the world (as in the Thoreau tradition), or grasping its very lack of freedom as its proper political form. Does ecological critique demand a terminally reduced subject?

The conference version of the paper is here: the full version might come out in Screen