https://www.facebook.com/groups/50735656290/ http://philtechbody.blogspot.ca/ This is a formal and applied exploration of an academic course as aesthetic canvas. Operating both as an accredited university course and a meditation on the course as a conventional cultural practice, it worked as performance, collaboration, relational/crowdsourced work, event/happening, among whatever other categories. It has the necessary requirements as a course in interface with the university - types of readings, of assignments, etc - and internally was sculpted by the interests and endeavours of its students. Central was the idea of legitimacy within the course and what makes or breaks that for a given student - here plagiarism, relevance, culture worthy of the classroom, the test/assignment, value in and out of the classroom were among the topics explored. In addition to a blog which operated as the institutional face of the course, over the term of the course, assignments/projects were done, which became collaborative pieces created and recorded online via a course facebook group. As a conceptual/virtual piece, its activities stretched beyond the course time and lack a definite beginning/ending. As a local piece, Philosophy of Technology and the Body was offered in the Spring Semester in 2009 at UBC, where it was classified as a fourth-year, for-credit course. Philosophy of Technology and the Body is a 19th century work written in English by German pedagogue, biochemist, educational theorist, philosopher and poet Jean Paul. It is the first work of Jean Paul's to be written exclusively for facebook and the interliterary net.timeframe. Instantiations occur across varieties of real time, including distortions of his "Philosophy of Everything", the "Travel/Game Towards Nothing" (different translations of the same) and the terror and positing of numbers. Hyperlogical manifestations and other trendy complex math sequences make up the bulk of what is the grotesque and ancient, transnational and polyhedral. Paul's educational theories insist on the (the deleuzian mode again a projected instance, nothing is said here but through an illusion of one's own particularity and how that may or may not be effected) triggers humbaba before and after the graphotechnical doll yoko, fetish, activism, feminism and the meta-ecstatic the net-multiplex of gargantua solanas, logic, biologic, and the neo-luddite the poly-eurovanguard, the dissolution of the technolocation, the collapse of space into the somarevolutionary, virtuality and biorepulsion yesous, kali, hallmark, minerva, anubis, xbalanque and their mediated directionality industrial embodiment and technodysfunction - polyalterity and the violent-oblique virtual officiality: the technopatent, noise, contribution, lo_y, clarity and opposition The course will explore web 2.0 as a representative return of the ultra-technologized to the neo-oral or "global village". the prosthetic orality of a totally technologized environment (web 2.0) is juxtaposed with its total embodiment (the body is the only "real" sphere left) it will focus on methods to undermine and engage with the structure (rupturing technology through the body), looking at issues such a pseudepigraphia (authorship), text and ownership (appropriation, found art), irony/satire, the ergodic, the self-reflexive (exploratory and participatory model) - hopes to encourage open exploration and diverse projects in a fluid pseudo-oral framework, as opposed to a closely defined rubric which produces very similar and comparable assignments. ongoing assignments that will explore ideas from one's own interest (and final project) - a forum to continually explore topics in class in free-form and play with and try out ideas for the final project; every student will be a grader (of everyone else in the class except themselves) and participant. assignments throughout will be grounded in web 2.0/virtual environments and context-specific "texts" will be encouraged (multimedia, hypertext, etc), though no technical skills are required. the course and its structure evolves with the participants and their expressed interest in tandem with its own developing focus and themes - the course and outline are a process which changes web 2.0 - text (text = principle technology - specifically text in web 2.0 - very different type of text...) ******subversion: (mis)translation, automation, authorship, noise, failure at reproduction, misinterpretation, irony, misbalance; the turning of a medium's weapons against itself; (difference isn't the ultimate ontology, but revolution, disagreement - the failure to even arrive at change as change's definition is upended, destroyed and revitalized. who is speaking to whom? who is outside and who in? the game changes, and with it the possibilities, and whatever ontologies we hope to attempt to create. -- 20 % 40 % (ongoing online projects) 40 % nodes - plagiarism, authorship, all this is open to whatever you want; the class evolved as we went progressed; gearing it towards what each student was interested; liminal the imagined and comical (the sickening) - the exogenous and greeted, the aggressive overseen whose obversion imperializes - nonstructures. verso: the virtual entrains the encapsulated, the singular diminishment of the deleted shimmers stratified, noncumulative, irreducible. the technology of perspiration - incision exaction and ritual reproduction; the nameless which does not perspire (yet), the lust of confusion and the lawless technoic tradition. the alterous disheartening, greeted lottery (overseen) - the inconclusion of the scientarch, where corporeal desperation and locutionary stratification (im)mediate the pharmacopedic. wrongness (sic). contraindication: the plagiarized vs the patent the technofetish vs the technically inept noise vs the empty deviance vs destruction technocracy vs the anarchoprimitive prosthesis and the opening of possibility vs resistance and the diminishing of unlikelihood the ironic vs the sterile liquid vs graphia mistranslation vs patronization the acultural vs the polycommercial culture zoomateriality and system-irrelevance transistor flesh