cyborgs

Opera queens (gay men who are fans of opera) collect the ephemera of opera to a degree which borders on hoarding: recordings, programs, pictures, signatures, interviews, memories, etc. There is no larger system by which they capture or organize this information, nor is there anything these men do with what they collect. Instead of using personal knowledge management systems, opera queens are personal information management. They are the tool which captures information....

The aesthetics of a tool can bring us joy, discomfort, peace, or any number of emotional responses. People made the decisions about the user interface, the possible workflows, the graphics and design, etc. with, one would hope, the end-user in mind. These emotional responses happen in the body and have various sensual responses. Culkin, making a pun on message, likens our tools to massages because of how they affect our sensual experience....

Do we count our mind as a tool we created? Or is our mind a creator whom we must trust? Either way, the mind is embodied in our somatic responses to tools. Jon Greenaway explores this fact through the films of [[David Cronenberg]], stressing how the mind is not just embodied but extends beyond the body which contains it. When we trust the creators of tools, we are, at the core, trusting how their minds are embodied in and alter the physical world....

Nothing we make is truly original. All creative work is inspired by something, draws from something, builds on something. As Tiago Forte says in the tweet below, creative work is assembled. Philosophically, assemblages are component parts brought together in a way that is fluid (not fixed). Donna Haraway uses the metaphor of [[cyborgs]]1 or “making kin”2 for assemblages: you bring together things that might not otherwise fit together instead of resolving the tensions between them....