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Wednesday, February 13, 7 p.m.
OneBook Book Club: Rethinking Progress in a Time of Disorientation
with author Peggy Reynolds
117 Lakeview Avenue
Cambridge, MA

Smoke Rings: New Forms for Thinking

Drawing by Jill Reynolds

Drawing on her Ph.D. dissertation, Depth Technology: Remediating Orientation, Dr. Peggy Reynolds will facilitate a discussion on how the on-going technological shift from what mediologist Mark Hansen describes as "a vision-centered to a body-centered model of perception" is leading to an expansion of the largely unexamined group of forms which help shape our basic thought processes. Instead of relying on Euclidian idealizations - the circles, triangles and squares which sight engenders - to provide us with scaffolding for interpreting our world, artists and designers are creating non-linear, tactile and other body-based alternatives. Their creations foreground network structures, fractal relationships and recursive topologies and challenge the primacy of accepted forms such as the atomized individual, the social hierarchy and the rationalizing grid. The technological revolution, in other words, has brought to light a dynamic universe that might allow us to rethink our relationship to it. We will be examining the origins of one original, idealized form - the grid - and how its hegemony, especially in the Western world, paradoxically is ushering in these new forms that destabilize the older, static order. To obtain the reading , please contact AIC co-director  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it