Charles Bukowski. Ace of Cakes. Cyborg homes. The Wire.

NBn interviews Ian Bogost on his book Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing.

bogost_alien cover“Particle Man”, Charles Bukowski, Heidegger’s tool-analysis, Atari, Ace of Cakes, aliens, tiny ontology, Bruno Latour, ontography, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the Bossa-Nova, Scribblenauts, Ben Marcus, “What is it like to be a bat?”, carpentry, cyborg homes, sugar granules, and The Wire.

What you’ve just read (assuming that you’ve gotten here via the list above) is a very particular form of knowledge-making. It is a list, a catalogue, a community of things. It is also a kind of travelogue, a “Latour litany” that maps some of the objects populating Ian Bogost’s beautifully written and wonderfully stimulating new book, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

Listen to the interview.

Published in: NBn: New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
By: Carla Nappi