Dominic Pettman
Biographic Data
| ID | 282068 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dominic Pettman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dominic |
| FAMILY NAME | Pettman |
| SIGNATURE | PETTMAN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College for the Liberal Arts, New School |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Elemental Intimacy and Pathetic Facticity: Reflections on Sad Planets
A Q&A with Dominic Pettman
The following exchange took place during the Question and Answer period of Dominic Pettman's (DP) talk, "The Observational Eros: Time, Libido, and the Attention Ecology." The talk was given digitally on 3 February 2022 as part of Relative Time/Little Time, a speaker series designed collaboratively by Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol (LB and JVdP) and Mosaic. The Question and Answer session was moderated by Mosaic editor Shepherd Steiner (SS
Observational Eros: Time, Libido, the Attention Ecology, and Surfing
In her popular book How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell briefly introduces the prospect of "observational eros." This essay borrows this suggestive prompt to explore the compromised contemporary relationship between desire and attention. There follows a portrait of the surfer as a specific instance of participating eros; one that complements the observational
Humid, All Too Humid: Overheated Observations
I haven?t made a single mistake in my life. I?ve just made a lot of good decisions that went really badly. Try as we might, we simply can?t imagine what our world would now look like, had our forefathers decided to use asparagus instead of electricity. In Humid, All Too Humid, social commentator Dominic Pettman curates the overheated thoughts of his own feverish mind, in response to a world struggling with unprecedented levels of cultural climate…
Miłość w czasach Tamagotchi
Love in the Time of TamagotchiPettman discusses the ways in which mediation by new technologies changes our perception of love and intimacy.The speed and global reach of technology makes it necessary to conduct a Turing test every day.Pettman cites examples of dating games popular in Asia, such as dating Sims or Meru Tomos.He also examines American dating websites such as eHarmony, whose founders promise to help customers establish a relationship…
Adam Kotsko. Creepiness . Alresford: Zero Books, 2015. 137 pp
Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human
Creaturely Love explores some of the ways in which desire makes us both more, and less, human. Focusing on key figures in modern philosophy, art, and literature—Nietzsche, Salomé, Rilke, Balthus, Musil, Proust —as well as pre-modern texts and fairy-tales—Fourier, Fournival, Ovid—this book examines how animals inform and influence the understanding and expression of love between people. From pet names to spirit animals, and allegories to analogies…
Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: Ideas, Otherness, and the New Vectors of Infection
Invasion of the Mind Snatchers:Ideas, Otherness, and the New Vectors of Infection Dominic Pettman (bio) can an idea be invasive? presuming that no idea can be 100 percent native to our blank brains upon birth, how might we sort invasive ideas with subversive or hostile intent from those designed to help us flourish, when both come to us from "beyond," smuggled inside language and cultural discourse? Such questions have often been posed, perhaps m…
Tolstoy's Bestiary: Animality and Animosity in the Kreutzer Sonata
Tolstoy's remarkably economical novella The Kreutzer Sonata manages to create one of the most intense, vivid, and thought-provoking portraits of jealousy in the canon, and is as disturbing to read today as it no doubt was in 1889. The rather unhinged protagonist, Pozdnyshev, explains to his traveling companion and narrator: “Of all the passions, it is sexual, carnal love that is the strongest, the most malignant and the most unyielding” (48). Thi…
Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines
Exiled from Funland: Flusser and Agamben after the Fall
Pavlov's Podcast: The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of Mp3s
The "acousmatic voice"-as famously defined and deployed by Michel Chion and Kaja Silverman-has in recent years unanchored itself from its cinematic context and become a free-floating aspect of the information age. We thus find ourselves adrift in a sea of solicitous voices without a visual origin or point of reference. The inherent uncanniness of the voice-whether it be the dog's absent master, man's distant lover, or woman's internalized other-i…
After the Beep: Answering Machines and Creaturely Life
This article explores the different ways in which the capacity to respond has been figured, and reconfigured, through different technologies over the past century and a half. Beginning with a rather harrowing telephone message, sampled by Glaswegian band Aerogramme, in which an anonymous woman pleas into the receiver for help, the discussion seeks to both locate and complicate the so-called human element captured in recordings of the voice. Using…
Grizzly Man: Werner Herzog’s Anthropological Machine
Grizzly Man: Werner Herzog’s Anthropological Machine1 Dominic Pettman (bio) A World From Our Sponsors “Wherever life thrives, trouble soon follows.” -BBC’s Planet Earth Where better to rediscover our sense of species-being than on the Discovery Channel? This staple of basic cable television in the US has recently become a cultural magnet for self-conscious explorations of what it means to be a human, at a time when new technologies are making suc…
Love in the Time of Tamagotchi
There is a popular conception among many Zeitgeist watchers, especially in places like the US, Western Europe and Australia, of the urbanized East as existing somehow further into the future. As William Gibson once stated: 'The future is here; it just isn't equally distributed yet.' This kind of cultural fetishism extends to not only technolust, but the practices that new gadgets and electronics encourage. The specific phenomenon explored in this…
Relations with Concrete Others: (Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall)
After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (Suny Series in Postmodern Culture)
The floating life of fallen angels: Unsettled communities and Hong Kong cinema
(2000). The floating life of fallen angels: Unsettled communities and Hong Kong cinema. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 69-80
Love in the Time of Tamagotchi
There is a popular conception among many Zeitgeist watchers, especially in places like the US, Western Europe and Australia, of the urbanized East as existing somehow further into the future. As William Gibson once stated: 'The future is here; it just isn't equally distributed yet.' This kind of cultural fetishism extends to not only technolust, but the practices that new gadgets and electronics encourage. The specific phenomenon explored in this…
Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human
Creaturely Love explores some of the ways in which desire makes us both more, and less, human. Focusing on key figures in modern philosophy, art, and literature—Nietzsche, Salomé, Rilke, Balthus, Musil, Proust —as well as pre-modern texts and fairy-tales—Fourier, Fournival, Ovid—this book examines how animals inform and influence the understanding and expression of love between people. From pet names to spirit animals, and allegories to analogies…
After the Beep: Answering Machines and Creaturely Life
This article explores the different ways in which the capacity to respond has been figured, and reconfigured, through different technologies over the past century and a half. Beginning with a rather harrowing telephone message, sampled by Glaswegian band Aerogramme, in which an anonymous woman pleas into the receiver for help, the discussion seeks to both locate and complicate the so-called human element captured in recordings of the voice. Using…
Pavlov's Podcast: The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of Mp3s
The "acousmatic voice"-as famously defined and deployed by Michel Chion and Kaja Silverman-has in recent years unanchored itself from its cinematic context and become a free-floating aspect of the information age. We thus find ourselves adrift in a sea of solicitous voices without a visual origin or point of reference. The inherent uncanniness of the voice-whether it be the dog's absent master, man's distant lover, or woman's internalized other-i…
Relations with Concrete Others: (Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall)
The floating life of fallen angels: Unsettled communities and Hong Kong cinema
(2000). The floating life of fallen angels: Unsettled communities and Hong Kong cinema. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 69-80
After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (Suny Series in Postmodern Culture)
Relations with Concrete Others: (Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall)
Grizzly Man: Werner Herzog’s Anthropological Machine
Grizzly Man: Werner Herzog’s Anthropological Machine1 Dominic Pettman (bio) A World From Our Sponsors “Wherever life thrives, trouble soon follows.” -BBC’s Planet Earth Where better to rediscover our sense of species-being than on the Discovery Channel? This staple of basic cable television in the US has recently become a cultural magnet for self-conscious explorations of what it means to be a human, at a time when new technologies are making suc…
Love in the Time of Tamagotchi
There is a popular conception among many Zeitgeist watchers, especially in places like the US, Western Europe and Australia, of the urbanized East as existing somehow further into the future. As William Gibson once stated: 'The future is here; it just isn't equally distributed yet.' This kind of cultural fetishism extends to not only technolust, but the practices that new gadgets and electronics encourage. The specific phenomenon explored in this…
After the Beep: Answering Machines and Creaturely Life
This article explores the different ways in which the capacity to respond has been figured, and reconfigured, through different technologies over the past century and a half. Beginning with a rather harrowing telephone message, sampled by Glaswegian band Aerogramme, in which an anonymous woman pleas into the receiver for help, the discussion seeks to both locate and complicate the so-called human element captured in recordings of the voice. Using…
Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines
Exiled from Funland: Flusser and Agamben after the Fall
Pavlov's Podcast: The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of Mp3s
The "acousmatic voice"-as famously defined and deployed by Michel Chion and Kaja Silverman-has in recent years unanchored itself from its cinematic context and become a free-floating aspect of the information age. We thus find ourselves adrift in a sea of solicitous voices without a visual origin or point of reference. The inherent uncanniness of the voice-whether it be the dog's absent master, man's distant lover, or woman's internalized other-i…
Tolstoy's Bestiary: Animality and Animosity in the Kreutzer Sonata
Tolstoy's remarkably economical novella The Kreutzer Sonata manages to create one of the most intense, vivid, and thought-provoking portraits of jealousy in the canon, and is as disturbing to read today as it no doubt was in 1889. The rather unhinged protagonist, Pozdnyshev, explains to his traveling companion and narrator: “Of all the passions, it is sexual, carnal love that is the strongest, the most malignant and the most unyielding” (48). Thi…
Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human
Creaturely Love explores some of the ways in which desire makes us both more, and less, human. Focusing on key figures in modern philosophy, art, and literature—Nietzsche, Salomé, Rilke, Balthus, Musil, Proust —as well as pre-modern texts and fairy-tales—Fourier, Fournival, Ovid—this book examines how animals inform and influence the understanding and expression of love between people. From pet names to spirit animals, and allegories to analogies…
Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: Ideas, Otherness, and the New Vectors of Infection
Invasion of the Mind Snatchers:Ideas, Otherness, and the New Vectors of Infection Dominic Pettman (bio) can an idea be invasive? presuming that no idea can be 100 percent native to our blank brains upon birth, how might we sort invasive ideas with subversive or hostile intent from those designed to help us flourish, when both come to us from "beyond," smuggled inside language and cultural discourse? Such questions have often been posed, perhaps m…
Miłość w czasach Tamagotchi
Love in the Time of TamagotchiPettman discusses the ways in which mediation by new technologies changes our perception of love and intimacy.The speed and global reach of technology makes it necessary to conduct a Turing test every day.Pettman cites examples of dating games popular in Asia, such as dating Sims or Meru Tomos.He also examines American dating websites such as eHarmony, whose founders promise to help customers establish a relationship…
Adam Kotsko. Creepiness . Alresford: Zero Books, 2015. 137 pp
Humid, All Too Humid: Overheated Observations
I haven?t made a single mistake in my life. I?ve just made a lot of good decisions that went really badly. Try as we might, we simply can?t imagine what our world would now look like, had our forefathers decided to use asparagus instead of electricity. In Humid, All Too Humid, social commentator Dominic Pettman curates the overheated thoughts of his own feverish mind, in response to a world struggling with unprecedented levels of cultural climate…
A Q&A with Dominic Pettman
The following exchange took place during the Question and Answer period of Dominic Pettman's (DP) talk, "The Observational Eros: Time, Libido, and the Attention Ecology." The talk was given digitally on 3 February 2022 as part of Relative Time/Little Time, a speaker series designed collaboratively by Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol (LB and JVdP) and Mosaic. The Question and Answer session was moderated by Mosaic editor Shepherd Steiner (SS
Observational Eros: Time, Libido, the Attention Ecology, and Surfing
In her popular book How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell briefly introduces the prospect of "observational eros." This essay borrows this suggestive prompt to explore the compromised contemporary relationship between desire and attention. There follows a portrait of the surfer as a specific instance of participating eros; one that complements the observational
Elemental Intimacy and Pathetic Facticity: Reflections on Sad Planets
Sociology (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · History (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works)