Michel Serres, “L'information et la pensée,” keynote lecture, Philosophy After Nature conference, Utrecht, September 3, 2014.
Jules Verne, “The Star of the South,” in Works of Jules Verne, vol. 13, ed. and trans. Charles Horne (New York: Tyler Daniels, 1911), 276–77.
See his earlier work on Lucretius’s atomism: Michel Serres, La naissance de le physique dans le texte de Lucrèce (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977). English translation: The Birth of Physics (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000).
On the role of the “third messenger” in Serres’s epistemology see Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science and Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
Konrad Zuse, Rechnender Raum (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1969). English translation: Calculating Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).
See the painting Zuse made that was inspired by this idea →.
Serres, “L'information et la pensée.”
Contra Bataille, apparently the cult of the sun god in ancient Egypt was born after the introduction of the calendar. The abstraction of space (geometry) was introduced to govern the agricultural fields on the Nile delta. The abstraction of time (the calendar) was introduced to govern and organize agricultural seasons. The cult of the sun emerged then not because of a metabolic worship.
The expression “data bank” was used in Romance languages more often than in English. It suggests a relation between data and capital that disappears in the term “database.”
See Matteo Pasquinelli, “Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine,” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 32.3 (2015): 49–68.
Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris: Grasse, 1980). English translation: The Parasite (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 173.
For a critique of “heliocentric slavery” see also Reza Negarestani, “Solar Inferno and The Earthbound Abyss,” in Our Sun, ed. Pamela Rosenkranz (Rome: Istituto Svizzero, 2010).
See Benjamin Bratton and the idea of the Black Stack in e-flux journal 53 (March 2014) →.
Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
Technically, solar databases provide measurements of sunlight exposure for almost any area of the world. See the Open Solar Database →.
See Natalie Wolchover, “A New Physics Theory of Life,” Quanta Magazine, January 22, 2014. The idea of dissipative structure was originally suggested by the Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine in Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems (New York: Wiley, 1977).