So much percolating in the avant mind

The media and communications program of the European Graduate School, a 9-year-old institution based in Germany, Switzerland and New York, and offering advanced degrees in a number of specialties, describes itself in expansive terms: “Aiming at creative breakthroughs and theoretical paradigm shifts,” its literature says, it brings students together with “visionaries and philosophers of the media world.”

On the school’s Web site (www.egs.edu), a quick scan of quotes from some of those “visionaries and philosophers” (faculty members range from “black lady of deconstruction” Avital Ronell to New York musician and conceptual artist Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) gives a kaleidoscopic taste of how minds are working in the avant-media realm:

David Lynch, filmmaker: “Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. Life is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too. With TV being the modern peephole. It’s so powerful, where you place things and the relationships. But you don’t work with any kind of intellectual thing. You just act and react. It’s all intuition....”

Avital Ronell, New York University professor: “What is it about survival that it should become a matter of aptitude or intelligence? If one were to state the only possible ethical position, it would have to be this: I am stupid before the other.”

Michael Schmidt, who teaches “Strategies for the Media Future of Music”: “Media stratifies music infinitely, creating a total temporal and spatial vertical -- a never fading hyperchord.”

Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky: “What goes through your mind as you move through the geometric fray of contemporary hypermediated life’s frequency drenched landscape? Consider the following mosaic: Possible performances. Impossible narratives. Ruptured flow. Binary Dissonance. Questions of omission.... The mind as a locale of total recall. Total displacement. Who’s there? Erogenous, decoded amnesia. Biopsychic paradoxes. Eclipse of the self. Prosthetic. Synthetic. Memetic. Technophilia.”

UC Santa Cruz professor Donna Haraway, historian of science, cultural critic and feminist theorist: “... I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”