Chilled chaos drawit full#

I spend hours staring into my mirrors, hours that bleed into days, which smear into months, examining the angles of infinity as they stretch from this anchor point in space.

Chilled chaos drawit full#

There’s the full South-facing wall covered from floor to roof in polished pewter-backed glass, our ballet wall, redirecting the sun’s rays in a precise web of gold during the brightest hours of the day. Curving baroque frames with gilded filigree detail, black wrought iron ovals from Budapest, a sixteenth century French mirror with an edging of carved bone and more modernist creations from the German and Scandinavian designers. It’s propped in the middle of the room, slumped like a drunken obelisk upon the polished wood floor, reflected from every angle by my collection of mirrors. I didn’t want to answer, but it was insistent, buzzing like some mechanised pest until I thought my head might explode. It was close, as they say, the air was decidedly close, and I was caught off guard when the doorbell startled me from my reflections. The day was mild, bordering on muggy, and no strange omens or elemental anomalies heralded its coming. After all this time, I never expected it to be returned. They brought your rucksack back, finally. I wonder if you died instantly or whether you lay shivering, breathless and paralysed, too, basking in some strange, synthetic afterglow. I always explode like an overripe fruit before waking up, shaking in the darkness.Īfterwards, I lie there as motes of reality settle softly on my sheets.

My eyeballs roll back, muscles lock, and my fingers rap a moronic Morse code. The pulse doubles, triples, quadruples, electrifying hairs on my skin. Circuits surge inside me, devastating orgasms that scorch and scald as I swell, engorged with shocks, synapses stretched to capacity from this internal blue-white storm. Soon, I’m rigid, fists-clenched, jaw-locked, paralysed by a force I can taste with my teeth. I’m certain it’s a thing with a sentience and intentions all its own, and I know it knows no limits, especially not the walls of its container. A thrust of energy explores my perimeters.

The pulse doubles, then loops ’round my womb, stopping just for a second before a whip-lash lick cracks my ribcage. It accelerates, racing up my thighs, twin lightning rods of energy converging on my crotch. You wouldn’t believe how gently it begins.įirst it’s in my toes, like they’re being suckled on by a mouth full of battery acid then my feet buzz, pins and needles in my soles before a bigger, more insistent spasm shoots up my calves. If I dream I dream of being electrocuted. The core ideas of human-centredness include human-machine symbiosis, the tacit dimension of knowl edge, the system as a tool rather than a machine, dialogue, partici pation, social shaping and usability.Narrated by Blythe Haynes. The present volume brings together various strands of human-centred systems philosophy which span the conceptual richness and cultural diversity of the human-centred movements. These include the British movement of Socially Useful Technology, the Scandinavian move ment of Democratic Participation, and the German movement of Humanisation of Work and Technology. This alternative vision has its origin in the founding European human-centred movements of the 1970s. The human-centred tra dition celebrates the diversity of human skill and ingenuity and provides an alternative to the 'mechanistic' paradigm of 'one best way', the 'sameness of science' and the 'dream of the exact language'.

This alternative is rooted in the European tradition of human-centredness which emphasises the symbiosis of human capabilities and machine capacity.

What are the alternatives of doing it? This book is about the human-centred alternative of designing systems and technologies.

In these circumstances, we all need to consider: On the one hand we are designing machines which embed more and more human intelligence, but at the same time we are in danger of becoming more and more like machines. There is now a serious discussion taking place about the moment at which human beings will be surpassed and replaced by the machine.