Recently, my wife's sister bought us a portable GPS, something I'd never dreamed of purchasing for myself. The first time we used it, all sorts of thoughts crowded into my mind: thoughts about space and place, about embodiment, about the human-technological interface. Ultimately, I decided these thoughts had to do with the oldest of human questions: "Who are we, and where are we going?" So I wrote them all down in an essay titled, simply, "Positioning."
That essay has now been published in the online journal Terrain.org. This journal bills itself as an environmental journal, and it is precisely that--if one can overcome the predisposition to think of the environment only as the non-human world. As the writings collected in Terrain.org indicate, the "environment" consists of the intricate and intimate relationships between that which we humans create and that which we don't. "Positioning," I hope, calls attention to that complex interchange linking our bodies and minds, our tools, and our physical world.
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