…entertaining but I suspect there is deep resonance here, if only we were able to sufficiently, efficiently, insightfully decompress it. The mechanisms and the technologies we make inhabit us every bit as much as we inhabit the world populated and inflated, made possible by them. How we do or do not respect those things is […]
In the early evening of fading light last night I visited a local shopping complex to purchase some simple necessities. In the sky just above some apartments I saw some small birds flying, too few to flock but just enough to exist in that liminal zone of groups of 3 or 4. Single birds would […]
The whole sorry mess of this conflict strikes me as a psychological (as much as ideological) pathology that endlessly reproduces itself, not as a function or measure of its successes but as the heroic recharacterisation (as you reflect, above) of its failures and suffering. It is perhaps a little like a gyroscope that follows its […]
Recently reading of airborne multiple-drone systems that, being once (and unsuccessfully) modelled on insect swarms, are now being modelled on wolf-pack behaviour, it got me thinking. Biomimetic systems are powerful but I do wonder if and when the analogies that compel them might at times become inadvertently inhibitory. Logic and technological (as much as biological) […]
Studies in the area of swarms (murmurations, schooling fish, etc.) consistently suggest that not only is there a cognitive boost in company, but, beyond even the plausible case in which the embodied intelligence with which we are all so intimately familiar is itself only the most salient and visceral experience of a natural bias towards […]
The value of art or any other commodity is quite uncannily aligned to the acquired significance (as structural endpoints) of meaning in language, of nodes in networks and of neurons in brains. That is – value is a function of where and how an artefact (or word) sits relative to all other artefacts, of the […]
Differentiation in ontology often asserts unnecessary-as-eminently-redundant-distinctions, however: Systemic hierarchies seem to come in two main flavours from which later differentiation and confusions emerge. There are designed hierarchies and there are un-designed hierarchies. The first is an assertion of order, planning and control on a spectrum from brute-forced top-down through to the most sophisticated and nuanced […]
The strange game of active measures is one in which the practise of deception invokes the erasure of facts in ways that can only ever offset, displace of delay their eventual broad acknowledgement and discovery by that long-suffering internal audience for whom misdirection and compliant fear under autocracy is normative to the point of cliché. […]
Context: In the Ocean, It’s Snowing Microplastics It is worth considering that the distributed material waste we can detect must only ever represent the most diminutive hyper-slice of a much vaster and more intricately complex dynamical system. It is a general problem of measurement as much as of the conceptual languages and normative grammars we […]
Objectivity is a strange beast. The language and corollary cognition with which we engage complexity is itself the constitutive invocation of a necessarily partial model of the systems we seek to define, articulate and/or usefully shape. The definition of a “system” being quite clearly the manifest as epistemological reality of that artefact, entity or logical […]
We are so entrained to think in terms of cultural continuity as a measure of successful system self-replication that we might never perceive or understand that the most significant moments in any history are shaped more (or at least as much) by difference and dissonance than by continuity and predictability. These stochastic inflections points of […]
It is always interesting to see these maps of culture and language or identity, even if they are always and necessarily incomplete. Also and incidentally fascinating to observe that languages drift, undergo metamorphosis and radiating speciation as a function of the implicit and yet eminently generative ambiguities and indeterminacies of verbal and written communication as […]
Daedelus Kite 