Context: Republican plan could embed destructive US foreign policy What a curious world this is where the aesthetic ambiguities of political self-interest are quite prepared to embrace such dissociative pathologies (and personalities) as would have shamed their forebears into abject silence. In some ways we might assert that this is symptomatic of a historical moment […]
Context: The Covid-19 Catastrophe; Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened – review An interesting article, skimmed, but honestly – we shouldn’t waste excess quantities of spilled ink or time on what is really quite a simple problem. That is: the grammars, games and mechanisms of political selection and government installation of and for […]
Context: This AI Robot Just Nabbed the Lead Role in a Sci-Fi Movie Dissimulated truths (here, as robotic self-representation) are perhaps always more compelling (if disconcerting) than unproblematically verifiable or “real” ones. Where a truth (or representation) is introduced as an overtly plausible fake, it is the slippery slope and unravelling, accelerating diffusion of value […]
What makes a beautiful story is often not so much that part of the narrative that is obvious and visible to the eye – like the tip of an iceberg – but rather all those depths that remain unseen, unknown and unsaid. Sometimes the back-story is even more powerful than the story itself and raises […]
This is an age-old competition between efficiency and resilience, aesthetics and utility. While efficiency and resilience are clearly placed here, aesthetics (as perception or experience) and utility (as effect-multiplication or intentional consequence) oscillate across arbitrary boundaries and definitions. There is an unacknowledged dimension to this binary model; that is, not so much that any reductive […]
Context: New analysis of human portraits reveals shift in culture, cognition We could just as well speak of aspirationally-unified (boundless, seamless, reflexive, interdependent) cultural and cognitive information-processing fields, topologically Ouroboros-like and akin to those conceptually-variegated and mischievously labyrinthine mathematical beasts of physics. A clear problem of determination, definition or observational identification here is in that […]
As it ever has been with this human being: finding an order, a pattern a convention or conceptual trope we tend on the whole – and with very little convincing required to overcome what minimal (and liminal) barriers to our gullibility that might exist – to mistake the order we find as being meaningful, objective, […]
Reductive abstractions in explanatory systems serve very well to ground those systems in self-validating (if demonstrably incomplete) logic, and possess considerable power and compelling reasons to believe them. Observe the thread of Turing‘s abstraction arrive in the (perhaps inevitable) artefacts, entities and exceptional utility of cloud computing – the simulated computing machines of various kinds: […]
A (personal) theory on the persistence of popular cultural flotsam: • Culture as an autonomously self-propagating information-processing system has evolved to encode (i.e. store) itself in multiple, parallel ways – for redundancy and continuity. • The value of such superficially-itinerant, largely vacuous, trashy culture is in the various ways that it stores partial, incomplete images […]
Perhaps “the centre cannot hold” because there is no centre. Chaos and disorder are far more the native state of material (thermodynamic, dissipative) facts than are the projected order and control around which we reflexively and aspirationally self-validate. Curious, indeed, (and under one perspective) that everything emerging out of the complexity sciences suggests that it […]
Context: The climate change clues hidden in art history The endemic representational ambiguity of art is an inevitable source of doubt in regards to veracity in a context of deriving Climate facts through the artefacts of Art History. A useful comparison of contemporary artistic reflections of environment and climate must always – and perhaps necessarily […]
Context: Solving the space junk problem In any conceptual domain (such as future configurations of Near Earth Orbit) where there are many degrees of lliteral-spatial, commercial, strategic or technological freedom beyond the most overt saliences of interest – the over-population mentioned in the abstract – we will probably find that ambiguities and unknowns will be […]
Daedelus Kite 