Categories
art culture

Cultural Mnemonics

Jimi Hendrix is one of those icons and representational idioms that provide a counter-cultural mnemonic eloquence. His presence is resonant with Jim Morrison, a prismatic Dark Side of the Moon, posters of Henry Fonda on his Harley in Easy Rider. The cultural nodes of these idioms are undergoing constant representational metamorphosis and this artistic thread […]

Categories
art

The Burden of Shock

…and there we all are, withered and worn by the aggregate burden of pandemic catastrophe, political ineptitude and an endless stream of normative everyday entropy that, not only does the media present to us because this salience of shock value is the central bank of any currency of garnering attention, but which is inadvertently also […]

Categories
art

Beauty is a Joy and a Forgetting

Beauty is such a strange sadness to a wise beholder. Truth, wrapped in youth like those blossoms that in aging inadvertently aspire to become the hollow frames or elder coccoons to which their own pattern or tapestry in time must trace an inevitable descent and unforgiving trajectory. We celebrate the flower, the spring growth and […]

Categories
culture

Instagram is really quite a strange façade…

Instagram, a virtual wonderland of beautiful faces and spontaneously zany lifestyles, creative activity and the broad spectrum of human positivity. A strange place, in many ways – not because all of these pastimes are particularly pointless or hollow – but because, even while the Global pandemic stalks us all and threatens to forever change this […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture

Language is an Operating System

Language is something of an operating system. Language also represents a self-propagating, abstract information system – much like culture or socioeconomic reality – that inhabits us just as much as we inhabit it. Human beings, technologies, artefacts and communication systems are the medium through which this linguistic entity manifests and self-replicates. The resilience of this […]

Categories
communication

The Persistence of False Belief

Do we possess beliefs or do beliefs possess us? Are the distributed, integrated information artefacts and systems of belief actually entities in their own right? Are individual nodes in a networked, self-propagating information system really the storage components for the resilient continuity of an idea, a belief or an ideology? Are the intrinsic errors (within […]

Categories
art

Worthless Chemistry and Orchid Dust

Fashion wears us more than we could ever be said to wear it; we only have these experiences and ideas in direct and reflexive proportion to the extent that they, in fact, have us. We do not search for meaning – it searches for us and there, finding us as so many yawning vacuums and […]

Categories
technology

Unravelling Tapestries of Cryptographic Entropy

The endless unravelling of assurance at one end of this cryptographic tapestry is simultaneously the enduring incentive, obligation and functional necessity of creating more sophisticated and impermeable logical entanglements at the other end. A question which springs to mind is as to the plausible inevitability of an acceleration of applied human or machine intelligence overtaking […]

Categories
politics

Ideology

Ideology is a tool, a technology of descriptive (i.e. algorithmic) information compression and generalised (over-)simplification through which complex realities and observed facts are rendered comprehensible.  Decisions, evaluations and strategic planning for continuity (of self, of organisations, of civilisation) are facilitated by compression. Having cultivated or procedurally-defined the conceptual boundaries and adaptive grammars of such systems […]

Categories
culture

The Gospel of Emptiness

Our images, our Self- or Other-portraits and all of our representational fantasies are always subtle dissimulations of a projected, doubly-inflected Self that we only ever feel that we need to cultivate – (in ourselves as much as in others), to construct, because it is precisely what is expected of us, what everyone else “does” (or […]

Categories
culture

On Writing

All writing is experimentation. Hemingway suggested that there is no good (first draft) writing, that all the quality emerges from rewriting and while I do not doubt that there is wisdom in this – I find that words flow most smoothly as though of their own accord; the essence of an idea, a concept, an […]

Categories
art

Enigma: Everything is Self-Representation but Nothing is Self

Consider how all art, all self-expression can only ever be the hyper-inflating interior surface of some compound, complex emptiness; how from nothing we have made everything (possible) and how the rich curvature and self-inflected acceleration of all thought, all culture and all reality was always (and already) the mischievous logical negation of unity, of completeness […]