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 […]
Category: culture
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
These marble busts at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg silently contemplate an ancient wisdom; that the metaphysical vacuum beyond ourselves and as represented by the deep mystery of Other minds is identical to that logical discontinuity and foundational uncertainty within our own minds and there is, as Wittgenstein said of these deep (but everyday) […]
The curiousity of narrative is precisely the (very) many degrees of freedom available to the hyper-inflating interior spaces of language and an associated conceptual eloquence of psychologically-resonant teleology implicit to story-telling. The resonance derives from the ways that language and narrative reflexively shape experience, perception, culture and cognition. The degrees of freedom highlight the logical […]
The Emptiness of Art
The true mystery of art lies not in the many ways that it is a “thing”, in the mischievously multiplicitous subtleties of manifestation; it rests in the many (more) ways in which it is a vacuum, a void, a potentiality and the endless presence of absence. We seek meaning in matter but fail to understand […]