The essential art in the formation of self-identity is the cultivation of an ideal object around which to sediment and concretise that self. Lacan identified a “Mirror Stage” in psychological development which concisely captures the cognitive and cultural arc of our shared experience. The catch (and cost) here: to maintain persistence, continuity and individuation, the […]
Tag: art
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Culture: Using Fiction to understand Fact
To understand the mood and the Zeitgeist of an era, inspect the art, the fiction, the entertainment and the overtly and consciously, intentionally superficial. It is in the manifestation and cultivation of oblique and useful falsehood that the underlying axioms inexorably reveal themselves. What is considered “real” or “important” reveals itself as merely being another […]
There has been a lot of media buzz recently about the potentials and limitations of Artificial Intelligence in a general domain of creativity. I have been studying aspects of philosophy, psychology, physics, logic, computer science and art (i.e. creativity) for quite a long time now. A question of Artificial Intelligence as creative agent creates a […]
It is interesting to observe that many, many wise benedictions on the topic of breaking down silos and valourising polymaths exist but it is questionable as to the extent of the actual application, acceptance or widespread acceptance of the associated concepts. Disassembling silos is vital for the emergence of scale-independent, adaptive, flexible and resilient self-organisational […]
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Tattoos and the Masks Within
Tattoos are a clear indication that all symbols, all representation and all meaning is not merely (or literally) inscribed upon our bodies and in our symbolic narratives. All meaning and symbolic representation warps our cultural space back onto itself; it is recursively twisted and bound back upon and through itself. All representation seeks the continuing […]
There is a filter and limit imposed on thought by language and its associated cognitive grammars. The burbling brooks of pure energy and sentient quicksilver in my mind are always just out of reach. Every beautiful concept fades back into the buzz and entropy of ideas and information or energy much faster than I can […]
There is no best, there is only better and it is a consequence of core psychological fallacies that we even assert or adhere to concepts and narratives of artistic, literary, ideological, political or existential completion and closure. It is always possible to creatively extend any system (or creative act of self-definition) by intuition and recursive […]
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Flying Kites
Returning to a particularly poorly-kept secret of our shared lives: no one actually knows what they are doing and everyone is improvising, making it up as they go along. We are born into a world of pre-existing stories, traditions and symbols which envelops us like a tidal wave and security blanket of meaning, identity and […]
Wildfires Are Destroying Bolivia’s Rock Art This represents an authentic cultural as much as an ecological catastrophe. History is characterised by the constructive, recombinatory sedimentation of complexity over time. It is a procedural thread that is also (and simultaneously) deeply infused with entropy, disorder and systemic disassembly. It is interesting to consider that while biological […]
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There are no “Creative Types”
We are all, each and every one of us, “creative types”.
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Gothic Beauty
The enigmas of human psychology and culture are writ large in the domain of Gothic fascination with darkness and death.
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Desire and Fear
We are bound by fear to our Objects and fantasies of Other and Self as much as by desire and there is a complex logical undercurrent and rationale to the ways that we (enigmatically) encrypt aversion into attraction and revulsion or death into fertility and life.
Daedelus Kite 