Beauty is a trap you walk into willingly. You know you’re being played—by bone structure, by light, by the chemical theatre of your own brain—but you don’t care. You lean in. We all do. It’s the oldest con in the book and the only one we want to keep running. Cross-cultural psychology has been here […]
Mnemosyne, the Titaness of Memory, stands as one of the most profound figures in Greek mythology, embodying the living thread of memory that weaves the past into the present and propels it into the future. She is the daughter of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), representing a primordial force whose power shapes not only individual […]
As almost all of our self-representations are now so profoundly inflected by digital curation, I wonder if we should even try to pretend that not only does social media lie, it is fundamentally incapable of telling the truth. Image: Bing’s version of DALL-E 2.
Artificial Intelligence has no experience of #beauty beyond its exposure to the corpus of training data with which its neural network weights and biases are programmatically refined. Despite this, it can return to us an image which we recognise as being in some way beautiful. The question that occurs to me is that of whether […]
Nature is interesting and beautiful, of course, and in all the many and diverse ways an environmental context and integrated system expresses itself in its bounded instances. I often do this and by inverse approach to either and both aesthetic or functional appraisal, consider the instance of embodied phenotype as being a mezzanine artefact and […]
All philosophy is futile; all language, deception and were it not that we find ourselves lashed to the mast of this listless human endeavour in knowledge and technology, we should hardly know or be anything much at all. Philosophy seeks to explain with words that which must remain constitutively inexplicable. There falling inevitably backwards upon, […]
I am endlessly captivated by the many and diverse ways that this world of ours, for all its patterned continuity, already and always bears a certain discontinuous fracture, harmonic displacement and logical dissonance at heart. It is as though all our vainglorious aspirations to meaning as the symbolic mirror of existential assurance and cognitive (or […]
Representational relativity is an epiphenomenon strongly supported by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (itself perhaps also, and ironically, subject to the representational vicissitudes and aesthetics of oscillating academic taste and cultures). While we might never decompress exactly what the Lascaux cave art meant to its creators, the reflexivity of creative expression as a function of whichever cultural […]
The strangeness of life is so close to us, so intimate that we can not see it nor recognise the novelty and peculiarity of human existence and consciousness for what it is. Like some exotic fish swimming laps in a tank of water: embedded, immersed in it’s context and oblivious to the improbability and sheer […]
Beautiful. Natural systems here approximating to optimal functions for energy dispersion (as fluid dynamics) relative to a topography and geography (as much as geology) that they then proceed to reflexively shape and mold. It is no coincidence that the pinnacle of technological sophistication converges on nature’s own approximations. In this case – note how the […]
As though fields of flowers, our experiences are living (and decaying) things and it is indeed in a transience native to all material and psychological things that we come to understand their true value and beauty. The most difficult part of this experience and light of living, of being, is to know that it is […]
Everyone knew that beauty was a trap but no one ever talked about it. The perfect prison, you see, is that which one makes in and of themselves and in being or becoming so enamoured and as though hypnotically entranced by the idea as an abstraction that itself comes to acquire some magical or narcotic […]
Daedelus Kite 