Some moments are so simple and unproblematically perfect that it is entirely understandable how Ancient peoples may have perceived a world so deeply infused and alive with mystery, magic and meaning. For all our progress and the hyper-extended cognition of complex technology, we have not really come all that far since then and while to […]
…and by that measure, love is the absence of hateful artefacts or experiences, peace is the absence of belligerent acts and associated technologies of violence. Where, though, is self? Can self be negatively defined in quite the same way and, if not, then what is it that is being happy, loving or peaceful but the […]
Jim Morrison, singer of the 60’s band The Doors, put into his poetry a precise summary of a modern life: “every day is a drive thru history”. A friend asks me how I am doing and I pause a moment to reflect, “how, in fact, is my life going?” The truth is: I find myself […]
Meaning is really just a game we play with words in language and there is no ultimate value or meaning beyond an experience of living and life that always and already transcends the limited clockwork constraints and limits or axioms and grammars of language. Language may be the limit of our worlds but it does […]
…and when we look back upon the arc and trajectory of our lives, what is it that we hope we might see? Memory is not any more reliable than is our hopes for an unambiguous future and while we might assert most probable causes (or consequences) from the evidence and experience immediately (or most recently) […]
In what ways might melancholy and a gradual (or rapid, accelerating) slide into sadness or feelings of hopelessness be the natural heir of organic experience in a material world that is always and already dissonant with energy diffusion and the endemic thermodynamic burden of what amounts to irremediable emotional and corporeal loss and decay? All […]
We inhabit the material of manifest corporeality and in equal measure – abstract patterns of information inhabit us. Which is more fundamental? There is no base, no anchor, no foundation; the imaginary spaces of information and autonomously self-propagating computational resonance are the contours through which matter and energy travels; the embodied (and reflexive, in our […]
Trompe-l’oeil is clever but, beyond immediate aesthetic effects and technical mastery, is really just the specific instance of a generalised principle of deception by which an artist fools our gullible brains into suspending their disbelief in the reality with which we are presented. The presence of a logical depth is in this way emphasised by […]
Every mind is like this: patterns, faces, surfaces and dreams. We recombine these things in different ways and while we might all arrive in different places and by different paths or idioms of cultural and linguistic orientation – it is fundamentally the same process that we are all engaged in. We all spend our lives […]
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 […]
You are not your self, your own possession and private labyrinth of interior significance and reflective surfaces. Neither are you in any sense, shape or form “owned” or prescriptively and unambiguously defined by any external realm or anchor of reflexive cultural necessity. You, and I, and the whole world are not the endpoints or causal […]
I find nature and natural vistas to be relaxing in pretty much the same way that sitting by an open fireplace or listening to the sound of rain at night outside my bedroom window is a soothing experience. There is something intimately reassuring in the continuous sparkle, flow and hum of nature and of the […]
