Observe the progressive sedimentation of difference that occurs as fields of study are defined and become their own relatively self-consistent, self-propagating information systems. Each area of study (of knowledge, of associated, interdependent abstractions) becomes structured around unique taxonomies and conceptual centers. The enigma of this procedural refinement is that the structural and functional mechanism of […]
Tag: history
A contemporary proliferation of fools is not half as terrible as their common access to digital communications platforms through which they might channel, diffuse and disseminate their compound and stagnant simpleton’s craft of remedial unknowing. In waving these great banners of stupidity, they seek to bludgeon rationality, intelligence and civilisation itself into humble (and submissive) […]
It is such a natural experience to us that we hardly notice our almost total suspension of disbelief in the artifice of form, volume and depth. Would a 15th Century mind experience this image the same way we do? Our world is awash with visual representation in ways that Early-Renaissance Europe undoubtedly was not. While […]
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The Coronavirus Blues
A few weeks (is it two, or three, now?) into isolation and social distancing, it is all starting to get a bit depressing. Never being anything much of a social butterfly at the best of times, I still feel a visceral burden of dread and anxiety mounting, an overwhelming sense of dread and emptiness. There […]
Zeitgeist.
The more we reflexively structure, cultivate and sediment our cultural identities, psychological subjectivity and civilisation around (and through) a limiting grammar and vocabulary of runaway greed, the more we find ourselves trapped in a spiral of accelerating entropy. Context: Thomas Keneally’s 2020s vision: We must abandon the language of the market to reclaim our humanity
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AI: Engineering Intelligence
I wonder in what ways the “engineering of intelligence” recursively shapes, and to some extent prescribes the most probable developmental vectors of, our definition of human intelligence. We may find ourselves several years from now seeking the inflection points and procedural saliences that explain why it is that our core assumptions and concepts of intelligence […]
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Libraries are Mirrors
This city… the morning sun rises as though summoned by the gently floating hot air balloons and here, the National Library of Australia is so wonderfully, poetically framed in representational space. This architecture – like some ancient Greek monument to a memory of the Gods and their dramas; but the only theatre here is that […]
If you listen very carefully you can almost hear a faint whooshing sound as the vacuum created in the wake of the products of our own creative intelligence, which having long ago outpaced us, draws us inexorably along behind it. As the accelerating juggernaut of pure and abstract technological metamorphosis has always – and perhaps […]
While we are able to cultivate semi-autonomous technical solutions that provide insight into material records of communication and – through them – a historical sedimentation of the self-replicating complexities of culture and cognition in information-encoding logic (as language), we seem a little less able to apply those same technical solutions to untangle the challenges represented […]
Why is it that ideological, political and organisational ineptitude and incompetence are endlessly reoccurring phenomena? If the longer-term evolutionary or biological history of a living system, including it’s diverse manifestations in and as cultural and political systems, is oriented towards efficient self-replication and continuity, why is it that so many poor-fitting (and indeed – positively […]
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Hong Kong: Umbrellas on the Go Game
The international society of nations, such as it is, is not very often seeking clever solutions to the problems that it itself is generating, across all countries and conflicts. Each instance of dissonance is a microcosm of a global property of discontinuity, a distributed planetary discord that is oblivious to nation or ideology and that we all are dealing with, wherever we are.
Daedelus Kite 