Language is a class of epistemological (as self-validating) tesseract. From within its horizon of intelligibility, we can only ever see or engage the descriptions (and the descriptions of descriptions) with more language. This is why Zen kōans frame impossible questions and concepts: it is a way to escape the language trap, using language. Non-linearity is […]
Understanding agency is deeply problematised by the languages with which we aspire to do so. We find ourselves haggling over meanings and inferential teleologies within a system of semantic encoding (in language) that, as complex adaptive system, maintains and sustains its tenured continuity in its environment as a function of the impossibility of isolating meaning, […]
To claim, to reclaim, to assert ownership or self-determination, in almost any conceivable constellation of semantics and implicature, is simultaneously an act of submission, concession and referential, relational displacement in, through and as language. Technology functions quite similarly in that every aspirational act and assertion of communication and control is only ever rendered intelligible and […]
The definitions of words. The definition (or description) of a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a document, a corpus. At the “atomic” level of words, each definition and interpreted meaning is inflated and rendered intelligibly sensible as a function of dependency. All words being defined in terms of other words, and as Bertrand Russell reflects […]
In a landscape where technology and language converge, we stand at an intriguing crossroads. Language, traditionally the domain of human thought and expression, now blooms in the realm of AI, independent of its human roots. This evolution heralds a significant shift in how we perceive and engage with this fundamental aspect of our identity. Once […]
Ottmar Mergenthaler’s 1884 Linotype machine revolutionised printing by the automation of typesetting. With keyboard inputs, it assembled and cast lines of type, replacing slower manual methods and vastly increasing publishing efficiency. Generative technologies invoke a similarly self-amplifying communications signal regarding an indefinitely extensible logic of engineering the reproductive methods and transmission media of symbolic language.
Being clever is not always about being correct, but being optimistic might in some (or many) instances be the greatest self-deception of all. Systems of largely unsubstantiated belief, as our private and shared worlds tend to be, generate a threshold level of expansive uncertainty and referential or relational (i.e. semantic) undecidability. This then invokes and […]
Semantics is a fascinating mystery that is haunted by, yet enigmatically accelerates towards, a vacuum composed of the circularly generative absence of its own semantic closure. (It becomes a complex, hollow and counter-intuitively meaningless tautology.) “Language” is itself simply another word, hollow and haunted by an underlying relational semantics that forever displaces meaning, identity and […]
What better way to assure cultural, cognitive or communications system continuity than to anchor its rapidly speciating encoding machinery in an endlessly productive combinatorial entropy and kernel core of stochastic uncertainty? This is precisely what generative technologies are doing. Food for thought.
A conspicuous absence of totalising metanarrative is a necessary condition for the efflorescing reproduction of the countless contemporary insecurities and partisan adversarialisms that masquerade as epistemological (or ideological) certainty and individuated self-determination. The absence of this binding property itself then becomes the binding property. In this way, the impossibility of logical or electromechanical (as infallibly […]
The value of a joke as surprise and stochastic, staccato salience in the otherwise smooth flow of narrative experience is a function of the semiotic entropy (as existential) displacement that it both embodies and reveals. Significance and meaning are stored externally to a symbol, globally-distributed in and as the networked “latent space” of all other […]
On a topic of philosophy, language and communication: seek what is absent to understand what is present. System unity (and meaning) is a member of this inverse set and once we understand that logical absence is simply a different kind of presence, we edge a little closer to constructively disassembling a bona fide enigma of […]
Daedelus Kite 