I wonder what she is reading. It may be the eternal burden of a reflective mind to be unable to simply accept reality at face value, to question what lies beneath, to investigate what hidden meanings or purposes might exist or dwell below or behind the superficial appearances of things. At least she is not…
Beauty and Impossibility
Looking into such a beautiful face, it brings to mind all the lives I have lived, all the dreams that I followed in some alternate reality, and all the lives that I will never, can never, live. It is as though all of these dreams, aspirations and desires have followed every possible path and configuration…
Culture, Cognition, Meaning
Culture, like meaning, is not found in one single place but is distributed across the entire surface of our shared cognition and the proliferating multiplicity of artefact, image and a logic of sequential algorithm and rationalised procedure that informs our experience. The self-evident fact that we are unable to unambiguously or unproblematically define or agree…
The empty frames and abstract worlds of words and facts blind us…
Words are those windows and apertures upon the world that in naming and framing facts themselves become things, entities, artefacts in the endlessly oscillating hyper-inflation of logical and referential, representational space. It is as though the glass pane of abstraction through which we see becomes opaque with the carried meanings (and burdens) of its own…
FOMO
Fear of missing out is much deeper and more challenging than the superficiality with which it is commonly portrayed. At some level we are all aware that we have very little effect on this world, that despite our starring role in the narrative theatre of our own life - we have almost no influence or…
The Reflexive Isolation of this Digital Life
The more technology connects us, the more it isolates us and the more these tools of information and communication allow us to define ourselves and our lives, the more uncertain they leave as to who we are and what (if any) purpose we have in life. We do not use information technology so much as…
Emptiness of Words
Words are the atoms of our minds; their meanings are like those mirrors that in discovering that their reflected superficial image was always an enigmatic uncertainty and impossible recombinatory constellation of borrowed energy, endlessly fade into some kind of dusty emptiness or purposeless entropy and vacuum. Our minds, also... and letting go is never easy.
Emotionally Random
I wonder at times if all of our emotional lives are little more than random fluctuations and transient, effervescent flickering candle flames in the chaos of our minds and of this, our shared world. Somewhere between the volatile, if probabilistically determinate, entropy of physiological or cognitive reflex and those diverse rationales and causes we retrospectively…
Extinction
The utter vacuum and meaningless emptiness at the very heart of our existence is disconcerting, dissonant and it is in general the last thing that anyone wants to hear about or acknowledge. From those brief few years we may each be lucky enough to experience, we seek and weave what little meaning and purpose we…
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…
Meaning and Value: Displacing the Center
We believe that meanings and values are stored in things, in objects, places, people but this is not true. Meanings and values are stored as and in the distributed properties of complex, adaptive and interdependent fields and relationships of reference. The value of an artwork is not in the artwork itself, it is a property…
The Freedom of Words
City flowers in summer. In every sentence, every voiced utterance and subtle nuance or aspiration towards meaning and purpose, we are that through which the world comes to know itself. These patterns and vibrant tapestry of mixed, living concept and blind, unknowing information are doing little more than that which the world is bound by…
