Aspirations to difference and self-individuation through fashion, personal taste or behaviour are really just an evolution of tribal identity and group membership. Belonging to a group that does not belong to a group by virtue of adaptively-defined expressions and experiences of individuality is still to belong to a group.
The dissonance of difference serves useful purposes for the continuity of cultural sytems.
The art of Leonardo Vargas invokes the ghost of Francis Bacon’s disturbing vision but arguably finds itself arriving in an altogether different aesthetic solution to a representation of human identity and the psychological dissonance of individuation.
Most of that which is “you” may not actually be you at all. What is original about you is the choices you make concerning the reconfiguration of preexisting things, concepts, objects, words, idioms and methods of self-expression.
At the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, it is a good time to reflect upon where we are all going as a civilisation and what we might plausibly achieve to inhibit, interdict or halt the possibility of any similar global catastrophes from ever occurring again.
Do we fall in love with a person or do we fall in love with the idea of a person? We can never ever really get inside someone else’s head, experience the world as they do and through their eyes, so we are surely only ever as much in love with who we think that […]
Social media addiction is a growing phenomenon. It is a problem-space defined by the deep irony that the more connected we all become by the putatively “social” information and communication technologies, the more isolated we all feel ourselves to be. In this context, expectation is fundamentally, foundationally discontinuous with experience.
We are actually all a lot more random and emotional than we tend to realise.
Unconscious and unacknowledged, the true power of narrative lies in the self-propagating autonomy it expresses – above and beyond any putative human control. We do not own the stories and meanings through which we live so much as they own us but an essential dissimulation of reflexive psychological self-definition endlessly fails, and is foundationally unable, to recognise this fallacy.
We are all empty, don’t let the shambling leviathan of commercial culture make you feel less than you are, feel worthless or unvalued and unloved.
Afraid of the Darkness that the Other and the Unknown represent, we inscribe this upon ourselves, into ourselves.
Ideological turbulence, media distrust, fake news and the hyper-inflating bias towards successfully self-propagating inflammatory rhetoric in (or as) social media is one instance of a broader principle through which life and intelligence negotiate and harness or exploit entropy in information and energy processing systems.
Daedelus Kite 