There is no final closure. No permanent certainty. No government that fixes everything forever. There are only systems that adapt well and systems that adapt badly.
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adaptation: fixing aussie politics
Tag: representation
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institutional failure
You cannot make the world better by changing who occupies positions of power while leaving the structure of power itself, and the machinery rewarding its behaviour, intact.
When I was young, I was immersed in the full spectrum of popular culture—stories, myths, comics, and games that framed the world through conflict, difference, and the clean lines of good and evil. What later generations found in computer war games, I first found in Commando comics, Greek epics, Tolkien, and tabletop quests. These weren’t […]
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Incantation
Language has long been treated as a neutral tool of representation, but theorists have shown that it is nothing of the sort. Saussure revealed that meaning arises only in the difference between signs, not from a fixed relation to reality (Saussure, 1916). Wittgenstein emphasised use over essence: words gain their sense within forms of life, […]
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Linguistic Tensegrity
Inasmuch as we exist in, through, and as language, language itself exists through us. Every action—social, emotional, political—is mediated by language, whether spoken, written, or silently structured in thought. What rises to prominence in our networks, especially in today’s hyper-connected systems, is not necessarily truth or depth, but whatever generates further propagation. Language reproduces itself […]
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Psycho-Cultural Computation?
Context: New analysis of human portraits reveals shift in culture, cognition We could just as well speak of aspirationally-unified (boundless, seamless, reflexive, interdependent) cultural and cognitive information-processing fields, topologically Ouroboros-like and akin to those conceptually-variegated and mischievously labyrinthine mathematical beasts of physics. A clear problem of determination, definition or observational identification here is in that […]
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Copy
We are all swept away by the normative idioms of our era. It is only really ever true that in retrospect the particular peculiarities of cultural identity and material self-expression become apparent. This (our) moment in time is not marked by any unique idiom or stylistic trait so much as the aggregate and accelerating dissolution, […]
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 Selfie Slaves
The extent to which we manifest or express individual self-determination in a virtualised, distributed public display of visual social-media identity-construction is simultaneously the measure of our imprisonment by that dragging anchor and inconstant vessel of Self. Self-definition is (a) freedom but it is simultaneously the persistent dragging anchor and burden of an external world, internalised […]
When the recombinatory convergence of once-distant or disparate symbols no longer shocks us, it is probably not merely because the world (and it’s inhabitants) have moved on and desensitised to the essential information entropy of difference. It is because these once dissonant symbols share some deeper (and logical) bond. The cultural and psychological self-representation of […]
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Tattoos and the Masks Within
Tattoos are a clear indication that all symbols, all representation and all meaning is not merely (or literally) inscribed upon our bodies and in our symbolic narratives. All meaning and symbolic representation warps our cultural space back onto itself; it is recursively twisted and bound back upon and through itself. All representation seeks the continuing […]
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Art without Boundaries
Where does art stop and the person begin? Is the frame of the canvas the boundary? Is the wall, the room, the building the boundary? Is the audience the definitive edge and boundary condition between the artefact and the meaning or interpretation?
Daedelus Kite 