There is a very special sense in which the ordered complexity our world resembles matryoshka nesting dolls. It is not purely of the overt ubiquity of fractal patterns of self-similarity in spatial or material structure and temporal sequence, although these symmetries are striking and quite deeply beautiful in their own mischievously inter-dimensional ways. The recursion […]
In our endless fascination with symmetry we mistake its instances for a generalised property of value and in attributing significance this way we tend to totally miss the point. More important than this or that symmetry group or identifiable pattern of encoded mathematical relationship and patterned ratio was always the mischievously-binding fact (and counter-intuitively asymmetrical […]
The world is so beautiful and perfect in all the glorious randomness and unexpected symmetry or beauty of it’s flow and form. Why is it that the perfection of this world deviates in the way it does from simple linearity to recurse itself into hidden patterns of mathematical complexity that displace this symmetry into opaque […]
Consider the many ways that the cyber arms-race is precisely this – a procedurally-incremental measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure. The hyper-inflating combinatorial possibility space of attack and defence as a gestalt creates it’s own momentum and self-propagating, patterned structure(s) and open or extensible system(s). The evolutionary nature of this process is inescapable. Each act of interdiction then […]
We inhabit the material of manifest corporeality and in equal measure – abstract patterns of information inhabit us. Which is more fundamental? There is no base, no anchor, no foundation; the imaginary spaces of information and autonomously self-propagating computational resonance are the contours through which matter and energy travels; the embodied (and reflexive, in our […]
Freedom is as this: a half-glimpsed beauty and eloquent symmetry that by it’s essential nature can only ever be experienced in part. To possess freedom, to behold it’s boundless symmetry all at once would be to try and control it, and freedom can not be constrained by the dragging anchor of mere psychological aspiration. This […]
This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]
This is what we all see when we close our eyes and look deep inside. It is imperfect, discontinuous, fractured and incomplete. This is also why it is beautiful. The world is a broken symmetry and imperfect self-reflection and this is exactly why there is diversity, complexity, creativity and life. Some things can only manifest […]
Cultural change is cumulative self-gravitation.
Information encoding for message transmission is a function expressed in (and as) visual culture and which evolves over time.
Good fortune or success may be more often a matter of statistical probability than of human intention or intervention.
The endless stoking of the fires of difference might do little over a longer term to benefit the ideological and political voices and positions of liberalism and humanism.
