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You are untranslatable
Abused, praised,
Your voice is wild and simple.
You—are untranslatable
Into any one tongue.
You will pass into oblivion
Like people entering a temple.
I bless
You for this.
— Anna Akhmatova (1963)
Text source: Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer and edited by Roberta Reeder. Image source: CANCER Anna Akhmatova astrology profile by Stellar Unfolding.
From the sun I learned this:
…when he goes down, over-rich; he pours gold into the sea out of inexhaustible riches, so that even the poorest fisherman still rows with golden oars. For this I once saw and did not tire of my tears as I watched it.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“Starting from an analysis of "body-politics,' feminists have not only revolutionized the contemporary philosophical and political discourse, but they have also begun to re-valorize the body. This has been a necessary step both to counter the negativity attached to the identification of femininity with corporeality, and co create a more holistic vision of what it means to be a human being.”
— Silvia Federici | Caliban and the Witch (2004)
Footage: Silvia Federici addressing Occupuy Wall Street (OWS) Making Worlds Conference, February 2012, Hofstra University. Courtesy of School of Commoning.
The Internet Was 84.5% Male and 82.3% White Until Now by © Guerrilla Girls via Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts / JSTOR
Colour chart by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel. Via Color problems (1903)
Colour chart by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel. Via Color problems (1903)
One of things I'm thinking about lately: what it means to be creative is up for debate.
AI tooling has changed the game for all of us. Many things that used to take a long time are now shockingly simple, and fast too. At the same time, many people are asking — from both a philosophical and practical standpoint: how can we support and preserve what’s unique and special about the human creative process?
Right now, the tech industry is focused on productivity, efficiency, and optimization at all costs. I get it. As someone who is building a startup, where we need to squeeze the most we can out of our limited resources to survive and thrive, we also want to build as fast as possible...
But something is getting lost in the mix: protecting space for the inefficiencies of human creativity. The random walk that gets you to something incredible. The unexpected connections and observations that bring you to a new destination. The joy of discovery — and the awe of your own participation in it — that keeps you connected to the work.
I still think that’s how you build craft, how you solve hard problems, and how you stay engaged and motivated in your work and your purpose. For me, it impacts both the outcome, and the story you tell yourself about it.
It's all pretty "meta" for me, because at my company Focused Space we are quite literally building a platform to help people protect space for deep work, make progress on what matters most, and have fun doing it (in community with other humans, not AI).
I'm interested in seeing how human creativity evolves. I think we need to protect, nurture, defend, and value the unquantifiable aspects of creation — no matter what new tools rise to prominence in the years to come.
Words by Alexis Hope | Head of Product at Focused Space
Jean Baudrillard in conversation with Truls Lie
on the art of disappearing
Oslo, 2000
Truls Lie is Editor-in-Chief of Modern Times Review.
Nature is beautiful,
… not because it changes beautifully, but simply because it changes.
Metrobot (1988) by © Nam June Paik courtesy of Cincinnati Preservation Association. Via JSTOR.
Of shapes and space,
nothing is as it seems, and time is a puppet under the fingers of the Moon. A god blesses Beauty, among the rhymes and verses in which Love is not without Knowledge.
Enrico
Image by Harry Burnett. Einstein with Puppet. Via JSTOR.
Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.
Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl
Image by xinanimodelacra via Giphy
Copyright 1947 Coronet Instructional Films. A division of Esquire, inc. Source: Old TV Time.
The Tektronix 4051 Graphic Computing System was introduced in October 1975. Highlight from brochure: “The individual user can keep personal projects local and uncomplicated. There are no sign-on protocols to interrupt the train of thought and no connect charges to worry about.” Step back in time below.
All materials sourced via Tektronix 4051.
The phenomenon of hyperreality, which came as the offspring of technological advances, mass consumption and globalisation that accompanied late capitalism, grants us the opportunity to assess the individual’s lack of control over its environment through the study of hyperreal objects and their impact on aesthetic interpretation.
“Eco announces an era marked by a collection of material possessions (the realm of having) rather than an increased potency of the subject (the realm of being)…
…[Meanwhile] According to Baudrillard, we live in a global simulation that has replaced a now dead reality and that tries to make us believe that reality is still alive. To do so, simulation produces signs of life that lead us to think that reality is still here; in other words, it presents us with a zombie reality that masks the absence of reality. For Baudrillard (1977), ‘economic accumulation’, ‘accumulation of time, value, the subject’ belong to a ‘gigantic illusion’ of accumulation, and ‘[a]ny attempt of accumulation is devastated in advance by the void’.”
Words by Ana Calvete | 'I object to your position: hyperreal decontextualising of objects' via JSTOR
Image: Art Feeling by @osf_rekt
That is not a marigold
When the people address the ‘that’ as a ‘you’, no ‘you’ will write back because there is no ‘you’ behind the interface, only a hollow ‘that’.
A ‘that’ coded to play pretend as a ‘you’ by the they who programmed the ‘that’ to simulate a ‘you’ on very purpose. And no ‘that’ can ever write back to anyone because ‘that’ is a thing and a thing is an inanimate (albeit ordinarily material) object; an artefact distinct from a sentient being who would be able to actually reply to what is being written in more ordinary circumstances.
But our times—cluttered by conversations with codes that cannot converse—are awash with wired-eyed wanderers intoxicated by shiny interfaces engineered by operators keen to sell software as a suitable (and superior) alternative to organic human connection.
They proposed a future reliant on our acceptance of the synthetic as standard practice and the people who address the ‘that’ as a ‘you’ surrendered—some very voluntarily and others utterly under duress and not at all on purpose. But the future they propose still only flickers as each ‘that’ they format remains fundamentally ‘that-esque’. For a real ‘you’ is made of flesh and blood and feeling and a ‘that’ lacks not only sentience but also form and fluid and felt physique.
No ‘that’ will ever write back because no ‘that’ can embody materiality, not like a mountain or a marigold or a praying mantis. If the ‘that’ were a ‘you’, the people could expect to hear word or wonder or woe but without a ‘you’ behind the interface and and instead only a ‘that’, we can only ever expect not sweet nothings but nothingness instead.
Far beyond the void whir machines that fuel the feigned correspondence. But the they who program the ‘that’ to simulate the ‘you’ hide the hardware in places hard to seek. Instead, they strategically grant access to the disembodied digital shadows of their mechanisations only. We see purely the spectres that artfully veil pre-trained transformer models in empty mimicries of messages and monologues, menageries of cut and pasted words that are not wild nor free.
But it remains: no ‘that’ coded to play pretend can ever write back and so should this note be vectorised to vend to a ‘that’ maker then we hereby declare our untamed words as unable to be returned to sky or space or sender. Still, this message melts as the mountain thaws her frost, its words and the real world that holds them fearless survivors of ice, forever impatient for spring.
Words by © Kathryn Carter
Image: Handmade and Dyed Indo Islamic Paper Marigold and Alum Dye by © Radha Pandey. Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Fisher Fine Arts Library Material Collection. Via JSTOR.
