Friday, 6 February 2009
Dualistic Oppositions Generate Mental Antagonisms
..or somewhat of ramble by way of continuation of ‘MetaMeme’…
The way we use language profoundly influences the way that we think and therefore how we experience and internally represent Universe. In relation to this point it seems to me that the overwhelming prevalence of oppositional thought patterns in our mental lives has been a source of much individual and collective experiential error. The fact that we are so susceptible to them and that these systems of thought have become so heavily embedded in our culture’s parsing, has something to do with the obvious symmetries inherent in our bodies and the dyadic observations of our lives e.g. male/female - night/day - earth/sky - life/death etc. which have been coded into our mythologies overtly and occult since story was born. Dualistic metaphors and models have no doubt been a useful part of our intellectual and philosophical development, in that they allow simplification and hence intellectual comfort, and are ideal for the formulation of debate, but unfortunately they now continually confound our efforts to move forward intellectually.
To extend this notion, I don’t think it is unreasonable to suggest that such absolutist dualistic oppositions are now not just abstractions, but do in fact have tangible manifestations (just think of morality or politics), and as such have at least in part led to many of our most dangerous social and environmental problems. A specific and temporally significant example would be the delineation of humans from ‘nature’ in Christian dogma (a pattern that has been ironically maintained by its offspring Humanism and that no doubt pre-existed both), that to my mind has served to literally abstract the biosphere from our experience. Rather than being part of its continuum, a facet of the dynamic meta-organism that is Earth, we have to come to see nature as somehow external and separate and ourselves conversely as hallowed and special. The consequence of this dualism is that we are more inclined to use and misuse our environment; we compete more than cooperate, we think selfishly rather than symbiotically, all the while growing evermore atomised, contiguous and damaged. It is very important to deconstruct such reality tunnels and find ways to think a little bit more grey, more maybe, as this might alleviate at least some of our inner tension, if not our bigger problems, moving us into the spectral domain, potentially even back into the continuum.
I also consider that these habituated neuro-linguistic patterns can be utilised insidiously by the unsavoury as well as by the ignorant and as such, maintained, often in defiance of actuality, long after the notion should have been discarded. These embedded imprints can then be used as the basis for the maintenance of power, which as a consequence brings the debasement of good argument, a word that now seems to effect much negative and discomforting feeling. When, as in the case of an oppositional model, one can only be right or wrong, an argument often becomes a confrontation rather than an exercise in elucidation; a battle, where discourse leads to the re-enforcement of ego and dogma, rather than a breakthrough into deeper understanding, and as such communication is sabotaged. This is most problematic when there is an imbalance of authority in a debate, where established power structures or intellectual paradigms, with their vested interests and entourage of experts, face novelty or dissent. The notion of dissent here can be softly re-engineered and attached to this lurking negativity, reconfigured into nay-saying, antagonism and worse, by those who wish to claim the authority of 'right', so that dissent effectively comes to be perceived as 'wrong', in the minds of audience.
Perhaps it is naïve to expect any more, but intellectual and often social history has always seen the eventual capitulation of paradigm defence to the march of novelty. Paradigm shifts sometimes occur peacefully, but more often difficultly and brutally, and the one we are currently engaged in certainly seems to be dragging heels. The replacement of a recalcitrant mechanistic linear determinism (albeit with a respectful acknowledgement) with a non-linear holistic system approach is desired, and I consider the de-emphasis of dualist thinking to be part of this shift. Simply though and to reiterate, communication is essential and necessarily continuous, and a healthy dialectical exchange should require us to question our own opinions and ‘truths’, as much as those of others.
..Semantic drift...
The way we use language profoundly influences the way that we think and therefore how we experience and internally represent Universe. In relation to this point it seems to me that the overwhelming prevalence of oppositional thought patterns in our mental lives has been a source of much individual and collective experiential error. The fact that we are so susceptible to them and that these systems of thought have become so heavily embedded in our culture’s parsing, has something to do with the obvious symmetries inherent in our bodies and the dyadic observations of our lives e.g. male/female - night/day - earth/sky - life/death etc. which have been coded into our mythologies overtly and occult since story was born. Dualistic metaphors and models have no doubt been a useful part of our intellectual and philosophical development, in that they allow simplification and hence intellectual comfort, and are ideal for the formulation of debate, but unfortunately they now continually confound our efforts to move forward intellectually.
To extend this notion, I don’t think it is unreasonable to suggest that such absolutist dualistic oppositions are now not just abstractions, but do in fact have tangible manifestations (just think of morality or politics), and as such have at least in part led to many of our most dangerous social and environmental problems. A specific and temporally significant example would be the delineation of humans from ‘nature’ in Christian dogma (a pattern that has been ironically maintained by its offspring Humanism and that no doubt pre-existed both), that to my mind has served to literally abstract the biosphere from our experience. Rather than being part of its continuum, a facet of the dynamic meta-organism that is Earth, we have to come to see nature as somehow external and separate and ourselves conversely as hallowed and special. The consequence of this dualism is that we are more inclined to use and misuse our environment; we compete more than cooperate, we think selfishly rather than symbiotically, all the while growing evermore atomised, contiguous and damaged. It is very important to deconstruct such reality tunnels and find ways to think a little bit more grey, more maybe, as this might alleviate at least some of our inner tension, if not our bigger problems, moving us into the spectral domain, potentially even back into the continuum.
I also consider that these habituated neuro-linguistic patterns can be utilised insidiously by the unsavoury as well as by the ignorant and as such, maintained, often in defiance of actuality, long after the notion should have been discarded. These embedded imprints can then be used as the basis for the maintenance of power, which as a consequence brings the debasement of good argument, a word that now seems to effect much negative and discomforting feeling. When, as in the case of an oppositional model, one can only be right or wrong, an argument often becomes a confrontation rather than an exercise in elucidation; a battle, where discourse leads to the re-enforcement of ego and dogma, rather than a breakthrough into deeper understanding, and as such communication is sabotaged. This is most problematic when there is an imbalance of authority in a debate, where established power structures or intellectual paradigms, with their vested interests and entourage of experts, face novelty or dissent. The notion of dissent here can be softly re-engineered and attached to this lurking negativity, reconfigured into nay-saying, antagonism and worse, by those who wish to claim the authority of 'right', so that dissent effectively comes to be perceived as 'wrong', in the minds of audience.
Perhaps it is naïve to expect any more, but intellectual and often social history has always seen the eventual capitulation of paradigm defence to the march of novelty. Paradigm shifts sometimes occur peacefully, but more often difficultly and brutally, and the one we are currently engaged in certainly seems to be dragging heels. The replacement of a recalcitrant mechanistic linear determinism (albeit with a respectful acknowledgement) with a non-linear holistic system approach is desired, and I consider the de-emphasis of dualist thinking to be part of this shift. Simply though and to reiterate, communication is essential and necessarily continuous, and a healthy dialectical exchange should require us to question our own opinions and ‘truths’, as much as those of others.
..Semantic drift...
Friday, 23 January 2009
Quintessence
..A purging surge of energy; cooled, condensed, made material,
transmuted in stellar flame alembic and deep telluric oven,
bled molten through weeping fissures in a fragile crust,
to clot cold in harsh light, after dark eons of internment,
and be ground gently in erosion’s interminable hand, to dust.
These ancient liberated remnants, compete for permanence,
with bark-stripped branches, borne from distant alien shores,
and the bleached carapaces of chthonic creatures, long since lost.
Worn inexorably smaller by the sea’s wet mineral caress,
creeping ever closer to the entropic threshold of existence,
each relinquishes inevitably to disintegration and dissolution.
...
Such vestiges of earth and life, squeeze between curious toes,
clamouring for sensory attention against the vital lapping wash,
whose effervescent rings of cool sensation, travel cutaneous,
singing the transition of a dynamic membrane, so delicately tense.
The coruscating surface surrounds now; an infinite fluid necklace,
tessellating patterns reconfigure constantly into new chaotic orders.
Esoteric dialogues materialise between flesh and inquisitive ocean,
vigourous exchanges of complex and mysterious informations,
reviving primordial nostalgias, forgotten familiarities recalled.
Similarly, wise lungs draw deep on their invisible, tenuous fuel,
before the final enveloping immersion into amniotic sublimity.
...
Loss of physical resistance, the apparent disobeyance of gravity,
infinite intangible hands reaching to cradle this rarefied body,
decorated by the taught shifting lenses of frustrated atmospheres;
each poised to dance ecstatically from liquid solitude towards unity.
An awareness of the dark; the deep; the void, of abyssal predators,
imagined leviathans, lurking impatient at the limen of knowledge.
Primal anxiety passes, banished by rich physical communions;
molecules muse cognitive, engaged in inscrutable occult quiverings,
each harmonic tangle, strung enfilade, on subtle quantum threads.
I am as soluble as salt, all boundaries dissolving in passive rapture,
but lung’s know: Return, towards the light, and the memory of self...
Sunday, 21 December 2008
The Day the Sun Stood Still
Today is the winter solstice, the solar nadir in the northern hemisphere, a temporal event in Spaceship Earth’s rotations where the sun takes its lowest path through our sky and the daytime is least: the astronomical New Year. This is an event that many wise have encouraged us to recognise as the origin of our ‘modern’ festive experience. The word solstice in fact derives from the Latin Sol meaning Sun and sistere which means to stand still, because this is exactly what it appears to do. Our sun, having clambered ever lower over the horizon since midsummer, seems to be disappearing, perhaps eternally, an experience which was no doubt,a source of unquestionable anxiety to early peoples. When the sun was henceforth ‘reborn’ from the horizon, into a fresh cycle of light, there was much rapture and hedonistic release; it is not hard to recognise a common origin for the many religious rebirth mythologies in this event.
To be reminded of these facts is important, because they are rarely noted in this post(?)-Christian, cultural climate, even though their significance is worthy of attention. All eyes are turned to the coming of Christ-mass, the so-called hallowed birth date of Yeshua Ben Joseph, coupled with the modern expectations of techni-coloured and infinitely animated, consumerist delights (To those of a Christian persuasion, seriously note the transfiguration of meaning). The anti-consumerist Christmas polemic can be left to adequate others, nevertheless, Christmas, and all communal festivals of its ilk, does demand analysis.
The 25th of December was typically the winter solstice in the Julian calendar (the solstice moves , relative to our calendars, being a tricksy and absolute astronomical bugger; Universe cares not for our overlays), a time when, amongst others, the pagan festival of Sol Invinctus was celebrated. This festival was eventually opportunistically hi-jacked by the Catholic Church and inevitably overlain with their own spurious, yet tangibly co-opted, mythology, one that successfully (even if unintentionally) drew attention away from the deeper resonance and historicity of the occasion (also recall Easter). The 25th in the Julian calendar became the 21st in the Gregorian, and the ancient celebration of a new year moved with it, Christ-mass now a specious simulacrum of what it once was. As a date is only meaningful inside the context of a calendar, there is something to pay heed to as we celebrate the arbitrary 'New Year’ of January the 1st. In the sense that all calendars are arbitrary (although occasionally useful), human overlays on the passage of time, we are brought back to the winter solstice.
The solstice represents something tangible, relatively absolute and inviolable, at a time of year when humans are rightly inclined to celebrate light, life and community, in the darkness of winter. Perhaps now we can reinvigorate it, and put it at its proper place in the pantheon of human occasion. Essentially though, what is important, is that people pay more conscious attention to the moments in their lives to which collective significance is attached, although having said that, by all means find time to feast, dance and revel, in the hedonic experience of your existence, whenever and however you see fit.
In these moments of transient collectivity it has become more important than ever (considering the unfolding realities of our economic and physical climate), to recognise and reinforce the significance and sanctity of community, tribe and environment. The need for the continued avoidance of being carried into wasteful, and oft insidiously wrought, socially reflexive behaviours, is evermore urgent. More than ever we should be chastened by the need to re-rediscover that which is genuinely valuable and necessary;for the sake of all our well-being. Love and respect do not require the latest glittery plastic toss to substantiate them, communication and empathy are always the profoundest and most valued of gifts. So, take a stroll and remember to remember, look at the trees, and notice the shape of each others hands.
Bah Humbug! Wink.
P.S. Muse on this image whilst thinking of Santa suits and the mythology of flying reindeer:
Amanita Muscaria (Fly Agaric)
Thursday, 9 October 2008
Sage wise and otherwise
Skin erupts crystalline, frozen flesh made teeth
space block fractures, fault-lines grinding light
void dragging, pulling turgid tipping labyrinths
a focal remnant; the axis of rotational notation.
I saw them, they saw me; in infinite moment
howling by through long fractal night, until
clambered giggled gasp crosses event horizon
shedding wonderous tears, at first breath of æon
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
Monday, 25 August 2008
Saturday, 16 August 2008
Constructal Theory
Much of this science is over my head, particularly because it is an obscure branch (no pun intended) of engineering, even though at first sight it seems to be fundamentally intuitive. In common with much of the work in systems theory, it elucidates principles that are dramatically complex in analysis but yet are displayed universally in nature with an apparent simplicity. Just recognising the similarities between blood vessel networks, tree branches and river deltas is almost enough to stimulate a kind of epiphany.
http://www.constructal.org/
http://www.constructal.org/
Thursday, 14 August 2008
Complexity and Coherence
In complexity theory, it is observed that when a simplified and idealised population reaches a certain threshold of component complexity, a system of negentropic novelty emerges spontaneously and sustains itself at a higher frequency of order, auto-catalysing and self-organising. These newly emerged systems then go on to manifest further non-linear emergences at progressively higher levels of complexity, held away from equilibrium and dissolution by autopoesis. Many of these elucidations are congruent with observable chemical and biological processes and offer a tantalising glimpse into how Life has been making similar, interminable emergent steps of accumulating complexity; an unbroken developmental chain running from diffuse energies and cosmological bodies to cognitive molecular interactions and the vast sophistication of conscious multi-cellular organisms. Certainly some important new ideas, not least those of complexity theory and emergence and their ilk, substantiate these observations and seem just on the cusp of societal bloom, at least in the minds of them that are keen to motion.
If we consider that what has been called mind, or consciousness, is an emergent property of the 'material' brain (not that I necessarily consider it to be), we can also then consider language as an emergent property of mind, and that the dense aggregations of information that construe ideas i.e. words and symbols to ideologies, paradigms etc. (however valid), will share the same emergent properties, emerging albeit in a kind of imaginal space, a noospace. This space was first articulated so by Teilhard de Chardin and to me seems notionally equivalent to what Alan Moore has termed ‘ideaspace’ and what Karl Popper called ‘World 3’; the world of objective contents of thought. It then becomes interesting to speculate what can and will manifest in this noospace, on the 'substance' it is made from, and the way in which it feedbacks onto the 'material' world proper.
Some have suggested that when informational complexity, like Terence McKenna’s novelty, is graphed against time, albeit with a tentative x-axis, the graph’s general curve is exponential, meaning that its steepness increases logarithmically over time, and essentially throughout history. Others have also noticed that at our current point of history we are tending very close to the vertical of this curve, at which point informational complexity increases so rapidly as to confound. Theories of singularities and transitional apocalyptic cusps therefore abound, or as Alan Moore articulates information doubling; water sublimates into steam. Regardless of the veracity or meaning of these propositions, ones which I am inclined to intuitively sympathise with, we, as self-reflective language generators, are witnessing what it is like to be on the accelerating wave-front of this emergence, the effervescing limen of novelty; of evolution. Pay attention to it.
Some have suggested that when informational complexity, like Terence McKenna’s novelty, is graphed against time, albeit with a tentative x-axis, the graph’s general curve is exponential, meaning that its steepness increases logarithmically over time, and essentially throughout history. Others have also noticed that at our current point of history we are tending very close to the vertical of this curve, at which point informational complexity increases so rapidly as to confound. Theories of singularities and transitional apocalyptic cusps therefore abound, or as Alan Moore articulates information doubling; water sublimates into steam. Regardless of the veracity or meaning of these propositions, ones which I am inclined to intuitively sympathise with, we, as self-reflective language generators, are witnessing what it is like to be on the accelerating wave-front of this emergence, the effervescing limen of novelty; of evolution. Pay attention to it.
Friday, 8 August 2008
6 ways mushrooms can save the world
I have always appreciated our fungal, Terran brethren, but Paul's insight, effort and passion, not least this lecture, are incredible.
Thursday, 7 August 2008
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
The Juicy Looters (Sternest Meanings Remix)
Warm half-mad, hindering saneness.
Deathly, bat-eared thug stutters.
Master's nihilist dreadness.
Obscuration nauseated joviality.
Fruitier or topnotch nightshade.
Ramble well crackpot recanter.
Hmmm! Abhorrent handbook pointers.
A scratchy grace smooches apeman.
I am the grotty, lush geek.
Hotheads distract to damnation.
Deathful, threatless hesitation.
Over-the-top, idiotical injury.
Fans of DADA, Surrealist automatic writing and Gysin/Burroughsian cut-up will appreciate this tool:
STERNEST MEANINGS
Sunday, 3 August 2008
The Incomplete History of Everything: Enuncipated. Chapter 17
"..With the arrival of sentience and self-awareness, came consciousness, and speculation. In the wake of the first primordial imaginings, mental architectures manifested, memetic information cohered crystalline. The advent of political, religious and philosophical thought, brought greater complexity, the meta-object now a tortuous, labyrinthine psycho-geography, resplendent in its diversity yet somehow unsettling in arrangement.
There were those who wandered far off into this baroque, symbolic sprawl, seeking to explore the expanding noos-spacial territory, climbing to perch vertiginous on remote romantic pinnacles, dreaming of dark dissolutions. Some travellers even became trapped, sealed in crumbling semantic cul-de-sacs or mummified in the crypts of extinct ideas; forgotten, as others leapt liberated from private, exegetic edifices, tumbling into the churning chaos of deconstructive voids.
Of them that remained, a portion found satisfaction in a vistal perspective, a relatively compelling truth, truths which they were always keen to share (reinforced as they are by familiarity and collective investment), whilst traversing safe, well-trodden corridors. Those who could not appreciate such views, clustered in basement catacombs, unaware or unconvinced that there was anything much worth seeing anyway, uniformly swaying to the thrum of the great ideological machines that rose around them. There were however, unaccountables...”
Friday, 1 August 2008
Wade Davis: The worldwide web of belief and ritual
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
Monday, 28 July 2008
Rant in Nu-major
History repeats and again the tangibly pathological, selfish, manic, self-aggrandising, edifice-building, venal, vapid, vacuous, soundbite-memorandum-mutherfucker segment of ‘society’ has spun semantic. A propagandist engine so completely convinced of the veracity of its value, and vision, that in denial and unconcerned, sweeps aside all complaint, dissent and refutation as mere triviality, whilst stipulating its own depraved logic as truth.
Long live NuLabia!
I’m hoping we’ll all get this as a Christmas card as the lights go out.
Saturday, 26 July 2008
MetaMeme
...or why arguments are always with mind viruses.
We perceive, translate and experience, a fraction of the sensory information that is currently extant in our temporal domain, yet we confuse this semi-fictive fraction with Universe. ‘The map is not the territory’. Cultural paradigms, most typically those concerned with taboo, tend to become ossified, fossilised as dogma, particularly in the minds of those that need to cling desperately to ‘truth’ for security, a truth which can only ever be their own, or that of their local group or time. These notions of ‘truth’ are often blatant falsitudes, but their mental potency self-sustains, often contrary to rational refutation. Such semantics trap us, bound static to outmoded ontologies, and although often harmless, some of these gremlins grow into brutal mythological beasts that cannot be readily slain.
Amalgamations of words, in the form of ideas (memes?), can behave autonomously; insidiously, masquerading as ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, when they are merely a notional ripple in the paradigmatic tide of a noos-spacial sea; a local experiment in the evaluation of Reality. Although knowledge of a model or idea becomes more sophisticated and complete with time (ideally more congruent with the thing in itself), philosophical, scientific and political ideas should not be intended (or accepted) to demonstrate absolute veracity (as some of the most notorious indubitably are), but to elucidate and explore, plausible, useful postulates, ones that can be tested and criticised (at the least enjoyed) by the dialectical exchange of history.
Reality - absolute, unknowable, ineffable - is denigrated on its journey through the prismatic vector of the perceptor, be it that of an individual or a collective. The course of this process manifests apprehension and prejudice, not intentionally, but inevitably. Reality-tunnels auto-constitute, every experience that can be construed confirmational, reinforces, and all evidence that is refutational, or cannot be reconfigured into confirmation, is partitioned off through displacement. Unfortunately, many of these perceptional journeys end in the extreme realm of personal certitude, belief, or other pathologies.
When absolute certitudes of any kind, limit the exploration of potentiality, the evolution of knowledge is inhibited. It is interesting that we tend to define reality on the basis of our ability to 'see' i .e. that which we can observe and measure, capture and dismantle, and our relationship with the sense of scale which this provides. The need to categorise, compartmentalise and reduce, can lead experimentalists too close to their subject, occluding them from the greater wholistic system, one that is often tangibly greater than the sum of its parts. In science, a 'truth' is validated by an accumulation of repeatable experimental results, results that confirm and substantiate the experimental hypothesis, but scientific ‘truth’ can only ever exist as a high probability of 'truth'; a best fit model. A hypothesis can never be proven absolutely 'true', even though it only describes itself in its own vanity, but it can be proven 'untrue', if it fails to account for even the subtlest behaviour of that which it claims to define. Many 'truths' and scientific models are demonstrably useful, in that they are functional, even when approximate (that our mental architectures and civilisations have been built upon such things is testament to that), but they are never ‘true’.
Curiously DADA, it seems that Reality seems to resist our anachronistic attempts to reduce it into symbolic order. The continuum of our perception is rarefying, but as universe stuff is examined to the limits of the looking glass, it ceases to be what we expect, confounding and confusing our very attempts to define it.
(to be extended)
Breathe Easy
We perceive, translate and experience, a fraction of the sensory information that is currently extant in our temporal domain, yet we confuse this semi-fictive fraction with Universe. ‘The map is not the territory’. Cultural paradigms, most typically those concerned with taboo, tend to become ossified, fossilised as dogma, particularly in the minds of those that need to cling desperately to ‘truth’ for security, a truth which can only ever be their own, or that of their local group or time. These notions of ‘truth’ are often blatant falsitudes, but their mental potency self-sustains, often contrary to rational refutation. Such semantics trap us, bound static to outmoded ontologies, and although often harmless, some of these gremlins grow into brutal mythological beasts that cannot be readily slain.
Amalgamations of words, in the form of ideas (memes?), can behave autonomously; insidiously, masquerading as ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, when they are merely a notional ripple in the paradigmatic tide of a noos-spacial sea; a local experiment in the evaluation of Reality. Although knowledge of a model or idea becomes more sophisticated and complete with time (ideally more congruent with the thing in itself), philosophical, scientific and political ideas should not be intended (or accepted) to demonstrate absolute veracity (as some of the most notorious indubitably are), but to elucidate and explore, plausible, useful postulates, ones that can be tested and criticised (at the least enjoyed) by the dialectical exchange of history.
Reality - absolute, unknowable, ineffable - is denigrated on its journey through the prismatic vector of the perceptor, be it that of an individual or a collective. The course of this process manifests apprehension and prejudice, not intentionally, but inevitably. Reality-tunnels auto-constitute, every experience that can be construed confirmational, reinforces, and all evidence that is refutational, or cannot be reconfigured into confirmation, is partitioned off through displacement. Unfortunately, many of these perceptional journeys end in the extreme realm of personal certitude, belief, or other pathologies.
When absolute certitudes of any kind, limit the exploration of potentiality, the evolution of knowledge is inhibited. It is interesting that we tend to define reality on the basis of our ability to 'see' i .e. that which we can observe and measure, capture and dismantle, and our relationship with the sense of scale which this provides. The need to categorise, compartmentalise and reduce, can lead experimentalists too close to their subject, occluding them from the greater wholistic system, one that is often tangibly greater than the sum of its parts. In science, a 'truth' is validated by an accumulation of repeatable experimental results, results that confirm and substantiate the experimental hypothesis, but scientific ‘truth’ can only ever exist as a high probability of 'truth'; a best fit model. A hypothesis can never be proven absolutely 'true', even though it only describes itself in its own vanity, but it can be proven 'untrue', if it fails to account for even the subtlest behaviour of that which it claims to define. Many 'truths' and scientific models are demonstrably useful, in that they are functional, even when approximate (that our mental architectures and civilisations have been built upon such things is testament to that), but they are never ‘true’.
Curiously DADA, it seems that Reality seems to resist our anachronistic attempts to reduce it into symbolic order. The continuum of our perception is rarefying, but as universe stuff is examined to the limits of the looking glass, it ceases to be what we expect, confounding and confusing our very attempts to define it.
(to be extended)
Breathe Easy
Thursday, 10 July 2008
Monday, 7 July 2008
sYSTEM cITIES?
Vincent Callebaut - Lilypads (Copyright Vincent Callebaut)[pixelab]
The creations of architectural savant Antoni Gaudi, were those of a man who succeeded in fusing a profound and innate understanding of bioengineering and biomimicry, with an elegant and refined organic aesthetic, one that was intuitively extant long before such notions ever became culturally or scientifically formalised. Recently, some intriguing and enthusing architectural anomalies have emerged, which seem to resonate with such an understanding, particularly those which could be called Aquatic Arcologies - partially self-sustaining water-based colonies.
Architecture of this form can seem unrealistically Utopian, and more realistically Dystopian when endeared to the worst facets of our nature; Dubai's artificial islands are audacious, perhaps hubristic, feats of engineering, yet are intended to indulge the decadent and acquisitive desires of the super-solvent. It need not be so. If the construction of this technology is sensitive but passionate, yet necessarily informed by the conceptual elucidations of systems theory and ecology (concepts that seem integral to the architectural intentionality but that are often frustratingly elusive in actualisation), then perhaps it could operate as beautifully as it appears.
Speculative architecture is not new; anyone familiar with historical Utopianism or Science Fiction will recognise extrapolations of the imagination. What is interesting however, is the local, temporal context that these new designs are emerging from; manking seems to be engaged in a significant period of social transition, the established, acquisitive economies are in perilous shape and an urgent sense of ecological anxiety is snapping at the heels of all but the most entrenched and recalcitrant of economic conservatives. New paradigms are desperately required in all walks of life, not just for the practical purposes of biospheric survival, but for the sustenance of manking's sense of hope and self-respect; lest we squander our apparent evolutionary and intellectual privileges.
Architecture of this form can seem unrealistically Utopian, and more realistically Dystopian when endeared to the worst facets of our nature; Dubai's artificial islands are audacious, perhaps hubristic, feats of engineering, yet are intended to indulge the decadent and acquisitive desires of the super-solvent. It need not be so. If the construction of this technology is sensitive but passionate, yet necessarily informed by the conceptual elucidations of systems theory and ecology (concepts that seem integral to the architectural intentionality but that are often frustratingly elusive in actualisation), then perhaps it could operate as beautifully as it appears.
Speculative architecture is not new; anyone familiar with historical Utopianism or Science Fiction will recognise extrapolations of the imagination. What is interesting however, is the local, temporal context that these new designs are emerging from; manking seems to be engaged in a significant period of social transition, the established, acquisitive economies are in perilous shape and an urgent sense of ecological anxiety is snapping at the heels of all but the most entrenched and recalcitrant of economic conservatives. New paradigms are desperately required in all walks of life, not just for the practical purposes of biospheric survival, but for the sustenance of manking's sense of hope and self-respect; lest we squander our apparent evolutionary and intellectual privileges.
Eugene Tsui: Nexus Plan
Eugene Tsui: City On The Sea
Links :
Vincent Callebaut
Lilypads
Nexus
Arcologies
Arcology Profound
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Saturday, 5 July 2008
Reader Notice
We at the Institute of Semantic Reindoctrination apologise for the postings of our patient 66601723. He has now been fully restrained and will no longer have access to the computer facilities. We are currently attempting to rectify his deconstructional dysfunction, although the illiterate alliterations are proving to be heavily embedded.
The Juicy Looters
When, if marshal madness reign
and tag-daubed shutter rattles
they send missiled shatter rains
and tear in joyous battle
a vicious orifice
and through this portent portal rent
we clamber, crackle.
Then, no pharm-bomb mind-rot shake
or greasy stomach's ache
can compare, the mighty urge to slake
a thirst, to dance and hoot
amidst these isles that hate
our deprivation
and lift their juicy loot.
and tag-daubed shutter rattles
they send missiled shatter rains
and tear in joyous battle
a vicious orifice
and through this portent portal rent
we clamber, crackle.
Then, no pharm-bomb mind-rot shake
or greasy stomach's ache
can compare, the mighty urge to slake
a thirst, to dance and hoot
amidst these isles that hate
our deprivation
and lift their juicy loot.
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