drowning in information
while starving for wisdom
currently reading Lo-TEK, design by radical indigenism by julia watson. tek is traditional ecological knowledge. the book surveys practices which sustained various cultures for thousands of years.
"The nature of modern communication systems is that anything can be said, any context is equivalent to any other context, so that things can be placed in many different contexts at the same time, like photography. But there's something profoundly compromising about that situation. Of course, it allows for a liberty of action and consciousness that people have never had before. But it means that you can't keep original or profound meanings intact because inevitably they're disappointed, adulterated, transformed, and transmuted. So, when you launch an idea for a fantasy or a theme or an image to the world, it has this tremendous career that you can't possibly control or limit. You want to share things with other people, but on the other hand you don't want to just feed the machine that needs millions of fantasies and objects and products and opinions to be fed into it every day in order to keep on going. And that's perhaps a reason one is tempted to be silent sometimes."
from social media content removal fail [web] by terre thaemlitz. this qoute resonates deeply with my current aversion to the internet. there's a similar exploration in the interview i linked a couple days ago, describing how mark fisher's concept of accelerationism was quickly mangled and found its way into the manifesto of the christchurch shooter.
“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.”
(from an excellent interview with matt calquhoun about mark fisher by holly herndon and mat dryhurst [web])
gemini://nnnnnnnn.co is now alive.
the link above will probably not work in your web browser, so first here are some words about gemini [web]
gemini is a different protocol (whereas the web uses http.) gemini is a very small specification: text, links, and that's about it. images and audio and other media can be displayed by following links, but not inline. in many ways it's more like reading a book.
gemini respects privacy by design (whereas the economy of the modern web is based on surveillance.) the tiny specification makes it possible for an experienced programmer to make a gemini server or client with relative ease, whereas creating a new modern web browser is literally an insurmountable task. since files are so small and clients so simple, browsing is incredibly fast and works perfectly well on old computers.
this project is still in its early stages.
fagradalsfjall is erupting.
ceramics by kelli cain, needlework by ivar heckscher. morning light reflected by window and mirror.
dawn chorus over rumbling brook
snow leaves
birds arrive
slowly chasing diamonds of sunshine
new algorithm. 12" x 8" (ish), black 0.32mm pen.
nature report, this last week: geese flying north, robins abound, first rainbow in a long while, mink runs around barn, red fox runs around house, three bald eagles flying together, mouse tunnel through sill plate into our basement is now closed and hopefully the pipes won't freeze next winter, van stuck and unstuck, mud season.
everything was grey: dusty interstitial iceland. two speak, third transcribes (i was the third.)
where are we?
we are nowhere.
what are we doing here?
we are looking at nothing.
twelve years ago we planted over a hundred trees. tiny sticks, heeled into the earth. now this white pine is twelve feet tall and made pine cones for the first time.
does this mean we are grandparents?
"The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck."
visiting friends
oceans become mountains. 6" x 4".
currently reading nan shepherd's the living mountain.
"Let this whole horrible chapter of history convince you that money is fake, we can do anything with it we want, and that we do not want cryptoart."
oceans. 12" x 8", black 0.5mm pen.
“Being pretentious is rarely harmful to anyone. Accusing others of it is. You can use the word ‘pretentious’ as a weapon with which to bludgeon other people’s creative efforts, but in shutting them down the accusation will shatter in your hand and out will bleed your own insecurities, prejudices and unquestioned assumptions. And that is why pretentiousness matters. It is a false note of objective judgement and when it rings we can hear what society values in culture, hear how we perceive our individual selves. Pretentiousness matters because of what it teaches us about the creative process."
we've been snowed in before, but for the first time we recently experienced the diabolical slushed in
6" x 4" two color.
"The guru is not exposed as a liar or a lech, a joker or a thief, but “only” a child laughing in the sun. The seeker’s mistake did not lay in identifying something special in this person, but in believing — hoping — that this specialness had something to do with knowing the truth. Instead, the numinous boils down to an ordinary state of radiant and childlike joy."
"The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently."
this leads the introduction of can't get you out of my head, adam curtis (2021)
sometimes i think my favorite color is black, yet i keep painting these crystalline rainbows
behold, the great northern winter tomato
"The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
everything is fine
today we ate the weird butternut squash that grew in the compost pile last summer
current research:
"Our perceptions work in large part by expectation. It takes less cognitive effort to make sense of the world using preconceived images updated with a small amount of new information than to constantly form entirely new perceptions from scratch."
how many times can you say
this is the final time
tehn@nnnnnnnn.co