we found this slab of old growth hemlock in the rafters of the building, forgotten in 1865. it is 22 inches wide, thrown down as simply something to walk on across the joists during construction: a portrait of past abundance and human shortsightedness. it is now a table, with renewed respect.
added a preliminary page regarding this site as an informational object.
see source.
paracelsus said "all things are concealed in all."
"When the unique is created, it also creates the creator.
The more finished goods become commodities, the fewer opportunities an individual has to generate new creation. The ability to mass-produce removes the opportunity for the great many to learn to produce at all. From such a thought, a future full of consumption-only hobbies might come as no surprise.
If you commoditize toys, you remove the toymaker. If you remove the toymaker, the toy is only an object of consumption. It ceases to be an object of wonder."
it is done. gnostics
currently reading megalith: studies in stone which is a collection of nine short books: stone circles, carnac, stonehenge, avebury, stanton drew, callanish, ancient british rock art, and surveys of stone circles. the diagrams and engravings are phenomenal.
related: julian cope's modern antiquarian BBC documentary (2000).
the breakthrough happened after adding constraints. watercolor and painting in general always felt intimidating, but it has become a joy after pushing some algorithms into the robot pencil mover.
this site is an exercise in small tech: using the computer on a fundamental level, always trying to distinguish between too-technical and too-dumb.
for example, the site generator sorts using the file's modification date instead of adding tag metadata. but then doing an after-edit requires a manual change to the date which is very easy to do, but specialized. even the idea of a "file" is starting to feel like uncommon knowledge given smartphones and cloud services. so (depending on who's looking) this is both too-technical and too-dumb.
it is wonderful.
"Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don't know. I don't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news."
the best part is when perfect math hits messy reality with bleedy pens and bumpy paper. that's where the life is.
processing, plotter, white pen, arches paper, 10"x10"
the problem with subtractive process is that you typically have to start with something before you can make things disappear.
did you mean "then"?
this is what the search engine used to say. tehn has been around since the mid-nineties. the word has no meaning.
the thing that gets us to the thing
somehow "hello world" is no longer sufficient for self-actualization and this tiny assemblage of technical text has been played with for too long. months. computers, formatting, site generation: the former thing. so what is the latter thing?
journaling with pen and paper has been helpful over the years for maintaining momentum. it makes it easier not to "lose the plot" as erik davis would say, though i certainly acknowledge there have been moments where i've been searching in a daze.
choose a direction, go.
tehn@nnnnnnnn.co