Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Regardless of what is being depicted in a photograph, the form itself evokes in us a particular pattern of intuitive, holistic thinking and emotion—the exact opposite of the pattern evoked by printed works. We have all heard the cliché “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Implied in this sentiment is the idea that images…
“As we have seen, Girard regards religion and culture not as the inventions of rational human beings but as essential processes in the evolution of humanity. For him, the scapegoating process functions as a catalyst in the development of symbolic thought. This increased mental capacity leads to ritual and myth, which in their turn develop…
The following is a short fantasy story I wrote and posted online in 2013 as an episode of a discontinued podcast of mine called Unfolded. I remember that I was reading a lot about disgust psychology and radical theology when I wrote this story so I wanted to re-post it here for those who may…
Munch: When Munch was a boy… freedom was a potato. It was you didn’t get killed today. Freedom from hunger, from the rusty blade. But to free himself, the man ate first so others could not. He killed before he was killed. He wanted nothing more, because only kings… had the freedom to want. But…
“Notably, tech giants today are able to wield the law against interoperators: new technologies that plug into their services, systems and platforms. That’s a privilege that none of yesterday’s easily toppled tech giants had—if IBM wanted to prevent its competitors (the “seven dwarfs” of the mainframe era) from making software, printers, keyboards and storage for…
“Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives…
“…human retinas are hardwired to spot edges and differences. When we look around a room, our retinal ganglion cells fire more strongly when they see borders and contours than when they see the blank middle areas of uniform color. As the information gets bumped up through higher levels of brain cells, those edges yield more…
“Improvising is all about human relationship. It is about listening, responding, connecting, and being generous. When a group of free players gets together and unfolds a coherent and interesting piece without a prior plan or template, it is like watching separate beings become integrated into a single nervous system. It is a partnership, with each…
“…branding animals ‘invasive’ is not only unethical, but it is also based on a confused understanding of species migrations over time. The reason that the rhetoric of invasive species has become so popular is because it provides a simplistic account of what are in fact very complicated biological processes. As such, the invasive species discourse…
”Indeed, when the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out. The body can…