Memory and Understanding

“Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.”
--Alain de Botton

"3:42 p.m., 2010" | Photo by Alexander Harding

“The path isn't a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”
--Barry H. Gillespie

Touch Everything

“When you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.”
--Lao Tzu

Le Satyre dans le Bois de Boulogne by Felix Vallotton

“The great lesson from the true mystics…that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard, and that travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred—this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.”
--Abraham Maslow, "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature" (1971)

"Exotic Contents" by Max Cooper

Avant garde composer/musician and visual artist Max Cooper (previously here) collaborated with Machine Learning and AI Researcher Xander Steenbrugge on his most recent track "Exotic Contents." The results are hypnotizing but the concepts described by Cooper and Steenbrugge are utterly fascinating.

Max Cooper:

I have been exploring the difficulties of communicating with words as part of my new Unspoken Words album project. I was thinking about how to visualise the idea, and started chatting to artist and machine learning specialist Xander Steenbrugge about a system for converting words to visual stories. The idea was to take the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who tackled this question of the difficulties of using words to explain our selves and our place in the world, and to have the AI system re-interpret these writings in visual form, making a direct visual representation of the Unspoken Words album concept.

It's interesting for me to see the incomprehensible philosophical language interpreted visually like this, full of symbolism and the boundaries between language, our selves, and the world, broken down into flowing abstraction. I haven't really taken it all in yet, I feel like there's more to discover in it than I can appreciate. The system has a lot more potential too, we will be running a version where you can have your own words turned into visuals and music as well, keep an eye out on my socials and mailers for that if you'd like to get involved.

The music was a similar departure from my usual interpretation of ideas, where I applied a half time drum and bass format with more aggression and sharpness of sound design. It’s a club track, but for me, an exotic form of club track. The name came from Wittgenstein’s private language argument, and the difficulty of communicating an entirely internal, subjective object to others when we can never directly show the object to each other. He uses the analogy of a beetle in a box, and I refer to the idea instead as our exotic contents.

Xander Steenbrugge:

From the very start of this collaboration, Max and myself were very eager to leverage the latest advances in AI to directly visualize language through the mind of the machine. For the past few months, in fact, I've been exploring this approach using a combination of two machine learning models: a generative system called VQGAN, which can generate pixels starting from a blank canvas, and a perceptual system called CLIP that guides this generator by scoring how well the generated imagery matches a given language prompt. Through this feedback loop, the system can be used to directly convert language into the visual domain.

After an early phase of experimentation with this technique, we quickly settled on Wittgenstein's Tractatus as a great narrative for this technique as it deals directly with the relationship between language and reality and aims to define the limits of science.

This final video then, is a direct visualisation of many of the statements posed by Wittgenstein in his seminal work, as interpreted by the AI.

Here you can find some examples of the timestamps and corresponding language prompts used to create the visual narrative:

0:00 "The world is everything that is the case"
0:16 "Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same"
0:29 "I am my world"
0:41 "According to Wittgenstein: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"
0:52 Tractatus quotes
1:00 "The picture is a model of reality"
1:26 "Objects form the substance of the world."
1:42 Tractatus quotes
1:56 "The picture is a model of reality"
2:10 "A name is a primitive sign"
2:23 "What can be shown cannot be said"
2:38 "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical"
3:19 Tractatus quotes
5:15 "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"
5:20 "The world is everything, I am my world"

https://maxcooper.net/exotic-contents

Take An Interest!

The Whole Must Be Well / Pity The Nation

Pity The Nation
by Kahlil Gibran

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
and eats a bread it does not harvest.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.

The Best Revenge

The Inward Significance

"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."
--Aristotle

"What if, when we die, we wake up?" by Alan Watts

Alan Watts (previously here).

http://www.alanwatts.com

"Everything"

"Everything."

How to describe it?

Created by animator David O'Reilly.

Appears like a video game.

Is not a video game as there are no goals.

Is an interactive experience.

Is about...well, everything.

A "player" (to use the term loosely) can explore the universe from the point of view of any living creature or non-living object.

Ambient soundtrack can include audio of lectures by the great philosopher and writer Alan Watts.

Listen to him speak beautifully about "The Game" (of The Universe, not this video game, although it is a perfect explanation of the game as well) while watching a sample of what "Everything" can look like.

"What are you afraid of losing when you die? Yes, everything that you have acquired as an individual and stored in your brain is dissolved and distributed. But at the same time it is equally obvious that when you die, there won’t be following the moment of death everlasting nothingness. So you can become aware of this tremendous interconnectedness of everything. Just as fronts go with backs and tops with bottoms, insides with outsides, solids with spaces, so everything that there is goes together. It makes no difference whether it lasts a long time or whether it lasts a short time. A galaxy goes together with all the universe just as much as a mosquito."
--Alan Watts

To purchase and experience "Everything," visit the website below.
http://www.everything-game.com/
http://www.alanwatts.com/

BEAUTY: Photography--Aurelio Monge

Spanish photographer Aurelio Monge creates tableaux and scenes in homage to classical painters and images of Greek and Roman gods and philosophers. I just love how he manipulates light and texture to accurately recreate such masterpieces.

His Beata Anima series is in homage to the painter El Greco. Notice how he poses his models and gets them to contort their hands into the exact poses seen on canvases from the Renaissance:

And he dedicates his Dei Filosofi series to "the great thinkers" like Plato.

http://aureliomonge.prosite.com/

Happy Birthday, Pierre!

A very happy birthday to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin! Born today in 1881, in the Château of Sarcenat at Orcines in central France, de Chardin was a French philosopher, Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and geologist who took part in the discovery of Peking Man and Piltdown Man. Teilhard conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky's rather Jungian concept of Noosphere. He believed that "evolution is an ascent toward consciousness" and the Noosphere is expressed as a kind of collective consciousness.

I can forgive him for being a Jesuit priest since his life was dedicated to the sciences. From 1905 to 1908, he taught physics and chemistry in Cairo and traveled extensively in Asia working in the fields of geology and paleontology. Teilhard de Chardin wrote many groundbreaking and influential books in the course of his life but it was his first book, THE PHENOMENON OF MAN, which angered the Catholic Church and his Jesuit order for his scientific approach to views of history, evolution, and humanity. They felt that Teilhard de Chardin undermined the myth of original sin developed by Saint Augustine. I say anyone who pisses off the Catholic Church is doing some good work. During his life, the Church required him to stop lecturing, ordered him to leave his teaching position in France and to sign a statement withdrawing his controversial statements regarding the doctrine of original sin, refused to publish his writings, banned what books were published, forbade him to lecture or teach on philosophical subjects, forbade him to take a teaching post at the College de France, and in 1955 it forbade him to attend the “International Congress of Paleontology” despite the fact that he had been named to the French Academy of Sciences just a few years earlier. Even with all the forbidding and huffing and puffing from the Church, Teilhard de Chardin thankfully managed to use his brain (something the Church frowns upon) to become a highly respected, admired, and influential scientist, evolutionist, and philosopher.

Thank you for your contributions toward the betterment and advancement of humanity and the human experience, Monsieur Teilhard de Chardin. Happy birthday!

Here are some marvelous Teilhard de Chardin quotes to enjoy.

"The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed."

"It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway."

"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience."

"Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation."

"In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened."

"Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth."

And I really love this passage form his book HYMN OF THE UNIVERSE in which he seemingly describes, through the third person, his own views of the Church and their campaign against him:

"So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness."