There are thousands of ways to optimize, reduce, or contract: these are control methods, not human exuberance or creativity.
Each has its place. Without over-indexing (on control or chaos) we can realize reactions that expand us (into a greater self), and those that contract us (for specificity).
To improve yourself in measurable ways has an allure, but limitation for expansion constrains the self into a nearly mechancial, narrow channel.
Tag: art
- Theme: Self
to remain vital, you must expand
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Culture
Alien kitsch aesthetics
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1–2 minutesWhen presented with the “sinking of the titanic” or the “reign of the pharaohs” in a museum, you encounter protected, curated historical artifacts and detailed, digitized storyline renderings.
When you encounter alien museums, they appear cobbled together by an amateur, often using a Xerox machine and hot glue. The budget craft leans into kitsch, undermining credibility.
Would enhancing the display to align with high-budget blockbusters create easier acceptance through a mainstream aesthetic?
Or is homemade production the key to alien culture’s resilience? By eschewing the mainstream, it opens itself to outsiders, using its cheapness as camouflage to maintain a joking persistence over short-lived seriousness.
- Theme: Systems
standards and gauges
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1–2 minutesOnce a system has been established, there are "tolerances" that shape the energies and forms that exist within it.
These normative parameters influence how we move through the world: slowly transforming and deforming under increments of utility and efficiency.
Said another way, our pathologies are incrementally ratcheted into expressions that can be grasped, that is certain "images" or "normative outcomes" that operate with the most efficiency inside the system.These easy-to-grasp conceptual abstractions are recognizable forms -archetypes or stereotypes as well as inches and ounces- which reduce friction by universality: to get the results you desire quickly make it easy for people to grasp your "increment."
- Theme: Self
Double Cowboy
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1–2 minutesAt the airport, I saw a man wearing two cowboy hats stacked on each other.
Obviously, this was for safe transportation, but it begs the question:Does wearing two cowboy hats make you doubly cowboy or completely clown?
Does doubling down create a double negative: the inversion of intent?In doubling down on identity markers, you move into the realm of affectation, pure aesthetics and costume, which denies authenticity. At such a point, overt self-awareness becomes excess and emerges as a parody.
- Theme: Self
The law of form
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1–2 minutesThe form is subject to the law (a set of agreed restrictions), which determines its shape and reactions.
To identify with the form (the shape) is to become bound to its laws.
In being "you," you bind yourself to consistency: a form of "you" with a set of laws.Yet the world is a process of change, and to become the form is to calcify the self and cease being aware of the world, lest it disrupts your formation.
- Theme: Culture
The cybernetic creative
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1–2 minutesCarl Jung speaks of the “daimon” of creatives, and the difficulty of balancing intense energies.
The daimon is not necessarily a demon, but a muse that compels. Ignored or frustrated the pent-up energy builds as anxiety and is often countered with self medicating in an attempt to feel normal.
Like any cybernetic system, positive energies must be regulated (released regularly) lest a tragic explosion occur.
- Theme: Culture
Play cures Burnout
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1–2 minutesCreativity generates positive energy.
You will be tempted to be creatively productive, to make something with utility, but don’t succumb to that instinct: Make something pointless that makes you laugh.
Play is the ultimate cure for burnout. - Theme: Culture
Aesthetic belief
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1–2 minutesConsider that aesthetics is a distancing from enjoyment to analyze or judge.
True belief has no distance, while aesthetic belief is a complex game played for enjoyment.
The difficulty is when your aestheticized emotions are confused (or bleed into) your identity as true belief: at this point, everything is the game.
Even anger and fear, which appear natural, are enacted a satisfy a role: they produce an effect that affects others, providing the aesthete with pleasure in their manipulations. Once beliefs become aesthetic and sincerity is deserted for the joy of the game, there is a deeper problem: When escalating artificiality is the reward, it may be pleasurable to invoke horror and watch the world burn.(ideas from Charles Blattberg)
- Theme: Self
When sincerity disappears
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1–2 minutesWhen you doubt sincerity, words become merely a performative script: an aesthetic affect played as a game.
When sincerity disappears, so does trust. The byproduct of acidic cynicism dissolves communal bonds, isolating individuals into performative identities donned as costumes, and swapped just as quickly.