If you are good at something, are you also passionate about it? If you are naturally talented with math, do you also love it? If you are a child prodigy of violin, does it mean you are passionate about music? I would say not necessarily; or at least there is no reason to believe that this is necessarily the case. Read »
Wittgenstein wrote in Philosophical Investigation, “to say ‘If it did not exist, it could have no name’ is to say as much and as little as: if this thing did not exist, we could not use it in our language-game.—What looks as if it had to exist, is part of the language.” There is a danger in assuming existence of anything that is exterior and/or anterior to language. This is what happens in religion where people dedicate their lives to defining what God is. Likewise, fine arts is a discipline concerned with defining what “Art” is. Both are byproducts of our language where the mere effects of language compel them to dedicate their lives to reducing the meaning of the words. Their involvement far exceeds intellectual inquiries; it consumes them utterly and entirely. What they seek is “transcendental signified”, but no such thing exists. They feel that if the name exists, it must exist. Instead of simply living, the words dictate their living. Read »
Language is a grid system that you lay over the reality in order to understand and communicate with others effectively. That is, it is like laying a grid over a piece of abstract painting in order to make the discussion of it easier. An odd phenomenon that happens with this is that sooner or later, the grid system takes over the reality. The painting itself becomes secondary to the grid. It takes on a life of its own. This is a “reversal of the over-heated medium” phenomenon where the effect is taken as the cause. Read »
“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho is a great book that incorporates various schools of thought, some very esoteric, like Jung’s Collective Unconscious, Gurdjieff / Ouspensky / Collin’s concept of time in universe, as well as the teachings of more mainstream religions and myths. It even echoes some of the sentiments of the popular happiness peddlers like Anthony Robbins and Alan Watts. The book successfully combines all these ideas into one neat mythical tale. What it tries to ultimately achieve is to shed some light on the eternal question of human race: the meaning of life. Unlike the Existentialists, Coelho apparently believes that each one of us have a purpose of our own called “Personal Legend.” The book illustrates the process of achieving it. Read »
NETABSTRACTION is an attempt at abstracting the dynamic content of the Web in real time. These Shockwave programs will surf the web on their own in order to create continuous random collages out of the texts and the images that they find along the way. Read »
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