The Satellite's View

This is an incredible image of the fractal coastline of Guineau Bissau, found on Geoff Manaugh's site. The satellite's view of earth is a weird one, flattening all landmarks into a kind of abstract painting. But it's also the most logical way to see the planet earth, where distances collapse and time seems to be reduced to vectors between points.

Whenever I see an image like this, I imagine being in a tiny boat, lost in the many fjords and inlets, unable to recognize where I am.....

Himalayas!

/>

A photo I took while looking back at Chulu East from Thorung La, Himalayas, Nepal. November 2005.

The Operable Man

Peter Sloterdijk, "The Operable Man"

"Who could overlook the fact that the House of Being is disappearing under scaffolding - and nobody knows what it will look like after the renovations. In the current state of the world, the single most striking feature of intellectual and technological history that is that technological culture is producing a new state of language and writing. This new state has hardly anything in common anymore with traditional interpretations of language and writing by religion, metaphysics and humanism. The old House of Being turns out to be something wherein a residence in the sense of dwelling and of the bringing close of the distant is hardly possible any longer. Speaking and writing in the age of digital codes and genetic transcriptions no longer make any kind of familiar sense; the typefaces of technology are developing apart from transmission, and no longer evoke homeliness or the effects of befriending the external. On the contrary, they increase the scope of the external and that which can never be assimilated. The province of language is shrinking, while the sector of straight-forward text is growing."

The Art of the Future

Literature as an art form seems to be waning—many people have commented on this. Peter Sloterdijk, in one of his essays, calls literature the art of "letters to possible friends." I've always liked the idea: that a book is a sort of signal beacon, sent out into the world and hoping to catch some like minds.

But if literature is declining (and I have my own theories about why this might be the case) then what form will constitute the "letters to possible friends" of the future? What can replace writing's human and emotive sense of connection? Seems like artistic mediums define ages: if so, we live in the age of architecture, of vast engineering projects and buildings. Perhaps this will become the next common mode of expression.

The problem I've always had with architecture, however (and I'm an architect, so I've considered this heavily) is that it really contains no human element. Sure, architects will argue the point down: but we make buildings for PEOPLE. Yes, but not necessarily to connect with people, or to offer them any sense of retort, any scaling device for their humanness. Architecture is brute; it sits heavily on the land and refuses. It does not shape us at the scale of the individual. It shapes cultures and landscapes and cities and the crust of the earth: things far beyond a solitary human.

But the question is, what art form will be used in the future to define us as individuals?

Here are a few quotes that have inspired me, to start:

"Jaguars invade the temple and drink wine from the chalices. In the end, it was forseen and is incorporated into the liturgy."
Franz Kafka

"One shall seek nothingness only to find a way out of it, and one shall mark the road for everyone. Whether in grief or in despair, one shall endure in order to learn how to save others from it, but not out of scorn for the happiness that the creatures deserve, even though they deface one another and tear one another to pieces."
Elias Canetti