Playing the Orchestra
Thoughts on what people might really be saying, when they say we need to think more strategically.
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Musings
The few bits of self-knowledge we manage to collect never arrive in time…
The Shape of the Ruins, Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Sunday Sketches by Christoph Niemann
Christoph Niemann is an artist, author and animator. In his series, Sunday sketches he takes an everyday object, then twists and turns it, until he starts to see it in a new light.
Read more "Sunday Sketches by Christoph Niemann"…how often knowledge comes like this: a casually effected violence which throws the world just west of true.
Sight, Jessie Greengrass
Theories of transference, and advisory warnings
Some thoughts on receiving and giving advice, unsolicited or otherwise.
Read more "Theories of transference, and advisory warnings"Is manhood dickhood?
Frankissstein, Jeanette Winterson
Counternarratives by Alexandra Bell
Alexandra Bell is a multidisciplinary artist. Her “Counternarratives” series shines a light on the ways in which news media report on, and shape our perception of events.
Read more "Counternarratives by Alexandra Bell"We’re not laughing in the pictures. We’re not happy.
We’re invincible.
The Faculty of Dreams, Sara Stridsberg
Unknown Knowns
A frivolous research exercise that led me somewhere utterly unexpected.
Read more "Unknown Knowns"Wikipedia
As far as I can tell, this is mankind’s most honest cognitive project. It is frank about the fact that all the information we have about the world comes straight out of our own heads, like Athena out of Zeus’s. People bring to Wikipedia everything they know. If the project succeeds, then this encyclopaedia undergoing perpetual renewal will be the greatest wonder of the world. It has everything we know in it – every thing, definition, event and problem our brains have worked on; we shall cite sources, provide links. And so we will start to stitch together our version of the world, be able to bundle up the globe in our own story. It will hold everything. Let’s get to work! Let everyone write even just a sentence on whatever it is they know best.
Sometimes I start to doubt that it will work. After all, what it has in it can only be what we can put into words – what we have words for. And in that sense, it wouldn’t be able to hold everything at all.
We should have some other collection of knowledge, then, to balance that one out – its inverse, its inner lining, everything we don’t know, all the things that can’t be captured in any index, can’t be handled by any search engine. For the vastness of these contents cannot be traversed from word to word – you have to step in between the words, into the unfathomable abysses between ideas. With every step we’ll slip and fall.
Flights, Olga Tokarczuk