Monday, June 16, 2008

To shape change into relationships

One of the great abilities of people is our ability to see and build relationships between things. Whether abstractly -- crossing through immateriality, referencing the invisible -- or concretely -- touching the material world, felt and interacting formally with the air -- our ability for relationships is one of our greatest skills. We are still learning this art, slowly. We can building relationships with other people, with places, with objects, with ideas, with memories... these are the things of the landscape of life. To get to know the landscape, one doesn't need to exploit it.

The element of a relationship is never lost, it is never won, but rather it is a process of 'how,' much like the question of 'change.' For change is a dynamic static. And a relationship is never beyond its finish, nor permanently before its commencement. But these states are also always present, like an idea forged in the mind and manifested with skill into reality, thus ideally expressing in the next stage a deeper immateriality. People mold change into relationships; this is our human genius. Change being our material, with relationships the most primal and potent of our sculpture.

to learn

One of the most important things I've learned is learning the importance of re-learning, and re-learning how to learn.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

living narrative

Density of time and space is activated by narratives: the interaction of people and their movements overlaid on top of the material nature of space and time. This is a spark to ignite the beauty of living.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

generational dimensions

Sometimes people speak of "parallel dimensions:" universes where another world exists, similar to our own, possibly with even the same people, but at the same time completely different and divergent. These parallel dimensions exist, to some degree. Okay, I know that sounds kooky but just hold on a second, I'll explain. When I speak of parallel dimensions I'm not talking about physics, string theory, or new age mysticism, but rather the condition of large scale groups of human generations separated by time -- I call these groups "generational dimensions."

At this very moment there is a large population of people living on the planet Earth. A large segment of this group of roughly 6.7 billion people was here yesterday and will be here tomorrow. And other segments of the population were here yesterday but not today (they have died), and are not here today but will be here tomorrow (they will be born). This population is constantly shifting as people come and go but at any given moment the bulk of people remains the same. But what happens when we look at this global population in 200 years? It is most likely that all of today's population will have died and a new population, shifting into place gradually, will have emerged. The differences between these two global populations -- between the one today in contrast to the one 200 years from now -- can be described as generational differences separated by a large amount of time, as each population is an entirely different generation of humans. The same situation exists in the past: 200 years ago there was an entirely different group of people living on Earth than there is now.

But how is this related to "parallel dimensions?" If we recognize that by most logical accounts there will certainly be that new generation 200 years from now as there was also a different generation 200 years ago, we can assume the future generation with an entirely different population will exist and that entirely different populations existed in the past. Each of these generations, which are entirely different when compared to one another over time, can be likened to the idea of parallel dimensions. The people of the future are a group of completely different living organisms that will share a likeness with us today and live -- paradoxically -- in the same world and an entirely different one. And like the idea of parallel dimensions, each "generational dimension" -- the large scale group of human generations that is distinctly unique from another -- is always in existence running parallel to our own generational dimension due to its due existence in its own time. Parallel worlds do exist, separated by time.

Each dimension is also cut off from other dimensions by the type of communication taken for granted within the life of a single generational dimension. The different dimensions can communicate with one another but only in a non-horizontal fashion (unless there is a way for instantaneous time-travel). Communication can occur vertically or diagonally across parallel generational dimensions through interpretations of the past, human record, archaeological remains, and the biological threads of genetics. And we can leave bread crumbs for the future in time-capsules, human record, our archaeological remains and genes, and the ability for future generations to interact with our present and near future generations through recorded and algorithmic, interactive media, environments, and the virtual domain of narratives, fiction, lore and their freshly minted adaptations.