past 'things I have been thinking about'
2024-02
What is your relationship to your unconscious, and what practices of the self allow one to be more embodied in your psyche, rather than one's conscious ego, or thinking mind? What is neither about intellect, nor about emotion, but about the 'secret third thing'? What practices of calibrating one's own compass exist?
Let's say that the hand-crafted image, text, drawing, object is interesting, not because it is more 'rustic', or 'analog', but because "fine motor engagement" of the hand allows the psyche, not just the conscious ego, to act and manifest. What kind of computational medium is truly open to the psyche, not just as an aesthetic layer, but as a medium? Are the practices of 'error checking', 'discretization', 'autocorrect' that digital signals have (discretization into binary, pixels, parity bits) itself an axiomatic disposition that bubbles all the way up into computational media? E.g. "Draw a circle, and our software will autocorrect it into a perfect circle"?
What is the feedback loop between architectural and spatial environments and 'egoic life', versus spatial environments and 'psychic life'? What spaces and neighborhood are grown from psyche and soul? What if each city, village, country house -- each spatial condition can be thought of as a collective unconscious manifestation of how that society articulates an answer to the core ultimate concerns of existence that Irvin Yalom notes as: death, freedom, isolation, meaninglessness? Comprehension, disassociation, denial, celebration, understanding -- how are these facts of life manifested in the fabric of the city? How does a city's denizens co-evolve with the city to formulate a response that becomes habituated into an individual's approach? The 24/7 diner as a denial of isolation? The club as a site to celebrate meaninglessness? A convivial city + an existential city?
What practices are not shareable or communicable through language or imagery, and thus are the 'blind spots' in language or imagery-oriented contexts such as: the internet, academia, conversation, work? Tacit knowledge is 'knowledge that we do not know how to make explicit' --
How might we rescue the internet from the smartphone and scroll culture? How might it look more like wizardry, like chemistry, like magic?
Politics and morals are (often) orthogonal to each other; politics gathers agreement and collective power; morals provides an internal compass that allows one to act in line with one's own integrity. The discipline we know called 'politics' is a mechanism for consolidating power through social inclusion/exclusion and solidarity/opposition; 'morals' is a primarily individual practice, offering a consistency to one's own self. Many times, a politics can be against one's own morals, and vice versa. What if these are best understood as orthogonal? A committment to a political group allows the possibility of solidarity and its joys, alongside the possibility of misalignment with one's morals. A commitment to morals allows the possibility of a path of integrity alongside the possibility of divergence and solitude. (See also: Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Bruno Latour's An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence)
What is the way I intend to think and speak about meditation, as opposed to practicing it? On one hand, it is exciting to begin to map out and research concepts and ideas and ways in which many, many others have operated with practices of the bodymind-with-itself. (For example: how to balance between vipassana & equanimity and seeking piti and/or jhana? Or cultivating metta, above all?) On the other hand, it's clear to me that the practice is the practice, and these points of excitement might serve as inadvertent points of attachment or grasping to, what is essentially, a practice of letting go. A desire to speak about meditation itself, contains within the seeds of a grasping-of. One possible resolution is of being content with my silence; another might be of quiet but unabashed joy. How might I navigate these poles while also finding a community of practice - a sangha?
How might one syncretistically craft one's own rituals? What are the practice of historical or traditional Korean rituals, both traditional, cultural, spiritual, and shamanistic (무당, 굿, etc)? How have various plant medicines factored (or not factored) in these practices? What is their story of dissipation and banishment during the colonization/war/dictatorship/modernisation histories of Korea? How have they survived?
What does it mean to allow the unfolding into a person? How does Nietzsche's idea of the Ubermensch in Thus Spake Zarathustra, the 'overman' who overcomes themselves and accepts who they are, compatible with the idea of Atman in Hinduism? What if Nietzsche's dead God is really only the Christian church rather than Jesus's God, and the idea of self-as-god or 'the Buddha within' is completely compatible with Nietzsche's (supposedly secular) overman?
What is a moral logic one might hold within any particular political economy? So far, it has been to envision an ideal (more just) future, and to understand the current present, and to only find work that exists in the overlap between the two. How can I celebrate what exists in this overlap? Or more complicatedly: how can I understand (and even prematurely grieve) for the wonderful work I delight in, that might only exist in a neoliberal capitalist economy, whether because its existence is due to the valorization-of-struggle-against-capitalism, or because it exists in the gluttinous margins of capitalist surplus-driven institutions? Well-meaning art and design work around protest, yearning, hope, idealization, struggle? (Or: could I be thinking about this in a different way?)
How to work with the oncoming tide of AI? AI is clearly Here To Stay; not even that, it will Clearly Erode Our Institutions and habits in a way unforeseen. Studies have already predicted that all manner of white collar work and intellectual labor will be eroded, altered, shaped by AI; while I predict that most jobs will not appear to be automated, they will be hollowed out from within and altered, so that the expectations of work will begin to conform to the requirements of AI. In the Industrial Revolution, the length of work day became nearly infinite (as labor was pressured to become aligned to the 24/7 capabilities of the machine, rather than the length of daytime), and struggle to restrict the work day to eight hours only arose through collective organizing and protest. (Marx's Capital, Ch 10). Similarly, it seems clear that the speed/capacity of human labor will be pressured to conform to the nearly-infinite capabilities of AI. What will survive afterwards?
(My bet is: the work that is culturally perceived to deeply cherish human agency, human sentimentality, and most of all, involves (even requires) human fallibility -- surgeons, artists, artisans, teachers, therapists, dancers, chefs..)
2023-11
How do you move inside of a project, or a life? What is the role of 'thinking' in 'designing' a future, which is to say, projecting an image or a goal that we wish to achieve -- versus a process of movement, of 'allowing' one's one practice or being to emerge and unfold into the world? (What is the practice of allowing?)
How am I, are you, able to be fully aware and in the present? What non-improvisational practices are necessary to improvise? Are non-presentness activities necessary to be in the present? I.e. How to focus on a drawing for the construction of a meditation space, or pre-purchase a plane ticket months in advance so that one may travel to a place that allows one to improvisationally travel.
What does the desire for 'community' really come from? How do attachment styles and family-of-origin dynamics and the psychodrama of our lives manifest themselves through a desire for a community, a career, a set of relationships, friends, a family, an identity?
Ethics and politics are (often) orthogonal to each other; politics gathers agreement and collective power; ethics can provide an internalized code that allows one to act, separate from the collective. Politics offers social exclusion and opposition as its legislating power; ethics offers integrity and a consistency to one's own self. Sometimes, a politics can be against one's own ethics. When the group pressures you to act in a certain way, following the group is to become political. 'Doing what I want' is also to be political, just in the opposite direction (of rebellion). An ethics allows the possibility of a path of integrity with the possibility of social exclusion.
What is the role of individual ethics in a collective context?
2022-05
Space is a sociogenic attention/affordance medium that include cultural habits, social norms, and technological affordances. If so, what is really at stake for space is the question of "how do we want to live and relate with ourselves, with each other", and how do spatial affordances shape or enable ourselves to answer this question?
What does non-naive good faith communication that can survive bad-faith communication look like? What are practices of interaction and communication, separation and distance that (wisely, non-naively) navigate reparative and restorative practices?
How do good intentions and personal experience manifest in practices of understanding, rather than intentional harm and false righteousness? What kind of spatial, relational, technological approaches would hinder or aid real communication and reparative practices? (When to, you know, just pick up the phone?)
The wordly practices that constitute our non-productive spatial lives (eating, talking, dancing, sleeping, showering, peeing, shitting, fucking, cooking, reading); how are these shaped by the spaces we inhabit? How does this intersect with financial/political practices of real estate development, financial investment, if at all? If architecture as a practice involves the financial/political practices of shaping space, what name would we give a practice that involves the shaping of our non-productive, affective, psychic spatial lives?
Where and how do we hold our optimism towards technology?
We are our environments. Our cognition is distributed in the environment. We are the relationships and spaces that surround us. We think through our friends and collaborators and our spaces. If we drew a closed loop around our thought in space, most of it would be outside of our bodies.
2019-10
What is the relationship between racism and aesthetics? Doesn't aesthetics or some sort of visual taste always have a form of exclusion that either aids, or is structured by racism? The gated community, the idea of 'purity', the dangerous, dirty, unkempt 'other' -- the racial other is always unaesthetic, disorganized, distasteful. Is there an aesthetics that is untouched by racism and power? What does just pedagogy around representation and aesethetics look like?
Design is often about planning to arrive at an ideal future scenario -- an ideal aesthetics, an ideal construction, an ideal space, an ideal result. Sometimes, design and planning is the start of broadening possibilities, like designing a raised garden bed for an unknown myriad of future plants. Sometimes, design and planning is the narrowing down to a point, when we would like spaces to be built like our construction documents, paper pages to be printed like our screens, travel itineraries to mesh with a 8:42pm flight time. Is it possible to find an aesthetics that can accept broadening possibilities, without falling into the trap of being "modular", "movable", "open source"?
Is an aesthetics ever possible without a power that enforces it? Is aesthetics itself ever NOT a manifestation of power in terms of form/vision/taste?
Feeling like the Other can be a good sign. It is (at least) a sign that I am being myself, when I am in white spaces. Maybe the problem is not the othering of people; it is the "Us"ing of people, the definition of a boundary in which "we" exist, the declaration of homophily and sharedness that builds gated communities.
Physical space is a computational medium. Physical space computes things. The sound that a doorbell makes in the space is a social/spatial computation that balances proximity and attention.