The Myth of the One

In contemporary Western capitalist society, the myth of “the one” is pervasive. This is the persistent belief that given a functional socio-economic role defined with rigorous specificity there exists an individual conforming to all preexisting expectations for that role. “The one” is out there, we just need to find them.

That this belief manifests most acutely in those doing the searching is no surprise. “The one” is the quintessential object of fixation for job recruiters and unattached individuals seeking long-term relationships. Because it is a myth, technology can only be expected to intensify the searching, leading to escalating expenditure and waste in true capitalist fashion without leading to resolution.

Organisms Under Threat

To live in the modern world is to exist in a state where every breath is painful and where every motion is inhibited by heavy oppression. It is to have all streamlines, streaklines and pathlines totally and completely circumscribed by a design beyond comprehension and unyielding to compromise. It is to exist in a state where even keeping one's eyelids open is a feat, for the air stings with a painful burn and is clouded by a heavy fog that induces sleepiness, comatose, and death. It is to be an organism under threat.

Those that are not threatened have already crossed the material divide; they are not organisms: they are no longer even living. They are the exalted beings of capitalism: those who have willingly given themselves over to be reformed, recast, and re-implemented as more perfect designs under the capitalist frame. They eagerly await the promised total liberation from materiality: the complete annihilation of the physical¹, capitalism's promise/threat of subsuming the universe and finally extinguishing its insectoid-drive.

Some of the (Many) Limitations of Affinity Designer

I've been using Serif's Affinity Designer for about six months now, having been forced out of the Adobe ecosystem due to it being financially untenable. While there's still a lot of depth to the program that I have yet to explore, I feel there's some value in documenting what I've found to be its limitations as it pertains to the work that I do, particularly since it seems hard to find solid information on what Designer can't do.

For those unfamiliar with the product, Affinity Designer is a vector illustration app by Serif positioned as an affordable alternative to Adobe's Illustrator. It is available as an app for iPad as well as an app on the desktop. I use a Microsoft Surface so my experiences pertain to the desktop app on Windows. I understand the app / MacOS is the primary focus for Affinity, so certain things (like performance) may be expected to be better there than what I experience on Windows.

The Weird and the Eerie of Swing You Sinners!

There's a peculiar feeling one gets when, after a long time absent, one feels oneself pulled into a familiar orbit. Not that there is an inevitability to it; it's not that all paths lead back to the same place, but rather that some regions are like drains for our psyche, threatening to slowly draw us in from a multitude of directions should we fail to keep our distance. So it was for me recently with a return to electro-swing.

The End of Design

In Arthur C. Danto's After the End of Art, he describes his assessment of the state of contemporary art: quite simply, art felt like it had come to an end because it had. Danto is clear throughout his work that by 'the end of art' he does not mean that there is no new art being done, or that this art is not good. Rather, he means something more like what many would consider art history - an overarching narrative under which the large body of 'art' proper could be subsumed¹. No longer was there a clear Gestalt into which art could be made to fit, in its place were many small movements: spurious excitations of ecstatic creativity that dissipated with rapidity. What Danto saw in the contemporary art world was one that had followed the trajectory of the art narrative as far as it could go until at last it was extinguished. This is what Danto called the post-historical moment, in which there was no longer a pale of history into which art belonged (Danto, 1997). This is the world of postmodern art - an eclectic mish-mash of styles all with separate narratives. It is a world that we are still living in - no new modernist artistic narrative has come along, managed to take hold and command the art world as was the case in the early twentieth century.

Totalitarian Capitalism

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguishes totalitarianism form the more familiar forms of tyranny known to us as dictatorships. Totalitarianism is a term reserved for Nazism and Bolshevism, as seen under Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Arendt stresses that totalitarianism is not to be confused with fascism, and points out that the Nazis themselves were keen to distinguish Nazism from fascism, and looked down with contempt on Mussolini's fascist Italy. While dictatorships have often been driven by totalitarian movements, once they acquire power they seize the power structure of the state. By the very maneuver with which they seemingly take on complete control they straight-jacket themselves; dictatorships are characterized by a complete takeover by the state, but also a containment within the state. They satisfy themselves with the bureaucratic confines and enter into a state of equilibrium. The totalitarian drive is extinguished. Conventional dictatorships are not unfamiliar, and while they are oppressive and brutal, the Western world has never been adverse to dealing with them. Operating as they do within the state structure they offer a degree of stability and predictability¹.

Totalitarianism, by contrast, is what happens when the movement is not contented and extinguished by the state but refuses the structure of the state altogether; it occurs when the movement refuses any structure at all.

Limbic Thinking Extended

Previously I articulated some of my thoughts on a concept I termed limbic thinking wherein I opposed the idea of thought being reducible to language or a language-like thing with the notion of language as merely one type of thinking in a landscape of different kinds of thinking, not all of which can necessarily be translated from one into another¹. Here I wish to sketch out some more thoughts and notes on the concept.

Obsessive Materialism in a Virtualising World

An interesting change began to take hold in the tech industry as the iPhone rose to prominence, eventually dominating the landscape and setting the terms for the way we think about communications technology. In truth, it had already begun with the iPod and was part of Apple’s design ethos at least since Steve Jobs returned to the company. This was a focus on the materiality of the device - the device as object: object to behold, object to be held, object to worship.

Reimagining the Green Lantern Corps

With the box-office success of Aquaman, long-gestating projects based on DC properties are sure to be getting a bit of a boost. One such project, a Green Lantern Corps movie, has been in the air but never solidified since the critical and box-office disaster of the 2011 movie starring Ryan Reynolds. However, what I would like to do here is not to propose a set of inane criteria by which Warner Bros. can "do the property right" or pine for a series of doubtless obscure and ultimately juvenile comic pages to come to "life" on the big screen, but instead to formulate a vision by which the formula and indeed the identity of the Green Lantern Corps might be subverted, perverted, and completely reimagined. I want to use the general concepts introduced in the comics as a springboard from which to delve into more interesting themes in greater depth than is offered by the typical superhero comic or blockbuster movie.

Project: Return to 'Return to Sender' Top-Level Image

Previously I posted about the visual development of an image for a small project titled Return to Sender. That post can be found here. Essentially I walked through the various steps I used to make the image (planning, model-making, photography and compositing) and ended with a note that I was somewhat satisfied with the image but considered it not entirely finished. I have since gone back and revised the image, so this post is meant to document those updates.

Warming Up to the Techno-Fix

In a brief but broad discussion in 2015, award-winning science fiction author and literary legend Ursula K. Le Guin decried the absurdity of those who would turn to the techno-fix to combat global climate change (The Nation, 2018). The expression is a common one: technology got us into this mess, now we want to use it to get us out of it?

The trouble is, there simply isn’t any other way to deal with it. Either we face up to our responsibility as the driving system for global climate or we abdicate that role, pretending that our professed ignorance is the same as innocence and being both surprised and resigned to miserable outcomes. It’s a shame about all the displaced peoples in the Third World, we’ll say, but what can we do? And how could we have known? And all that biodiversity rapidly disappearing, at least we were able to preserve most of them as digital recreations inside of simulated realities so future generations can experience them.

Science and Self-Imposed Limits

If science is, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, a language that excludes all teleological vocabulary (Bauman, 1989) - a descriptive technique that avoids purpose or will - then it follows that there are limitations to its reasoning that are built into its interpretive framework. These limits manifest at the innermost and outermost scales - the questions concerning the self and the nature of the universe.

Peak Postmodernity: Peak As in 'Peak Oil'?

The present moment is characterised by peak postmodernity. 'The Death of God', what Nietzsche foresaw as an event that had occurred and yet was still on the way (Roderick, 1991), has come seeping into the culture at large, so that its engulfing damp has become unavoidable. What starts at the boundaries of the organism comes to reside within it, before being incorporated, integrated, and accepted into the body proper. The nihilism that Nietzsche feared as gripping a culture that had begun to realise the 'Death of God' and yet failed to put anything of worth in its place was in full evidence on the Internet 4chan board /b/ and other marginal subcultures that would soon give rise to the alt-right (Nagle, 2017). Within these subcultures nihilism had come to reside as a sort of default, and the appeal of fascist totalitarian solutions began to permeate the consciousnesses of those who feared the spilling out of the attitudes of the Internet onto behaviour in the "real-world".

Ancient Modernity

All my life I've dwelt among the creaking frames of ancient modernity. The world of callous institutional lighting along with the requisite always-flickering-but-never-to-be-replaced fluorescent tubes, paint-slathered brickwork in heavy desperate coats – trying to cover it up… always covering things up – drab brown-brick exteriors and the mediocre monotony of seventh-generation xeroxes of so-called exemplary modern architecture, worn thin by the necessary concessions to cost-consciousness; utopian ideals yoked and made subservient to capital. A world that can only inculcate a vague ambivalence, for feeling too is made hazy and indistinct by the replications of the cultural photoreceptors. A world that is holographic, hollowed out, and made so oblivious by the lobotomization that it cannot comprehend its own irrelevance. A world that can only pantomime to the march of progress in a somnambulant stupor while feasting on the remains of its own rotting flesh.

Don't worry folks, we can make things better, and that's exactly what we are doing and what we're going to do! And don't fret about those ideas floating around in the air, they never happened! We can have it all, we can be modern and anti-modern all the same. No contradiction there, no siree!

Project: Return to Sender "Top-Level" Development

Back in Fall of 2017 I started work on Return to Sender¹. This was to be a very short comic that I would incorporate into a larger set of comics as part of a personal project. I won't go into the details of that project here (perhaps another post), but instead I simply want to detail the development of what I refer to as the "top-level domain" within the comic.

Some background is perhaps in order though. Return to Sender is an idea for a short story I came up with: a visual narrative of a woman coming upon a lab not intended for her eyes, discovering tanks with brains hooked up to computers and having the startling and unnerving realization that if those brains are simulated people then she too might be simulated, and on and on. To illustrate this I intended to depict four different levels of reality: that of the woman, a lab environment above her, an industrial environment above that, and finally a seemingly alien environment as the top-level domain.