I was watching the moon rise the other night over the edge of the highway which is a lot like watching paint dry but it rises instead of falls. Each night the moon gets further and we get older and the clouds get dirtier. But then it rains and rains too much or too little or not at all. What is it like to be alive during the death of an ecosystem, in favor of a cybereco quo— an algorithmically fungible ethos one that favors smart thinking and quick wit, disseminated through the very actors that allow free speech to equal ecologically devastating narratives to permeate as mundane and patient?
What does urgency look like when change occurs both too slowly and not at all? Who are we to become, recognizing ourselves only ever through the gaze of the tools others give us—subscription eyes—a shiny, disproportioned mind/body dualism that serves at its very core an apathetic heart and a subscription to indifference?
In school I remember hearing about a class that took a trip to Italy to learn about slow food. It was an aesthetics class that let you drink.
Today we have slow genocide and a lack of imagination for words that describe Literally Anything Else Other Than What’s Right in Front of Us. What does it mean to notice causal destruction around us? What does it feel like to be on a ship that is much too big for the body of water it is in? (peril)
Right now we are in a mode of ‘aesthetic reordering’ where words become signifiers for telos rather than indications of trust and intent and clarity.
Everything, beginning with the way we speak and see must change in order to reorder.
This ship we are on cannot be restructured, ‘innovated’, bought, accelerated, funded, or repainted any more times in order for us to never ask the question of where we are going in the first place.
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I am striving to document the slow changes that I see around me which turn into faster changes that I can’t. The feeling of the *something speeding up and whooshing past is what I am investigating in order to preserve a sense of ‘what it was like then.’
I am curious what happens when lots of people look up at once and realize that the ship has been docked all along, simulating sailing, emulating voyage, and imitating living.
The different compartments of this ship cannot see one another and everyone speaks different languages and no one has memory of how they got there.
What signs would we use to signal? What keys would we give others to unlock the thousands of doors with no markings? What do we label them? What languages would we create? What words would be new? What room do we put our memories in when nothing can be owned by us? What do keys become when the intent is uncertain? Are we locking or unlocking?
What does it look like? When do we go there? What highway do we take? When do we get to paint?