The choir of one conducts an archaeological dig of the self.
What else to expect other than massive truth bombs?
The head is the instruments of instruments, yet it can’t outsmart the amygdala. The prehistoric brain fires on all cylinders.
The inner-narrative searches beyond the mask anchoring down any Shakespearean stage.
The ego has the power to build and the power to destroy. Once undone, there are no lily pads to jump to next.
German photographer Andreas Gursky’s photograph “99 Cent II Diptych” (see above) was once the world’s most expensive photo.
In it, the Dusseldorf School photographer stitched together a two-part photograph (also called a ‘diptych’) of a vast but empty grocery store in Los Angeles.
Taking another contemporary digitally manipulated view of everyday objects, Gursky’s “Rhein II” sold for $4.3m at Christie’s New York in 2011 — the image became world’s most expensive photo to sell at an auction.
“I wasn’t interested in an unusual, possibly picturesque view of the Rhine… This view cannot be obtained in situ; a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river,” recounts Andreas Gursky on the work.
However, I still dig the artifice projected in his 2017 high-speed train ride in Tokyo, where he merged multiple photos to give the picture a blurring, hyperreal effect.
Gursky’s “Bahrain I” which reconstructs myriad images of the Bahrain International Circuit racetrack is also one to marvel at — especially for the way its paint-like race-tracks enhance reality.
Regardless of his skill, Gursky tells his students that it’s only because of hours of practice and work that beget his radical intuition.
“People keep trying to find a matrix for the perfect image, but it’s intuition, it’s not something that can be taught.”
Andreas Gursky (via FT)
You can learn more about Gursky’s 2018 exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery in the video below or right here.
The revolution is in consciousness — passing and going into aliveness with a jolt of caffeine.
We can fool the brain into thinking that we’re more jazzed up than we are.
But one’s attitude and perspective don’t change overnight. We grow into ruthlessness through restlessness.
The audacity of hope is an oddball talent.
We once looked to religion to save the world. Now, we look at a few individuals who take big chances.
Entrepreneurs want to be gods.
Elon Musk basks in the simulated world’s glory, where he exploits his mental software to rewire predestined code. Always in overdrive, Musk creates endless opportunities to break the mold.
We can control our destiny if we’re crazy enough to believe it.
We paint from what life gives us. We are the sum total of our experience.
But how often do we underthink our motivation and overthink action? Sometimes, it makes sense to think big and pull the life out of ourselves.
The doer is a different breed. Dreams are meant to be followed, broken, failed at, and remixed.
There’s nothing more disruptive than someone chasing a so-called “pipe dream” with consistency and patience.
Why is the inner-critic so afraid to break the shackles and live up to their best?
To doubt is to do — doing is a way of building up courage and establishing narratives.
With both currents and counter-currents, the sea fits tightly. The chaos is why it works.
The same complex, close-meshed holes occur in just about every advanced, self-persisting object.
The brain is plastic and thereby adaptable, as is the plurality of cultures that melt away into the American identity. New York City learns to relearn every day, making perpetual change a haven of bliss.
When differences bind together, they create new entities. Friction is the original instigator.
Oceans, minds, culture, cities— the graduations of failure grow on top of each other in anti-fragile increments, using a state of regeneration to stem the tide of inertia.
Devoid of context, an abstraction so genuine it steers clear the badge of authenticity.
We, meaning-seeking creatures are lost in the dizziness of freedom. We follow an inner narrative only to see it conflict with the ideal stories we tell ourselves.
Dreams are saturated with misleading formulas that destabilize our consciousness. The truth lies between the lines, soaking in the gray space.
We may drink it black or flatten it with white, knowing all along that the coffee is the mere vehicle for imbibing caffeine’s truth serum.
Awake, finally embracing the certainty of being forever lost. We gag on two sips of Americano and spit anxiety back out again.
You bought the new notebook, snagged a new pen, and listened to a motivational podcast. You’re ready to do the work!
But two things happen as you start:
1 – You freeze. The thoughts in your head never make it to the tip of the pen. Your brain trips up on its wiring of ideas. Warning!
2 – You get going but know that what’s splurging on paper is crap. You’re producing sheets of melting ice. The writing is ugly, an explosion of everything at once. Such cacophony melts your heart, deadens your spirit.
The urge to quit and give in to the resistance is what smothers dreams. Goal-setting often backlashes when you set the bar too high.
Systems are more powerful than fears because discipline always overrides motivation.
The real work happens when you sit your ass down at the desk for half an hour and write hundreds of words regardless of the outcome. After all, the more you make, the more you have to play with.
Writes James Clear in “The case for having no goals in your life:”
“Goals are good for planning your progress and systems are good for actually making progress.”
James Clear
It takes a long time to strike the chord you seek. The rest of the time you’re practicing with the intent to nail it down. All writing is in the edit.
Even poor sentences give you fresh ideas and force you into new territories. Writing, as in all creation, requires both patience and persistence to push the wastewater through the shoddy pipes. Here’s how to tap into the creativity faucet.
The muse only works in your favor if you’re willing to be consistent and put in the work. “Remember our rule of thumb,” writes Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, “The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
The rest — the Moleskine notebook, the perfect pen, the dreamy goal — are excuses that trip you up.
The cement of society amounts to a thin place that refuses to be exploited and homogenized.
The world is flat once again, as nation-states, cities, and towns have gone back to their most nativistic urges.
Globalization was never ruthless enough, spread unevenly amid the digital divide, and invariably vulnerable to the power-hungry few.
The market shifts back to impulse over cooperation, as people gravitate inwards and head onwards into deeper provincialism.
The only penetrating force — Amazon Prime — brings the people to their doorsteps.
Once dormant, the balance of power re-emerges to run the show.
God, the great fashioner designer in the sky, weeps below at the unintelligent design.
Algorithms and artificial intelligence — human products — jam the world of competence and comprehension.
The past is as present as the future, with those ignorant of history daring to repeat it.
Relaxation is an art, antithesis to our ‘always on’ culture.
But it takes work to do nothing. Those tiny hits of dopamine are addictive.
The route to super-consciousness is paved with roadblocks, the least bit unplugging from the maelstrom of 24/7 news and unnecessary push messages.
Chasing the rectangular glow for entertainment produces intense cognitive clutter. All the engagement makes us less happy in the end.
Distracted into busyness, we begin to decay into inanition. We miss the events unfolding in our day, permitting evil to spread as a consequence of blindness.
When we’re interacting in excess, we miss out on recharging and thinking. Disconnection is the only way to put the mind back into the mix.
The goal is not just to relax, per se, but to be free from collecting screen souvenirs. What we want to strive for is long-term serotonin.
We fight for the present to turn idleness into concurrent exploration. Time ticks to the clock as the mind does to the brain. Breathe and stop, we can stave off the ludic loop.
Surrounded by accelerated context, moments of silence seem to be the only way to make anything click.
Abstract thinking strings together collisions of thought, producing ever-more complexity or the deepest simplicity.
Tinkering with possibilities makes everything strange, at least at first. But that’s yesterday’s genius.
Today and tomorrow, we’ll mill around some more, waiting for the most certain idea. Even the subconscious doesn’t give time off for the brain to relax.
Said one, “If a mind was so simple we could understand it, we’d be too simple to understand the mind.”
Crunching it all down to the essence, we complicate nothing. We’re always left circling the strange, left with more questions than answers.