What if the “errors” or the slight imprecision or misunderstanding that naturally come with translation are actually something precious? A site of potentiality and anarchist thinking. And what if imperfection does not falsify the original text but instead heightens our sense of both the original text and ourselves?
What we call “the future” is too often just a mode already contained in the present. But for us to re-imagine the future we need to first un-imagine it.
Instead of attempting to eliminate artificiality altogether, artists are using it as a vehicle to transform the time-based experience of artificiality into life and reality.
My Newsletter, “Enter the Forest,” is not about trees, though it could be. It’s about stepping into a space where clarity dissolves and plurality emerges.
Here’s the fundamental paradox: authentic workplaces may actually undermine the very community they claim to foster. True community emerges when people actively choose to direct their attention away from themselves and towards each other.
The French anthropologist Marc Augé has coined the modern equivalent of such liminal spaces. “Non-places”, he calls it – defining transient spaces, such as supermarkets, airports, railway stations, or even the interiors of planes and trains. These places lack a sense of identity, history, or enduring relationship.
As a new field, it is exciting to see how regenerative practices are starting to develop as both a philosophical system and a practice in these fields. However, I have also noted a nostalgic, romantic tendency within the regenerative movement – a dream of going back to nature – to restore what never was.
By transcending our immediate, embodied experience, these moments of reflection open up deeper connections – not just to ourselves but to the world around us.
There is a form of performativity that works by a strange kind of hollowing out and dematerializing the object until there is nothing left but the very ephemerality of experience itself.
Today, more so than ever, the analog has a certain allure as a countering of our hyperdigital world. It works and creates meaning in different ways than the instant gratification model of the digital, where speed and the readily availability of the consumer’s every desire seem to be the only governing structure.
Counter-memorials materialize memory as a process rather than in the form of a static historical product. They emphasize abstraction over representation, the memories of victims over the celebration of victories, and instead of venerating official history, they are a forum for subjective engagement with the past.
I saw a disturbing video the other day. It was of a young Turkish female Ph.D.-student, Romeyza Ozturk, surrounded and arrested by masked men claiming to be from ICE, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Her crime, apparently, was that she had written a piece calling for more attention to the Palestinian situation.