[unconditionalstudio]

[lascitasdelashoras]

Kunihiro Amano - Flying Cranes, 1957

[eopederson]

Janela gradeada com veneziana vermelha, Olinda, Pernambuco, 2019.

[philosophybits]

“No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Authorship and Style”, Parerga and Paralipomena

[sacredbathos]

I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me. Thus, at once, we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of “inter-subjectivity”. It is in this world that man has to decide what he is and what others are.

- Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism is a Humanism"

[unconditionalstudio]

[estrellah]

x

[rubypomegranates]

“Books are not meant to remain in your mind, but in your heart. Maybe they exist in your mind too, but as something more than memories. At a crossroads in life, a forgotten sentence or a story from years ago can come back to offer an invisible hand and guide you to a decision. Personally, I feel like the books I've read led me to make the choices I've made in life. While I may not remember all the details, the stories continue to exert a quiet influence on me.”

Hwang Bo-reum “Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop”

[brarchives]

zezé motta by julia acrina

[tridentandtales]

Egyptian amulet with a protective spell against scorpions

Third Intermediate Period, Dynasty 26–30, ca. 1070–332 BCE

Metropolitan Museum of Art 47.105.5

Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen

[floriental]

“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all…I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.”

— Eugène Ionesco, Present-Past Past-Present, ch. 5

[sacredbathos]

‘It was on a dreary night of November…’ The creature comes to life on a page from Mary Shelley’s manuscript of Frankenstein from 1816.

[sacredbathos]

The assumption that literature is what’s trapped between the covers of a book leaves out readers, who in truth co-produce literature through the act of reading. Literature is not words on paper; it is words on paper that are being read by readers. In its most extreme form this meant that it didn’t matter how (and by whom) a text was written; all that mattered was how it was read. The act of reading was everything, and the words written by an author merely an excuse for an act of reading to take place.

[...]

AI is a perfect experiment in reader-response theory. Does it really not matter who (or what) produces a text? Right now, the verdict seems to be that it matters a great deal. The Creative Resistance in particular has everything invested in the difference, and many readers feel cheated when they learn that a text was written by AI. But will this attitude persist? The core insight of reader-response theory helps us phrase this question in a better way: what matters is not the words themselves but how we read them. For AI, this means that the real question isn’t how good AI-produced texts will be but whether readers will continue to read them differently (or not at all).

[...] When faced with AI, I’ve come to see that post-structuralism got something important right, namely that there is nothing natural about language. Language is not some magical capacity that makes us human, but a strange technology that has taken hold of us and changed how we think.

The way Derrida made this argument was seemingly counterintuitive: writing is more fundamental than speech. This claim went in the face of historical evidence that humans had first evolved the ability to speak around 100,000 years ago and then, much later, learned how to capture spoken words through written signs. What bothered Derrida about this story was that it made language seem natural, and writing artificial, when in truth all language was artificial: a thinking tool. The best way of making that point was to show that speech contained traces (an important word for Derrida) of writing, in the sense that it was an artificially created system that operated according to its own rules. This artificiality was easier to see in writing, hence his claim that writing, this overtly artificial technology, revealed something about speech that might otherwise be difficult to see.

- Martin Puchner, "Words, words, words"

[lovefrenchisbetter]

[tobiasforms]

[sacredbathos]

More strange than true: I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

- William Shakespreare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

[ourheatisgospel]