You work in a field that is obsessed with digital. I think probably the pure irrelevance of that medium, when you get down to it, is the reason people are so hellbent on wanting it to matter. It’s almost an inverse. It’s like they’re making cotton candy, yet they’re obsessed with nutrition. ‘It has to have nutrients in it!’ they say, because they know it’s cotton candy. I’m not being dismissive. People freak out when they’re thirty, they freak out when they’re forty, mostly I think people just like to freak out. I guess it’s convention. Convention gives people a sense of comprehension. And people are not at peace with incomprehension. I read an article about a space craft that was tasked with taking photos, I think Carl Sagan was involved. NASA said we’ll only operate this camera until we’re at the edge of the universe. After years and years, when it slipped past the edge of the universe and NASA said let’s cut it off, Sagan lobbied to take one more picture – and it was of the earth. Can you imagine what Earth looked like from outside the universe?
...It was a tiny little dot. And Sagan pointed to this little dot in this vast sea of stars, more than you can imagine, or ever count, and he said, ‘Every idea that any human has ever thought, every fight, every war, everything that has ever occurred, happened there.’ How insignificant, that people would die over property when it doesn’t even rate as a speck in the universe? I appreciate that idea. Because insignificance is liberating. If you stop thinking this is my land, then you’re free. If it’s your land – my property, my concept, my scene, my society – you have to defend it. You’re hamstrung by it.
