Posts (148)

I finally realized that the place that I keep coming back to in my dreams is called Antananarivo

Some animals use motion parallax, in which the animals (or just the head) move to gain different viewpoints. For example, pigeons (whose eyes do not have overlapping fields of view and thus cannot use stereopsis) bob their heads up and down to see depth.

Thanks for a great evening and for showing me that incredible pond full of flowers @hirootas

The iphone makes things look a certain kind of way. Nepal is the third poorest country in Asia. It is a landlocked country held at the mercy of India for most of it�s resources. It was devestated by the earthquake in 2015. There are frequent power outages throughout the country because there is only one hydro-electric plant, which is poorly distributed. Access to clean water is not a small problem. Roads are mostly dirt. There�s such a bad dust problem that often you can not see when walking down the road. The top export is hand crafts. Nepal is the largest producer of metal buddah statues, purchased frequently by other asian countires. Infastructure is scarce and foreign aid frequently does not go back to the people of the country. NGOs, while good in intention usually only send people out to the countryside to do educational workshops for village people, a kind of glorified tourism for foreign students and people looking for a way to travel with good conscious. The cities are underserved. Im just a tourist here, but you can�t be here and not think about this seriously, when the tourist industry is one of the things that sustains the economy but the lives of those coming to see the mountains could not be further apart. While it might not seem like much, rebar is a major advancement in building construction to prevent some of the catastrophic damage as was experienced in the last earthquake. Something we�re accustomed to seeing in hardware stores and take for granted. For the past five to six years I�ve been photographing human scale architecture and businesses in the extra-urban and suburban landscapes of some of the worlds developing regions. I grew up in one of the poorest areas of the US, a troubled landscape riddled with political and environmental complexities because of it�s lack of access to basic infrastructure and the politics of big coal. By photographing in these places I�ve been attempting to connect back to my own experience and to show, often unpleasant, connections the majority of people on the planet share in their material experience of contemporary life on the planet.

I�ve been generally discouraged and dismayed at the expression of the tourist industry in Nepal. There is clearly a great need for the influx of money coming from tourists, but it�s hard to swallow the ways that this money cycles back into the accommodations and comforts of those travelling here despite the fact that the rest of the country feels a severe lack. In the mountains where tourists trek, there is crystal blue water, but in the cities there is no infrastructure to distribute water at all, except for tankers that carry clean water like fire trucks. Water is inaccessible except to those few small communities who live in higher elevations and those who pay exorbitant prices to hike along side it. Trails are trashed with litter, especially water bottles, because tourists need certain conveniences to be brought into the mountains whose packaging can not be brought back out easily and where there is no clear structures to deal with it. But this is not a Nepali problem to solve when the concerns of day to day survival take priority. Worst of all however is the fact that, in a return to 19th century British India, westerners pay porters often as little as $10 a day to carry their luggage up into the mountains for them so they can walk unencumbered. Nepalis, among those from Bangladesh, Malaysia, and the Philippines, are some of the most exploited workers around the world. In Qatar and Saudi Arabia they are often held in conditions that match modern day slavery, yet in their own country westerns walk along beside them, smiling, while paying them per day less than what they would pay for a sandwich at home to carry sometimes as much as 30kg on their backs. Colonialism exported to a personal scale of consumption. Several Nepalis have told me that tourists are Gods, and every time I hear this it fills me with some kind of rage.

What�s mind blowing when considering the time I�ve spent in Shenzhen over the last eight years is seeing a city evolve at breakneck speed. It�s been like witnessing microbes multiply in real time under a microscope. The intensity of this speed seems to have gone from unhinged to surgically precise. The first time I came to Shenzhen and went out from the factory I was working at, I remember taking a taxi and driving head on, at high speed, into oncoming traffic on a highway to avoid congestion on our road. Now walking along newly polished and pristine sidewalks, it�s hard to imagine a more well tempered environment. I can only imagine what it�s been like for those who live here.

How firmly we hold on to how little we know

Why walk through the valley of the shadow of death when you can stroll through the spiritual gully

Knowing how far the stone for the Taj Mahal had to be carried and thinking of the people that had to do the work makes you wonder...

A few of the last remaining original structures from Charles Correa�s Belapur Incremental Housing project

Looking back at the end of these last few weeks, having gone from one full moon to the next, I�ve travelled through four countries each at different stages of industrial development. From the earliest stages of development in Bangladesh - where there is very little public infrastructure and where factories are mostly producing basic raw materials and ready-made garments - to the highly advanced and refined industrial processes of Thailand, producing specialized products such as car parts, petrochemicals, plastics, and refined oil, and where public infrastructure matches any other developed economy: I�ve witnessed in a short period of time what it looks like to compete in the global market. While most of the pictures I�ve been posting have been things I�ve seen in passing, or on my few breaks from the road, I�ve spent the past month roaming everyday through some of the most unbelievable, but deeply toxic, industrial landscapes on the outskirts of some of the worlds largest cities. Industry, especially in it�s crudest forms, is palpable in the air and in the throat, and it�s harrowing to see how interwoven humanity is with that reality in large parts of the world. I had experienced these landscapes for work over many years in both Europe and China, but I never saw more than what could be seen during a walk to have lunch or dinner. As in past experiences working in factories though, I�ve been touched over and over again by the incredible persistence, enthusiasm, and good will of the people I�ve met along the way, and in this case, those that live on the outskirts of what could so easily be called a waste land, but which, in reality, is home. I�ve been so deeply fortunate to have had this opportunity to see so closely and to get to know all the people that have opened up their homes, or their factories, to someone who was just passing through for no other reason but to see what it was like there. It was the interactions with everyone I met that brought life to a world that, from the outside, could have seemed dim. My only regret is that I could not have stayed a little longer, to get to know everyone a little better, but somehow I know we will meet again.

hanging with the best of them in Hunan @infoandupdates @uj3rk55

the pacific of the heart is the pacific of the mind

From Henan to Haryana to the Himalayas, I�ve been beyond fortunate to get around in the last two years to witness the world we live in, in all of its dirt, spit, blood, shit, and splendor. I�m thankful everyday for having had the opportunity to see what it�s like when the veil is lifted. I hope that all of those who are pushing through the most difficult work in the most difficult times know that this work, that stays true to the condition of our planet and looks at suffering and the danger of human violence and aggression squarely, as an embodied reality that we can not be afraid of or hide from, will keep able bodies afloat. The world is truly devastating, but sometimes, in that weird morning light, quite beautiful. And it�s important to know, through it all, there�s reason to be together.

Time stands still on a sunless day; at one time this was the largest sun dial in the world

In the mid 19th century missionaries in Hawaii were in the process of banning traditional Hawaiian cultural practices, and surfing, which has long roots in Polynesia, was seen as frivolous and something to be discouraged. It was tourists of the late 19th century, mariners, merchant marines, and writers, that became interested in surfing, watching from the beaches of Waikiki and learning from locals in the years just before the overthrow of the Hawaiian queen and the annexation of the kingdom as an American colonial possession, the same decade that saw the colonization of the Philippines and US expansion into the Pacific. It was ironic that as the colonial missionaries hallowed out surfing of its Hawaiian roots, some young Anglo-European boys would begin turning it into a sport that would later become a multi-million dollar industry and a symbol of mid-century American cool, the culture of Warhol and Ruscha, the Beach Boys and LA. And as the endless summer goes on, the grandsons and great grandsons of those missionaries continue colonizing coasts around the world with surf camps and an occupying culture that was never really their own and that reproduces the disconnect of their colonial family histories. The missionary families of Hawaii would go on to become the largest sugar producers of the islands, running, before the inclusion of Hawaii into US statehood, a monopoly on trade and the governance of the islands, creating a de facto capitalist monopoly state. These same families after becoming a state would be responsible for the development of Waikiki into a tourist resort, turning occupied land that had been taken from the kingdom into the surf, sand, and sun that shapes what people think of when they think of Hawaii today. And as the sugar monopoly started ending in the 80s, the tourism monopoly began. The waves may be endless, and surfing is something else now, but the culture was always a figment of the tourists imagination, disconnected from the reality of what made possible that culture in the first place. The American psyche rests too often in the same pools.

There never was any kind of economy that was not based on human relations of the most immediate kind. Determinations of social groups, of the relations of production, who is within and who is without. The status of the individual within the community, the exclusion, the inclusion, is always a process of making and breaking bonds. Before all else there is this sense of alienation, not from the commodity form, or the fetish of consumption, but the alienation between our day to day lives and those around us who make these determinations and the idea of Economy, as an abstraction of those with Power and those without. There is always before all else a web of power relations that begins with you and the small group of those around you who determine where you will go and what you will do and be. The alienation that we most often feel, or at least that I most often feel, is from this disconnect between the effort exerted and the idea of effort at all. One makes an effort so that an abstract determination of value can be made by those around them on the merit or worth of such effort. As if there was a �real� value marker which would allow us to make the determination, yes this is deserving, no this is not deserving. There are no class relations that are not tied up in status relations. There is no �making it� without that set of forces that drive an individual into the social setting in which such power can be put in motion. There is no class position that is not deluded with the idea that there is a small subset of people that have determined the social hierarchy. There was always before all else individuals beholden to their immediate environments of social interaction which have placed limits on who and where movement is allowed. There is nothing abstract that sets value, there is only the petty whims that desperately move us to hold onto our position within a web of social meaning. We could let go�

For the last eight years I�ve been working on a long term research project attempting to connect the threads of what we have come to call the �global economy�. Over countless trips I�ve attempted to observe in some small ways the material manifestations of the productive and financial networks that have been dispersed across deeply uneven and disparate geographies. The project began with walks around factory towns in South China and Italy where I was working, but it lead me to take walks much further afield: around the garment factories of Dhaka, industrial districts outside Mumbai, ex-sugar company housing in Hawaii, coal mines in Appalachia, the periphery of Silicon Valley, the ports of Jakarta, and to central business districts, luxury housing developments, and speculative real estate projects everywhere I go. Part of the �project� has always been a personal process, a kind of exorcism of the abstraction of economic forces in my own life, a reanimation of the world of things that circulate and enter our days when all economic experience in the 21st century remains alienated, abstract, and elusive. The horror of that alienation for me is that in a moment when the making of personal meaning is fused with the circulation of images themselves, the image as commodity and value, that we are constantly reanimated by the ghost that we are trying to escape. Walking into this world that is deeply divided between the forces of production and consumption is in some small way to try to make sense of how the worlds that we live in can come to be. But more importantly how do we think about the inequalities of both material life and perception that emerge in the chasm between experience unless we prioritize this as inexorably a part of the political process. How we perceive and represent world process matters now more than ever.

Might one resist giving architects their images when the insistence on the experience of form in the 21st century is tied to a public space of pure display, where the flow of spaces that are open and easy are only a reaffirmation of the flows of capital that remain as zones of exception for a decaying planet. What is the responsibility of the architect to this division of space in this casual construction of orgasmic materiality?and can we really trust that the abstract building can represent anything more than the reinforcement of the forgetting of difference implicit to the flows of neoliberal construction? How could we have come to fetishize shape, and in turn art, so intensely and passionately? Apartments called� Miro, Pissarro, Dali should be taken more seriously for exactly what they are

What�s strange is that in a country that operates on the abstract concept of markets, very few markets exist that actually allow for individuals to buy at the lowest prices or to negotiate, at least in the way that Adam Smith theorized. Markets, where they do exist are often limited or mapped onto to a particular class experience everywhere except with the exception of Los Angeles and New York. The US operates in ways closer to the soviet command economy, where economic planning is highly centralized and consumers have limited access to and engagement with competition. It�s of course most unsettling hearing those on the right drumming up red scare tactics in relation to progressive policies when in fact the status quo is anything but a free market for anything. Imported electric bikes for example were shut out of the US market early on due to �concerns over safety�, which in reality meant that a market had to first be established at the right price point for the bikes and under the �correct� manufacturing conditions. Which is to say that they needed to be marketed to middle class shopper that would be willing to pay more substantial prices than the $400 bikes that were being used by delivery drivers and imported from China. Electric bikes generally sell on average for a few thousand dollars now, a niche product that does not open up transportation options for those with less money to spend despite the possibility otherwise. But, in any case, I prefer chiles.

Though they are nearly 10,000 miles apart, and the height of the classical period of Mayan culture was almost 1000 years before that of Ayutthaya, as I meander to consider the spectacle of ruins I can�t help but think of Jit Poumisak, the Thai Marxist historian and once exile, wondering if the Mayans have their Poumisak? and wondering why the experience of history has been reduced to such monumental obsession with the display of power and its subsequent demise. Poumisak was radical for rethinking the long history of subjugation in traditional forms of Thai power that fell outside the tidy framework of European civilizational and technological developmental narratives, and I have to wonder if one might think with him in order to rethink how we approach and represent the �ancient�.

You can remain in the city, but you are dead to us

Views from the valley - thanks for the art historical reference @stellamaris87

On the afternoon of my thirtieth birthday I broke down. By this I do not mean to say that I had an anxiety attack or experienced the wavering thoughts that can overwhelm one in moments of doubt, I mean that I experienced a rupture that tore apart every thread holding together my sanity and any vaguely clear sense of an integrated self. I fell to the ground hyperventilating and seemingly screaming, though this I do not recall. Tearing myself away from the afternoon light of my kitchen floor I would spent much of the rest of the afternoon lying terrified under a park bench by the east river crying. And the crying would not stop. For several years. The tears would flow endlessly, day after day, seemingly at random at the sound of a voice on the subway, the way that someone would look at me on the street, in the middle of a restaurant at lunch time crowded with people. I would cry at the news. I would sit on other park benches and cry for the birds. I cried until some people finally convinced me that the time had come that it must end. And then when it stopped, I flew away. It has been four years since last I cried in that daily way that had become my habit, and I�ve cried only twice since then. Once during the crisis in Palestine in 2021, which was too much to bear, and recently upon hearing the news that a friend who is far too young faces the uncertainty of being terminally ill. Disclosure has become part and parcel of the politics of the mediated self, thrown into motion for the sake of social accumulation and relatable content. Of course empathy at times, community at others. Disclosure and non-disclosure the rhetorical point between the virtual and real. The boundaries of the private and the threshold of the self. And yet as I go back to those years in which my self had no real inside or outside, where the outside and others seemed to swirl in me with the intensity of the last song that would ever be sung on planet earth, such boundaries only bring to mind the ruins of the mind that wants to hold on. The spaces where one confronts not what has passed but what has transformed through its very uncertainty. Where boundaries themselves fall into ruin.

One valley to the next (the newish Mexico City cable car system was modeled on this one in Medell�n, the first urban mass transit cable car system in the world)

Final port of call. In August of 2017, after several years battling the most intense mental illness, loosing significant means of income, committing a kind of social suicide that I still feel great remorse for, and undermining every new relationship I found, I downsized my life significantly, sold or gave away many of my things, and began a long trip around the world to come to terms with some thing about being in and of this world that I could not make sense of from my limited position in New York. What started as a way of getting to know the present, in its economic and social reality, through visiting factory zones, ports, urban auto-constructions, architectures of infrastructure, and the ecologies that merge disparate corners of the world into a fabric of consumer alienation and environmental rupture, transcended into something more personal and disassociating with this place we call home. Throughout the past five years I�ve returned regularly to Candide, who was chiseled away by the horrors of the inquisition and spanish empire, looses faith completely in the �best of all possible worlds�, yet looses faith as a way of coming back to the necessity of tending to one�s small corner of the world. There is no need to think through the duality of optimism-pessimism as it is presented, what is is, and what we can do is only proceed. What I mean to say by this though is that I�m happy to be finally closing this stage of my life. Ending these trips, as such, for now, to be more settled, stable, and devoted to a different kind of being-in and of the world. It has been incredible, but starting this next chapter, I think daily of what it means to be grounded and no longer moving out towards the sea�

I�ve come to embrace the labor time of social media as meaningful labor in the end, though maybe not socially necessary, labor that can be embraced as a daily profession with enough enthusiasm to not feel physically exhausted by it. In tandem, I�ve wondered about the pastoralism in the figures of nature and home in long standing representational strategies tied to utopian communalism which equally and often acts as the basis of social medias domestic productions and reproductions. Why have proto-socialist arts and crafts aesthetics and Robert Owensesque desires for a productive retreat from capitalist totalizing (aesthetic) experience often resulted in an attempt to make the labor space of the socialized screen more familiar to life and not more deliberately distant? What of this utopian pastoralism in its relation to the labor of the screen? And the embrace of the cottage industry/cottage as the bastion of comfort in a sphere of total domestic labor time of the pocket phone? Grazing over the platform commons

Touch grass so they say. Is the domestic and natural landscape photograph on social media the ultimate defense mechanism or a regressive tendency in the psychologically commodified world of user-data, like and subscribe capitalism?

From Northern renaissance to Dutch disease (Groningen natural gas driven inflation and subsequent state led economic restructuring programs)

Clear cut future. Having spent the better part of my adult life working in book printing for artists and art publishers, my attention has shifted to the ebbs and flows of global networks of material exchange connected to the industrial nature of art production. I�ve passed through a circuitous route from the macro-economic flows shaping life and its varied forms outside the factory compound walls to the natural states where material commodity exchanges are derived and from which all industry begins. In Portugal the government has been actively transferring its forest management to a monoculture of Eucalyptus specifically to be used in the paper pulp trade. The monoculture of the gum tree, native to Australia, puts strain on other plant species from overcrowding and over harvested forests. The plant consumes much higher quantities of water relative to other local species, but it is a quickly regenerative tree that once felled can be grown for pulp again within nine years. The inversion of this �sustainable� practice as the paper industry would have it has lead to intensive drought and land clearing for said purpose, coinciding with a general trend in Europe and globally of younger generations moving from the countryside to the neoliberal urban hubs that have defined 21st century cosmopolitan culture. The depopulation of the countryside and a lack of forest management in its wake, combined with drought and a general tendency towards less biodiversity in said forests, has made this landscape ripe for wild fires, and wild they are� Rural politics is the politics of our era when climate change and urban existences tend to ignore the long arc of such embedded problems, having focused instead on generic impulses towards cultivating a techno-cultural environment that is disconnected from the materials and people which support it. Or alternatively fetishizing the hyper local utopian communal impulse of geodesic domes and hippie modernism. Meanwhile artists and designers obsess over the perfect paper for their publication from day to day lest it not seem quite good enough� the start of another long term set of questions� the forests for the pulp, the pulping for the trees

Can one be a photographer without owning a piece of equipment? Having sold my cameras to pay rent, I wonder about the relationship between object and identity. Or separately, is there reason to make pictures that remain outside the techno-teleology of the narrative of medium? Should I have to argue my case for being a lazy photographer when the choices are political, deliberate, circumstantial? Relatedly I thought I might write about the relationship between personal finance, subjectivity, and the macro-political/economic issues that become the objective substance of discourse in politics. Having grown up with a single working mother in southern Appalachia, who was doing battle as a social worker in the context of an economically depressed region facing opioid and meth epidemics throughout my teenage years, and who raised two children on a salary approximating minimum wage, I became accustom to the emotional crisis of social stress and barely having enough to get by. I grew up in a small enough environment, with enough stable people around me, that I was well supported in my life, and with extended family that helped me in large ways. But the crisis of the intimate sphere of the home never leaves, the panic at every wrong move and the worry about whether things will work out that was my mothers life. How can you be easy going about social relations, about staying calm in the face of pressure, about getting on well with middle class pictures that you are expected to be working towards when the emotional tools needed for success were never so forthcoming. You can play, but in the end one feels isolated. And even more so when the environment you come from, and those who had similar experiences of stress in the place that you�re from, take up fascist causes, doubled down on bigotry and racism, become the negative inheritors of a future that they feel resentful for because they thought that their situation, depressed, would improve. And so the more alienated you become from where you came, the harder you turn away and never want to return. A little embittered knowing it didn�t have to be that way but nothing can change the past� these are throwaway pictures

Excited to have just received a generous Dutch creative industries fund grant to develop a project combining environmental data and ambient monitoring with new technologies in computational photography to experiment with tools and systems for practicing landscape photography today. Also excited to be wrapping up nearly eight years of photography and research work with a first book that will be released later this year and an exhibition and public programming to follow in the next� #taxseason

A weak spirit is better than the arrogance of knowing too much

Being an artist was always a way of escaping the pain of growing up in a small town and going through the process of downward mobility and the judgement and isolation that one feels in being told what you are, rather than being able to be what you are. There was nothing that was not ever exhausting about this experience of watching my mother lose self respect and to desperately hope that I might, if nothing else, get a job delivering packages for UPS because they had good benefits and a dental plan. To go from the ambition to see your children succeed to hoping they will find a way to make a modest income was a devastating and exhausting process to rebel against. And was becoming an artist even a resistance? I can�t be sure what it was I even appreciated in art, but I liked the cool nights and feeling like I was walking around unattached to everything that ailed me� that detachment an ode to public space�

Blocked in Amsterdam, round heads, caning and reds, replacing tea pots and beds

At some point realism becomes far too boring to continue

From the handmade to mechanical reproduction, and the small inventions in between

My monthly expenses: Student loans: $700 Storage unit: $250 Credit card 1: $400 Credit card 2: $200 Credit card 3: $75 Personal loan: $100 US Phone number: $30 EU Phone number: �20 Adobe products: $30 Dropbox: $20 Rent: �900 Food: �800-1000 Extra: ? Taxes: TBD Can there be any radical politics without openly discussing the invisible forces that shape us? And the psychological disposition necessary to different forms of survival necessary under late capitalism? What do the backends of our lives look like that everyone is so careful not to expose? For risk of being judged under neoliberal economic thinking as having a failure of character? Of having �done it to ourselves�. If we think of personal finance as a collective responsibility, and could be open about it, without fear of comparison of circumstances, and the wasted time in guilt of having more or having less, maybe the narrative would also have to change. I fail to improve my circumstances in this economic moment, in spite of real effort, but not everyone knows the pressure of this situation well. I�m certainly not special in having to work too much to survive, but where does one find the time for reflection and substantive work under such conditions? What does it take not to have to fight everyone to pay a fair amount to cover the bases and not be tied down to the new feudal state? The last three years I�ve made less than $25k per year, and relied on loans and credit cards to make up the difference. This does not make me special, but it says a lot about the institutional-financial precarity of making the choice to be an artist. And the further pressure of being pushed under subjugation of the bank to potentially be forced to give it up, to generate other values. Art and cultural institutions make claim to social equity and support of social causes, but at the end of the day financial decisions outweigh all others, at the detriment of everyone else, only then not even to pay their bills on time. After spending months researching small indigenous owned printers for a client, rather than just finding the money to support a community decidedly underserved, I was told it cost too much�

When I was 17 I lived in Belgium, and speaking very little french I learned to spend time alone. In a kind of wandering introspection, but wet, I rode my bike between Walloon cities; the feeling almost gone. At present I�m subsumed by hours looking at my phone, traveling between cities. I would have hated myself now. Never coming back to the solitude possible before it felt old. Bad pictures still make bad poems, but at least it was fine to waste time and be slow.

I remember my mother, in her persuasions and fear, encouraging me for years to get a job at FedEx, for the benefits and retirement. She imagined I could drive trucks and work my way to the office job. In the end, I still learned my protestant work ethic; from a corporate one hour photo lab where volume and speed were important. I remember color correcting for too long some more beautiful negatives and being exiled to run the cash register. I got good at selling cameras on promotion, because that was what paid, and I liked at least observing how much trust was involved and abused there. Now, I can not easily think of being an artist. Separating myself from my work as work first. I�m paid to work in art producing factories, not mystified by some nicer end value of the spirit, but more mystified by business management and time. So I feel I must always treat my own work as the work of another. The tension of being both at once, productive, a necessary struggle with confronting time. Can I keep working for this client, myself, who does not pay? Yet I keep adding work into a list of tasks, competing with other clients� work who I know will give more, and who demand my attention in a more satisfying way. That feeling of being needed and knowing the rules because they�re contractually obliged. I feel more comfortable this way, knowing I will be paid back in the end, having lost the precarious uncertainty that most of us desperately try to keep at bay. Or toy with when the consequences are less risky, and the fun of playing with a system is not too great. Or then truly rebel against when the suffering is too great. To justify working for yourself under such conditions is our moment. Here though, the possibility that work can be reclaimed, only made precarious by deregulated labor and gig work. In some productive tension, I think with the worker, yet the ghost figure dithered into a falsely imagined past. There is no such thing as autonomy here, freedom only means not having to worry about paying the bills or bodily harm. Of course it�s heavy handed, but absurd is it not� thrown into a lifeworld that both contains us and promises freedom on the back side of the same coin

b-sides are generally more fun; the context of labor in Europe, labor in the US, and labor elsewhere all has it�s own character and history, the rawness of the dying figure of the bastard pioneer industrial workman of the US just makes less sense in Europe where labor laws are tighter but where efficiency of work is more closely tied into the psychology of education and class division is more structurally defined, how to think with the social context of what�s made more productively?

What I mean to say is, it�s exhausting playing so many roles

I can�t help but feel I become more and more arrogant as I get older, not out of that unbearably certainty of rightness and righteousness that comes from believing oneself to have the correct position that makes many a man insufferable, but rather a wall, covering what�s underneath a long and painful exposure to being too emotionally sensitive to the world and getting more and more pissed off, to people�s constant dominance over their peers and their colleagues, backstabbing and clambering to be on top, in the smallest of situations where this kind of thinking corrupts into war, not having been given the tools to stand in face of it and know what to do. At some point you throw up defenses and say, I won�t take this anymore. Arrogant, still. In a world like we live in, isn�t it a bad look to play power games and be too concerned with individual success when usually it means one upping your friends and ignoring the constant subtle violence of everyday life?

I started posting here on an earlier trip to Amsterdam in 2017 as a way to document some years of itinerant trips following the bylines of a naive idea about what it�s like to live in one of many possible worlds. It�s been a bit exhausting, and exhausted, the false starts and failures we all face, usually ending in some kind of disappointment rather than an overarching joy. Largely just because it�s hard to come to grips without a solid physical place to hold on. I thought I would try to write something nice, a summation of a set of chance encounters, that would otherwise be inspiring, a kind of feel good story, because feeling good should be something we at least strive towards under the weight of present life. But really I�m writing this just to say thank you to everyone who has helped me out in some form along the way. Finding me rooms and apartments. Finding me work when I�ve been desperate. Giving a little bit of help when it was needed. My cynicism and negativity can be exhausting, I know, but I�m grateful. Next year I�m stopping taking photographs all together, too exhausted by imagery, to focus energy on organizing some public talks and events in Europe, a new life to engage with the political present more directly and to push against my reserved personality, and as a way of getting out rather than rambling on about inequities of life and material conditions as a proxy for processing the grief that comes from many forms of personal loss. In the meantime, a book of photographs and writing from these intertwining trips will be released sometime soon enough, as a kind of work day song to sing along with the labor that goes into all the mental-material production of 21st century life, the environmental windfalls of late capitalism, and the reproductions upon reproductions of world making orders that require us to pull and push against in trying to stay alive. Thanks @roma.publications for one last post

Try not to pay attention to the city in order to see the city, you can follow the water instead

Sorry to everyone I�ve ever been difficult to be around; sometimes you have to pack up and say goodbye

In the end attention wanes, a bit too many shrugs to shrug off

Notes on work: brand ambassadors ratcheting experience and uploading exquisite value beyond the strata of top shelf luxury products delivered to the highest position on the platform�s aesthetic market belies in language the turmoil in the disassociation between an outer silence and an neurotic inner world

Beating the war drums, driving development, the conservative avant garde in architecture fading into the background of oil investment, quiet riots, Kent State 2.0, suburban silence, the severity of stable comforts with time to reflect on �things as they are�, pointless buildings and military marching bands in their sordid opulence, with graffiti the only thing in the way

My grandmother was from Latvia, and as time goes on, I feel a sense of regret or remorse or longing that I will never have children, but it�s a feeling more like the feeling of having woken up from a long night of sleep. I see friends whose lives are more stable, who have the resources to take care of a child, making this a decision they live by, but I can�t help but feel it would be impossibly negligent to bring a child into the world to struggle with my lack of financial stability. Yet, still, so many do it. Elsewhere at present so many children are barely holding on, to no fault of their parents and of their new lives, but out of sheer and utter violence. The kind that drove my grandmother away from Latvia when she was 3. The paradox of having long passed the age when my parents had me, is that I wonder if I still have family here.

Marsh village. Soviet panel housing built for large scale immigration to Riga between the 1960s and 80s, largely from outside Latvia to service soviet industry. High rise, low rise, mid-rise and a beautifully stereotypical brutalist shopping center playing the hits. A bit of spring in the air

Is it not the same, the meticulous development of the image, like the contruction industry, striving for perfect surfaces through which the development of value can take place. In construction, vast projects of speculation is driven by cronyism and oligarchic former rulers, having moved out of governance into the profit shares of vast new apartment complexes, then put into private markets for mortgages to be traded and value extracted in rent shares, where previously there had been none. The developers all having left the country ages ago. Photography, elsewhere, acting on these surfaces, exists in the practice of development.

Endless displacements and deferrals, in the background a complicated and conflicted ground. It seems rather pointless to consider paintings from this vantage point, how can I blindly act like I can visit these sights, yet still there�s some space to breathe

Armenia reminds me most of Nepal. Both landlocked countries, wedged between power conflicts, borders closed capriciously, controlling the flow of goods and the position of the government towards those surrounding powers. Realpolitik by instrastructural blockade. Everything is too expensive, nothing is quite ever in enough supply. Nothing notable to export. Migrant work in the diaspora is one of the largest sources of income, more people working out of the country than in. In this case, hemmed in after the collapse of the soviet union with no recourse

Let's say Istanbul isn't the gateway between Europe and Asia, but a guardian city on the Bosphorus allowing passage between the Mediterranean into the Black sea, a place for ship watching. I think of Roger Fenton's photographs of the Crimean war, and the Crimea of 2014

Since I left Yerevan my phone has been broken, my instruments stolen, and I have no longer been able to post pictures from my phone. I will try to reconstruct events in the reverse, a crime novel with no crime, a spy novel with no spy.

The first time I was in Istanbul was in 2013 and the Gezi park protests had just begun, were escalating, later to reach a peak and turning point, into the present. The protests, if anyone remembers, were started in counter to the proposal to develop Gezi park as a shopping mall. A development theory of images. Over ten years later it is not so shocking to see how development projects linked with state led gentrification at a massive scale have taken over the city, but how many have had to fight to keep their homes or their sanity. How developers have and are waging a war not just for city centers, but for regional development, a story to put people into the speculation of apartment complexes, and a more perverse speculation. Maybe this is the geopolitics of what one calls home. This was only months before the Euromaiden protests took over Kyiv, the subsequent invasion of Crimea, the gradual restructuring of a region for what end, the instability of Europe beginning in 2013. On my way back to Amsterdam, I think of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, and that particular arc and trajectory of geographies, having just been to Tbilisi, where, there, in a moment reminiscent of Hong Kong in the fall of 2014, the pressures of these arcs spill over. And yet, forgetting all this recent history to the news cycle, always forgetting, I wonder while in Istanbul, why the Ottoman Empire and it's trajectory into WWI has been written out of European history... as if it were an afterthought, as if what is happening now within that empire, were divorced from such long arcs. Cycladic thoughts, Homer, the Odyssey. I leave it all loose, with tail ends that don't tell the story. For 400k, if you buy a home in Turkey, you can have permanent residence. Second homes, and differential rights distributed.

Baku inevitably reminded me of China, not because of the high rises or new architecture, but because of the level at which the state apparatus can be seen and felt so presently in daily life, never did I feel so strongly the presence of cameras. Driving down Haydar Aliyev Avenue on the day of the arrival of a diplomat from Belarus, every 500 feet stood a police officer for over two kilometers, perfectly positioned like toys placed carefully along the highway, subsumed by the scale. Unbelievable levels of investment in oil make for a perfectly clean city, with straight surfaces, and ease that seems uneasy.

The Greater Caspian Basin, a major deposit of a slurry of mud beneath the surface of the earth, is also the first oil production region in the world. Oil, in the early 19th century hardly had to be drilled, seeping from the ground and could be carried off in buckets. A strange ground, the tectonic pressure that creates the conditions for the abundance of oil and gas, also produces this slurry of mud that spews from seams surrounding the better part of Baku. Occasionally these 'volcanoes' explode, releasing mud and fire up to 500 meters in the air. In Azerbaijan one bathes in crude oil and mud alike...

Several months ago I took a day trip from the Clyde River in Glasgow to the Craigmaddie Reservoir where Glasgow's water supply enters the city, then further north to Loch Katrine where the source of the water in the highlands begins. In an almost straight path one can follow the channels where the water flows, along aqueducts and underground channels. Loch Katrine was also a Victorian getaway from the harsh industrial urban environment of Glasgow, and in 1899 a steamship was assembled on the Firth of Clyde, then disassembled and carted up into the highlands by horse to be bolted back together to provide cruises to Victorian tourists on the landlocked lake. The trajectory of the water down the mountains and the ship back up, encouraged me to follow through with this trajectory from Oslo to Baku over five weeks, with many stops inbetween, never quite following the path I intended. The first foreign company in Baku was founded by the Nobel brothers of Oslo, of Nobel Prize fame. The Nobel's were diverse traders and had been working prolifically in arms manufacturing, supplying large numbers of weapons to the Russian army. In the early 1870s, they went on their first trip to Azerbaijan to look for wood that could be purchased cheaply for the manufacturing of rifle butts. But instead, the brothers who invented dynamite and followed every advance in the emerging chemical industries, in Baku came to find an opportunity in the first industrial oil fields in Absheron, and what was called the Black City, setting up what might be considered the first multinational oil company manufacturing and trading in refined oil from the Caucus. So in Oslo I started this weird trip traveling, first to the Equinor offices in Fornebu, in a new development that mirrors the exaggerated space and form of the Heydar Aliyev Center, another oil marvel, where oil power is divorced in form from the hyperbolic imagination. Inbetween, the Baku�Tbilisi�Ceyhan pipeline is a 1,768 kilometer long crude oil pipeline from the Azeri�Chirag�Gunashli oil field in the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. And one asks, what is the fastest line between two points?

Every nation needs it's Paleolithic origin story, deep time as a function of the long term development of a national consciousness and claim to unbroken historical settlement

Tourist views are a zone of extraction in of themselves, planned routes, attractions, dinners, guided tours timed by the minute and hour, gas calculated by the quarter mile, the main event unrolling like a bargain sale. Better just to stay where you can get a view with dirty windows and keep to your business

First impressions are always a little off base, and it begs the question of what one is caught up in when one doesn't know the context. I feel a bit insensitive knowing so little, and yet coming to a place for the first time in the middle of seismic events. In this context, one argues that loosing the liberal civil society means a distancing from Europe or North America, but on the other hand, a strong and authoritarian state has always been the pathway to the kind of repressive social stability that works well for markets. Yet, the situation is maybe complex, and my first impression is to be confronted with the network of digital nomads that have expanded their reach through the liberalization policies of Mikheil Saakashvili and the way the invitation for small European investments in business, leads to networks of cafes for expats and geographies of the sons and daughters of oil barrens seeking a good party. Narrow minded, but wearing those new and hip Salomon shoes, I listen to a young late-night Brit talk about how he's working on builidng better ties in Tbilisi to help expand his oil contacts. There's a fine line between a party scene and the wealth that funds it. I think, of course pointlessly, about Saakashvili's exile in Williamsburg in 2013, the buzz in the news in New York around a political exile living in the fastest gentrifying neighborhood in the city, and how there was a kind of allure and cache in some disconnected American context there that felt it gave a strange charm to the Brooklyn cause. I'm reminded in this ignorance of everything around me, of Medellin and Bali, where policies to attract young and mobile affluence from the west is more complicated within these contexts, and how the membranes between worlds seem somehow thick or distant. Two dimensional support structures for these geographies of digital extraction, much more nuanced and complicated when situated in the histories of place. First impressions require second and third, and maybe somewhere a slip into the complications of class and social meaning that develops across/between every state that makes the prospect of speech something to continually rub up against.

I wait for an interlude where waters are raging. The sons and daughter of wealthy families, of doctors and lawyers and well meaning merchants and developers, collect degrees and accolades within their community, building social-cultural cach�, and having used their wealth and their lovers wealth, in a fetish of subdued and humiliated affluence, to move away from those places they have abandoned to get closer to centers of a more stable and greater social power. Generational wealth begets status, and status allows for movement, fluidity, that no matter how many degrees you collect, when you are not from such a background, will mean nothing to no one. Because everyone knows that what is most important is that you not try too hard to �be something you�re not�, or else you might be seen as 'inauthentic'. Better not try to be what you're not, better just show what you are, honest poverty rather than aspirational or the distaste of gauche showy poorly trained wealth. It's so much work to hide so much. Someone once joked, it's easy to claim a kind of possession about where you're from, an identity, when it shows in some vague notion how you struggled to get where you are, but not so easy to claim the identity of a place when it means boasting about inheriting a small estate or your family's second home. Uneasiness of belonging, that as my friend said, I over-identify with, in places that seem to bring me back to the complications and uncertainty of all of this. Maybe he's right, maybe it's pointless to care about divisions of class and wealth when you don't have the resources or strength to do too much.

'Hipster' is a pejorative for someone of a class that does not have access to the more subtle nuances of cultural meaning that is learned through proper education and socialization, so instead attempts to approximate a status that is not their own through purchases within the capitalist marketplace through differentiation. The distaste for gentrification is quite often a distaste for the way that an 'in the know' culture is degraded into something more base, something more commercial, something more open to buy from anyone, negatively democratized as it were. The complication as such is that over time the aspirational quality of the commercial becomes the norm, the process becomes something else and in the background, the city does not just loose it's critical edge, the return to the initial consumer erases whatever complexity there was in the initial aspiration even when it was treated as something contemptible because it was 'poor' in both money and spirit. These clich�s maybe start to have a relevance, because they approach the most basic ways in which the everyday has mutated into something a lot of people do not like, but are ashamed to treat as what has been created and one must live with in the present. Maybe no one thinks too much about this, but I think of how small New York coffee shops and airbnb make it nearly impossible for me to even visit my mother because even in the most rural places, everyone is connected to the dream of turning their homes into hotels and sucking dry the last of the living. Meanwhile, it's quiet in western Europe, while the war in Ukraine escalates into something else. How to fold two things back on themselves, so that this quiet immediacy implodes.

I wanted to visit Rustavi as it was one of the many towns that sprung up across the Soviet Union in a meticulously planned fashion to support a single industry. One wide boulevard leading to the factory, lined with housing and shops, in an opulent and grand European style. Total industrial management decays when left to the market, no different than anywhere else. I'm reminded on these boulevards of similar planned cities, and the familiarity is at least somewhat settling. A premise for a novel set here, poorly conceived, as I remember an acquaintance in Hong Kong chastising another acquaintance for proposing a story about a young migrant trader living squalidly in a tiny apartment in Guangzhou, having fetishized the experience of someone he was not. Anyways, is it not important to try to think across the complexity of different contexts, accepting that difficult subjects and understanding are worked through in that embarrassing exposure, impossible to get a clear position on what we've encountered. We throw things away as provisional when something actually needs to be said. In Rustavi, a young woman turns up from London one day, being taken around by a group of architects. The woman, an upper middle class writer, whose parents neatly deposit a few thousand pounds in her bank account every month to help with her bills and her dinners when her work is not going as planned, is creatively in the doldrums, bored at home with her partner who works too much. She is out on a journey of self discovery, wishing to prioritize excitement and happiness no matter the cost. In this town the young woman finds herself attracted to a young man who grew up there, infatuated with the image of modest responsibility, and the experience she might create, an unexpected encounter with passion, leading her into the questions of herself she wishes to write. For several weeks she keeps returning to this young man, ten years her junior, who is taken by her intensity for him. And over time this dedication from her, leads him to be convinced they will live together in London, obsessed with leaving his town and situation. While she slowly abandons his texts to go back to her life, he digs in

Seduction is a form of power premised on an oblique oppression, a disconnection between desire and need, a deception in low resolution to the object it wishes to seduce, knowingly or not. In the second half of the story, gone back to London, she returns to the fabric of a life, and the afterimage of something no longer hers and no longer to appear in any objective sense in her day. Yet meanwhile the small movements of actions in this place sets off a chain of events that pulls the elements of an escape closer, yet more fragmented, more difficult in the web of relations and relationships that would have to be undone to truly leave. Trying to wrest himself free is harder than he would realize, and not without guilt and confusion. Several times in this story he dies, and its possible an entire political movement might or might not have been set off to revitalize the Stalinist legacy of his hometown, in the process of negation and disowning of something that was never really his.

Everywhere I went I kept seeing a shirt that said 'Oedipus: the Original Motherf*cker'. I can no longer remember though if this was in Georgia or in Germany. It seemed too close to home. In Marzhan, back in Europe, I wonder if I ever really left, was there ever such a discontinuity between what is remembered from the past and how much remains? Projections become a favored tool of technicians, yet there is no disguising this construction of the past from the present. East Berlin, neither that far from Riga or Tbilisi when walking. My friend though, furious and outraged that I would want to go there, with his frustration with my small minded gawking at these projections and half knowledges, wouldn't mind if I had done the same somewhere so much further from his home. When something is distant, it is easier to think of without the immediacy of its effect. Is this not how the news works? Had I not just been to the same housing projects elsewhere, would I have even found myself here, signs for the AfD leading into the election? In the shadow image of a day to day projection in Europe of Berlin, which is both affected by and disconnected from the complexity of its context, something only a few kilometers away seems another world, even when it makes that projection of a city of art and music precisely what it is.

It's all tiring, but then there comes along something light hearted for the weary who take themselves too seriously: a ballet choreographed to an orchestra playing all the grating songs that customer service hotlines set up for the hours of waiting that prevent anyone from speaking to anyone who could help. How many minutes have you waited before the voice comes on to tell you that you can access your account information online, then to return again to the same song. The buffer ballet danced with a kind of craze and gentleness that no one can resist. Absolutely pointless, but there's a tiny dancer in my hand.

Homelessness has officially been made illegal in the United States. While I�m not exactly homeless, I�ve also not had a steady apartment since 2017 except for one year during covid. I think about how inconsistent and unreliable I am through all these years, how terrible I am at keeping commitments, managing both moving and working simultaneously, the responsibility of movement a huge burden on getting anything done, and also a laboring process in of itself. Finding somewhere to stay for a few weeks, moving things from one apartment to the next, putting things in storage, packing bags, renting cars, finding another apartment. I realize how trapped a homeless person can become, in trying to negotiate being out of the system while trying to get back in. I also realize how little patience most people have for me, for this condition I've both created and not created for myself. How can you afford an apartment without the money to make a downpayment on an apartment? How does someone living on the street make that transition? I circumnavigate one place, while working, to come back to another. I tell people when they ask where I live, the name of a city, just so they do not think I'm incapable of living. Fixed addresses are an important feature of the paper work one must fill out to receive any kind of service. A partial list of places since 2017 I moved between. Fall of 2017: New York 6x rooms/apartments, Buenos Aires 4x rooms, Uruguay 3x apartments, Virginia 1x room. Spring 2018: New York 2 x room/apartment, London 3x rooms, Amsterdam 2x apartments, Belgium 2x rooms. Summer 2018: New York 1x apartment, Virginia 1x room, Tokyo 1x hotel. Fall 2018: Hong Kong 4x apartment and 2x hotel, Nepal 6x hotel, China 4x apartment/room and 6x hotel... Fall 2023: Italy 1x room, Barcelona 2x apartments, France 1x room, Amsterdam 3x room, Hilversum 1x room. Spring 2024: Amsterdam 4x apartments and 1x store room, Rotterdam 1x room, Scotland 2x rooms... The list continues, but there has not been a season I've not moved as frequently since these times...

It's impossible to see the gradient that shows up when traveling from one place to the next by plane, the way that suddenly the context that is shaping one region has morphed into another that feels so familiar. There is a call to be slow, to move at a more human pace, to take notice, to resist the call to a be productive and as efficient as possible. Yet, the same call demands remaining productive in ones slowness, because to truly resist, to drop out, does not get one anywhere. I can not tell if taking my time has been a good thing or a bad thing, I certainly see others having achieved far more in far less time. To be moving in circuits that provide more opportunities to grow, to continue to gain in media capital, and to somehow still be able to demand a kind of slowness in that position. I feel a kind of mania in wanting to rest, and then I come back to the city, and I feel that I've been left behind, or I'm no longer good enough. Not intelligent enough, not having read enough. What was the point of resisting? What kind of work can one do that remains productive. Here, a global financial capital, so sleepy on a Saturday afternoon. And having just traversed half of Europe, you feel the pull of one side on the other. What would it mean to set things down to rest? And then, I cross back over the Atlantic...

one direction, then switching to completely another. Out of nowhere, a suburban paradise. No need to travel to Margate or St Ives. My uncle�s queer friends growing 600 varieties of day lilies in the back yard of their deceased mother. My uncle faced with losing his marriage, only recently made legal, a marriage long deprived and found at 65, in Trumps nationalist christian america. Sometimes beauty comes like a flash from nowhere, not far from a highway, someone sensitive enough to care about how paradise might be found.

Appalachia is many things, but in spite of the strange confluences of bibles, guns, and hillbilly fanaticism, it is also more complex, troubled by its isolation, beautiful for its geologic history, forgotten in its Cherokee past, smokey in its mountains, and by no means a place where the would be be traditionalist conservative wheeler and dealer can claim that a bunch of lazy rednecks have spent too much time on the dole and need to get back to making America Great Again, Appalachia is too complex and the issues far too complicated to reduce the people to the populist anti-government crowd that has sadly descended like a trance on families that once had the backbone to stand up against corporate mining companies. The farmers market is still full of berries, the rhododendron still blooms wild on the balds of the hills

Brat. The shitty vibe of American inequality. That dude sitting on the street in his tesla, not the stereotypical 6� white dude in finance, but the extremely beautiful musician with the Assembly vibe, earrings, perfect sunglasses, beautifully dressed, immaculate girlfriend in Maison Margiela boots. Or the dude who takes your job, who hardly works, who thinks of daily labor as for lesser people, was using the job for the nepotism, still made more money than you in spite of your endlessly taken advantage of hours and naive belief that if you worked hard enough someone would recognize you, came from a wealthy family, everyone gives him praise, says he�s the dream, because, ya know, namaste?

Taking a step back to filter a particular branch of the news cycle and elections, to see the entire eastern coast through a series of interconnected sand bars, astonishing how far the beaches stretch, tracing the contours of a coastline that disappears behind the noise of political television and the strange attempts at assassination. Was it me, or did the event fade as quickly as it came? Wanchese was used as a seasonal fishing village for 1500 years before English colonial settlement. Roanoke Island Colony a pipe dream of Walter Raleigh in 1565. But in marshland and swamps, tidal wetlands, all the way to New York, a break away from Royal Farms and the misery of over abundant gas station food that seems to forever be the heritage of American civilization, look a little past what was already pretty arbitrary defended as a nation. Have all protestant landings been this prolonged of a fever trance? Piney smells mixed up in humid seawater, pulling in the history of deserters, of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons. Passing wasteland and anything other than muddy backwater lagoon, the Chesapeake Bay, to Fresh Kills Landfill, sites reclaimed and meant to be made 'accessible', on top of something else completely, still the fish will kill you with their mercury if you eat too many. Arthur Kill, achter kill, what krill, what krill.

I feel like I shouldn�t have to make these kinds of posts AGAIN!! Why is it so hard for people to understand, when you go three weeks with an account balance like this, that the only way to get on is to put your day to day expenses on a credit card. Nor should I have to describe the feeling, and anxious stress, of being nearly 40 and regularly waking up having this same situation year on year. All because you had a couple bad years in New York? Nor should I STILL have to describe to anyone, the anger and resentment I feel, at having to CHASE clients for PITIFUL pay that they are TWO MONTHS late paying! If you respect the people you work with, even if you�re going to pay them intern wages, you pay them immediately, or at least on time. People see me traveling, and they think, oh, he must be having a nice time, but let me be clear, I chose this life to try to enjoy the experience of being alive a little more when dealing with this stress (no over head of rent) over the same life, getting f*d over, and sitting around uninspired in a dungeon. If you have the luxury of having the extra time to have hobbies (I used to play Snooker a few nights a week) your life has a kind of affordance of time that makes things a bit less chaotic. I�m still a professional, and can be professional, but when everyone around you (ie Clients) treat you with such disrespect to leave you with $3 in your bank account, then that shit spills over into your other relationships and way of carrying on with things in life�

Sentimental attachments to the things in my house as I get into my adult life, not the thoughts I had on Tiree, rather ghosts, crofting, and the commons, the true commons, of sheep, ravaged by kelp harvesting

Love seems a bit pointless through all this brutality, don�t you think?

A view to sea birds, whales, and cruise ships hovering over the Orkneys

And then back to the social reality of the outskirts of the kingdom

Coming back from a trip through the Hebrides and the far north of Scotland, thinking about the periphery and limits of what Europe might be, and the displacements there that led to other displacements to Appalachia, from those that were removed for grazing land and wool, to finally wrap up a long and ongoing project, possibly for another? The first copies of my first artist book with @roma.publications being released this month are finishing this week� Such an incredible pleasure to have taken the time, and been given the incredible opportunity and challenge by Roger to slowly put together the pieces of such an expansive and ongoing process of photographing and researching the boundaries, limits, and expanses of global production networks in the widest sense of the term. And to @reichenbach.benedikt for the nearly four years of looking at my pictures with me and spending the countless hours editing, rearranging, and discussing the contours of a life project I can hardly even fathom. For those who don�t know, I had been working on a long term research project in the past years on the kinds of geographies where I worked in the globalized production of artist books, a project that took me to a MA program at Berkeley in political economy and to live in China, Mexico, Europe and brief stints elsewhere, trying to piece together the economic world systems as they are projected and neglected in the representations and conceptualizations of such pressurized and routinized spaces. What it turned into was equally a reflection on class decline within the context of my family and the political problems of distance and disillusionment therein, fueling right wing insurgencies where I grew up and the squeeze of too many things and never quite enough. This fall I�ll be giving some performative lectures, slideshows, and organizing some conversations with friends to try to think through what it has meant for smaller communities, again in the widest sense, to consume and be consumed. More soon� and with love for everyone who has helped me out along the way, with my struggles and my daily grinds

I was waiting for you to tell me, but I guess I already knew

In 2022 I retraced much of the trip that Robert Smithson took in 1969 to make his Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1�9), at least through his itinerary in Campeche and Quintana Roo, later along the border with Guatemala, in advance of the completion of the first leg of AMLOs Tren Maya, arriving in the afterglow of several high profile incidents on the beaches of Cancun and Tulum, and in the strange disappearances behind images of tourism in Mayan towns in the center of the peninsula, set against an enclosing ring of roads and clear cutting, ripping lines along the beaches, to try to see what was reflected in those mirrors he carried out, aimed at nothing, speaking to nothing, through the frictions of nothing. Where the complexity of a changing situation outside of those mirrors, only reinforced by an abstract way of imagining, through his text, an absolute and universal language of a displaced history that he wouldn�t approach, filtered through a tradition that was not his own, and embellished in the idea of something cosmological and mythic in the mirrors themselves. A kind of ressentiment towards myself for my father not taking me after his second marriage to see Chichen Itza and bringing me back a cheap statue of the pyramid, dropping me off for several hours instead at South of the Border in South Carolina, to wait while he did his business. Ironic maybe that the brother of the woman I stayed with for a month lived in Myrtle Beach. Abstraction overlaid on abstraction, and the violences behind abstraction that abstraction equally produces. Henequen for the ropes that sail the ships, that hang the gallows, the Hacienda architectures cast as beautiful and romantic as the Mayan and mestizo work by hand, taken off in the field, under a shimmering sky, reclaiming an image layer by layer. Behind every curtain, a mirror. Reference images from research by H�ctor Hernandez on the archaeology of henequen haciendas...

how to progress from an argument in text to Mirror Displacements to the context of a contemporary world built around the architectures of images, of spaces that elucidate an idea only in and for themselves? Or that produce a kind of amnesia to the histories of space. How to express not just �what brick wants� but what is every brick? And how did brick get up so high, so round, so smooth. Mirrored windows against the wind. How to express something of that being in the world, without resorting to romantic notions of ruins or antiquity, acknowledging the stacking and the sorting of material, the vast pages of so many images superimposed on surfaces and buildings, in a philology of every tiny part of the material that makes up daily life. A heavy weight in images that seem benign. Earlier this year Netanyahu released a "redevelopment" document called Gaza 2035, reflected in the last slide an image generated by AI of the "future city" project. The second slide is of Aleppo before the Syrian war. The first a proposal for the worlds second tallest building, never completed. The third, a Mayan temple remaining part of the urban fabric.

Photography and landscape, or sublime trash, or the predominance of plastics in production and education (1991-2021)

Caught up in extremely lazy readings of James C Scott and Pierre Clastres

If Apple gave me a free iPhone, I would take romantic pictures of southeast asia too

The most heavily bombed country in the world, 2.8 million tons of bomb, not that far from _i_n Bi�n Ph_. Instagrammable moments on the backpacker trail, coming in at number 19 on the best of southeast asia, supposedly, they say

I guess it�s not that interesting to talk about the history of GI soldiers off on R&R leave to Thailand and its beaches, the impropriety of comfort girls and beaches that would develop into a robust post-Vietnam ravaging tourist industry. Not so surprising to learn in Laos that heroin use during the war on these retreats led to a long lasting heroin run from SE Asia to places like Harlem with networks established during the war, not unlike painkillers post-Iraq, strung out soldiers looking for a way to make money after the war is up. Former KMT soldiers too, wrapped up in new deals post-republic in the changing times of mountain hideaways. Soldiers eventually have to find their fix to maintain their position. Machiavelli wrote of course about the relative pros and cons of different forms of armies in the 16th century. At some point social structures transition, skills must be put to use, and a new landscape is born that those that consume it will have forgotten anything about its histories. Because, beaches will always be beautiful.

I would agree, food makes a place, forget the rest

after so many years of failed attempts, finally made it to the Scarpa Brion memorial, looping back on recent visits to Angkor, the Sixth Pantheon of Chacarita in Buenos Aires, Rossi�s modena. labyrinths in quiet corners for the dead

Dangerous complexities of history and the future, pressured markings and palimpsests

Another building I�ve long wanted to see, but how could one not take a step back to reflect on what a formalism of the spirit denies in the return to the historical present? Wikipedia requires further reading that might never be read: After NATO�s occupation of Kosovo in June 1999, it was revealed that the Yugoslav Army had used the library as a command-and-control centre. The materials inside had been stolen, reading room furniture smashed, and the card catalogue had been dumped in the basement. The library workers were kept out for a week while Kosovo Force (KFOR) peacekeeping troops checked the building for any hidden explosives. According to national and international organizations, about 100,000 Albanian-language books were sent to the paper mill in Lipjan for pulping. Among those books were collections of national heritage, which explained the nation�s origins and history.

A brief history requires explanation that I have no time for, though many others do, and other who can speak to a history that I can not

Is it not justifiable to have a mental breakdown at the first election of the man when he reminds you so much of the father you thought you had k*lled, libidinal impulses in the politics of personal corrosion. The second time around, not so much, forget the whimpering when there�s too much to hold onto, a waste of time to think about. Instead, other paintings, obfuscating my time

1573: the Battle of Haarlemmermeer. It�s worth looking at the paintings that exist of the Haarlemmermeer battle as it gives a good sense of how much land was filled in in the Netherlands, not unlike in HK and Singapore, where the streets can be so flat. Of course it ruins the oblique mystery of the atmosphere of glowing green lights, but maybe it�s possible to hold a few modes of thought at once. Of course there�s baiju as well, though I never made it to Luzhou when I lived there�

Everything that�s solid moves with the wind, sometimes more like a house of cards

Much too tired to mark up my notes. Instead, a list while walking: new battery pack for phone, eyedrops, rubbing alcohol, sewing kit for travel, organizational bags, e-ink notepad. Meanwhile, I�ve broken my nose.

�vibes bro, vibes� she said while riding in the backseat of the taxi late at night, not paying attention to anything directly, bored and waiting for the night to end

Of course these kinds of generic photographs can�t communicate beyond the surfaces of google maps and countless uploaded images in the guise of tourist recollections, meanwhile forming an twin view of every single place on the planet, at every time, and in nearly all detail, and is it even my role to try to convey something of this, or the cross currents from southern coastal Guangdong and Fujian to Tainan that can�t be seen, where Ming loyalists and pirates in the 17th century once found a home, Koxinga floating somewhere, and family heirs, still remembering several weeks before in Chaozhou and Shantou the lack of time to make it further north, setting histories to coordinates and chasing after ghosts. Maybe it�s too sunny for these thoughts, sharp edged and meticulous neuroticism tends to come out when the skies are slate grey and the rain feels like splinters

Roman author Aelian describes salamanders as being drawn to the fires of forges and quenching them, to the annoyance of the blacksmiths. I too am annoyed, and I�d like to be quenched

I had a strange dream about architects and their models, a ramp that extended from the sea, in switch backs to an unbelievable height but that was meant to be walked, and on the way, people reviewing your progress, the vertical structure of the criss crossed walkway all in near black concrete. A bit out of synch with what�s in front of me, back in the forests of New England, after the coasts of Taiwan

Maybe unhinged thoughts in opposition are a way forward in tandem with unhinged everything, the hinge of a door rusty, poorly lubed, needing to be taken off the frame before it can swing. A case for the unhinged that is not properly aligned with the nihilistic tendency of the right, nor maybe the left. That one can continue to be informed but not have the right language to make out the contours of the present future without resorting to old ways of constellating ideas in out of date explainations. To speak to new conjunctures of history, when there is no articulation, where �to articulate� also means to rotate. An articulated joint. And where thoughts are disorganized by both algorithmic intelligence and seeing too much content, can we really say it�s brain rot? Or is it a crutch. I�m more and more willing to loosen up my grip, to try to later be specific, I only ever feel truly unhinged in America. It goes without saying that we are all are in a bad position relative to the history of wealth and American imperialism, in a post-colonial order of imperial reach that Americans were never in a position to inherit, and really never even knew what it meant given that such imperialism has forever been hidden from view to the American public that hardly knew more about what�s outside its borders, or could even begin to fathom what Malcom was after.

Too much to capture, a building for an archive, like a glass house of time

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn�t go away. And if anything has endured, it�s a perennial crisis of faith [paraphrasing PKD]

when the eyes start to lose impression like the taste buds of a smoker, following a stream outside Vienna for several hours back into the city

More positive energy on a less positive day [Wien Energie - Spittelau incinerator - Hundertwasser] Headline: �The International Atomic Energy Agency meets in Vienna�

Cat food on watermelons, a scene, a crowd by the Duomo in protest and holding public talks on political action, next to a lone man still playing a guitar for tourists that no one is listening to, at the other end of the piazza someone riding his bike talking on a cell phone and playing a harmonica. Tipping points that remind me of fervor

Italian realism, or the great A1 road, half reading notes by Groys on the aesthetics of politics while looking for dinner among grating noises of flagging industries.

returning to Robert Lax after ten years of searching: (�.) i lift one stone and I am thinking i am thinking as I lift one stone

AQI rating: wild fires in Turkey and haze carried from the particulates of the destruction in Ukraine

Sisyphean trips in this geography of personal myth, finding myself at the entrance to the cave where the book of revelations was written, the fire burning inside, the fever dream of this heat. Coming here stupidly, naively when the wind and skies ring of so many palpable smokes All roads lead to Gjirokast�r, but why rome did you feel so lusty for the adoption of state religion. Crusades, like cocaine, laid out on the table in an offering to the brother of a former French president I am pounding and being pounded, I and I was a sailor writing without words this time, taking no pictures, throwing hands up like you really don�t care, there�s Panigiria going on out there

It�s said that the wrong person finds you at your best and leaves you at your worst, and the right person finds you at your worst and brings you to your best. It�s not hard to move this into the realm of the political. Like Lord Jim, I�ve been chasing too long after my own shadow, one that it would seem is no longer there. Wings melted, lapping on an island, wild, that is its own labyrinth�

Meanwhile in Republika Srpska energy is being brought to the world, and the dark outline of the letter Z infects the smoke that produces it�s shadow. reclaiming this from the amnesia of history, Z might be read, instead of this betrayal slashing the landscape, through the protests of Grigoris Lambrakis. It�s not a question of whether the past can be rewritten, but rather how to rewrite the present, against the attempts to change the meaning of the past

So the legend goes, two families were feuding and the young daughter of one family fell in love with the son of another. This of course intensified the fight so the brother of the young man decided to end the life of his brother so that the families would no longer have a good reason to fight [a Balkan version of romeo and juliette while visiting monuments with Jan]

Secrets kept between Richard Burton and Tito, somewhere on the way to an Austro-Hungarian fountain of youth

Restored paintings of partisans up on the hill, from which we later descended in a rattling golf...

Oblique strategies are sometimes counter-productive under the spell and amnesia of disorientation coming from contemporary fragmentary and routine guiding technologies

Taken for granted, most of the time [the meaning of which should be glaringly clear]

the orientalist fantasy was in Europe always the fantasy of their own east and west, the grain empire contra naval ones, the transit zone and markets of venice and the roads to Constantinople, where the influx of spices for preservation might fend off disease. The Habsburg and German empires attempting to build railways to the levant. That WWI began in Sarajevo is no surprise. Current politics in Bosnia possibly reflects these problems of a dependent Europe better than anywhere, a Europe that cannot make sense of its own immediate geographies, too lost in the correctness of the apparatus of its bureaucracy Some references are too specific, so much so that except in those cases where lived knowledge of the specific gives meaning to the particular, it would be better to evade the need to speak too directly and leave the referent open. But I see hovering in cafes and new brands iykyk, speaking generally to how little anyone knows about the context outside their immediate surroundings. Rarely is there time to understand enough to write everything out. One is already always in the know when everything is at ones finger tips except for the deep cuts, in these basic configurations of glistening feudal relations under fintech management and emergent ways of life. it�s obviously easier to glide. Why rural Serbian-Bosnian villages have embraced this �Z� unsettles me, driving past, thinking about the past, when a renegade leader would call up support from the R. military to protect crony dealings. Otherwise foreign hydroelectric projects that support the EU�s climate energy plans, outsource environmeal disaster to the EUs immediate periphery, very much not unlike coca cola in Chiapas sucking the water dry. Meanwhile, news reels cut to central Africa, the french are busy pulling out to meet the demands of the new NATO king, while the Wagner group gets a private makeover by the official state army. If in this sick handshake world of work, Syria was a deal to other armies in his first term, what will happen next in the Sahel says the correspondent? What I�ve not seen written about astutely is how the politic around Odessa and Pal. are closer than they seem

My friend, I want to apologize for everything that I cannot find the words to say. I am constantly fumbling over myself and making poor choices that leave everyone disappointed. I�ve long wanted to have the resolve to look the world in the eye resolutely. Yet I wake up everyday now and read in major western news outlets how there is an epidemic of male loneliness setting in for aging adults in the industrialized world, or worse its inverse of chauvinism and an exaggerated confidence in power, which, as I turn 40 is harder and harder to read. Feeling that the main thing that is being said is closely connected, in short, to the stereotyped depictions of vitality in laboring success. I would like to enjoy music again, but it�s rare that I feel untethered enough from the stress of an upended daily life to relish in the open ended feeling it once brought me when I was young. One is confronted almost immediately with the opposite of this sociological question, and wonders if it is even worth asking such things about being middle aged and alone, through the very real fact that such subjective experience is only problematized by the economic anomie of this privileged western post-industrialized existence that�s all becoming more tenuous as our grandparents pass away and the memories they carried from their youths that held us to an overarching ethic of care and concern start to fade. Very real concerns in real mourning contradict this story of perceived isolation and lack. And so that leads to the further disquiet in one self, to appreciate what one has, though one wonders whether that road also leads to blind stoicism and passivity, away from the path needed for radical empathy, through the pain and anger and frustration of mourning for another that gets one to the more forceful demand that this ravaging assult must come to an end. I once had liked to think I could exist in some kind of resolved solitude of the garden, knowing that most of my life has always been lonely and alone. Yet in spite of this, one wants someone there with them to process what is too hard to process alone. I�m sorry I haven�t been there, and I�m sorry for everything I haven�t said and done.

Somewhere a kite flies in Kosovo down a road I can not go

A sort of uncommon places, where the common or familiar is doubled over by the baked in assumptions around a particular experience of everyday vernacular that could even make the familiar strange, but where there�s equally an assumption about the foreign build into the backside of that equation that takes for granted what is at hand... anyways, how to move a mountain is here quite the question underway

Discernment in the sense of access to positional power has an affect of it�s own

Great lines, heavy sets; thankfully the fishermen towed us in

Off the bucket list, on a little trip through the mid-century charm of the outlook of the Endless Summer, which feels quite distant and dated now. Somehow that surf film was pivotal, on some level, thinking of horizons as a teenager. Something beautifully simple about a particular notion of what is impossibly distant. Now I�m sitting around in the evening, watching the same right firing over the same reef, with young Senegalese surfers on another level, dodging rocks in low tide jutting out in the sections, paddling across to the break a km away from the city because they don�t want to pay for the boats, afraid of literally nothing. Meanwhile, eating dinner with a bunch of young Australian miners taking time off from working in Guinea to surf the classic break because that�s what things look like in 2025� Having just turned 40 I�ve decided I�m going to spend the next ten years surfing, ambling in writing, in all the places I�d still like to visit. not putting so much effort into the excessive costs of ambition, being strapped down, or whatever else. Au revoir Salome, it�s ugly what you�re doing

When the fruit is ripe you have to pick it, otherwise it rots

Like another drop of rain in the bucket; funny how certain images of a place come to haunt an entire vague notion of what it might be, when so little is shown in the surrounding context, and there is only a single building or landmark to express more than it could possibly contain; for how many years this building hovers

everything becomes a backdrop. When I first started these obsessive movements, my primary concerns were two. One how an entire concept of the �world�, as it is depicted either as a wholly unified or as a disjointed but continuous entity, is constructed, primarily through images. The second, how the actual world is materially constructed through production and physical processes, the political machines that operate differently across regions, and the human labor and destruction that goes into the maintenance of the lived world. At the time I was maybe more radically open, raw and available, connected to others, vulnerable, willing to engage in a kind of radical vulnerability. I would cry in public, and have hour long conversations with parking lot attendants at 3am. Over time I�ve become distant, and with that the world returns back to its hardened desktop images, that I chase like an idiot�

For those who live their lives in the water, thank you for opening your doors to a stranger

We ignore that which we find irrelevant, and then it simply disappears, still there amidst its neglect, how great deals, silence the news so readily These were pictures from 2018, somehow no one will remember what was there, I wonder if the subway lines were finished that kept the city steaming. In spite of all seeing vision, working over every inch, in a constant state of streaming, 1:1 the world in whole, security apparatus and cameras and satellites alike, the hard memory, physical memory, processing needs, raw storage needs, the means for a moment kept means the all seeing whole still disappears, then its shadow memory, an unjust rule, a record and complete unknown, yet still the fear of god. Here, at least, a few documents that can be not what they are I have a hard time remembering years later, years that are already past, grimy nights in Amsterdam, biking through the city aware of the filth in the poorly renovated apartments with bad parquet, so much of personal memory lost to whatever is now immediate, the totality of memory of the once vivid filled endlessly to be forgotten, the news in el fashar in flashbacks of memories of other recent moments taken aback and aback and aback, similarly sitting in the cold wet night at home, this news, the vague bird feeder shadow against a poorly lit garden wall, not remembering details of that drizzle that was so infuriating at the time, on either side of the world, the dampness in my clothes because I'm no longer there, an overly expensive apartment on the canal where occasionally I heard the neighbors having the loudest sx, that annoyingly frustrating awareness of being surrounded by things that did not hold any kind of embrace, of being outside, firmly outside, not any different than in new york, hoping to get close to something that was always too far away, or people that did not want to meet, or kept saying they would only to displace the displacement to another displaced day After an entire summer trying to x herself by attempting to jump from the window, all she could say was she hoped he would do the same so he would never get ahead of her in life

A strange and haunting feeling to be told casually by a supplier over ten years later that all your colleagues were going behind your back saying that you couldn�t handle the pressure of work, when they knew that was not the story. I suppose most people who go a kind of mad are often being gas lit by their social environment to the point they can�t tell what is real and what isn�t. But mostly, I can only imagine how so many people being denied their social realities feel at this very moment, meanwhile, ends well that�s all well

Moving again, so little time to reflect, brain rot is in backdrops, whether real or on the screen, it has not made me a better person, but there have been moments when the challenge of the perpetual machine undoes a sense of enlightenment so profoundly and immensely that one recognizes nowhere can be reached, sisyphus carries flowers always to the end. what I wish for is the comportment, and endurance, to write the same lines again and again and again, or to rework the same thought with beautiful attention to the turn of an idea. instead, chasing these compulsions, that no longer serve me, emptied of their ends, I can hardly find a bed

Cochin II, sometimes you miss people who want nothing to do with you

Exactly 12 months since I was last in penang for the holidays. since then, venice and trieste, northern croatia, sarajevo, serbia, pristina, singapore, chaoshan, shenzhen, hk, southern taiwan and taitung, taipei, sf, southern appalachia, london, amsterdam, vienna, the eastern greek isles and icaria, split, southern bosnia, belgrade, southern kosovo, northern macedonia, albania, northern scotland, senegal and dakar, the coast of cote d�ivoire, new york, appalachia, abu dhabi, oman, kerala,,, finally back in KL and next to singapore. At this point, it�s a way of life, but next year I might try to stay put. If I set up a spare room will anyone come visit?

Absurd the adults and mentors who push their negligence on the generations after them and train them to be insensitive and hostile to the world, where are the teachers who cultivate bright souls?

White Lotus Riau Islands, hiding behind glass doors, the privilege of luxury is surely debilitating {what does oil want other than a lifestyle}

It feels insensitive to be posting pictures of Singapore at the moment, in spite of such great animosities of spirit, lingering in a place where capitalism still has some veneer of happiness as a way of life, where stability of markets has seemingly made calm hard questions that feel distant. It�s rare that I�ve ever had enough time to get to know Singapore really, even though it�s the sixth or seventh time I�ve been here, I�ve never really walked it�s neighborhoods beyond all the �towns�, to see some side of the landscape before the British, in small sacred springs that I guess not so many people pay attention to passing through Fort Canning Park, springs the masters apparently ran dry, where certainly there was a landscape before reclamation and Raffles City. I�ve spent most visits in the image the city wants to project to the post-colonial world, the special case of city-state prosperity and shopping malls that make an entrep�t of centuries old competition, in spite of the brand names that are decieving. Coming from Penang, I�ve thought that maybe what is loved about old colonial architecture is its nostalgic failures, forgetting for a moment in the playtime tea and coffee about its continued successes in the present, in such nefarious ways. The Tower of babel was a potent metaphor in 2010, as language models were becoming form and soup, but in the present it feels reductive to look up at towers, a trivial story of punctuation to deter with, the breaking up of civilization into language, the danger of reaching for gods eye. More potent in the present may be the foot of Nataraja standing on Apasm_ra, with that greedy little smile on his face�

I would agree, it has lost the libidinal force between the line and the image, when the last vestiges of immediacy [I don�t know, is that what they call immanence] have been taken away by the transformation of all direct connections into unreachably dissipate ones by the scale of the suffocation of its whole, how its been rid of any communicative possibility to mire. I am marketed myself to myself by myself, alone. And an idiot I am for chasing my own tail, how stupid I feel arriving somewhere and realizing how terribly off I was following the path of the machine, learning for weeks, and not even noticing what was happening. In conversation I find myself even spouting off false facts, heresay from here that is nowhere. Really I�m just embarrassed and ashamed at how gullible I�ve become, like the sound of voice to speech videos emitting from a courtyard window. I was only in Colombo for a few nights in passing, but as soon as I arrived I understood how off I was in my perception [something about ports, surfing holidays, though I did learn however that Isra*lis are barred from going to Bali]. Anyways, I understand not even the half of it, but enough to know the trouble many Sri Lankans must feel at what similar strange bedfellows one finds having become a new Oaxaca. I�m sure also that I should have stayed longer, but there was something I couldn�t bear in the reflection of the algorithm in the depressing way that everyone is watching. It�s a weird and sad thing to wake up to, as if over the last few years I�ve just been scrolling through the planet... After so many destinations on repeat though, I recommend staying in a place with a hard limit of only for one or two nights, enough just to be surprised and to feel the rush of discovery of something that shocks your senses, as much can be seen in 36 hours if you�re ready, otherwise to stay for six months, a year, even longer, or go back to one place again and again, and with enough of a goal of learning to first speak at least enough of the language that you will have been able to think partially elsewhere. anything less seems unfair to those who live in a place. I am just a tourist here, whether Colombo or Vienna

When I spend this many hours scrolling, I get such queasy lips, uv index 7, the ferry�s gone amiss

The golden age. In 1998 a major el nino event bleached something like 40-60% of the entire coral population of the Maldives, and after another event in 2016 has left something like 7% live coral in most of the major atolls. I travelled to one of the few places that was largely unaffected, but I�m not a diver and every time I went out for a surface swim, my goggles would fog up or I would get sea sick. Interestingly though the Maldives had one of the longest standing authoritarian governments in Asia overturned by elections in 2008, subsequently turned back over in 2012. During the 30 years of rule foreigners could not visit local islands, but since 2008 locals have been allowed to run guesthouses on their islands, whereas before all tourist islands were single island resorts, giving the country the mystique of luxury travel and exclusivity. Turned over another way, the maldives is sinking and bleaching, and beginning to face problems with algae bloom and atoll erosion. The solution, to relocate the outer island populations to Male on reclaimed land, with the aid of massive urban development projects just above the water line. Wildly impossible. Though, a strange precedent if you were not following history or were not alive, in 1962 the wealthiest island in the maldives was forcefully depopulated in full liquidation after they attempted to set up a breakaway state in response to the Maldivian governments response to the British possessions in the region (re Chagos and Gan). History has a way of repeating itself for different ends and different reasons... I swim with a school of parrot fish who parrot my parodies of paradise

I remember finding American apparel so spiritually depleted, yet the best I could hope for were a few brief moments of relief from the suffering of the sun. all things important disappear. Sentiment burned in brutality. Rapid eye, REM. Slowly the paint turns grey, and should I dye my hair golden before my brow recedes. Remember how relentlessly the tsunami was lapping, when 5 meters is the tallest elevation of land

Considerations of class and context, traveling through fissures and bubbles, profoundly wronged by heartless beating, out there somewhere searching for water, forgetting what one might continue to find...

I'm surely convinced that my job, whatever it might be, will not be replaced by AI. That the majority of people are complete idiots, and I say that with absolute love, is astonishingly more clear, but I'm equally aware of how pallid the answers without meaning are in the statistical reverb that is filed away in the annals of directionless mooring. Generative engine optimization, and Near Religious Longing, of slot machines clanking, cooling in the rivers of Cherokee. Though more than that, it�s that those I once too often looked up to in love, reasonable people who slither in the ear, thought of as competent decision making adults and way finders among strangers, were really only children masquerading as complete. And often only then because of resources, of lawyers or advisors to take care of their affairs, to hedge away any doubt that the benefit of their decision was for the good of all. Faced with complex problems, rarely is there sound advice on how to be in the world with such trouble. And as all the trouble leads to trouble for everyone but themselves, I�ve reached a state of clarity in so far as I�m completely disillusioned, mostly in myself, for having looked up to anyone at all in how they�ve made their way in life. Such challenges require vision and a backbone of ethical resolve, yet much of the resolve of such adult children takes the form of self fulfilling praise, bringing endless and unaccountable harm to everyone in their way. Parents spiritually misguided, living in a timezone they call large language models, such idiots still think they can ask the machine to help them make the decisions they were too stupid to make on their own. Decision making deferred once again in favor of, decisions that will destory us all. Goodbye faulkner, there�s definitely no one I trust

There must be something somewhere, beyond polymarket prediction, generative language looking sexy amid recapitalized ruin

Maybe I'm wrong to no longer feel the need to explain [to myself] the complexity of crisis so incommensurable with the propositions of a camera. What felt urgent ten years ago in attempting to piece together, through an overwhelmed consciousness of looking, the impossibility of relations that make up that hectic forward driving motion that bulldozes the sensible, which has only become more apparent with time in the breakdown of the surface of things�reality having caught up with a hypothetical principle�of distilled and re-inflected mediations, of social relations hardened and unclear, in the �cosmic waste� of a million productive bifurcations. Believing in a principle of coherence drives practices of reporting at some level, a world needs a view, or at least a vantage point. But maybe that doesn't take what�s at stake all that seriously, or at face value with the surface of the present, withheld by the constraints of communicative tools rather than the possibility of coherent lifeworlds. Especially if maintaining an unwavering position, whether positive or negative, produces ends, I'm less and less able to distinguish gravity's inflection, and maybe that's in fact the end. Would it even be possible to take up the systematic logic of Weber to tackle the bureaucratic management of emerging prompting labor? Or otherwise a philosophical anthropology of someone else's camera? That the surface of relations has changed in such a way post-Covid as to make what was tacit in common shared knowledge seem trivial, or in excess of experience, does not readily encourage conversation around the profound loss of spirit and break down of bonds of current tracking systems. So yes, these were my dumb years. The years when I was overwhelmed by highly constrained possibilities, of looking for somewhere, or some position, to ground myself from above, but instead finding obfuscation, and Adorno, hiding in the wrong year, as if it were still 1994. Except that once, when we broke through the valley at dawn and were living at the speed of light. What I needed then were sunglasses, not a replacement camera, intensity doesn't want to be seen in those overly washed out skies.

If an entire theory of nationalism can emerge from generalized print media and capital, would it not be useful to think through the current state of distributed power through a more nuanced take on React Next or Svelte, rather than simply admonishing the demons? There�s no reason what we think of as ai had to be chat bot, except that speaking to our screens makes it more intimate

A rather simple minded argument. If politics, re. polis, was rooted in the experience of the city and it�s rational administration, maybe we should no longer speak meaningfully of �politics�, when there is nowhere, even the most remote village, that is not already organized around the logic of the urban experience, which has transcended any notion of a localized place (the gentrification of the techne of the countryside, for example) and exists everywhere that electricity is available near you. Is it politics what we speak of when we talk about the management of the vast tracts of data that still become the thread of life in the least and the most of places, fin tech always seeks out the tracking of every minor transaction. Of course this is administered differently everywhere, and there are real material drivers of friction and social change, so it�s not exactly post-politics as such but also not the biopolitics of life, nor the monopoly of power that the US seems currently intent on trying to resurrect in armageddon fashion, the conservative base having been too overwhelmed and nihilistically fascinated by the scale of change on the iPad that took place over the last fifteen years not to indulge in nostalgia for what was lost and what was to come. Bit coin religious fervor turned into AI powered robo-crusades, and the creaking of technocratic Europe, gives the present an odd sense of what�s at stake for themselves, and how little it is politics, which makes it funny to see politicians trying to ply their trade. Is politics still a vocation in its dying breath? Yet travel writers still make money, holding onto the city, reliant upon a notion of place as pastiche, as though space has not fundamentally changed� the sea is a precipice, where I�m waiting for you