Exploding universe 1.0
In a speculative and possibly failed attempt to go beyond an anthropocentric perspective of what we conceive as the world. I use and manipulate materials/media belonging to different realms:
Artifacts used either to store, produce and contain knowledge (drawers, shelves, desk). Domestic chemical processes such as making dough and kombucha. Growing edible fungi, cultivating mycelium, both following sterilization protocols and not following them. Training a Machine Learning model with thousands of texts from Sci Fi writings to respond to my own thoughts which are interpreted by a Sir Attenborough impersonator. Placing fungi specimens from the university collection and at the same time training another ML model with thousands of images of them. Bringing the ‘real’ to the ‘virtual’ by 3d scanning the produced objects, utilizing obsolete technology like the overhead projectors and other things that I won’t reveal as well. Can you spot the pattern?
So, I ask myself, what are the implications of a mind that is so intrinsically linked to artifacts and how the experience of being can be challenged by the encounters between humans, artifacts and non human entities?
It seems for me that all these materials and their intersections are set in a way that allows me to think about nature, technology, and ultimately in how we produce knowledge. Do we really get to know something that is not just merely a byproduct of our own cognitive structure? Isn’t naming something colonizing it? I have failed to go beyond myself, even though I feel the urgency to do so. To be honest, the more I think about things the more I feel separated from them.
I rotate, head, in this exploding universe.