Day Four - Cleaning up the Tabs
I will probably stop including which day I am on when I get to day 8
Welcome to day four of a daily email rewrite experiment.
To quote from day 1 “Every day for the next week I will send out a daily email. Then the following week, every day I will send a rewrite of the email from 7 days ago. I am not sure how long I will do this… I’m going to try for a month.”
The Pressure!
A little reflection on this exercise so far… it is a fair bit of work! Right now I feel a little nervous. What if I don’t really have anything to say today? I am wondering if I need to include different media in this newsletter: food, film, net art, fashion. Perhaps meditations on cosmetics, permaculture, yurts, or bread making.
When I get into a state like this I focus on my body. What does my body feel like? My legs feel good, my arms feel light, my feet feel tingly, my neck hurts a bit. My head feels pressure, probably from the half bottle of natural wine I drank this afternoon. Natural wine is wine made without additives or additional yeast. It is more variable and sometimes more funkier.
The Evening!
The once gray sky is now turning dark and the birds have stopped their chirping making space for the evening insect symphony. am looking forward to a large bright moon, since tomorrow August 3rd, is the full moon. I googled overcast sky thinking I would include a Turner painting right about now, but instead I saw a Vija Celmins. The images below are from an article from The Paris Review.
I saw these pieces a while back at the Met Breuer. The level of detail in that water picture is very intense - those are all individual graphite pencil strokes. That to me is as much as physical practice as a work of art. But yes, both these images are gray, like my sky this afternoon.
The New Weird!
While googling Clemins I came across a new website, this is tomorrow. On their front page was an image by Henry Hudson that I include below. It is made from plasticine - which I find incredible and googled a bit about that process. It is included as a video below.
This work reminds me of the film Annihilation (image below), which I also recently included in my computers, robots and film class. Jeff Vandermeer, the author of the book Annihilation, has an excellent twitter persona and also wrote a fantastic book on creation called Wonderbook. Annihilation, the book, is part of the New Weird Genre, beloved by Lovecraft enthusiasts, speculative realists, and others. I always love a new genre, especially a weird one.
The Tabs!
When I started this newsletter I thought I would go through all my open tabs. Especially all my GPT-3 open tabs. I am not sure how interesting that is, but I am having difficultly letting go of this organizing concept so here it is. A list of my tabs with some mini commentary.
I have a tab open on OPO, organizational theory, written by Bonnitta Roy, whose work I have become familiar with during quarantine. The article is dense with some great graphics. It proposes a network structure for leaderless organizations based on access, adaptation, support, incubation. From my perspective a manager is someone that constantly is striving for alignment on a vision. When there is true alignment on a vision the right actions follow. In this perspective everyone can and should be a manager, but depending on the scale of the vision you are responsible for, you will be navigating the network differently.
A bunch of tabs trying to understand the hype around GPT-3, Open AI’s new machine learning algorithm based on an enhanced language model. There is even an HP Lovecraft story made by GPT-3. A bunch of philosophers are talking about GPT-3 over at daily nous. What is interesting about GPT-3 and machine learning in general is how scale (and to some extent speed) creates phase transitions. There is nothing particularly new in GPT-3 algorithmically, it is just MORE. But this more creates a different system. Perhaps a job for system poetics.
I had a tab open from What is emerging, that had a bunch of video projection. I did not read it closely, but I did see a shout out to Joanna Macy and environmental activist who is a personal hero.
Reading the untold truths about fallen angels. Yes this is a little weird. For some reason I am interested in the mythology of angels, perhaps because of Henry Corbin.
Scenius -communal genius -genius that comes from a cultural scene - like perhaps the inklings! This concept is from Brian Eno and relates a bit to my meditation on community at the end of yesterday’s email. I got this link from from Venkatesh Rao’s free newsletter teaser.
Yamakasi and the history of Parkour. This stuff is fun to watch. I sort of missed the whole Parkour fad, I think I was either trying to get pregnant, pregnant or nursing a child.
4E cognition - I keep hearing about new cognitive frameworks. This is one I heard about this week. The 4Es refer to cognition that is embodied, embedded, enacted and extended, and located outside the brain.
An article about the neurobiology of neurosis that I do not understand from the journal Nature.
The End!
This newsletter desperately needs a rewrite but isn’t that the whole point of this exercise! I just dumped a whole bunch of CBT on my neck in the hopes that it will feel a bit better. Now I will lay back and finish watching An Angel at My Table, a Jane Campion film about the life of the writer Janet Frame. Janet Frame’s, The Carpathians, is one of my favorite books.
Happy Tab Closing
x
Meredith