analyzing thought patterns generally requires some type of visual metaphor. one of my favorites is that certain concepts or events are the equivalent of releasing a few drops of ink into a clear tank of water. in its default state, the water is clear, it looks like it’s doing nothing. but once you put a colored liquid into it, suddenly you can see how the water is flowing. it was already flowing this way, but now you can see it. another liquids metaphor is that going deeply into certain topics is like pouring water out onto a seemingly flat surface. almost no surface is really flat, and if you do this, you see the water naturally find the lowest point, and pool there - even if its several feet away, at the edge of the surface, somewhere you never would have expected. this second example is one i use quite often, as going very deeply into certain topics often leads to an unexpected place. this unexpected place isn’t random - it’s some type of “lowest point”, and once you find it, you can see people’s varying intellectual paths somehow just seem to end up there, over and over. one example of this you see online a lot is any type of radical or skeptical politics somehow ending up at nutrition and alternative medicine. these two fields seems totally unconnected - but they’re not. apparently once you start getting curious about power and people telling you what to do, that intellectual water you spilled out happens to flow and pool up around what you’re consuming. this kind of makes sense - what you put into your body and why is, in a way, the most direct and imminent manifestation of society telling you what to do, and what to think. in this way, many of my personal interests seem to flow towards and pool up around the concept of images. religion, esoterica, magic, shamanism, theology - whatever you want to call this cluster of topics as a field - if you think about one of them for a while, you’re going to find yourself circling the concept of images, and asking yourself what images really are. our culture has a strange and unique theory of images at this time. in my opinion this is partially due to photography, and it’s presently undetermined how AI images will fit into this understanding. to swiftly explicate this cultural understanding, you can just ask yourself what an image is. literally, what is it? an image represents something. okay, what does it mean to represent something? it’s right in the word: it re-presents something: it presents it to you again. this seems obvious, but the slip up is that we actually do not think of photography in this way. a painting of an angel is clearly a representation of an angel, and you would, even casually, call it this: a representation. but our engagement with photography scrambled this. if you have a photo of yourself at a friend’s wedding, you would never say, “this is a representation of me at the wedding”. we don’t see it as a representation. we say, “this is me at the wedding”. in our mental model, the photo isn’t re-presenting you at the wedding. it’s not a representation. we talk about it as though it just “is” you at the event. you would never show someone a photo of your sister and say, “this is a representation of my sister”. but that’s literally what it is. the AI image, as subset of photographic images, takes this view of photography and accelerates it wildly - as, it is, literally, a re-presentation of photographic images. it is re-presenting information from other photos to you, as a photo. its unclear how a culture that already failed to see photographs as representations will parse this: literally (very im 15 and this is deep) re-presentations of representations. thats part of why those fields i mentioned above all have a paranoia about images. i was once doing a lesson about a highly geometric and symbolic form of religious art. a student asked, “is this real?”, referring to the painting. its impossible to answer that. its neither, and both. its an image.
https://hell.twtr.plus/media/8ea4c589e3751edba33f52e622fc6651a3a61c7a8a7cb4c6e4326b5199e5478e.file
https://hell.twtr.plus/media/48c89db7058535ea5d6345d6ad355ea86a77d529512d0b7f89f053e460a5e4f0.file