Here’s a current installation of Kawamata’s, “Nest in Liaigre”:
Stumbled upon the work of Tadashi Kawamata, who reclaims old wooden objects and furniture for his elaborate constructions. Here’s a shot of The Nest, a large installation in Helsinki in 2022:
Naples (c. 1841) by John Ruskin:
Study of Dawn: purple Clouds (1868) by John Ruskin:
Matt Crawford, on dirt biking as an example of the “humanizing possibilities” of risk:
The feeling of exposure one has on a dirt bike recalls one to a basic truth: We are fragile, embodied beings. There is a certain risk that is inherent in moving around, by whatever means. A responsible person does everything he can to minimize this risk. Yet is risk somehow bound up with humanizing possibilities? […]
The heightened contingency of driving off-road resembles walking in the faith it enacts—that of throwing oneself into the world with hope. The ancient Greeks had a single word to express the condition of being “without a road,” when the way forward is not clear: aporia. It represents a moment pregnant with the arrival of something unlooked for.
These experiences of serendipity and faith feel a bit scarce in contemporary culture, and the language for articulating them seems to be fading from common use. We have a vision of the future in which there would be little scope for such moments. The most authoritative voices in commerce and technology express a determination to eliminate contingency from life as much as possible, and replace it with machine-generated certainty. That’s what automation does, whatever else it may accomplish. More broadly, a need for certainty is expressed in the project to expand rational control over domains that remain intolerably wild. At times, this project comes untethered from any utility-maximizing logic and looks more like a compulsion. It reveals a metaphysical orientation that seems a bit cramped, or timid.
Currently reading: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling 📚
Joy says hi
Geoff Shullenberger, shedding some light on the ultimately therapeutic aims of liberal elites who use the lexicon of ‘decolonization’:
Here we find an indirect clue as to the true nature of the “decolonization” project that has become a prominent part of higher education: Like much of what now takes place in elite institutions, it is ultimately a therapeutic enterprise. Battles over land and sovereignty are displaced onto the psyche; the demand for territorial restoration has become a metaphor for internal struggles over identity and belonging for which universities serve as a staging ground. […]
There has been no more fraught subject than Israel in elite universities in recent decades. Most of them have influential constituencies on both sides of the conflict, and they have consequently acted in contradictory ways, often attracting the ire of both Israel’s supporters and its opponents. But their reluctance and awkwardness in responding to the current situation hints at a problem deeper than these divided loyalties. For years, elite colleges—and other influential institutions—have lent their prestige to once-radical concepts like decolonization, seeming to imagine that they could be kept separate from the gruesome histories out of which they emerged. Fanon, the intellectual godfather of “decolonial” thought, wasn’t so naïve. As the world becomes more dangerous again, the luxury of metaphorical radicalism may prove too costly to sustain.