Unwinding the Tape
What it's kind of like to be an architect
So last night I watched the Watchmen with Cat, who is now gone on a cruise for a week. It's spring break at Carnegie Mellon, and I am one of a small percentage who's decided to stay. Now I'll be able to maybe actually feel like I own the campus when I finally make the trek up to the studio floor. Something I want you all to understand is the extent to which I am behind on my work... Last semester's project, the Skygate Hotel, was not materialized. It still exists as fantasy, my second primarily truly virtual space. There are decisions to be made that I will not have another opportunity to make, like with every project I know, but the conception of that architecture is literally the full weight of me as a designer. At least for another decade. This is how my life "works".
So in case you haven't noticed, the past year for me was mostly about delving into the occult and paranormal, meeting with some of the greatest minds mankind has been fortunate enough to bear. I must have mentally fused with Aleister Crowley for some of it, if we are to believe we can embody the spirits of those who have passed on... The opposite of exorcism is possession, which one more step is synonymous with bondage. For the record, the "conspiracy" I adhere to is that of the existence of mind control, more specifically the state of being under the influence of another entity's will. Whether this so-called other entity is simply human (and so without control of its emotions) or one step beyond it (robotically cruel?), is the extent of my questioning on the matter. Why, you ask, are you on this intrepid quest to the pits of lunacy where the foundations of reality drop away? Ha, but I answer, not only is your entire wakefulness just as well someone else's dream, but the mysteries of space are older than the dream, the Stone Masons probed them holistically, and mathematical puzzles and metaphysical riddles exist outside of "everyday" experience. They are the highs and lows of our wanderings, when we may drop the facade of vision our I's maintain and question once more what it means to be 'Me'.
I believe that Heaven and Hell only exist in our imaginations. As the most sublime spaces, of both love and terror, they are allegorical and fundamentally pure to whichever end of the experiential spectrum we are capable of stretching to its limits. They are subsequently weighed as an influence upon our politic, a phantom imprisonment, and today we see the state inherit the power back from the church that hasn't been delegated to commercial worship. What we see around us, including all the invisible things hidden between that, is all we should assume is at hand. Even my conceiving of this scenario is a virtual act, and once more one grounds against the mind as the unifying controlling factor. What the so-called virtual act is proving to us is the complexity of our selecting preferences, even the question of what to do first. How can a simulated you know anything about what the real you has forgotten? The sad part of this story is that we could not have come to understand those preferences without trying them out on ourselves first, with aisles of Campbell's soup en masse, masking the gluttony and destruction, to establish virtuous and aesthetic standards everyone can go by, if not merely comprehend. Maybe I'm trying to explain away our collective insanity?
And we truly are insane, and this century had better be about coming clean to the fact that the money we print and ship overseas is as dangerous to us as the weapons and drugs we traffic and proliferate. That the rate at which you kill does not change the fact that you do. That the public is the private, that laws and regulations are not of the same nature we are, and that that nature is in fact guided by the stars and planets as faithfully as we have mapped our world to them. It's a mad, mad world out there, and all I can do is design and close the shutters, draw the curtains, and float the glass. And let Nature in.
"Change is a word, it doesn't mean anything, change what?" - Ron Paul
So last night I watched the Watchmen with Cat, who is now gone on a cruise for a week. It's spring break at Carnegie Mellon, and I am one of a small percentage who's decided to stay. Now I'll be able to maybe actually feel like I own the campus when I finally make the trek up to the studio floor. Something I want you all to understand is the extent to which I am behind on my work... Last semester's project, the Skygate Hotel, was not materialized. It still exists as fantasy, my second primarily truly virtual space. There are decisions to be made that I will not have another opportunity to make, like with every project I know, but the conception of that architecture is literally the full weight of me as a designer. At least for another decade. This is how my life "works".
So in case you haven't noticed, the past year for me was mostly about delving into the occult and paranormal, meeting with some of the greatest minds mankind has been fortunate enough to bear. I must have mentally fused with Aleister Crowley for some of it, if we are to believe we can embody the spirits of those who have passed on... The opposite of exorcism is possession, which one more step is synonymous with bondage. For the record, the "conspiracy" I adhere to is that of the existence of mind control, more specifically the state of being under the influence of another entity's will. Whether this so-called other entity is simply human (and so without control of its emotions) or one step beyond it (robotically cruel?), is the extent of my questioning on the matter. Why, you ask, are you on this intrepid quest to the pits of lunacy where the foundations of reality drop away? Ha, but I answer, not only is your entire wakefulness just as well someone else's dream, but the mysteries of space are older than the dream, the Stone Masons probed them holistically, and mathematical puzzles and metaphysical riddles exist outside of "everyday" experience. They are the highs and lows of our wanderings, when we may drop the facade of vision our I's maintain and question once more what it means to be 'Me'.
I believe that Heaven and Hell only exist in our imaginations. As the most sublime spaces, of both love and terror, they are allegorical and fundamentally pure to whichever end of the experiential spectrum we are capable of stretching to its limits. They are subsequently weighed as an influence upon our politic, a phantom imprisonment, and today we see the state inherit the power back from the church that hasn't been delegated to commercial worship. What we see around us, including all the invisible things hidden between that, is all we should assume is at hand. Even my conceiving of this scenario is a virtual act, and once more one grounds against the mind as the unifying controlling factor. What the so-called virtual act is proving to us is the complexity of our selecting preferences, even the question of what to do first. How can a simulated you know anything about what the real you has forgotten? The sad part of this story is that we could not have come to understand those preferences without trying them out on ourselves first, with aisles of Campbell's soup en masse, masking the gluttony and destruction, to establish virtuous and aesthetic standards everyone can go by, if not merely comprehend. Maybe I'm trying to explain away our collective insanity?
And we truly are insane, and this century had better be about coming clean to the fact that the money we print and ship overseas is as dangerous to us as the weapons and drugs we traffic and proliferate. That the rate at which you kill does not change the fact that you do. That the public is the private, that laws and regulations are not of the same nature we are, and that that nature is in fact guided by the stars and planets as faithfully as we have mapped our world to them. It's a mad, mad world out there, and all I can do is design and close the shutters, draw the curtains, and float the glass. And let Nature in.
"Change is a word, it doesn't mean anything, change what?" - Ron Paul