brettworks

• An essay about experience in the digital age.

“It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world; it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and the experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions—the unrepeatable and the unpredictable—are what technology abolishes.”

“Alienation involves a distance from the world, a lack of connection between it and us. What technology does is compensate for the loss of reality with a substitute. Technology calibrates all differences, fills in every gap and crack with images and voices, bringing everything close to us in order to restore the connection between ourselves and the world.”

• An article on swing changes and teachers.

“After his second-round 64 at Quail Hollow, Homa said he has always imagined swing changes being ‘some grand thing, like something I’ve never done before.’ What Rattan did was give him permission to do what felt natural, instead of tacking one tweak on top of another, like clay lumped atop clay.”

“‘The goal of the teacher or coach is to empower,’ Rattan said. ‘It’s so much more powerful if it’s him saying, Hey, I’m gonna get my hands out in front of me and I’m gonna do this, instead of me saying, Hey, what if you get your hand out in front of you and try this. It’s his swing. It needs to be his idea.’”

• An article on social media art.

“On the surface, these works don’t have much in common other than capturing the attention of the public. This is a genre of art that’s often only as interesting as the response to it, which makes it especially interesting to the people doing the responding.”

• An essay about narrative warfare.

“He’s spent nearly a decade perfecting the art of narrative warfare. In media theory, it’s called strategic distraction.”