art
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Resonant Thoughts: John Berger’s “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos” (2026)
“The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and their times overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering” (13). “Most workers in the world carry the same physical stigma: a sign of… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Dave Eggers’ “Contrapposto: A Novel” (2026)
“Rembrandt lived three hundred years ago and knew far more than we do now. How is that? Why is that? Why have we gotten less skilled, less competent, less knowledgeable, less adept and versatile? How can that be?” (168). “You have been mistaught! You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Cory Doctorow’s “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (2026)
“Art is what happens when an artist has a big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling in their mind, which they infuse into some artistic medium—a book, a song, a dance, a painting, a photograph, and such—in the hopes of making a facsimile of that big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling materialize in the minds of people who… Continue reading
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Music’s Complex Problem
Édouard Vuillard, Morning Concert (1937-38) Why do we turn to music when there are so many other artistic, physical, social, trivial, and spiritual pursuits claiming our attention? One reason is that music is a multimodal experience that is already meaningfully integrated into our lives. Music is everywhere as a tacit shared language, a perpetual underscore… Continue reading
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Stolen Moments Are Open-Ended
The brief moments in which many musical projects begin feel stolen because they are as if outside of time, free from routine, surprising, and rich in delight. They’re powerful because they’re witness to something new happening. But how does this unfold? As usual there’s no plan, I’m just exploring—clicking on sounds, moving audio around, or… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Riccardo Falcinelli’s “Chromorama: How Colour Has Changed Our Way of Seeing” (2025)
“Conventions change to reflect wider changes in the culture, but what is worth underlining here is how the ideas that we have about things have always been constructed starting from the concrete uses of the things themselves” (104). “This is how our collective imagination is constructed: an idea appears, takes shape, is liked, begins to… Continue reading
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Aftertouch
Johannes Vermeer, A Young Woman seated at a Virginal (c. 1670-72) In MIDI parlance, aftertouch refers to MIDI data that’s transmitted when a key or pad on an electronic controller is held down after the initial attack to control parameters such as volume, vibrato depth, or filter brightness. One of the first synthesizers to incorporate… Continue reading
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