Epicurus /
Epicurus made three important innovations:
- Firstly, he decided that he would live together with friends. Enough of seeing them only now and then. He bought a modestly priced plot of land outside of Athens and built a place where he and his friends could live side by side on a permanent basis. Everyone had their rooms, and there were common areas downstairs and in the grounds. That way, the residents would always be surrounded by people who shared their outlooks, were entertaining and kind. Children were looked after in rota. Everyone ate together. One could chat in the corridors late at night. It was the world’s first proper commune.
- Secondly, everyone in the commune stopped working for other people. They accepted cuts in their income in return for being able to focus on fulfilling work. Some of Epicurus’s friends devoted themselves to farming, others to cooking, a few to making furniture and art. They had far less money, but ample intrinsic satisfaction.
- And thirdly, Epicurus and his friends devoted themselves to finding calm through rational analysis and insight. They spent periods of every day reflecting on their anxieties, improving their understanding of their psyches and mastering the great questions of philosophy.
Even today, Epicurus remains an indispensable guide to life in advanced consumer capitalist societies because advertising – on which this system is based – functions on cleverly muddling people up about what they think they need to be happy.
An extraordinary number of adverts focus on the three very things that Epicurus identified as false lures of happiness: romantic love, professional status and luxury.
Adverts wouldn’t work as well as they do if they didn’t operate with an accurate sense of what our real needs are. Yet while they excite us by evoking them, they refuse to quench them properly. Beer ads will show us groups of friends hugging – but only sell us alcohol (that we might end up drinking alone). Fancy watch ads will show us high-status professionals walking purposefully to the office, but won’t know how to answer the desire for intrinsically satisfying work. And adverts for tropical beaches may titillate us with their serenity, but can’t – on their own – deliver the true calm we crave.
Epicurus invites us to change our understanding of ourselves and to alter society accordingly. We mustn’t exhaust ourselves and the planet in a race for things that wouldn’t possibly satisfy us even if we got them. We need a return to philosophy and a lot more seriousness about the business of being happy.
Divide and conquer. The Digi Corps push identity crises on us. Fearful and insecure we are easier prey for ads /
Clouds NYC /
Today's list /
Misinformation
Polit-think
Group-think
Trend-think
Censorship
Suppression of speech
Algorithm-think
Wrong-think
Right-think
Must-think
Kill-think
Shop-think is always ok though
Corporate-think
The machines have started selecting all the offenders
Reminds me of a certain communist dictatorship I grew up in, history repeats itself in new clothes
When they start arresting artists and people for Say Crimes
Do not let corporations shut us up for Think-crimes
Government mandated
Banned
Banned words
Shadow-banned
Words are banned but not guns
Today's list /
I don't subscribe to tribalism
countryism
localism
languageism
DNA-ism
I will speak whatever language I want and I'll be from whatever country I want and I will belong to whatever place I want.
Spiky City /
Georgia O'Keeffe show at MOMA, on the other hand, is worth it /
MOMA = Artism on Command by Corporate Demand /
MOMA = Art on Command by Corporate Demand.
The Cultural Dictatorship of $Digital Corporationship. Now corporations are in charge of telling you what kind of art to make.
MOMA has stooped to a new low, this used to be an institution presenting cutting edge art. Now I see the same things that I see on social media, the AI Art BS. They all train models and make meaningless computer tomography images. It's just photoshopped somebody else's stuff, I can do it in 3 seconds on my Mac applying five Photoshop filters in a row, and then if I throw my Mac out of the window then it's going to be even more radical.
While MOMA ignored cutting edge digital works for the past 20 years. By the way we did these kind of images in video games 20 years ago. I can show you a screenshot of a video game that I made exactly 20 years ago that looks better and more timely than what I see in Norma, aka MOMA.
Art On Command, Your art has to be trained on Dogma.
It reminds me of the communist dictatorship I grew up in behind the Red Curtain.
Now we have the Digital Curtain conveniently obscuring the soulless fragmentation of our society by algorithmically commanding all our interactions.
Ingredients of a Subway Car /
Ingredients of a Subway Car is a series of installations, performance and simulations inspired by the NYC subway and based on a drawing of the same name. Culminating in a series of videos and a solo show of the same name, 2017.
Read Marina Tsvetaeva to Rilke letters and thought we have lost the intensity of art sharing experience through the curation of content by social media /
Because the only motivation of social media is commerce which has no meaning once the commercial object is bought, used and discarded. Art lives forever though and we can relive the art objects endlessly over millennia. With time art only becomes more precious.
Urban Poetry - I see entire lives discarded by the trashcan /
I wonder who lived them, how and why they are no longer needed.
The NBA is not a good neighbor like the ad goes, kids should dream to be engineers and not ball players /
I'm looking at this endless going back and forth on television in my gym, I watch television probably twice a year, okay maybe once in a while in the gym, I'm wondering how is it possible to tolerate this terrible life between baskets.
Inbetweening.
Back and forth, taken out of context this could be performance art, an early piece.
For someone who likes truth I'm a pretty big liar /
Traveling /
I get goosebumps and profound oneness with the universe thinking about the tiny human creations made by the yearnings of our soft fleshes, crawling around Mars carrying the desperate human questions.
We are star stuff, our elements made in the Big Bang and excreted by turbulent stars, we are the Star Stuff. We are not going, but returning to it.
They say all the universe and all in it is just one thing sloshing around a bit, for a little bit. It's not even sloshing that much, it just is. If that is true we are not really traveling to outer space, we are going inwards, into ourselves.
People /
All friendships and relationships in the US revolve around money. This is a wasted opportunity.
People have been convinced by financial institutions and media conglomerates who naturally own all media that the only viable relationship is the relationship to money. This is the only true life consideration and they perpetuate this nonstop.
So naturally people get alienated from other people because they don't consider peopleship a worthy pursuit. Instead, people pursue relationships with money.
On the other hand, art is supported usually by wealthy people, who are skilled at money. It is great when people use their talents to generate wealth.
Developments like space exploration, which is my biggest private obsession, are championed by massive amounts of money. And practically single-handedly developed by very talented entrepreneurs like Elon Musk.
So my heart is split there. I have no answers and I do not offer any condemnations because that would be untruthful.
The only guarantee is I'm going to keep asking the questions every single day
NFT = BFS bull fucking shit /
This title is also NFT by the way, you can't buy it though. I only sell it in exchange for an Earth size planet.