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INFLUENCE OF SERIOUSNESS


A hall-sized installation of glass and light that immerses visitors in an infinity mirror.
teamLab Borderless | Tokyo (JP) 2024

We are in the world to create and contribute meaning in whatever arenas we choose or invent.

COSMIC JOKE

Anything whatever in the world can mean the world to us. Yet, meaning is not a property inherent to the world, no more than the value of a 5-dollar bill is a property inherent to strips of cotton and linen; the world is meaningless.

And that's hilarious. The joke is that we get to write our own punchlines. To be as heart-breaking, uplifting, volatile, derisive, provacative, practical, romantic, or mystical as we choose.

If meaning were inherent to the world, to the Universe, then human creative agency would not be. Only seriousness.

Creative agency, a property that we possess inherently as humans, is an endowment from a meaningless world that asks us to play; which asks that we fuck around, and find out.

THE INTERNET IS LAUGHING AT YOU

As the saying goes, 'choose your path or have your path chosen for you', or something to that effect. In other words, create meaning for yourself and write your punchline—otherwise. Yet, seriousness offers a pseudo-choice, a way to make a choice without making a choice: a dynamic and personalized subscription.

That's the misleading influence of seriousness. Seriousness streams and presents consumption as an act of meaning-making, and disguises persuasion as discernment, and trends as taste.

A ceramic cherub with a cracked face.
Boring angel | Prague (CZ) 2022

Seriousness asks, Why suffer cultivating the joy in the horror of your authenticity, when binging and scrolling feels good enough?

WHAT IS WHAT IS MAKING YOU FEEL?

Creative agency manifest in a meaningless world is a protection from the absolute and authoritarian, the appeal of which as the answers to the conduct and content of our lives is an active, increasingly persuasive, algorithmic- and interface-design choice.

But the world, the Universe, does not command or persuade, but calls, and reshapes to our answers. Through whatever obstacles, toward adventure, toward horror, toward joy.1

An ominous all-black sculpture with humanoid shape positioned like it is hiding.
Where the no-things roam | Budapest (HU) 2023

To ignore the call is to play only the first level of a video game, satisfied to pretend nothing beyond exists; ingoring clues in the game-world which beckon and dare you to accept genuine success that follows invariable, and often repeated, genuine failure.

To ignore the call, is to deny the mystic impulse to formulate, and re-formulate, an authentic delivery to the cosmic joke, and the libidinal development of taste and discernment—and instead become serious, increasingly attached and succeptible to the hollow satisfaction of persuasive interfaces and algorithmic delivery.

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1 I love footnotes. I don't like anchors. But you probably have no problem scrolling, do you, tool?

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