Equivocality

I’ve finally imported all of my (10,000 odd) travel photos into Lightroom and I’m starting to organize, tag, color correct, and most importantly of all, select which ones I want to assemble for a show. At a remove of months or years, I’m definitely seeing new aspects to my work. Even more fun, I’m begging to see previously unexpected correspondences between them, such as this one:

click for big version

I’ve always understood that photographs can be related visually, such as by form, texture, or color. I’ve also know that photographs could be related by theme, or tell a story. What hadn’t occurred to me until recently is that images could also be connected by the emotion they inspired in me. I love how understanding communication is a never-ending process…

If I got the offer I would go instantly. I’d pack up everything and nothing and leave next week, or probably tomorrow. Even if I could never come back. Maybe especially if I couldn’t. I want to see the Solar System that badly.

Yeah, the technology, the adventure, the leap into the unknown is exciting. But I’ve always imagined turning off my radio at the end of the day, unplugging from Earth and having the cold planet all to myself for a little while in the dusk light. Boots crunching on the dry-ice frost, I’d sit down a rock and look at the sky.

And probably see something like this NASA video of drifting dust in the night-time Martian sky.

These images make me suddenly lonely, happy, and hopelessly yearning all at once.

What I do in my Wednesday and Friday morning aerial class is mostly sucking. These are the sort of classes you take if you want to be an aerialist, a trapeze artist or something. Accordingly, my Russian instructor has made me hurt. She’s thoroughly professional, but isn’t known for being warmhearted or encouraging.

This would be easier if I wasn’t usually good at things. In fact, it was many years before I got bad at anything. When I went to university, I even made the lucky decision to study something I already knew something about. There were always these kids in the back of the class going, “wait… what??” but I was never one of them. In fact I didn’t even understand such people. I mean, how could you sit through class after class and never, you know, bother to work out what the fuck we were all talking about?

I know better now. In circus school I sit at the back of the class.

When I began Equivocality in 2005, I didn’t know what I was doing, just that I wanted to publicly share some of my writing. A lot of things have happened since then; I went traveling (again), I started the Writer’s Travel Scholarship, I began to write fiction. Equivocality has become a sort of scrapbook of my attempts to communicate. I really enjoy the fact that I can put anything here, that I am free to experiment with different forms — prose, poetry, photography.

But it’s surely not to everyone’s taste. It’s too much about me. (Also, no one can spell it!)

That’s why I have begun another writing project. More of a standard blog, with more frequent updates. Something you can add to your reader, something that most curious people will hopefully find interesting. It’s taken me a few weeks to find my footing, to figure out what it’s actually about, but I think I’m seeing a pattern in the things I want to write about.

No, but what if? What if we’ve been going about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence all wrong? Why do we expect anyone anywhere to be sending messages to a random little yellow dwarf star? I think no one’s sending us messages for the same reason that we’re not sending any messages to them: it’s ridiculous to expect that someone could be listening, in just the right place at just the right time on just the right frequency.

Instead, I started thinking about the problem of interstellar communication the other way around. I just assumed that a network of technological civilizations already exists, and asked what the protocol would be for connecting to it.

Supposed to be out yesterday, I know, but I just got back from India, and I have to read all these damn entries. Which I thank you all for submitting. Hang tight. The winner will be announced Soon, I promise.

Calcutta you are motion! Calcutta you are noise and smoke and all the impolite truths of humanity stacked on top of each other in one place. You are sound and light and fresh fruit juice, a man yelling mango juice mangojuice mangojuice! into the crowd on the corner. Step right up and get your slice of life! There’s nowhere to run anyway. The streets are packed with cars and carts and bicycles and rickshaws and pedestrians, and usually no sidewalks. The sidewalks are for sleeping on.

Existence itself may be considered an abyss possessed of no meaning. I do not read this as a pessimistic statement. If it be true, then I can see in it nothing else but a declaration of autonomy for my imagination & will– & for the most beautiful act they can conceive with which to bestow meaning upon existence.

When Wikipedia was launched in 2001, many people though that the project could not work. They questioned whether anyone would be interested in writing articles on a volunteer basis, they wondered how giving everyone access could possibly result in accurate information, they worried about vandalism and conflict over contentious issues. Surprisingly, all of these concerns have been dealt with rather well. Wikipedia works, and is now unarguably the best encyclopedia in human history.

But why does it work? I’ve been participating in the Wikipedia community for some time now, writing, mediating disputes, and carefully studying the design of both the software and — just as important — the policies and culture surrounding it. To the best of my understanding so far, here are the basic reasons why Wikipedia works.

Consider: a Bluetooth headset implanted just under the skin + appropriately slick voice-command software = telepathy. I wonder who is going to sell it first?