We're back! ~1500 words you never asked for! But first a reminder that I'm exhibiting work in London this weekend (4th - 6th May) at Brompton Cemetery Chapel. Opening afternoon is on Saturday the 4th til 6pm, I've heard that there will be tea and cake and I'm showing a new semi-AI-influenced interactive sculpture work called Cyclopticon and a recent film I've not shown yet called Swimming Through Synthesis. Details here!

The below is paragraphs of boring text, next time I promise I'll include some relief in the form of cute life updates, shows I've seen, music I'm enjoying, and TV shows I've watched (it's just Battlestar Galactica).

Item 17; Why have I not emailed you

I would say I stepped out too far? The last message I sent was two months ago, and it's tempting to fall into a self-effacing trap where I believe that I haven't had my thoughts properly ordered, I've been too chaotic, I've not handled my workload well enough. Any of those might be true, and similarly a reasonable excuse is that the past term of my MA offered more academic opportunities for writing, which became a focus. That one's definitely true; I started writing to you at a time when I felt I needed to write but nobody was asking me to.

Really though, I was previously having a great time dipping in to relatively narrow topics in which I could rapidly collate some research and maybe have some ideas. I say now that I might have stepped out too far because either through acute awareness or more likely, deep naĭveté, I tried to develop macro-analyses of some unfeasibly broad phenomena like why we believe things to be true. I set out confident in the belief that casting a wide research net would gradually lead me towards a specialism rather than away from it, and it's embarrassing now to admit that I was caught off-guard around a month ago when I found myself overwhelmed by an inability to coherently articulate contentions which functionally pointed outwith themselves to broader and broader issues. In hindsight, I feel really bad for the manager in the BBC's Responsible AI team who deftly managed to endure a research interview in which I asked them absolutely untenable questions like Do you have any concerns that greater public knowledge of synthetic media might feed into effects such as the Liar's Dividend?

So I couldn't see the wood for the trees, an appropriately dumb piece of parochial english semantics underserved by its irony usually inferring wood as a conglomerate of trees and not really leaning enough on the quirk of trees being made of wood; the wood is semantically both external and internal to the tree. In my case, the wood I was trying to observe was the internal, literal, specific, but the wood I managed to glimpse was the collective, vague, external. I couldn't see the wood for the wood!!