language

Protagoras observed a strange paradox about language. Despite the perpetual flux and change of the physical world, language lends the mistaken impression that the world is not in flux, that it is stable. As the Presocratic philosopher Empedocles had observed only a few years before, ‘there is no birth for any mortal thing, nor any cursed end in

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“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”

― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

As we are fed more content, we are pushed deeper into algorithmic niches. In return, we are encouraged to engage with more extreme and polarizing identifiers because it is more labelable, more indexable by the machine — the creation of the “Island". On this island, the slang, in-jokes, and archetypes which emerge as a community develops in... See more

Words shape our ideas, how we see the world, and how we relate to one another. As design teacher and researcher Anne Galloway says:

“Language doesn’t just make things—it assembles, cobbles together, entire worlds and all the relations within.”

Language makes it possible for us to navigate places and relationships; to express needs and requirements;... See more