Jen Dorman

“If technology is making the illusion of participation feel more potent, it’s not by overproducing the means of human connection but by creating the conditions in which endless, aimless discourse has no phatic component. […]

Who could possibly believe that an interaction with an AI model is (1) a conversation and (2) that it warrants evaluation in

“I’ve never been very happy about the world,” he confessed in a 2018 video interview for the Lower East Side Biography Project. “So what makes me tick is this obsessive need to figure out what isn’t here that I want to be here. I make plays — or whatever you want to call them — to try to fill that great big void.”

• NYT, Richard Foreman obituary

The company name refers to the metaphysical study of the nature of existence and to Mr. Foreman’s conviction that the situations he worked with were, as he told John Rockwell of The New York Times in 1976, “basically hysteric — repressed passions emerging as philosophical interactions.”

“Truth revealed takes the unfortunate shape of everything that isn’t true.”

• Richard Foreman, playwright + founder of Ontological-Hysteric Theater

complexity : timeless beauty.

We need to redefine complexity because it’s seen as a thing to avoid instead of a thing to chase. Simplicity gets all the attention; and it frames complexity as a sin. I think we’re confusing complexity for convolution (complexity gone wrong). I’d argue that complexity is the holy grail.

Nature, art, and technology all

“But as more tech folks jump aboard the progress train, I’d suggest that they go one click deeper in illustrating what kind of society we’re hurtling toward. Which technologies they’d like to see in abundance, and which they’d prefer stay scarce. And put away the cyberpunk for a second: What about our relationships to each other? The kind of “good