John Girgis
@johngirgis
John Girgis
I believe we also make maps because we are desperately, primally afraid of being lost. The tighter we cling to them the more we confuse them for something real. And when we do that, they stop showing us where to go and start leading us in ever-decreasing circles. If we can hold them lightly, however, they can open our perspective and contextualise... See more
Alexander Beiner • Lost Ways of Knowing
MONSTERS GIVE US COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS WE CAN: THEY ARE OUR PRIMAL FEARS GIVEN FORM, TERRIBLE PREDATORS WHO CAN BE VANQUISHED IF ONLY WE RISE TO THE CHALLENGE. GODS GIVE US SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS WE CAN' T: THEY EXIST TO EXPLAIN FLOODS AND EARTHQUAKES AND ALL THAT WHICH LIES BEYOND OUR CONTROL. IT DID NOT SURPRISE ME IN THE LEAST TO
... See morePeter Watts • Echopraxia (Firefall Book 2)
Nothingness, then, for all its presumed vacuity, is a multi-faceted thing: it embodies ways of knowing, it has ontological agency and politics, it has degrees and dimensions. A map of nothing demonstrates that an experiential nothingness depends upon a robust ecology of somethingness to enable its occurrence; and it recognizes the particular... See more
Mattern • How to Map Nothing
According to the teratologist (that is, the theorist of monstrosity) Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, we can understand a culture by what it calls monstrous; the monster stands for everything a society attempts to cast out.26 Monsters dwell at borders; you might even say the border creates the monster.
Lauren Elkin • Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
Scientists couldn’t look directly at nothing to see something; they had to look and listen around the void, deploying techniques similar to image compositing and echolocation. We might apply these lessons, these techniques, to our own attempts to comprehend the pandemic’s pause, which has its own experiential event horizon. We have to look and... See more
Mattern • How to Map Nothing
For me, the Greek gods reflect what happens to humans when we see only ourselves and our own needs. The great gods have such infinite power and resources that they have forgotten what it’s like to want, to suffer, to show empathy, to face all of life’s minor inconveniences. They have forgotten what it’s like to be told no, and it has turned them
... See moreMadeline Miller • CIRCE
“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
Frank Herbert • Dune
One to One: On maps, cartography and our relationship with geographical enquiry over time stretching from ancient Babylon to GIS software. With increasingly sophisticated tools to build maps, "we have the means to comprehend the future.
"We are each at the centre of our own map... We are all innate mapmakers... maps [are the] mediators between an... See more
"We are each at the centre of our own map... We are all innate mapmakers... maps [are the] mediators between an... See more
Weidenfeld & Nicolson • You Are Here: A Brief Guide to the World
If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.