A question of river-ness
November 2025
Experiments in diffusion AI: in this series I’m forcing/hacking a small locally-run diffusion model to produce abstract, averaged and rough images for a minimalist prompt, int his case “river”.
Anniversary Tree
September 2025
My employer gifted me a tree for my work anniversary, but I'm unsure where this tree exists, or what it is. Is it a living being? a conglomeration of living beings? a number? capital? an idea?
Vorhanden
August 2025
Adorno said that “objects do not fall into their conceptual buckets without leaving some remainder behind”. Things normally only available as superficially, in their conceptual wrapper (in "zuhanden" mode, using Heidegger's terminology), take on a more real existence at crisis points. Any breaks from our routine time and space can bring about these ruptures in our understanding, allowing us to enter the "vorhanden" mode of interating with our surroundings.
Second nature
January 2025
"Along with God, we have murdered nature", in Henry Lefebvre's words, and we have been forced to give birth to a Second Nature, a hybrid made up of decomposing bits rescued from the old. Lefebvre goes on to say that we need a new way of situating ourselves in this new nature. A natural world that is no longer the other, the unknown, the counterbalance of culture.
Sea in between
September 2024
The sea is often imagined as a barrier—what lies between places, what defines an island as separate. But in my native Galicia, in northern Spain, historical land registry documents describe coastal property boundaries with an evocative phrase: _“bordering England to the North, sea in between.”_ This peculiar legal language reveals a different relationship to the sea: one that sees it not only as a dividing line but also as a bridge, collapsing distance and suggesting proximity. As if the sea were merely a pond between familiar shores.
Horizons
June 2022
Yi Fu-Tuan talks about how horizons are temporal as well as spatial, signalling to us the future to come, the open possibilities. Space as co-maker of futures.
40 Hz
November 2021
A few years ago, a long period of going in and out of depression made me realise how reality, our experience of the world, can change dramatically from one day to the next. Even within minutes. Which experience is the true experience? Is there an objective world out there independent of you and me? It doesn’t feel as if it is you that has changed, it feels like the world has changed, that the act of living is somehow different. Taking antidepressants and realising that those little pills can, again, change your reality, can be very disconcerting.