The service of translation learns to spell out words already uttered in another language. The transference of guilt that happens in this exchange is a bonus process. If you specialise in doing translation for a mafiosi, you will form phantom memories of crimes you never did. Or rather you will form phantom memories of the effect of performing the narration of things you never did. You won't know what it feels like to kill someone in cold blood (till you do it). But you will know what it feels…
Design is a science of enforcing convenience. There is no harm of course, in lightening labour and simplifying systems. No harm. Except to the interests of the mind. Things quickly become boring when they become convenient. In fact, they recede into the background. Become a part of the infrastructure. Take toilets, for instance. Or the internet. Or maybe the ipod. Industrial design is the only knowledge-system which holds an ambition to bore everyone as quickly as possible. If it is easy to…
Service is already agreed to be an act of empathy. A channel of co-experience. So I service memory, make history disappear. You can talk to me as if history were washed away. History being an archive of collective experience, not the moss that a spinning lifespan gathers (there is another page for nostalgia somewhere in the museum). History will have to disappear, because time is not a cemetery. What will we do with so many dead people, so many ghosts? Land will run out, where will the…
The desire to perform magic comes from a desire to fulfil the audience. Fulfil the audience's desire to transcend, rise up, be delivered out of ordinariness. So, magic is performed. Whether this performed magic is illusion, trickery, deftness of handwork or access to supernatural power we will leave open for now, let's say. It can be either; without disrupting the configuration of this idea. Lightening moods; being the joker, jester and the racketeer all combined is a magical act. Anything that…
Serve vice. As there is little else to serve. All virtue is cloaked, parables of grandeur and heroism hide emotions. The truth in virtue remains oblique and diluted. Much like family stories, family histories. So, some filmmakers only make films about gangsters, about violence. They cannot think about the life we live. Only machines retain the capacity to serve. And machines cannot emote. They only fulfill their purpose of existence, and that maybe is an emotional way of thinking of machines.…
