<<< how to draw a perfect circle freehand >>< Of all shapes, the circle has the largest area for a given length of perimeter. A two-dimensional geometric figure consisting of a set points in a plane that are equally distant from its center. Its outline, a line turned curve in order to meet itself, imposes no hierarchy and has no clear beginning or end. A self-contained enclosure symbolizing totality, the continuous, the self, and all cyclical movement. Signifying an inside and an outside, a territorial scission. A circle is a kind of ideal condition that we encounter in many complex systems from language to the smallest components of matter, it is quite literally an emergent microcosm evoking the origins of life itself. >>< Walter Benjamin proposes that history be perceived as a monad, not a spatiotemporal continuum of progress and expansion but an image of extreme contradiction. A constellation saturated with tensions. >>< Memory becomes stone in architecture, a constellation of tangent points. >>< Without architecture there would be no stonewall, without architecture there would be no 'brick.'>>< A mourner is always searching for traces of what has been lost, constantly searching for shadows of ourselves. Excavating to find the breath of our haunting. >>< Werner Heisenberg >< With its seemingly unlimited growth of material power, mankind finds itself in the situation of a skipper who has his boat built of such a heavy concentration of iron and steel, that the boat's compass points constantly at herself and not north. With a boat of that kind no destination can be reached; she will go around in a circle, exposed to the hazards of the winds and the waves. >>< Jean-Luc Nancy >< The horizon of the infinite is no longer the horizon of the whole but the whole [all that is] as put on hold everywhere, pushed back inside the self. It is no longer a line that is drawn or a line that will be drawn, which orients and gathers the meaning of a course of progress or navigation. It is the opening or distancing of the horizon itself, and in the opening: us. We happen as the opening itself, the dangerous fault line of a rupture. >>< Someone told me a research essay is something you perform. >>< Conical Intersect, also known as Etant d’art pour locataire, was a circular, spiraling cut made visible from the street conceived at Plateau Beaubourg, on two buildings adjacent to the projected site for the construction of Centre Pompidou in 1975 that had been slated for demolition under the modernization project for the Les Halles-Plateau Beaubourg district. Perhaps more than any of Gordon Matta-Clark's cuts, the Parisian site neatly illustrates the faith based on the concept of progress that characterized the 20th century, embodied in the construction of Centre Pompidou, and the displacement and destruction of community and place as prerequisites for such progress. >>< @casuelero: That's v interesting. Did you ever get a chance to listen to that Vilashini Coppan lecture I sent a while ago? She talks about rhizomatic maps and the data-ification of literature [one imperializing and the other deconstructively decolonial]. I think there might be something there about translation and a mapping of the world in which the landscape acquires a certain density? She also talks about 'the tectonic collision between one history and another' and the divisive logics of time that sets indigenous inhabitance to one time and settler to another. IDK if any of this is helpful but it comes to mind. >>< @hernameis_jamie: Love these!!! I swear I look at cosmogram drawings every week.>>< Micah Schippa >< A river is carried to the nearest ocean through a series of exchanges and carriages through the mouth. Passed from mouth to mouth; the orality of water. >>< We share a set of vital organs; the flickering coexistence of spectral life. >>< Ballard >>< The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus capitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurons and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. >>< paradox as method of inquiry >>< *walks through a bead curtain* >>< In Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation, a team of researchers enters the unknown Area X. At first, things seem normal, but one of the researchers is haunted after seeing a Dolphin with an eye that is “painfully human, almost familiar” believing it to be her late husband. After 17th-century astrologer John Greaves spent multiple days staring directly at the sun in an attempt to measure its diameter, he began to see apparitions in his damaged corneas like “a company of crows flying together in the air at a good distance.“ To engage with the sublime is to be drawn to self-destruction by its refusal to allow itself to be understood.>>< -how do architects feel about circles? -confused and overwhelmed i think -why do you think that is? -it's difficult to react to i think its much easier to do something within a square than within a circle >>< equilibrate >< i wish you balance or like a seesaw so blindingly fast that it feels and looks like balance >