‘Man, Sartre tells us, is “a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.”’

“There is a long-standing relationship between drug consumption and the cultural understanding of landscape. From Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to the M25 raves of the late 1980s, new perspectives, new uses and new ideas of landscape come about through the way that drug use allows us to see. If we think of Jim Morrison driving into the Mojave Desert to take mescaline, the Beatles with a harmonium in a tree, the situationists hyped on varied substances wandering the backstreets of Paris, or Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters wiring up sound systems around a valley to distort perceptions of distance and proximity, we might be assembling an atlas of drug-induced landscape research.”

‘The etymological origin of the word “recipe” offers a further insight into the nature of the exchange. The word finds its root in the Latin word reciperere, meaning simultaneously “to give and to receive”.

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In these terms, the recipe itself—especially in its embodiment as instructed actions—needs to be understood as a vector for establishing the uncanny barriers of signification erected by the bounds of the cookbook itself as a haunted site of death, enchantment, and revenant signs. In this way, eating, a vital and animated activity, is “disturbingly blended with death, decomposition and the corpse.”‘

‘The picture Houellebecq paints across the nightclubs, resorts and restaurants of the West is of a society that understands the facts but won’t spell them out—where concern for the body (health, beauty, sensation, etc.) has been raised to a cultural zenith, only without any corresponding apparatus to give meaning to decline and death. This, he opines, is the bleak consequence of the ongoing march of consumer capitalism—“which, turning youth into the supremely desirable commodity, had little by little destroyed respect for tradition and the cult of the ancestors—inasmuch as it promised the indefinite preservation of this same youth, and the pleasures associated with it.”’

One of Land’s celebrated concepts is “hyperstition,” a portmanteau of “superstition” and “hyper” that describes the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Hyperstitions are ideas that, once “downloaded” into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Nick Land describes hyperstition as “the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies”.

‘For centuries, and as late as the early 19th century, a “moment” was something quite specific—a 40th of an hour, or around 90 seconds.

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Because most of the world’s landmass is in the northern hemisphere, Lowe says, heavy winter snowfall can impact how quickly the Earth rotates in certain months. “It’s like a skater putting their arms out—all the snow gets accumulated to higher and higher altitudes, and you can physically see the Earth slow down,” he says. “And as that snow melts and recedes back down into the ocean, the Earth will speed back up a little bit again, just like a skater pulling their arms in.”

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Take snapping your fingers. It might seem instantaneous, and is a sort of shorthand for something that happens in a moment. Instead, it is like live television with a short delay. By the time your brain has processed the command to move your fingers, the visual of your middle finger sliding down your thumb, the feeling of that finger striking the corner of your palm, the vibrations of your eardrum from sound waves in the air—all passing through nerves like electricity through copper wire—the snap has long since come and gone. All these stimuli seem to be happening simultaneously, even though they aren’t. And your brain is rewriting this perception in the moments between when it occurs and when the stimuli are threaded together. “Your perceptual world always lags behind the real world,” he says.

The lag is further complicated by what our brains know about causality and anticipation—and that any given perceived moment is influenced by what happens before and after it. “The part that we fall for … is that there are these crisp moments in time, instead of blurry,” Eagleman says, “which is to say, you know, if you’re incorporating information from the past and also from what happens next in an event, it means that the moment ‘now’ is not a crisp moment in time. It’s actually smeared out, over at least a half a second, maybe longer.”’

Excerpts from Susan Sontag’s On Photography:

“The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

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Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from. Now nature—tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

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To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subject.

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There is no matter in all the world so homely, trite, and humble that through it this man of the black box and chemical bath cannot express himself entire.

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The other world is to be found, as usual, inside this one.

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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans—the used things, warm with generations of human touch, that Rilke celebrated in The Duino Elegies as being essential to a human landscape. Instead we have our paper phantoms, transitorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

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Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. Photographs make normative an experience of art that is mediated, second-hand, intense in a different way.”