WORDS ABBREVIATE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THINGS
The word snowflake puts a cap on that concept. As in, "oh those are snowflakes." But in reality they are complex ice crystals that come in varying forms and infinite shapes. A point sadly missed if one is regarding a snowflake. This is perhaps why it has taken us thousands of years to build a language barely adequate to communicate our understanding of the world around us. And also why language requires us to string together complex lines of these abbreviated meanings to get back to the initial understandings of the concepts behind them. From the Hopi to today we seem to have evolved toward making things that start out simple more complicated to understand, moving backward as it were. This being a direct result of written languages need to be economized thus abbreviating or cutting off the natural webbing of meaning. Only in works of poetry do we find words that fold in on themselves adequately enough to produce vast meanings and feelings in a terse vehicle.
Abbreviation =complexity
Editing= simplicity
chriseddy
2 comments:
i see you really appreciate the lossy compression of symbols....
Different tactics: Lossless and Lossy compression
Lossless Compression - No data (in a technical sense) is lost. Therefore, the compression process is reversible.
Lossy Compression - Some data is lost during compression. This process is irreversible.
Lossy compression generally creates smaller files than lossless compression. However, many types of files cannot undergo lossy compression without losing functionality - once they're compressed, you must to be able to decompress them in order to read them. In these cases, lossless compression can be used to store smaller files, and the file can be expanded when a person needs to be access it.
lossy compression acts the same way in language, there is a loss of functionality along with the compressed understandings/meanings.
William S Bouroughs spoke of language as a virus. But perhaps the virus has been written for language.
A virus that causes us to choose economic ways of communicating over terse ways to relate.
In art we need to use the LAWLESS compression. It allows for expanded functionality through its inherent nature of involving randomness and serendipitous results.
Lawlessness in compression undermines the codified social meanings (the virus) and allows us to claim language as truly ours.
chriseddy.
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