GUIDE TO LIFE ARCHIVE

I Basic Philosophy

II Necessary Knowledge

III Productive Living

  • A: Practical Strategies
  • B: Emotional Well-Being

IV Autobiography

  • A: Life History
  • B: Experiencing The World
  • C: Inventing Reality

V Beauty

  • A: Analysis
  • B: A Collection

VI Art-Making

  • A: Techniques
  • B: Strategies

Appendix I: Picture Library

SENSATIONALISM
(a disorganised collection of notes that I made taken from an unrecorded source)

Ernst Mach, 19th C. philosopher and scientist: “sensationalism” – our external reality is a chaos of sensations which our brains filter to make it manageable and this function helps us to understand the world better as the more we understand this principle and improve it, following the efficient lines of least resistance, the more we can comprehend and manipulate the world.

Shklovski: de-familiarisation (also Rodchenko und Moholy-Nagy):
“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

“The sounds of the sea vanish for those who live by its shores, as the thousand voiced roar of the town is vanished for us, as everything familiar, too well known disappears from our consciousness.

Automisation corrodes things. Clothing, furniture, one’s fear of war. And so that a sense of life may be restirred, that things may be felt, so that stones may be made stony, there exists what we call art”

Moholy-Nagy: The camera gives new access to objective truth not by showing things as they are but by countering our ways of knowing. Our mind processes the world falsely according to conventional ways of seeing that have become invisible and pre-conscious. The lens, as opposed to the eye, won’t do this processing.