Stories, Integrity and Horizontalities

Slow Muse has been a personal repository for my thoughts and feelings about art, art making and creativity for almost 20 years. As the landscape of creativity has constantly changed, I have frequently been surprised by what persists and what does not. At this particular moment in time artistic expression has become increasingly politicized, then […]

Strangers Meet

At a time when things feel particularly frayed and fragile, finding a place of clarity and comfort is hard. Frequent reference has been made to the haunting the lines of W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem, Second Coming: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Every […]

Stealing Bones

Kurt Vonnegut was famous for his conviction that all stories conform to very defined narrative shapes. He liked to chart out each storyline’s trajectory—he had about eight of them–and gave them names like “Man in Hole” and “Boy Meets Girl.” And now AI has demonstrated that these fundamental story forms are indeed legit–identifiable, indelible, ubiquitous. […]

More Than Just Out or In

“A cartographic conception is very distinct from the archaeological conception… The latter establishes a profound link between the unconscious and memory: it is a memorial, commemorative, or monumental conception…Maps, on the contrary, are superimposed in such a way that each map finds itself modified in the following map, rather than finding its origin in the […]