A few things that have inspired me recently:
⭕️ This week I watched, but definitely didn’t understand because it was all in Japanese, a show about photographer Kenji Sato. In particular his stunning photos of the Presidio Modelo; a Cuban prison designed in the style of The Panopticon. The idea behind the Presidio Modelo is that it was a circular prison that allowed a guard, stationed in the centre, to view all the prisoners. From Wikipedia:
The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.
Kenji’s Instagram is full of equally awe-inspiring photos and is definitely worth a browse.
⭕️ I revisited this breathtaking (quite literally) video about Guillaume Néry. This guy’s a serious legend when it comes to deep water freediving. NARCOSE on Vimeo.
⭕️ Nils Frahm & Ólafur Arnalds make some seriously beautiful music in their own right but put them together and it’s a beautiful melting of minds and sounds. Trance Frendz is the result of one evening when the two of them got together in Nils’ studio in Berlin. Each track is named after the time it was conceived and everything is improvised with no overdubs or edits. There’s a video of Alexander Schneider catching the whole thing on tape which is totally worth a watch. The song that most resonates for me is 23:52. Cannot. Stop. Listening.
We are — as far as we know — the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious.
We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness.
We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself…
It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.
Mark Strand