I love it when I see traces of semiotic processes in all kinds of places, not only on my favourite one – the Web semiopshere.
May was such a month.
First, I found this:
These are stairs at the national Palace of Culture with inspiring lines by the Bulgarian poet Valeri Petrov. The poem is called Flying People and the verses go like this:
FLYING PEOPLE
They are not coming from Cosmos,
They were born here,
But their hearts are more crystal than sound,
And look, they fly off
Over the terraces with washing,
Over the mud, over the cinders in the yard,
And it is so nice that even single people
Exist from the tribe of the flying people.
And somehow we are going ahead
And women are dragging us,
And we drink our cognac in pubs
Talking on silly things,
Proudly raising our noses up,
Or with expression of wise fatigue
We try not to touch the point
For the flying people.
It is true that they are not from the real world,
You will not meet them on the tennis court,
They have no their own “Fiat”.
But why then something hurts us when
We see them to fly off in open space –
Maybe they remind us that
We also had belonged in the past
To the tribe of the flying people?
[I found this translation here: http://ntl.inrne.bas.bg/workshop/2015/contributions/iwnt34_poetry.pdf]
They poetically coincided with another “flying” theme: the one of the Webit.Festival (I got some notes from Webit, the keynote of Mastercard about digital identity and of D-wave about Quantum computing being the most interesting for me).
Apart from the “flying car” there, I met a bunch of wonderful young people having won the NASA and National Space Society Space Settlement contest with their Space City.
Back to the Earth and my writing space, this month I had a good amount of thinking and writing:
I published my deck from the International Forum of the Faculty of Slavic Studies at the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” 2019 where I talked about how I saw digital text:
And also talked to Frode Hegland about text as substrate, the usefulness of any technological construct as its essence, the need for deeper look into the writing and the reading processes we live by. All in all it was an interesting month. One of alignment and realizations. I left some projects, got to new ones and curbed a bit my enthusiasm about doing everything by myself as to be able to walk the talk towards digital ecology of being. It is just too hard for me to deploy my own shortening service, for example, or not use Facebook, or to use only my website as a platform (although I am trying), or to embed Linked Data within every post manually, or to describe my images in RDF…
The good news is that I remain an optimist. It is just that by the time I get to learning to code, I will more diligently stay on the writing and reading side of the digital text and leave the codes of tech assemblages alone for some time.
Thanks for reading!
Have a great week ahead!
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