[FRIAM] Spanish Castles in Space: Heider and Simmel revisited

[Jon Zingale]

Working to derive structure, objects, and meaning from time series
continues to be a wellspring for me of unsettled phenomenal questions. More
and more I feel:

1. Limited efficacy working from a framework that considers objects to be
ontologically prior to processes, and a greater need to build tools that
work from the flows of phenomenal experience toward more familiar
touchstones.

2. To whatever extent I am successful in building these tools, it seems to
me that the world is much more process than it is object, that like
Tolstoy's unhappy families, chimeras are exactly those flows without a
doppelganger.

3. that object/non-object asymmetries are more subtle than are easily
investigated by platonic/complementary/dialectical thought. For phenomena
with well-behaved mean and variance I may reliably identify derived objects
with their behaviors, where no such expectation can exist for those without.

Linked here are two videos. The first is the 1944 classic by Heider and
Simmel and the second is a music video whose content is composed by visual
artists working with current AI tools. This second video has qualities that
I find disconcerting, reminding me of dreams or what my earliest
experiences might have been like to struggle with object permanence.
Somehow the video highlights for me how few of my experiences of the world
are likely made up of proper objects, how much work it must have taken my
nervous system to parameterize and set thresholds, to reliably resolve the
world into objects that were *good enough* and *for such and such
timescale*. The video exists as a kind of rhetoric or evidence that the
world may be usefully understood as flow, as a procession of differences.

Heider and Simmel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTNmLt7QX8E

The Orb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGHMq9uky54
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