In a hyperdimensional world
Five fragments for the week of May 4, 2026
Hello from the start of May and the start of my second week in London. I spent most of the weekend in Glastonbury, then had squash for Sunday roast on the way back. Next: a bank holiday here, a workday back home, so I had all day before my day began.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
One of the bigger meta-patterns I've noticed is that engineers and conscientious people tend to overweight the value of internal consistency and logical consistency
Our audiences are barely paying attention, and it is more important to resonate in simple ways than to worry deeply about the precision and consistency of our systems and logic
Reality is incredibly complex, and any illusion you have that you have figured out a "consistent logical formula" for your work is probably wrong and unimportant
Vibes matter a lot more than people think in a hyperdimensional world
– Scott Stevenson on X, May 3, 2026. I’m so torn on this. Striving for the elegance of consistency and cohesion does feel valuable to me. It does! I want to be that kind of person. But any striving needs to come with the knowledge that you’ll never get all the way there (reality will intervene) and few will ever notice or care that you tried at all.
[After grad school] I was working for the artist Pierre Huyghe…He said this one thing to me once, that every artwork needs a coefficient of stupidity, and by that he didn’t mean that it had to be stupid, but that it had to speak plainly and directly to the unconscious.
It was important that art doesn’t present itself as smart, or trying to be smart, or make you smarter, it’s important that it gives you an image or an experience, and you break the image or experience with one gesture.
This coefficient of stupidity really stuck with me, that art really is powerful once you start talking to the subconscious.
– Ian Cheng in an episode of Art and Obsolescence, October 5, 2021, excerpted by Celine Nguyen here. Break the image or experience with one gesture. As above: resonate in simple ways rather than worrying deeply.
The camera lucida is not easy to use. Basically, it is a prism on a stick that creates the illusion of an image of whatever is in front of it on a piece of paper below. This image is not real—it is not actually on the paper, it only seems to be there. When you look through the prism from a single point, you can see the person or objects in front and the paper below at the same time. If you’re using the camera lucida to draw, you can also see your hand and pencil making marks on the paper. But only you, sitting in the right position, can see these things, no one else can.
– David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, 2001 and 2006. I went to a Hockney exhibition last Tuesday and this book came up many times; so many that I walked straight out the door of the gallery to…well, first, another gallery, but then on to John Sandoe Books, where I picked up a copy. I love his intense devotion to seeing clearly.
Well, we went in late November, and we were there about a month to track. We stayed in a big house that was split in two levels. The boys were downstairs and Carey [Lander] and I were upstairs. It was a bit of a spooky house, and it was a bit of spooky street. It had a lot of—we call them cupboards—I think you call them closets. Far too many. Creaky floorboards. Surprise little shafts. Quite creepsville. Like being in an episode of Scooby Doo every night when you get home. Waiting for somebody to jump around the corner.
– Tracyanne Campbell of the band Camera Obscura in “The Obscura Object of Desire,” an interview facilitated by Matt Putrino, published in Interview on June 3, 2013. All about the recording process, cozy in its own right. Reading about optical devices brought to mind one of the beloved bands of my teens, so I thought to look up “where are they now.” And do you know what? They’re touring in my husband’s hometown of Woodstock coming up at the end of the month! Underachievers, please try harder…
all technology brothers should have a birthright trip to paris to see how good certain things can get and all the axes of civilization they don’t think about.
– roon on X, May 2, 2026. Certain things get pretty good in London, too.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com