Paint something in your mind
Abyssal Transmission 004
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Images are not passive when you’re under. Everything you see in there has meaning, no matter how obtuse. And therefore, images have meaning. Agents have interpreted paintings hanging on the walls of a room they’ve entered and not spent time to investigate them. This is almost always a mistake. A subject’s mind often grafts symbols onto pictures that can give you deeper insights into what they were thinking or feeling at the moment of death. Furthermore, images during a dive are almost fractal in nature. We have on record accounts of agents who were able to enter the psyche space that built a given painting or photograph, or even signs and mirrors.
–Correspondence from Encoder Heirophant
On the outside, what is the purpose of art? I feel like so many very smart people have written so much philosophy about that but I haven’t read any of it myself. On the inside, however, art almost always reflects something back to us, right? It’s often easier to encapsulate feelings and encode symbols into pictures than it is to say them aloud (even if our brain is whispering to ourselves). Nothing on the inside is placed by accident, that’s something I learned in my first dive. Everything is arranged according to specific patterns, rituals, understandings of the world and the self I suppose. I don’t know why, but I know I’m right. I could ask my wife “why’s that chair there”, and she might say “I needed somewhere to sit” or “It was left over from when we had friends over” or whatever. During a dive, however, a chair might be for sitting, it might have been a fragment of memory of any given chair, or it might be a person or a piece of a person left static. This is even more true for images, as any static picture inside of a dive isn’t really static. Pictures often are an augmentation of the self, containers for memory, meant for offloading cognitive processes to something external. What then happens when we turn our eye inward and construct a painting inside of ourselves? New microcosmic fractal worlds are created…
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Welcome back. If these little stories don’t make it obvious enough, I have been thinking about the many possibly ways images can be used and constructed, in video games and elsewhere. The stories we’re working on are concerned with memory and interacting with a vaguely remembered, possibly allegorical or symbolic past, and we’ve been discussing how visual art fits into this. There are symbols that we all carry with us, as well as flat representations of moments in time. A creature I once knew told me that they remember snapshots more than dynamic and living events, and I’ve been thinking that both might exist side by side. What would that look like, if mapped to this little room I’m building. Is a snapshot only that, or does it possibly contain the whole of a singular experience, only encoded differently. How many little possible realities might exist if we thoroughly mined someone’s remembered life.
Until next we talk.
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