it’s the Universe’s Fault
Don’t blame me, it’s the Universe’s Fault
Tab 1
In the opening of 2025, I wrote several texts1,2,3 which grew increasingly interested in Light. Across these texts, the role of Light in, for example, “the moment of recognition” (the formation and emergence of the Self), or the development of Language, became increasingly pronounced. Following the Light revealed something I hadn’t perhaps noticed before, a faultline running down the back of everything. A curious signifier of a great event, buried in time.
To begin with, within François Laruelle’s Universe Black, Philosophy is framed as operating under the authority of Light,4 which assigns position. All that Light can interact with is White. The Real, or the Universe, is Black, meaning Light does not and cannot interact with it: the Universe Black is without position, it is “the opacity that renders the Real invisible.”5 The Earth and Man, too, are Black. The difference between Black, Black and Black, can only be discerned through their relative (pre)position, Man is on Earth which is in the Universe, Black-on-Black-in-Black. As such, Light participates in producing observable differences that either may or may not have any bearing on the Real, may or may not reflect any structuration at the level of the Real.
Second, in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre & Jacques Lacan, the primary antagonism of Being involves the twin-concepts of Eye and Look(/Gaze), where, as Jameson succinctly puts it, “you can either look, or be looked at — not both.”6 There is still, within Sartre & Lacan, remnants of the Hegelian fable—“the other is looking at me, so there must be a me”—a scenario in which the emergence of the sense of self, the ‘me,’ arises through negation when the Look of the Other is in your Eye. This asymmetrical power dynamic affords being, as human existence, its traumatic quality. We evolved to have eyes because it proved advantageous to hone in on a short bandwidth of radiation due to the positionality that Light introduced as a possibility when it split from matter in the dawn of everything.
Thirdly, just as another example, in Baudrillard’s work, the distinction between inside/out has broken down, a scenario characterized by total visibility — Light is not God’s brilliance illuminating everything to our benefit, Light has a dark side or a dark precursor; it reveals the very trauma from which it came. Light and language are a part of simulation: we observe things, we name them by transforming the thing-in-itself into a concept (a signified) which is anchored into the symbolic in the form of a signifier. These processes of observation, recognition, and identification bring forth the World at the loss of the Real.
These philosophical accounts led me to the materialist question of what light is and where it came from, a question that can be answered at different levels of complexity or using different registers. For this text, it may suffice to say that, in the early moments of the Universe after the big bang, Baryonic acoustic waves oscillated across the entire length of everything, escalating until the points of relative-high pressure exceed a material constraint and the primordial matter rips, releasing light into the Universe. The schism between Eye and Look, appears to extend directly out of the separation of light and matter.
Our subjectivity emerged through the same evolutionary processes as language, the body, and the earth; subjectivity falls out of us, in the sense of technical externalization, and every significant aspect of our subjectivity is tied to light: it is light that the Eye evolves after, granting us the ability to discern position at the cost of pure being. It is not only good traits which are passed down through genetics, mistakes are also hereditary, we need not look further than the immense suffering of childbirth to understand this.
All that is compiled, is compiled by a compiler, and all compilers are compiled by compiler-compilers. There exist today, in the world of code and programming, bugs that exist today because they have been passed down from the earliest compilers.7 The shared common ancestor of whatever compiled the first compiler-compilers, was built with flaws, because it was built by something flawed. The flaws of the human, such as not yet knowing various things, are inherited by the compiler-compiler(-compiler); an original sin to be beared by all to come.
This endless reproduction of errors seem to go far, far beyond the mortal human. When you look back into the infinite plasma of the early universe, anomalies like cold spots are sometimes interpreted by scientists as the seeds of galaxies, the early onset of future megastructures, as if the observable Universe itself (the galaxies, planets, possibly even blackholes) are these myriad cold spots and temperature anomalies, a sort of pattern that has replicated and sedimented over time and over all possible scales. If we should entertain the metaphor of light splitting from matter, bursting from the seams as they break, then what we are arguing here is that light brings with it all of the problems that lead to its emergence.
Philosophy and Science converge around a shared, insurmountable barrier: the observer. In my earlier days of studying ethnomusicology, there was always an insurmountable problem in ethnographic and anthropological discourse revolving around the problem of the observer — you cannot go somewhere without disturbing it, your presence, your Look, changes fundamentally that which you Looked at. Quantum theory is beleaguered with the same plight. Like the ethnomusicologists would say, you’ll never be one of them, you’ll never understand the way of matter. The Real is always barred from us, it always gets away from us. Materialism becomes trapped due to the primacy of measurement and observation, something which cannot ever uncover anything true in the sense of something that has some direct equivalence of the Real because the Philosopher, as a light source, as an archaeologist digging into the earth with their bare hands (allowing the sun’s rays interact which that which was otherwise barred), is chasing after precisely that which has no surface for light to touch. If, until now, we have been assuming that to know the Universe we must interact with it, or measure it, then what should we do now that we know that all measurements are, at a certain philosophical level, false impressions, or delusional, even — and how it can be possible that planes fly when everything we’ve ever known has only ever been true to us.
As Rasheeda Philips lyricises: “Becoming collapses into being like a piece of light, suddenly shy when observed.” What Sartre understood as pure being, which is disturbed—collapsed—by the look of the other in your eye, could be articulated as becoming, equidifferent,8 entropic, chaotic becoming, and it is identity which is inserted, short-circuiting infinite becoming into finite being. It matters not if we are observing an electron in a lab, an indigenous group in a rainforest, or a patient in a clinic — anthropology and psychoanalysis have expended immense effort to problematize this effect, and the psychoanalyst, for example, must not only be aware of how their presence and observation makes the patient behave differently, but somehow wield this inevitability to nonetheless find something that is, for lack of a better word, true, in terms of helping the analysand and learning something about the mind in doing so.
According to Slavoj Žižek, “Lacanians like quantum theory because they want so much to be materialists but can no longer go any further with [matter as empty space]” (and so on). A psycho-materialist question may involve asking what the universe must be in order for something like a subject to arise, what are the conditions necessary for this phenomenon. As a Lacanian, Žižek understands the subject as only existing in Language: “we are never at home in Language, there is always a gap.”9 The moment that the self appears is attributed to the recognition of the failure of language: “we attempt to speak, but we never say what we mean to, and it is precisely this failure which we name the subject”. (Ibid.) In this sense, we return to the discourse of Laruelle where the Philosopher is associated with this illusory Whiteness, this gap between the Blackness of Man and Earth.
In his work on quantum theory, Žižek extends this analysis by discussing what he calls “the problem of Wigner’s Friend,” which entails the hard-problem that “no matter how all-encompassing it is, an observation cannot include the observer itself as one of its objects”. (41) Alenka Zupančič is quoted by Žižek: “Reality in itself (independently of our subjective interaction with it and perception of it) is not another deeper reality (like the Kantian noumena as opposed to the phenomenal reality), it is the same as our reality minus the gap (of the real) which locates the subject into it.” The only possibility for such a gap, into which the subject can step in order to observe the Universe to exist, is for it to be built into the Universe itself. In much the same way as with the corrupted compilers which pass down hereditarily an original sin, the materiality of the mind/subject is bound to the materiality of the Body, the Earth and the Universe.
Even in the materialism of, say, Lucretius, the gap is built into the laminar flow of matter in the form of the swerve, this inevitability of inclination. Nothing exerts a force upon matter from the outside, so it moves and it swerves for its own reasons. If the swerve is intense enough, matter can curve right back in on itself, and so the ontological operation of folding through which greater orders of complexity become possible, is an inherent possibility cooked into matter from the outset. I favour the metaphor that I attribute to my reading of Thomas Nail’s work on Lucretius, where we imagine the emergence of difference as attributed to this folding of matter’s laminar flow back in on itself.
Ouranos, the negation of Gaia, represents a stage in the folding operation, a maximum intensity of difference before and after which matter returns to where it was. In folding like this, the laminar flow of chaos encloses itself, forming a circle. I refer to this as a (double-)negative space, it is the site of emergence. Folding is an ontological operation because it creates the conditions for emergence. It is double-negative because it is the result of subtracting from what is already negative, producing the illusion of a positive value. I theorize that this emergent gap is a replication of the inherent gap in matter, sedimenting upwards in scale.
Where this then returns to psychoanalysis is marked by the Pontus. This point, the point where matter appears to enclose itself, is the concept of position in Laruelle’s Universe Black. It is only from this point, this perspective that matter appears to enclose itself. This is the position of observation. For there to be this double-negative space, there must already be an observatory gap within matter. To bridge this with Žižek again, there is likely no God which observes the Universe, collapsing it into a superposition that we all see, yet it is also unsatisfactory to say that everyone sees their own Universe, a completely unique Universe that has no relation to anyone else’s. Time is, according to Žižek, the first illusion, or the least illusional thing, (48) and it appears as a one-directional vector, not because entropy or the second law of thermodynamics declares it, but because we are all observing from the same temporal position, (31) from the I enthroned in the Eye, upon the head of the upright posture of Man.10 That we can build skyscrapers, that we can appear to share a singular Universe together as life on Earth, is made possible by our shared temporal position.
From Lucretius we can understand that everything that appears to be static or permanent is, at some temporal level, metastatic and impermanent. For Laruelle, as an example, we can understand that to measure the electron is to always get a false result that does not necessarily or likely correlate to the Real. Yet, if every measurement was a lie, we would not be able to build skyscrapers. How can the measurements be false (observation disturbs the result) and true (we can use these results practically) at the same time? That these false measurements are reliable enough for engineering is because we all, as humans, share a temporality. We’re all observing the Universe from a very similar perspective, from Earth, as humans, and that is why we appear to share a world together, that is both real and not real at the same time. We all continuously produce the same illusory superposition through occupying the same observatory gap.
As the subject inhabiting the gap within Man looks out toward the Universe from the position of the Earth, we all see the same multiplanar composition, the contours of which are defined by differences in temporal intensity. The Universe is the backcloth, which always moves slower relative to the Earth, which always moves slower, relative to Man, who moves the fastest. In reference to Thomas Lamarre,11 Lucas Ferraço Nassif discusses multiplanarity in relation to the Unconscious: “what is going on there, between-the-layers?”12 It is from the double-negative gaps that emergence occurs; everything comes from Gaia (mater), from Ma’.
(間)
Tab 2Here, we touch upon the heart of my work last year, as we arrive back at the idea of trauma, as an irreparable wound, an insurmountable gap. I daydream again, about Baryonic Oscillations in the primordial, pregalactic Thalassa, acoustic waves that spanned all matter in the Universe; waves converge and megalithic peaks push matter to its limit, breaking at its seams, and then, Light, floods into the Universe.
A year later, I picked up a copy of Slavoj Žižek’s Quantum History (2025), and was quite surprised to find a lot of the ideas that came up in my own research, which I consider to be more akin to daydreaming. As you would expect, Žižek’s approach here is much more well structured, and much more well informed, and so it provided an opportunity to tie my previous work into a more proper discourse, perhaps.
This book, at its heart, attempts to weld together Philosophy and Science, and to make each side understand why they need each other. On the one hand, referencing his own work inadvertently in a recent panel with Alenka Zupančič and Carlo Rovelli,13 Žižek said that “we Lacanians are so interested in Quantum Theory because we want to be Materialists, but we can no longer proceed with materiality as defined by some empty space”, and “how is reality itself structured in order for something like subjectivity to arise?”. On the other hand, the contradictions and counterintuitivity found within Quantum Theory, including but not limited to non-linear and reversible time, observation as interaction, and wavefunctions and superpositions, indicates that, today, “Philosophy returns with a vengeance”. (25) Quantum Theory, which is primarily studied in the form of mathematical and theoretical experiments and so on, finds itself stuck on the same issue as Philosophy, as what Quantum Theory calls observation, Philosophy calls recognition, or the recognition of the subject as a subject.14
From here it is quite easy to start daydreaming: Sartre wrote of a collapse, where the Look of the Other in your Eye transforms you from a nothingness into something, a subject, an identity, and so observation is interaction in that sense. Measuring the electron field forces the electron to take a position, forces the collapse, or rather, in making an observation, we take a position, against which everything else is momentarily measured.
Between observation, recognition, experience and measurement, there is an epistemological agreement that you need to test the Universe to know it, you need to interact with it for it to reveal something about itself. The very “experience” of subjectivity is perhaps a qualitative form of measurement, which is then, in turn, a quantitative form of experience. We are constantly, cybernetically, measuring and re-measuring, and comparing the snapshots to determine and make predictions about movement, and so on. As we scan our surroundings, two important processes set in motion that relate to observation and recognition. Firstly, we can think about the process of recognition between subjects, this collapse from nothingness into Being, and secondly we can think about recognition in the Hegelian sense, in the sense of a process—which I prefer to call identification or assignation—where the subject observes, for example, a nearby arborescent organic structure, and, in naming it a tree (assigning a sign), rips it out of the Real and into the World. Our Eye beholds the Real as a collapsed superposition. It is, in that sense, an illusion.
The inspiration here came from a famous diagram associated with Lucretius, of folding, the ontological operation. As Chaos unfolds upon the imminent plane of Earth (stratification), the laminar vector is subject to the clinamen, the swerve, and with enough intensity, the vector folds all the way back around to where it came from. Yet, in 3-dimensional space, the point of recursion, marked by the Pontus, is only visible as such from one incredibly specific perspective, and should the diagram be tilted slightly, the loop may become a spiral, and never appear to intersect itself again. Yet, in having a body, we take a position against the Universe, in relation to it, a position that we cannot change, and we are, as such, locked into a specific illusion, and from this position, the line appears to enclose upon itself, creating an internal territory, a gap. Yet, this diagram has one obvious flaw, Žižek comments on the illusory nature of space and time in a way which changes my reading slightly.
The subject is a double-negative, observatory gap, as if a life inhabiting the very fault built into the fabric of reality, like the original sin in the first compiler-compiler, or like a programmer’s backdoor secretly installed at the lowest conceivable level. Gaps between perceived layers are not limited to Lacan or Hegel however. The cosmology of Gilles Deleuze & Guattari, for example, is one of incompleteness,15 too, and this can be explored through the work of Lucas Ferraço Nassif, a post-Lacanian researcher whose work in psychoanalysis and philosophy is very fond of Guattari, which currently focuses on Japanese Anime.
In reference to Thomas Lamarre,16 Nassif discusses the composition of this media form as being layered, with a background that is static, and then further layers with their own tempo, creating a perspective illusion: “what is going on there, between-the-layers?”.17 This is, of course, in reference to concepts which are quite specific to Japanese Language, like Ma (間), the negative space which creates the conditions for emergence, it allows things to shift, and it allows new meanings to be observed. Perhaps, in the most simple, intuitive sense, the abstinence18 involved in, effectively, not animating everything, or not attempting to depict everything, leaves a lot of space for the imagination to take root in. After all, it was Lacan who described aesthetics as the domestication of the Look,
It is another daydream of mine, to think about sparks emerging from these densely striated spaces between, for example, the layers in Laruelle’s cosmology, Universe, Earth and Man. With Lucretius, the operation of folding is highly compatible with the analogy of self-replicating compiler-compilers, as every fold is a negation, and, as we have already said, in reference to Hegel, negation contains that which it negates. Yet, Lucretius does not use the language of science to describe this process, but the language of storytelling and mythology. It is through Thomas Nail’s arduous close-readings of Lucretius that the conceptual paradigms underpinning modern science are negations which contain that which they negate, in this case, Lucretius. I always tell a particular story about this, in a particular way, or with a particular emphasis. The story of the revolution of Earth against the Heavens, an absurd ritual where Gaia instructs Tethys to make a weapon out of Chronos, symbolised as a curved blade, with which she castrates the Father, and as the genitals crash into the ocean, Aphrodite arises out of the foam, inside a shell.
When we imagine the Athenians looking out over the Aegean, the image after which the story is modelled couldn’t be more obvious. It describes the water reaching up to the sky, entrapping air in its folds and dragging it back to the body. In this moment, foam is formed, a miraculous new thing that is neither water or air, but a new possibility, a new assemblage. Lucretius, as interpreted by Nail, saw the spiral-form of shells and imagined them as forming at the point where flows of water met flows of calcium, hence Aphrodite appears inside a shell, forming in the crucible where two elements interact, interfold. It is a story for another day, but the moment Aphrodite walks upon the shores of Cyprus, Heaven has arrived on Earth, a superposition arising from a primordial ocean of wave functions. She’s the goddess of desire in a desiring-Universe, and Lucretius' singular invocation of Aphrodite is precisely because of the apparent impossibility that desire could emerge inside of itself, so to speak. I think again of Laruelle, when I try to imagine how desire could replicate as such, as to appear inside itself like a Hindu avatar, how there can be this distinction between Desire and Desire. It’s the same problem as with Black and Black, a problem which Language solves through the assignment of position. Man appears within the Universe, Black within Black, a logical impossibility which causes, you guessed it, a breakdown, system collapse. The subject is caught in the very fault that opens up when the Universe folds back on itself with such intensity that it breaks, marooned in an oxbow lake, dwelling amongst the giant otters and rare birds.
How can we truly speak of blockchain-native aesthetics?
For a moment, the promise of a new cultural formation derived from a distinctive visual and symbolic vocabulary native to blockchain technologies, cryptographic economies and digital subjectivities seemed possible and desirable. But can we truly speak of blockchain-native aesthetics? Can such aesthetics be meaningfully integrated into the history of art, media theory, or social formation? We propose the term "web3 aesthetics” to interrogate and articulate a theory of art that would operate specifically on NFT markets and link it to the current discussions on digital art.We understand aesthetics not as “decoration,” nor as that which is simply “beautiful,” but as the systematic production and critical analysis of sensation, value, and cultural consensus, as well as the study of the mediums that constitute the narratives and discourses attached to our understanding of the world.
On Digital Frameworks
IM-EX
The goal of implicit-explicit is to mutate a text-based body in order to increase its stable & dimensional complexity using content inputs &/or modifications. It can be played via solo exploration or within a competitive multiplayer context.
This body is mutated through navigation and movement that emerges from the central possibility of destabilising and re-stabilising the parameters and positions of its content.
This game emerges as a project within Sybil's residency, where, for six months, the 邊界 team will be working on developing the project with the help of collaborators.
During this time, the 邊界 team is committed to producing an extensive series of parallel materials related to this project, which will include both research practices and new publication formats, as well as artistic side projects working with different materials, physical events and more.
D/WB
S02
邊界_systems arises with the intention of unsettling institutional stasis and the geography of fields of action and knowledge, directly probing the structures that constitute cultural apparatuses and seeking to displace and reimagine possible formal configurations that may open onto new modalities of research and artistic production. Format s02 emerges centered on these practices, seeking to reconceptualize and reconcile the operative possibilities—both aesthetic and theoretical—within the conditions of digital culture, situating its inquiry at the limit, the edge, the frame, the frontier / from the philosophy of language, memory, the geometric and the abstract, the systems and the activable, and the processes of producing value, meaning, and identity.
- “Gazing into the flames of Anamorphosis: Open Secret, CoreCore, Unconscious/Television”, by Claire Elise, Becoming Press, 2025
- “Being & Light: Weaponizing a Language of Visibility against the Symbolic”, by Claire Elise, Becoming Press, 2025
- “Introduction to a Desiring-Materialism”, by Claire Elise, Becoming Press, 2025
- Laruelle, F. (2012) Universe Black in the Human foundations of Colour, in From Decision to Heresy, Trans., Robin Mackey, London: Urbanomic. p.405
- Ibid. 404
- The Years of Theory, Jameson
- Ken Thompson
- I favor the term “equidifference” for describing the maximum difference of becoming where everything is equally different from everything else, there cannot be any more difference than there is, there is no pattern.
- He speaks about this in the IAI panel
- Following Lee Smollin’s interpretations of experiments with Quantum Entanglement, which seem to violate the laws of causality and relativity, defying the conditions of space, so to speak, Žižek calls space the final illusion, or the least obvious. (48) The duality of space and time is but a spectrum of increasingly less obvious illusions—but illusions all the same.
- Thomas Lamarre reference
- Lucas video lecture reference
- “What is the true nature of the Self” with Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič and Carlo Rovelli. Institute of Art and Ideas. YouTube.
- See Ikäheimo, H., Lepold, K., & Stahl, T. (2021) Recognition & Ambivalence. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Deleuze incompleteness
- Thomas Lamarre reference
- Lucas video lecture reference
- Žižek describes abstinence as the most radical act, in contrast to a Universe that acts and interacts constantly.