“The short answer is that what CERN has observed is consistent with the existence of a Higgs boson but that the number of candidate ‘Higgs events’ falls short of the number required to announce the result with more than about 50% certainty. A slightly longer answer is that experiments like ATLAS and CMS produce results that are ambiguous. The particle is highly unstable lasting only a fraction of a second before it decays. The experiments cannot see the particle directly, they can only see the debris left when the particle decays. A single event has multiple explanations. The decay of a Higgs particle might have given rise to a particular set of tracks but so might many other processes. The only way to be sure is to perform the experiment over and over again until there are enough events to distinguish statistically.”

— This, this and this

“The unknown that is at stake in research is neither an object nor a subject. The speech relation in which the unknown articulates itself is a relation of infinity. Hence it follows that the form in which this relation is realized must in one way or another have an index of “curvature” such that the relations of A to B will never be direct, symmetrical, or reversible, will not form a whole, and will not take place in a same time; they will be, then, neither contemporaneous nor commensurable.”

— The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot

“Emptiness, by contrast, is a condition that modernism treasures. Pli selon pli reminds one of that. But I am not aware of an artist before Richter who tries to make pictorial intensity out of a kind of fullness - a stuffed-fullness, or at least a heavy impenetrability- that has no specific substance to its parts, no feeling of its constituent colours and textures having been hit precisely by the maker, fixed inevitably, in all their unique particularity.”

— Grey Panic by T.J. Clark

Newcomb's paradox →

“I don’t like Helvetica because of its authority, and I find it a clumsy typeface. I don’t know if I find it clumsy because of its association or I just find it aesthetically clumsy, but I try to avoid it.
I have attempted to devote the majority of my adult life to placing work within structures where they would function irregardless [sic] of what culture they found themselves in. That was a little bit of an aesthetic problem for people in the beginning, but I think in 2008 it’s not any longer questioned. […] I think in nouns, as a general rule – and you can’t communicate with people when you think just in nouns – so I basically have to then figure out a way to place it in a means that other people can see this as a specific object. That’s my job as an artist. That’s what I do here: that’s what you do in a studio. Occasionally I’ll draw something to understand a position. The drawings themselves are not sculpture or anything. They are dealing with things that find themselves on the table, or find themselves in the middle of the room, and how I looked at it in the moment.[…]Art is something that’s looking for a place and banging against the walls, and that’s what you think in terms of shaking things up. It’s just looking for some place to be. Once it finds that place, it’s no longer art; it’s some sort of thing; it’s culture. An artist is never supposed to assume authority. You think it – you can think anything you damn well please, but you don’t assume it within the work.[…]I just went back to a typeface I had been working on – I never had the time to devote to it – and devoted myself to it, and it’s a very simple typeface, and it seems to be functioning for a while; and I guess one morning I’ll work up and it will have entered into the culture in such a way that I’ll try to find another typeface. Maybe, happily, there’s a need for what I do. Maybe there won’t be one day – you never know.”

— Lawrence Weiner

“Meaning takes place in the symbolic, is constantly negotiated through language (be this spoken or visual), through the dynamism of metaphor, structured by desire, power, gender and the rest. This process is open, ongoing and - most importantly - contestable. That’s why we have art in the first place.”

— Declaration on the Notion of ‘The Future’ - International Necronautical Society

Curiosity →

Quadrature Ghost →

The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem →

“In short, it’s about subjectivity finding its assignations within material space and transmitted (or occluded) history, experience being dragged and catapulted along their ineluctably death-driven arcs.
Literature, in short, is not made up of ‘characters’: it understands that existence, whether individual or collective, is formed and unformed within networks of language and ceremony, spread across topographies whose axes, or gravitational force-fields, are law, pleasure and mortality, subject to the exigencies of topography itself. As such, it offers, at its deepest, neither commentary nor entertainment; rather, it is the very source-code of our being, index of its contingencies.”

— from Tom McCarthy, “Remember Freud”

“The experience startles him–not least because it plays out in the real and close-up space around the house an aspect of some scenes that he occasionally intuits but never quite pins down when riding the dial’s highest reaches: vague impressions of bodies hovering just beyond the threshold of the visible, and corresponding signals not quite separable from the noise around them–important ones, their recalcitrance all the more frustrating for that reason. He sees these things, and hears, or half-hears, them as well, quite frequently–usually as he’s straddling the wavelength-border between consciousness and sleep.”

— C by Tom McCarthy

Numbers stations →

also, The Conet Project

“–Sometimes the best that’s possible is a stand-in or an approximation in order to manifest a desire for the internal. In the process you make notes inadvertently that reveal the gaps between a fantasy and one’s own ability. It becomes the same thing over and over. Then maybe it’s a confidence issue from then on. Coping with one’s fantasies. Drawing (on) something that’s out of reach so instead drawing the reach, or pretending to.–…A wanderer comes across a pile of chipped porcelain pieces. Set to work with glue, they construct an elegant saucer. When the previous owner, before they no longer had a use for it, first found the pile of chipped porcelain pieces they had constructed a teacup, and the owner before them a figurine of Adonis. Thus is the nature of history: many pieces always being found and then reconstructed.”

— Richard Aldrich at Bortolami 2009