In one of our first brainstorming sessions (I believe around December 2020) we noticed that ‘autonomous systems’ are often described using the prefix ‘self-‘: self-organization, self-regulation, self-observation, self-referentiality, self-adaptation, self-sensing, self-performing, self-generating, self-determining. That’s how we decided to experiment with the term: maybe the word ‘self’ can provide an altered access to ideas of autonomy, systems, emergence. My contribution to this experimental round is composed of two blog posts, that are somehow interwoven.
One page is a short diary in which, over the course of one week, I took notes, general thoughts and spontaneous intuitions around the term ‘self’. A second page is a browser-based piece that attempts at tranposing / reinterpreting some ideas from the diary in a ‘typographic experiment’. The two pages are interrelated, and should be read ‘through one another’. They don’t aim for closure, completeness or correctness, the intention is rather the opposite: to raise questions around the self, to initiate a process of ‘opening’ through the self.