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Eventually we're all in the land of the forgotten. (This has 2 meanings: eventually we'll all be forgotten, but as we change as individuals the current moments are slipping into the past. Those moments are both short and long, large and small time windows. As people change over time, they forget the person they used to be decades ago. This is why life-long curiosities give your life integrity. If you're still thinking as a child, it makes the time window 360 degrees rather than a porthole, or otherwise very narrow windows. It becomes like a window in a prison cell. Very often you are the person that chose the cell with the tiny window. 9This is the Cook County Correctional Center in downtown Chicago, a skyscraper prison, designed by Harry Wiesss. I've always like this building because the skin is so interesting, as a container for time windows.
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Several Dynaxiom entries use windows and time as metaphors to explore human perception, technology, self-reflection, and art:
1. Windows as Metaphors (Perception, Interfaces, & the Mirror Contrast)
In the Dynaxioms, windows often represent outward perception, interfaces, and portals into the future or the past, frequently contrasted with the inward/narcissistic reflection of a mirror:
- Dynaxiom 0486: "The day seems to last longer when you just sit and look out the window and think."
- Dynaxiom 0529: "The camera is a room, a window, and a mirror all at the same time."
- Dynaxiom 0541: "A credo for growing old: stop looking at the mirror and look out the window. One of the first things you see when you shift your gaze is the absence of mirrors, and you realize you no longer need to be continually obsessed with what they no longer reflect, freeing you from the burden of the past, and letting you look off into the future."
- Dynaxiom 0942: "Sometimes when I look through curtain-less windows into empty rooms I think about the people that once sat in them and looked out of them and wondered what they wondered about."
- Dynaxiom 1257: Capturing an image is described as being inside a "room" looking out of a "window," a satellite, or a LIDAR camera.
- Dynaxiom 1412: "An interface is like a window—and there are many types of windows... User interfaces are a window into an abstract world of a computer, also known as the User Illusion."
- Dynaxiom 1827: The world is analyzed as a "mirror" phenomenon versus a "window" phenomenon of artistic expression.
- Dynaxiom 2178: "A mirror and a window can be equally as dangerous; With a mirror, you're always looking back on yourself narcissistically, but you can also be looking out a window into the bright future looking back on yourself narcissistically."
- Dynaxiom 2916: "Mirror art is what we think should be interesting to us; window art is what is intimately interesting to us."
2. Time as Metaphors (Form, Perception, & Human Experience)
Time is framed not merely as a chronological clock, but as a flexible canvas, portrait, equity, or way of seeing:
- Dynaxiom 0006: Every day time seems to move at different rates with different emotional qualities, leaving us feeling either "drained of time or drowning in it."
- Dynaxiom 0228: "Good music makes time transparent."
- Dynaxiom 0612: "Insomnia is all about being constantly reminded of the passing of time."
- Dynaxiom 0660: "Wisdom is (at the very least) an accumulation of time."
- Dynaxiom 0669: Temporal states in audio/visual data exist in a "liquid" state detached from space-time, whereas playing music requires "merging into a real flow of time."
- Dynaxiom 0801: "The earth is at the center of our artificially metaphorical time universe. It is the 'second hand' that makes the first hand aeons appear to move."
- Dynaxiom 0813: Time moves faster when the future seems certain, whereas uncertainty causes parts of time to move at different rates.
- Dynaxiom 0882: "Time is a portrait, not a landscape."
- Dynaxiom 2000: "Time is a way of seeing."
- Dynaxiom 2239: "Life is like riding on your very own bus... endlessly riding into the sunset."
- Dynaxiom 2267: "Time needs rhythm to give it form."
- Dynaxiom 2324: "Time takes time in different ways."
- Dynaxiom 2328: "Time is equity: If it takes you five years to make something, there are five revolutions of the earth embedded within it."
- Dynaxiom 2712: "Time spends us."
- Dynaxiom 2937: "Music plays both in time and with time."
💡 Would you like to explore how these spatial and temporal metaphors intersect with specific mediums like photography, architecture, or music?
