Definiowanie odpowiedzialności

Artists sometimes ride through life like Odysseus lashed to the mast, with all senses deeply experiencing the song of life, but also voluntarily bound to the ship of their art. They are refusing the
powerful Call of the world, in order to follow the wider Call of artistic expression.

Things are always in the process of flowing into their opposites

According to the ancient Chinese philosophy of the I Ching, the doctrine of
changes, things are always in the process of flowing into their opposites. Extreme
idealists can turn into cynics, passionate lovers into cold-hearted haters. Abject
cowards have the sleeping potential to become heroes, and many saints began as great
sinners. This eternally changing feature of reality is described by the Taoist symbol
of Yin and Yang, the two comma shapes flowing into one another, each with the seed
of its opposite deep in its center.

Bjork, my savior

We just have to define technology. There's no one answer. Sometimes you have to burn yourself. Maybe there are a lot of kids now who don't know how to walk in a forest and do basic outdoorsy things. You can be on Facebook for a long time, and then you get a feeling in your body like you've had three hamburgers. You know it's trash. I always advise my friends: just go for a walk for an hour and come back and see how you feel then. I think we're meant to be outdoors. I was brought up in Iceland, and even if it was snowing or raining, I would be outdoors all day. Entertain yourself. Do shit. I think we need to put humanity into technology—the soul. It's about using technology to get closer to people, to be more creative.

You work meticulously across almost every artistic aspect of your career. How do you juggle all of them?

A big part of it is I've just done it for a long time. If you publish your first book, maybe you wouldn't be bothered by the paper, but three books later, you might say, “Actually, I do care about the paper and the font.” As time goes, you get opinions on how to do things. In the beginning, when I was punk bands back in Iceland, I was really dogmatic that it was all about the music. You're not supposed to care about how you dress, your hair—that was all superficial. Very strict. But then you see four photos of you—not that you're ugly or you’re pretty—but it's just not representative of the song you wrote. Five years into it, you go, “Wait a minute, I met this guy at the bar and he does photos, I think he understands.” And then you do photos together. It's gradual.

Do you think you're better at what you do now than you've ever been?

I don’t know. I look at it like this: You're in orbit around a moon, and age just means you’re always looking at the same thing but from a different point of view. To be able to not be shot out of orbit, you have to be really careful about getting rid of any luggage that isn’t relevant and will weigh you down.

First you discover the tool, then it’s like meeting a new friend, and then you can try and figure where the magic happens, where the most potential is to grow. It’s that heat point, and that feeling of entering the unknown, that really excites me.

I love the feeling of entering the unknown. You have to allow yourself a lot of mistakes, and then when you get it right, it’s so rewarding. 

Do you see VR as something that removes you from the natural world or do you see it as something that folds into reality?

I think it’s both. I think it’s binary, and I think that’s almost the point. If you try to escape one thing and just do one or the other, you’re always going to end up at the same point. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it sort of eats its own tail. It’s always going to be that question, for sure, but I’m sure that was the same question people had with everybody on trains reading books or commuting or whatever. It’s always going to be, are they here with us in the train, or are they somewhere else in their book? I don’t think this is any different. There are obviously different challenges with this, though.

I heard somebody say that he watched some crazy game, for like eight hours a day, that had the wrong physics in it—like all the distances to the mountains or whatever didn’t add up. So, what happened after a few days, is first he would get seasick when he was in the machine, and then he would actually get used to it. Then when he would take the machine off him, he would get seasick. He had to put it back on to not throw up. That’s obviously very scary. Then with anything, you have to work out things like the soul and humanity, and what’s good for you, and not be lazy. These good old ethics can come back. To not get addicted.

In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler (188o-1936) identified eight colossal monads of great majesty, with a ninth now in formation, as having shaped and dominated world history since the rise, in the fourth millennium B.c., of the first literate high cultures-(!) the Sumero-Babylonian, (2) the Egyptian, (3) the Greco-Roman (Apollonian), (4) the Vedic-Aryan, of lndia, (5) the Chinese, (6) the MayaAztec-Incan, (7) the Magian (Persian-Arabian, Judeo-Christian-Islamic), (8) the Faustian (Gothic-Christian to modern European-American), and now, beneath the imposed alien crust of a Marxian cultural pseudomorphosis, (9) the germinating Russian-Christian. 1

My basic metaphysical axiom

Now it is my contention and my basic metaphysical axiom that existence—the physical universe—is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It is not going anywhere; that is to say, it does not have some destination at which it ought to arrive. It is best understood by analogy with music because music as an art form is essentially playful. We say, “You play the piano.” You do not work the piano. Why? For instance, music differs from travel because when you travel you are trying to get somewhere and, being a very compulsive and purposive culture, we are busy going everywhere faster and faster in an attempt to eliminate the distance between places. With modern jet travel you can arrive anywhere almost instantaneously, and what happens, as a result, is that the two ends of your journey become the same place. So you eliminate the distance and you eliminate the journey, and you forget that the fun of the journey is to travel, not to obliterate travel. In music, though, one does not make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest, and there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crashing chord because that is the end. The same is true of dancing because the point of dancing is to dance.



When you think a bit about what people really want to do with their time, and you ask what they do when they are not being pushed around or somebody is telling them what to do, you find they like to make rhythms. They listen to music and they dance or they sing, or perhaps they do something of a rhythmic nature like playing cards, bowling, or raising their elbows. Given the chance, everybody wants to spend their time swinging