“It is apparent that the disruptive gesture resembles work. Work is a gesture whose motive lies in the decision to make something different from what it is, because it is not as it should be. Both destruction and work decide that something is not as it should be. Unlike work, destruction decides not to make it differently but to get rid of it altogether. It negates not just the way the object is but the object itself. One could then suppose that destruction is more radical than work. That would be an error. It is less radical, for its decision does not get at the roots of the not-supposed-to-be. It has no model of obligation. Work is revolutionary. It replaces that which should not be with something that should be. Destruction is not revolutionary: it says no, but not dialectically. The being expressed in the destructive gesture is less radical in the world than one articulated in gestures of work.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

2026.6.12🕒1337~Let’s own our own domains again. Bring back the static web. Visit websites like we used to instead of letting the aggregators harvest our brains. Visit our fellow artists’ sites like we would drop by a friend’s house with cookies we baked ourselves. Let’s dust off XSLT and build sites that never crash. “what does my website do? It sits in place like a cubic meter of granite.”~

This evening, I snipped some thyme in the garden and heard flapping. I approached. A pileated woodpecker, twenty paces away, at eye level but not wanting to be seen, all eighteen inches of him, flew off. Soon I heard knocking on a distant tree.

“The gesture not only reaches from the present into the future but also brings an anticipated future back into the present and returns it to the future: the gesture is constantly monitoring and reformulating its own meaning.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

To establish a garden in is heroic. Over years, root systems grow into woven carpets. I have learned how to pull them up using an edger and a hand cultivator. To take a garden back from neglect is to reject tragedy. A bed can return to grasses with surprising speed. To maintain a garden is gentle work, nothing like yanking up the carpet of grasses and tree roots. But the garden requires it constantly.

There are whole realms of the self left to grass. I can feel them when I meditate, asking for their own good for me to tear them up, to water the exposed dirt, to add compost. If I pull mind-weeds all day it is easier to face them, because areas of the garden are ordered and sane. One compares them and knows what is possible. We must neither try to rule nature nor let it rule us.

“The gesture of painting is a form of freedom. The painter does not have freedom, he is in it, for he is in the gesture of painting. Being free is synonymous with actually being there. The observation of painting allows us to see the concrete phenomenon of freedom. Only through subsequent efforts to explain it can its ontological, aesthetic, and political dimensions be distinguished. Freedom is actually indivisible: it is the way we recognize that others are in the world with us.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

“The meaning of the gesture of painting is the painting to be painted. This was not discussed very much in this essay because the intention was to pursue the gesture itself. Of course, the painting to be painted is assumed in the gesture, the painted painting is the stiffened, frozen gesture. If there were a general theory of gestures, a semiological discipline responsible for deciphering gestures, art criticism would not be empirical or ‘intuitive’ and would not try to explain aesthetic phenomena away by assigning causes as it does today. Rather, it would be an exact analysis of gestures that have solidified into paintings. In the absence of any such ‘choreographology,’ the better strategy may be to observe the gesture as it occurs before us and in us: as an instance of freedom. It means to try to look at the world with fresh eyes, without the prejudicial spectacles of objectification and abstraction that come with our tradition. Then the world would ‘appear’ again, illuminated with the splendor of concrete phenomena.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

“The subject is the cause of the photograph and the meaning of painting.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures