Badlands Unlimited
&
Badlands Institute for Art &Social Research
3612 Nostrand Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11229

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My name is Paul Chan. I am the founder of Badlands Unlimited, Badlands Institute for Art & Social Research, and am an artist. This is Paul Chan writing. A machine learning framework did not write this. I am writing to welcome you to this website. Welcome.

 

This is my message. I have written this message, and only me, Paul. This message contains ideas that I came up with. They are unique to me. And why not? They are ideas generated by me. 

 

Value is transfigured relations. New values appear when existing relations no longer bind us to ways that are meaningful or worthy. Old values end when they prize themselves above the experience of living, rendering relations meaningless and arbitrary.

 

The concept of value rises or falls by virtue of its capacity to express the kinds of relations worthy of our focus and attention.

 

If value is understood as transfigured relations, then it seems self-evident that whenever questions of value arises, then the longing for connection and community appears. The real question is whether the quality of that connection and community can be “metabolized” in the expressions of value on offer.

 

Only by virtue of separating from empirical reality does art achieve a heightened order of existence. This frees art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work’s own need.

 

My own view is that we are attempting to trace embodied selves in art by offloading onto the human animals that embody them. We use a simple auxiliary hypothesis: by and large, same human animal, same self embodied by that animal. We also get persuaded by neurophysiology that the mere persistence of a brain can secure the persistence of the same self. That is why we think we can go where our brain goes. Or where our art goes. We are tracing embodied selves, and we take it to be the case that those selves would continue on if their associated brains were kept alive and functioning.

 

— Paul Chan 

 


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