There is nothing that can make your mind more interesting.
It's impossible to actively achieve depth.
When your personal experience is lacking you have to turn to that ball of light splinters, the imagination.

Invention: neurocartography. Converting the intangible dimension into the second. Giving weight and depth to that which has none. Drawing links between node coordinates in mental Cartesian space.

Thesis: an organic supercomputer has limited memory but can run programs. The brain runs few programs but has a expanse of memory second to none.

Field: Meta-alchemy. Substance interaction. Cultural noise. Social acidity/conflict/turbulence. The relationship between the human and the object: the computer and the brain, the electric and the neuroharmonic.

In a peachflower forest on the north coast lives a city where people decided to do things right. In natural ecosystems energy enters as light and leaves as heat, and matter cycles from biotic to inorganic. The people designed buildings to grow inside and around trees, and for electricity to pulse green, shooting through axelsynthetic veins up oxygenated skyscrapers, cool and light, filled with artesian air.
400 years prior to this, a young man lives in an apartment in static altitude space, and enjoys its insularity, its closedness, but happy that he can slide the windows open once in a while. Two bridges away, there is a skypark full of ponds and lotus flowers. Noise is all around him, loud enough to assert the presence of the population, soft enough to allow for the delusion that they're very, very  far away.

• Ephemera is printed paper that exists for a moment in history and then dies. This includes party invitations, flyers, business cards, receipts, advertisements handed to you on street corners. When ephemera is removed from its momentary relevance in space and time, it becomes an anachronism: a chronological error, a faulty intersection, a historical fuckup. In fact, the word ephemeral means fleeting, momentary, spontaneous, dying quickly. Ephemera is the dynamic omnipresent spirit of the paper world that is constantly moving: capture it and try to keep it, and it vanishes into (paper)thin air.
• Broaden your definition of what a text is. Texts have text (novels, poems, non-fiction), and they also have no text (plays, movies, songs, pictures). Texts don't need to last forever; like ephemera they may lose their relevance but we still have that insight into the moment of time when they still had it. These days ephemera doesn't quite dissolve into nothing as easily: MySpace comments, spam email, banner advertisements; they're all data ephemera, and I think a lot of people would agree you can learn quite a lot about a person from looking at their MySpace comments. Text is the noise of a culture: noise made by people doing, being, living, consuming, producing, interacting and engaging with other people. Literature is a textual manifestation of society, as is music and art, and inevitably the language-on-paper that a society generates. Noise is in the moment, but an echo in theory lasts forever.

  Well, this little post-mocks mini-holiday has certainly taught me a lot about myself: namely that I need people around me to stay sane. I'm serious, I've been alone for a week and I'm losing my mind. My attention span has vanished: I've walked from one end of the house to the other, doing something for fifteen minutes then getting bored with it, doing something else, getting bored with that, then just ending up lying on the ground. Bored. The minutes seem to fly away, but the days feel so long: there's a sense of both transit and inertia simultaneously, moving but ending up in the same place. My mouth gets dry and my body gets lethargic.
   Ironic that I should go out of my mind in the absence of people and then get neurotic when I'm actually with people. It's that diametric genetic conspiracy I was talking about: my mother's genes force me to crave people; dad's, on the other hand, tell me to run away very fast.

Let's talk about university.
    Knowledge is the business of the academic. Do we have an 'academic identity'? Do we identify ourselves by the knowledge that we have come into? When I finish my university degree, will I be a arts scholar or a scientist or both or neither? When people ask 'who are you?' are they really asking 'what do you know?' The idea of being in a brain-damaging accident and losing all your knowledge is very disturbing to me: so my personal answer to the general question above is yes, what I know is very much a part of me. Sometimes I love the idea of knowledge being my life: I have a very steampunk, feudalistic image of scholars in my head, all conducting experiments with scales and alembics in huge gothic castles on mountains, discussing philosophy and quoting verse from The Politics, in huge Greek style amphitheatres beside big European forests and big stained glass cathedrals. In a big way I want to live a glamorous intellectual life, waking up with coffee in the morning to read the New York Scientific Journal, walking into my little atelier in an apartment in Hong Kong, where I have bookshelves reaching up to the ceiling. But that's all aesthetics: being a type of person is more than looking like you're that type of person, no matter how many gothic castles full of libraries and laboratories (or apartments in New York) you live in. That's me though: life is in the performance. Perhaps, for me at least, what you look like is who you are (which is why being able to change your face through the internet gives you near-unlimited control over your perceived identity).

I can be a scientist.

I can also be a writer.

And I reckon I'll have fun doing both.

(pictures courtesy of ninive from deviantart)

• Data is not information, or so my 'experience design' art book tells me. Yet data is the currency of 21st century meaning. You don't need to talk to someone every day to really know them: all you need is access to the data they generate. Look at their credit card payments to see  what they've bought, hack into their home security system to see what time they come home on friday nights, count their top twenty most frequently used words in email and MSN. Its possible, if you have access to public CCTV files, to collect all the photographs containing a particular licence plate number of a car travelling down a major highway and build a mathmatical map of everywhere a person goes, how often, how far. There are cameras all over canning highway and any major train line: use an algorithm to recognise a certain license plate and all of a sudden, you don't need bushes and binoculars to stalk a person. Forget biotechnology: if there's one way that computers are really going to become part of the human consciousness, it is our propensity to create numbers in whatever we do: we are living, breathing, multiecheloned data structures in moving flesh and blood.
• In history there is continuity, and there is change. Continuity is how the democracies of ancient Greece still exist in a theoretical sense in the global roundtable, and how consumer goods are still the line between who has something in society and who doesn't. Change is in the way black people were once slaves to the way they are on the covers of magazines, our heroes and idols. Change is in the way art deco New York made 'up' the new direction for urban development. A revolution is change: but a revolution has a lot to say about continuity as well
• In terms of voice, our generation really doesn't know how lucky we are. With access to the internet there is absolutely no interest we have that we can't satisfy. This is good and bad. Every kid with a thirst for knowledge can look up 'astrophysics' and 'chinese literature' and 'japanese nihonga art' and let their mind wander for hours. In the same way, any lonely teenager doesn't have to look far for a ways to test if a noose is going to break under the weight of your hanging body, or how ingesting less than 500mL of ammonia will slowly but very noticeably kill you one screaming nerve ending at a time. In years gone past, people had to go to Paris and New York and look for months to find a whole underground subculture of artists and poets that listened to avant-garde neo-fuck post-rock jazz music, but who didn't have a problem with wearing Von Zipper: these days its as simple as tribe.net. Go log on to Yahoo! Groups right now and type in "I like fucking cats with herpes" and you will find a whole clan of people just as fucked up as you.
• One day I will write a scifi epic and I want the world to be ready.