Hi.
Really glad to join the network. In the following I am sharing a brief testament to my journey so fur.
In 2012, I voluntarily initiated what has since become a prolonged experiment in liminal existence.
At the time, I occupied a successful position within architecture, strategic foresight, cultural analysis, and future-oriented innovation. Yet I had become increasingly preoccupied by a paradox: contemporary institutions appeared extraordinarily effective at generating novel realities while becoming progressively less capable of understanding, describing, or orienting themselves within the consequences of those realities.
This observation gradually evolved from an intellectual concern into an existential imperative.
Rather than continuing to participate in the production of future narratives, I chose to suspend my participation and enter a condition of deliberate uncertainty. Crucially, this was not an act of withdrawal. I did not retreat into isolation, nature, or an alternative community. Instead, I remained embedded within the social, economic, and symbolic infrastructures I wished to understand.
The result was a form of liminal citizenship: neither fully inside nor fully outside the systems under investigation.
What followed cannot adequately be described as a career transition. It more closely resembled an extended emic inquiry conducted from within the fractures of late modernity itself. Over more than a decade, the familiar coordinates through which identity, success, value, and belonging are conventionally organized were intentionally suspended.
Such a condition generates a peculiar phenomenology.
Unlike most human endeavors, it offers little immediate feedback. Progress becomes largely invisible. The distinction between incubation, stagnation, and delusion becomes increasingly difficult to establish. One is required to continue investing attention, trust, and effort without reliable evidence that these investments will ever produce observable outcomes.
In this sense, the experience resembles the cultivation of a bamboo root system whose germination period remains unknown. One is tasked with tending to a process occurring beneath the threshold of visibility while simultaneously confronting social exclusion, misunderstanding, ridicule, and the persistent suspicion that no emergence may ever occur.
The central challenge is therefore temporal rather than material.
The difficulty lies not in sacrifice itself, but in the prolonged absence of confirmation. One inhabits a space between worlds in which previous identities have been relinquished while future forms have not yet appeared. The result is a sustained encounter with uncertainty, disorientation, longing, and meaning itself.
It was within this territory that many of my subsequent inquiries emerged: contemplation as a primary human faculty; language as technology, map, and mirror; coherence as an emergent property rather than a designed outcome; and the possibility that contemporary crises stem not from complexity itself, but from the diminishing cultural capacity devoted to understanding complexity.
Much of my work since has therefore been concerned with tracing the contours of realities that existing systems struggle to perceive or describe.
At the moment, my thinking is being informed by Henri Poincaré, A Thousand Plateaus, and The Dominion of the Dead, alongside Simone Weil’s idea of ‘attention’. I am interested in attention as a form of practice: what becomes perceptible when we remain with something rather than immediately trying to resolve it. ‘Friction’ can become a point of information, revealing a ‘hatch’ — an opening into another configuration — while metabolism describes how experience, information, memory and meaning are transformed. These ideas are currently part of the ongoing phenomenology of my praxis.
Not as critique alone, but as contemporary cartography.
A cartography of the unmapped conditions produced by modernity itself.
All the very best.
Jacob