# Introduction - Jacob Strand
**URL:** https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/t/introduction-jacob-strand/894
**Category:** Welcome
**Tags:** introduction
**Created:** [September 25, 2026, 10:35am UTC](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/t/introduction-jacob-strand/894 "2026-09-25T10:35:21Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@JacobStrand](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/u/JacobStrand)
#### Post date: [September 25, 2026, 10:35am UTC](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/t/introduction-jacob-strand/894/1 "2026-09-25T10:35:21Z")
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
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### Author:  [@RobertBunge](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/u/RobertBunge)
#### Post date: [September 25, 2026, 11:38am UTC](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/t/introduction-jacob-strand/894/2 "2026-09-25T11:38:50Z")
> [@JacobStrand](#):
>
> language as technology, map, and mirror
Welcome, @JacobStrand ! All of this is amazing! Quite a bit of it resonates on numerous levels. This bit in particular: “language as technology, map, and mirror”.
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### Author:  [@rufuspollock](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/u/rufuspollock)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2026, 8:17am UTC](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/t/introduction-jacob-strand/894/3 "2026-10-02T08:17:47Z")
Hi Jacob — really glad to have you here, and thanks for sharing this.
A lot resonates, especially this question of how we cultivate the attention needed to perceive and navigate what is emerging.
I’d be curious: **what are you looking to explore or do next?** Is there a question you’d like to investigate with others here, something you’d like to contribute, or a way you’d like to get involved?
And thanks for your email too — very glad you reached out.
Best, Rufus
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### Author:  [@JacobStrand](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/u/JacobStrand)
#### Post date: [October 10, 2026, 12:01pm UTC](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/t/introduction-jacob-strand/894/4 "2026-10-10T12:01:30Z")
Hi Rufus and network.
Thanks for your kind welcome. I am very excited to get involved.
To answer your question. There is this on-going enquiry…
**A Refrigerator or a Lighthouse**
_A creative mapping exercise for Second Renaissance_
I would like to contribute a creative and philosophical mapping exercise exploring our relationship to objects, space and meaning.
My starting point is the possibility of suspending the coordinates through which we habitually navigate the world. Drawing on Henri Poincaré’s reflections on geometry, relativity and physical change, I am interested in what happens when we question the frameworks through which we establish position, scale and direction.
Imagine entering a blank canvas. A void in which the familiar coordinates have lost their authority. The world outside continues: an ongoing party, already furnished with its objects, functions and rules. From the street, we look in. But in this new space, we have the opportunity to begin mapping differently.
Everything becomes a waypoint in a coordinate system through which we orient ourselves in space-time. A refrigerator, a tree, a stone, a chessboard. Each can serve as a point of reference in relation to our own position. I call them lighthouses.
A refrigerator or a lighthouse?
The refrigerator is conventionally understood through its function: to cool and preserve. A tree through its biological processes: to grow, reproduce and seed. Yet what happens when we suspend these assigned functions and reconsider our relationship to the things themselves? The refrigerator becomes a lighthouse. The tree becomes a lighthouse. Each offers a point of reference from which new relationships can emerge.
This is an epistemological exercise. Just as a pissoir can become a vase through a shift in the framework through which we encounter it, an object can acquire a new significance without losing its material existence. The question is how our ways of seeing establish what a thing can be for us.
I imagine the exercise unfolding across a series of plateaus: new configurations of relational experience that become accessible when we question the geometry through which we navigate. We release the ladder, discover the hatch and enter another plateau. From there, we reconsider our relationship to ourselves and to the physical world of things.
But a blank canvas presents its own problem. If everything can become a point of reference, everything can become significant. The result is clutter. How do we choose our lighthouses? Would we choose the refrigerator or the tree? What deserves our attention, and what happens when we allow ourselves to remain unorientated rather than immediately rebuilding the coordinate system we have left behind?
Here, friction becomes productive. It marks the resistance between inherited ways of seeing and the possibility of new relationships. Metabolism describes how these encounters are absorbed and transformed. Decay reminds us that things and their relationships change through time, that no configuration remains untouched by the world in which it exists.
The exercise is to remain with this uncertainty long enough for a new point of reference to emerge. Not to replace one fixed system with another, but to explore how meaning arises through the relationships between bodies, objects, events and time.
The broader ambition is to invite people to reconsider their relationship with objects in general. What happens when we encounter things beyond their prescribed functions? How might our everyday surroundings become a field of discovery, where ordinary objects offer unexpected ways of locating ourselves in the world?
I see this as a form of contemporary cartography: mapping not simply where things or territories are, but how they become meaningful to us.
The first lighthouse is a choice. The map begins with the relationship we decide to establish.
What is a spoon then? A portal or a piece of metal?
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### Author:  [@RobertBunge](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/u/RobertBunge)
#### Post date: [October 10, 2026, 12:37pm UTC](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/t/introduction-jacob-strand/894/5 "2026-10-10T12:37:10Z")
Yesterday, while driving, a red car pulled up next to me on the left. Then it turned off to the left down another road and out of me view. I thought to myself, that car was significant to me for a moment, because I might have collided with it. But now is it gone away, it is not longer significant, and it will soon fade from both memory and awareness.
But then I thought, “I wonder if it is possible to be aware of the moment in which I forget the red car?” It appears it is not possible. To be aware of forgetting the red car is to not forget the red car. The more I think about forgetting the red car, the less I forget it. The red car, evidently, is massively significant, because I continue to memorialize it here. Was the red car a lighthouse perhaps?
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### Author:  [@JacobStrand](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/u/JacobStrand)
#### Post date: [October 10, 2026, 12:48pm UTC](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/t/introduction-jacob-strand/894/6 "2026-10-10T12:48:45Z")
I currently live ‘sin techo’. I am not homeless. I got a home everywhere. And roofs - I find along the way. I do have a little blue car, though. I have realised why I like driving. Because in that moment I enter a coordinate system that we all somehow adhere to. In other ways. I feel ‘normal’ when I drive. I belong to the 2 dimensional community. I am reminded of The Rolling Stones song. I see a red car…and I want to paint it black. I will consider enforced persistent attempts to 're’memory loss. If it actually proposes the opposite effect. Do you drive a blue car too?
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### Author:  [@RobertBunge](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/u/RobertBunge)
#### Post date: [October 10, 2026, 1:04pm UTC](https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/t/introduction-jacob-strand/894/7 "2026-10-10T13:04:55Z")
> [@JacobStrand](#):
>
> Do you drive a blue car too?
4 x 4 truck. Gray. (I bought it before I saw it). Useful for outdoor adventures. Snowshoeing and kayaking both feature alternative coordinate systems.