Are the “little red dots” on Illingworth’s space maps part of the same landscape that Wordsworth and Thoreau described, part of the same visceral ethos as mountains and trees, part of the same cycle of birth and demise that orders our lives, part of our personal physical and emotional conception of the world that we live in? Or are such things instead digitized abstractions, silent and untouchable, akin to us only in their (hypothesized) makeup of atoms and molecules? And to what extent are we human beings, living on a small planet orbiting one star among billions of stars, part of that same
...more
