“I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath,” Dante Alighieri

“He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” Albert Einstein

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” Albert Einstein

“Always do what you are afraid to do.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences.” Rainer Maria Rilke

“Navigare necesse; vivere non est necesse” Pompeu

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Cada vez mais ponho da essência anímica do meu sangue (…)” (Each time I put more of my blood anymic essence in things) Fernando Pessoa

“What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out.” Michelangelo Antonioni, (written with Julio Cortázar), Blow Up, 1996.

“(…) I find her memory becoming more dominant. It seems to be growing beneath my feet, as if a dehydrated image that has been watered, swelling up out of all proportion. (…) The more I think on that image and its repercussions, the harder it is for the image to decay, to fade.” Paul Buck

What sorts things out? It is impossible to think the world without means of its images, memory and without getting of it a synthesis. Images that becomes more and more dominant. One approaches reality as part of image and of an effort to have a memory synthesis. The power of images and of trying to synthetise its memory, and getting a balance of it gets bigger and bigger and while new technologies tools in the web such as search comes up short delivering more and more data, video, pics, even text, keywords, one as to localise its focus and find ways of “sorting things out”, to find the best way to perceive the world and reality. The best way of getting the best proportion of beneath the feet.

In a time where companies like Sweden’s Polar Rose lives up to find ways to find stills of family members and friends on the Net with 3D and face-recognition technology that it claims can single out Grandpa from other family members in a photo posted on a web site, even if he’s not directly facing the camera, new questions will be post to the way one perceives person’s identity and the environment surrounding us, as well as what is the private the public and what kind of surveillance world we inhabit almost near the most weird visualisation of science fiction…

It is a fast and strange reality measured strongly by an image of an image and perceptions of the memory of all the perceptions… And in this landscape “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it” as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it a long time ago. To dream in a time where reality is a mix of sight, sound and motions across cultures is not a simple task. And how to construct cultural strength in a world managing chance and continuity?

This is the challenge one must undertake in a quest for a paradigm of personal essence.