Another week, another Media Studio, and another lesson learnt. I sit there in class and soak up everything that is being said. It might not look like it, as I aimlessly twirl my pen and gaze off into the distance, that is the four black walls that cage us, but I am drawing in the information and thinking about it. Thinking. Now that’s something that we don’t think about all that often, but it is exactly that which we were asked to think about today. Why do we think what we do? How do we know what we know? How many limitations are our thought patterns constrained by? and why?

It’s in those thoughts, within the four black walls that make the box we sit within, that you begin to realise that is exactly how we think about every single thing on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute basis; We always think in the confinements of an internal ‘black box’.

From this, it became clear to see the importance of not reaching to the first step as meaning. More often than not we only ever define a ‘thing’ based on its purpose for us; we think for the thing rather than thinking as the thing.

This was reiterated in Week One’s reading: ‘Ontography. Revealing the Rich Variety of Being’, where the nature of thinking, objects, and life overall, is anything but broken down, but instead a continuous flow in an outward reach. Society has flourished and advanced at rapid lengths but with “an obsession with simple explanations”.

…Ontography can take the form of a compendium, a record of things juxtaposed to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation…

Before now, I had no idea what an Ontograph was. I had no idea that it was a tool to flesh out the existence of anything and everything, where “a particular configuration is celebrated merely on the basis of existence” – how great is that; a grain of sugar from your morning cup of coffee, a lighter used to light your cigarette that you had with your morning coffee, or even the button you press to wait for a signal to cross the road while you sip your coffee and puff your smoke… all those ‘simple’ things suddenly exist as their own. We never think that they exist as their own entity, or that without those things existing as their own we wouldn’t be enjoying those seemingly simple and routine pleasures.

We live in an anthropocentric universe, where we have the ‘luxury’ of things thinking for us instead of us thinking about what things actually are. We are selective beings and we can’t notice everything, but when we try and begin to, it is evident just how intricately intwined this universe, and everything that exists within it, actually is.