Sitting in a train from Bucharest to Craiova, I am thinking about the
reasons behind few things. Why to do something? Why some people are more
active in life than others? And what is the purpose?



The case of travelling and being interested in things around is
obvious: it's curiosity of an explorer mixed with humanity's evolution
to homo neophilus: information-savy thinker-explorer. I like to think
about another reason, which I call microworlds.



Take a complex matter, such as the world around us, which can't be
easily thought of as a whole. It's so complex and so difficult, a mind
has usually problem finding out where to focus, which part to think
about.



As a proper computer scientist I do what we always do: construct
everything from top down as well as bottom up: whichever suits the
problem better. Or combine both approaches.



The bottom-up principle: take a tiny part and understand it well. Then combine.



I like to look at small parts of world around us: say an obscure
musical genre fans, developers of a particular software, medicine
doctors focused on an esoteric (as in "not common", not unscientific)
parts or approaches, people going to one pub, parts of society with
common opinion. Listen and understand. There are patterns, there are
mysteries, there are exceptions. But it's rewarding and fun.



Take this to a next level. Everyone with a camera is a wanna-be
artist, documentarist of his or her microworld. Bloggers, twiter feeds,
obscure art performances that are seen once and never repeated.



You can say, that the past had it's art celebrities. Today, the
world of art is diversified. They all offer their personal approqch to
documenting the microworlds of their minds and their minds'
surroundings.



We will never ever be complete to see, read, hear, smell nor
understand even a small grasp of today's great art. But we will be able
-- through creating and consuming personalized art forms -- to
experience, create and become parts of new microworlds.



It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. Meet me on the Dead side of the moon, at Eris Quies.



That kind of microworlds.

(original post)