026 · Automatism
Susan Sontag and André Breton meet at the camera: surrealism, psychic automatism, photography, computation, and the expanding image-world.
Semiotic Drift
An ongoing archive of fragments and short critical pieces across theory, life writing, visual culture, memory, and digital culture. By Marc Brüseke.
Latest posts
025 · Interruption
Photo-sketching, photographic detail, and the moment an image interrupts attention and opens a fragment through memory and association.
024 · Haiku
Haiku, haibun, haiga, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, the Winter Garden Photograph, and the relation between image, text, absence, and desire.
023 · Dream
A dream of finding my mother at a supermarket checkout in a city that resembles both Cape Town and London.
022 · /
Semiotic visual analysis and haiku poetics meet at the barre oblique, a slash that holds two methods in unstable relation.
021 · Dream
A dream of a suitcase that appears to contain a dismembered body, but turns out to hold 83.2 kilograms of Hida beef.
020 · Satori
Roland Barthes, studium, punctum, haiku, and satori at the point where photographic meaning exceeds commentary.
019 · Dream
A dream of a neti pot, blurred vision, Karabo in the back of my mother’s Ford Capri, and stars hidden beneath the seat.
018 · Meaning
Roland Barthes, John Berger, photographic meaning, the limits of structural explanation, and the unresolved space where photo-sketching begins.
017 · Fragment
The scaled dot-product attention equation from the Transformer architecture, isolated as a fragment.