By nothing

We decided to let the physical piece into the market. As fate, cause and effect, another collector resonated with this piece, Socrat. He told me that he has been studying zen in the school of Dogen for 5 years. And this koan and calligraphy vibed. We connected and our conversations in linear communication.

Socrat then reached out to discuss the purchase of the physical piece. As I looked at this piece in more detail and perhaps with a blank mind, I noticed that the koan I wrote had no fixed orientation. Theoretically there are 16 factorial ways to read it, intended or unintended.

But just demonstrating a few symmetrical orientation, the implication or the question that arises from the koan shifts just a bit or significantly. This is when Socrat texted me with some visual experimentation by mid journey, trivially translated by google. So in this sense the koan is a conversation between human, google and mid journey and back to us human. Together with Socrat, zen, flows between AI, NLP and us mere humans.

In this sense, who is the master and who is the student. Google, mid-journey, or us human?

In the creation of this collection, I think these works of art passed the Dogen-Turning Test without a doubt that is no different to any doubts we usually have. In this collaboration I merely provided a 16 digit seed in the form of a koan. And Socrat is in constant conversation with the AI to create different visuals, so meditation flows. Given the different koan orientation, there both my translations and Google's translation to seed midjourney.

As if

I leave the most abstract or literal output throughout our mediation the cover page of our collection. By nothing like nothing — 以似無

Full collection of the 12 Koans: As If, Nothing 以似無

Below we limit ourselves to 12 permutation of the original koan, with Google and my translation and the Socrat is in his virtual dialogue with midjourney attempting to reflect on the koan. All individual works can be found in the 12 koans collection.

The complete collection can be found here: 12 koans.