The Wayfinder's Dilemma
"How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?" - Plato
For better or worse, the developed world is changing. We are witnessing the transition from a collection of societies, separated by lines on a map, toward an interconnected network of belief structures. We no longer depend upon geographic proximity to decide which faction of humanity we belong to; if we find ourselves out of alignment with a particular group, we can go find another one.
This nomadic mindset can be highly beneficial to us: we are free to discover who we really are, and connect with those who inform our ever-evolving worldviews. On the other hand, we can lead ourselves astray by curating ourselves into an echo chamber or engaging in a destabilizing game of ideological leapfrog. So how do we integrate new information into our worldview without losing our way? How do we construct the path toward our ideal selves?
The Wayfinder’s Dilemma is a meditation on how we apply meaning to our experiences as we attempt to orient ourselves in unfamiliar situations. I use the desert landscape as a metaphor to explore our perpetual quest to understand our place in the universe. Each image presents a new waypoint - a new experience we must reconcile with those we’ve had before. Together, these seemingly random moments create a narrative in which the ambiguity of “what is” becomes a springboard to consider “what could be”, calling into question the ways we construct our individual realities and interpret the world around us.
