22 June '26

This session deepened the group’s figure-and-ground thread into a genuine reframing: the difficulty of showing relationships in a 360-degree knowledge space is not a problem of where to route a connective line, but a problem of signification — of how out-of-view information can keep doing the work that knowledge-in-the-world is supposed to do. Drawing on Don Norman’s affordances and signifiers, Donella Meadows’ systems thinking, and the founding choices of hypertext, the conversation worked through what a node should reveal when closed, how to distinguish an author’s corpus from collaborations and shared topics, the multisensory and dispositional dimensions of perception, and the constraints that XR swaps in rather than removes. Threaded throughout was a reflection on human–machine co-evolution, sharpened by Mazlish’s fourth discontinuity, alongside a running live demonstration of one AI briefing another to render the session’s own song and quotations into image and video. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/06/22/22-june-2026/