"A synchronistic event is a unique, 'just-so' story and not predictible precicly because it is always a creative act in time and therefore not regular." – Marie-Louise Von Franz, On Divination and Synchronicity: The psychology of meaningfull chance. (1969) Inner City Books: Toronto. p.54.
The Observatory for Locally Observed Serendipitous Tangents (LOST) arose from the digressive nature of our meetings and discussions, as a way to investigate these digressions through humour and explore their impact on the wider Observatory Project. LOST is tasked with observing the ripples and consequences of tangents and digressions. Images captured at these points of distraction or diversion between paticipating subjects are collected by the participants. These images then are "sonified" using the Observatory Project's Adaptable Sound Interferometry Equiptment (A SINE). Now existing as a growing web archive of images and videos, LOST attempts to record the serendipitous moments between what we observe and our thinking, discussion, and ideas about the world.
The digressive elements of our meetings and discussions create a general theory of relative thoughts. Preliminary research has suggested that although ideas are formed through a seeming logical path from past experience into present modes of (mis)understanding, they are often interrupted by serendipitous or synchronistic experience. As the laser splits (via beam splitter) along two paths, a digression occurs. A cloud gives rise to ideas formed by the experience of the subjective past and other vectors yet to be defined. This observatory examines this proto-state of ideas before they enter the social conversational discourse. Does a tangent enter at soft and subtle thresholds of meaning or erupt at meteoric speeds with a hard knee?
