Residents

In 2024 October 7 – November 8 Martynas Miliauskas, a mathematician, accompanied by his architect friend Emilija stayed at Artists’ residence. We would like to share their thoughts about the work and experiences in Panemune Castle Residence:

“Together with Emilija, we arrived for a month at the artists’ residence in Panemune Castle at the beginning of October. The purpose of the residency was to carry out research on the issue of one specific formulation of truth (“truth is the product of two opposite sets of truths”). The plan during this period was to understand the existing theories of truth, to give myself time and space to understand whether the aforementioned definition is worth something and to formulate an argument in the format of an essay.

When I first arrived, there was a period of a couple of days to get used to it, because I am used to thinking about the most important things while walking, so it took some time to find my “circumference circle”. But after that it was just a perfectly productive morning, you drink coffee, climb up to the Vytėnai chapel, then descend to the grave of Duke Vytėnai and his wife, turn around and head towards the Gelgaudai oak tree, and finally return to the castle. If you need more time to structure your thoughts, there are many good diversions along the way. You are in silence all the time, surrounded by nature, the countryside, the castle and their idyllic harmony. Yes, you are becoming a poet.

In the afternoon, a favorite productivity hack was to walk towards the Kartupėnai mound. A long straight line starts from the mound with a view of the Nemunas from above. Zero people around, only fields in the distance. Okay, I saw maybe two people in the whole month, one riding a bike and one walking towards a cow. And the hack is that you can write without any pressure, but with the sound recording on the phone. If something comes out of silence and boredom, just dictate it out loud. If no one is shooting you in the head, you are not shooting, you are burning calories, charging your batteries.

Actually, reflecting now, I look at this month with white envy. The presence of a specific deadline, isolation from the hustle and bustle of the city and world news. You get overworked, you go for a walk around the castle, the village, the mounds, etc. I wrote several versions of the essay in the past, and in the end I chose the one whose narrative form was inspired by M.C. Escher’s paradoxical illustrations. I also had mini-existential crises related to the argumentative strengthening of the essay as a format. The very fact that I am here “looking for the truth” was also difficult. This is what a blast of hot air looked like. Finally, I decided to create a web page for establishing the truth of statements based on the aforementioned definition of truth, in addition to the essay. As a result, I realized that I never even considered that every “truth machine” in our society, be it Wikipedia or science or ChatGPT, each of them uses a certain theory of truth by default to put a “stamp” on the truth before presenting that truth to us.”