A Mound of Space
“There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscapes of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing that he likes to think about.”
–G. K. Chesterton
“I soil the paper to prepare it for hallucinations. I reverse the day’s attempt to assassinate me.”
–Matta (Roberto Matta) [Quoted in: My Devotion, by Clayton Eshleman, p. 82]
A wonderful thought from Boris Vian, quoted in A half-century homage to France’s master-prankster, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the author / jazz musician / artist’s death: (more…)
Brian Eno: “possessions are a way of turning money into problems.”
–From a New York Times editorial, Five Scenes, One Theme: A True if Unlikely Story, by Bono, November 14, 2009.
Leave it to science to transform dada into data. A new study suggests that the experience of nonsense, “may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large,” according to a recent article in the New York Times, How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect.
The article continues: (more…)
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
—Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut (1953-1994), computer scientist and educator. This has also been attributed to Yogi Berra.
I just stumbled upon a great essay by Philip K. Dick, written in 1978, a few years before he died: How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later. It is longish, but an entertaining read. Here are some excerpts: (more…)
Early afternoon yesterday, before the news broke about the plane ditching into the frigid Hudson river, I made this larger drawing from a chunk of words I first entered in a Snarkbook on Jan 7th.
Is it megalomaniacal of me to think that I might be God, controlling fate with my words?
See also: The perfect ditching of US Airways 1549
In a feat of amazing piloting by heroic captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, All 155 Escape Jet’s Plunge Into Hudson after a flock of geese take out both engines of the Airbus A320.
Here’s a great cell phone photo snapped moments after the jet hit the drink by a tourist who was Twittering away at the time on a ferry bound from Manhattan to New Jersey that was one of the first on the scene to help rescue passengers:
Here is the photographer, Janis Krums’ succinct caption: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”
See also: Pace yourself the air is freezing
Super geeky, but a beautiful image. It was created by Perry Hung, who explains: (more…)
Says English Russia, which posted a nice series of photos of this smokestack collapse:
After the Soviet Era too much of objects stay abandoned in Russia and with the modern rise of development of new business and residential areas more and more are need to be removed from the terrain. Many controlled demolition companies act on this market, sometimes they have some nice objects to remove like those two old factory chimneys.
Time for another edition of Newsmash, a mashup of headlines taken from CNN.com over the last 24 hours. For added fun, guess which of the headlines below was NOT altered in any way, but appears just as it did on CNN.com (*answer following):
Amish invade Florida town
Baby squirrel to help count California rats
Best dressed sheriff loves house standing
Blind masseurs jump from bridge
Candy may prevent attack
How to avoid places that are good for teeth (more…)
The Centre Pompidou in Paris is currently showing an exhibit of the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. Here is the Pompidou’s introduction, illustrated with images I found online:
470+ examples of Swiss and German modern book design: Book (design) stories from new typography to Swiss style modernist book design in Germany and Switzerland 1925–1965 (and beyond). Here’s a nice example, #51 in the collection, a Swiss survey of Die Neue Architektur by Alfred Roth, first published in 1948, cover design by Max Bill:
View the full index of all titles in this collection.
Via Grain Edit.
Another interesting thing I saw at Stanford’s art museum, Spared from the Storm: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art:
Image: Joseph Cornell (U.S.A., 1903–1972), Radar Astronomy, 1952–56, mixed media
Note how ol’ Uncle Joe applies his signature to the back of the box: reversed. It looks like he painted his signature on thin vellum and, when dry, glued it face down, leaving the signature reversed when viewed from behind, but “right reading” if viewed from the front of the box and you could actually see through the back of the box to see the signature.
Arts & Architecture was a great arts/architecture/music/culture magazine published in the United States from 1945-1967. The magazine always had a great cover that reflected the art and design aesthetics fo the era, and now you can see images of all the covers together on the Arts & Architecture website. Here is a taste:
But that’s not all. You can click on every cover and download a PDF with excerpts from each issue.
Thanks to Grain Edit, a cool blog devoted to art and design from the same era as these magazines, for steering me to them.
Found this a couple days ago at the Sacramento Zoo. The kind of beauty that capital improvement campaigns, sadly, usually replace. I should have offered to buy them a new sign if I can have the old one. Maybe I will.
Chris King is a writer and musician living in St. Louis, a city born at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Chris has a thing for confluences, both literal and metaphoric — thus the theme of his blog, Confluence City.
This fascination with confluences is something we have in common, as you’d probably guess by looking at my work, which at its most basic level is a confluence of word + image.
I don’t know Chris, have never met him. He just emailed me out of the blue a couple hours ago to introduce himself and to say that we share an affinity for Robert Walser. Another confluence. And an influence.
He and I also share a trait of writing things down in notebooks and any scrap of paper at hand, which, as professional musician, he used to do in between gigs in notebooks he dubbed “gigbooks”. In “The Chatter of the Soul,” he elaborates: (more…)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan (p. 204), relates this anecdote about Apelles of Kos, a renowned ancient Greek painter from the 4th century BC:
Sextus Empiricus retold the story of Apelles the Painter, who, while doing a portrait of a horse, was attempting to depict the foam from the horse’s mouth. After trying very hard and making a mess, he gave up and, in irritation, took the sponge he used for cleaning his brush and threw it at the picture. Where the sponge hit, it left a perfect representation of the foam.
A beautiful case study in support of Taleb’s advice to “maximize the serendipity around you,” something I am always trying to tap into both in the visualization process (painting, drawing, making stains) and in the conceptualization process (making words, stringing words along, weaving and unweaving narrative threads).
Thanks Michael for sending me the book — it’s very interesting and, as you suspected, right up my alley.
Pardon my rusty Portuguese (ok, my non-existent Portuguese, which is even rustier), but I just discovered a great art blog, Gramatologia, published by the Brazilian artist Amir Brito Cadôr. Amir’s work and the work of other artists he features is predominantly text-based in many different languages, and the site is mostly visual, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t read Portuguese. Check it out.
Amir’s work is often caligraphic, and plays with type and alphabets. Here is a self-serving example of three randomly chosen pieces from his Livro dos Seres Imaginários (Book of the Imaginary Beings) that just happen to spell my name when combined in just the right way:
