Naoko Ito Ubiquitous 2009
As part of the Urban Nature series, Naoko Ito took a six foot tree branch cut it in several pieces. Then, with each piece trapped into it’s own jar, mounted the whole set to recreate the branches original form.
Via Neatorama
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Robin Sloan uses the economic concept of stock and flow as a metaphor for today’s media.
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
The clarity of such a mental model is incredibly valuable when determining the level of trust from your sources.
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Timelessness is as good a means to judge the importance and value of writing as any other and this article on how we lost (and now have rediscovered) interactivity by Douglas Adams, written in 1999 but still as relevant and enjoyable to read today is a perfect example. I’ve been misquoting a passage from this for years and so I’m pleased to be re-aquainted with the source (thanks to Aden Davies).
…during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non–interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for.
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The evolution of Crayola crayons, from the eight available in 1903 to the present day set of 120, charted for our amusement (or careful analysis). Despite the cull of shades in 1990, when eight were retired, is the ever increasing number of shades sustainable?
via Etre
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Many writers describe the arduous, physical side to their work and, importantly, the need to build up stamina. The emphasis on the labour of writing is brilliantly explored in Haruki Murakami’s ‘kind of a memoir’, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
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Most designers can barely contain their delight when using the ampersand in their work. This seemingly humble symbol (albeit now in widespread use in the inputs to SMS, emails and twitter) provides rich opportunities for visual flair given that it, more often than not, enjoys complete artistic freedom from it’s typeface family. The concept of using the ‘best available ampersand’ is now considered de riguer, as described by Robert Bringhurst in his typographic bible, The Elements of Typographic Style.
Since the ampersand is more often used in display work than in ordinary text, the more creative versions are often the more useful. There is rarely any reason not to borrow the italic ampersand for use with roman text.
And yet so easy is it to mark yourself as a follower of the cult of ampersand with the uniform, badge and shoes it’s history is often overlooked. Both webdesignerdepot.com and Adobe offer decent summaries of the evolution of this typographical gift from the first Roman use, through the sublime 18th century Caslon example to the plain, modern variants. All worthy of inspection although only a madman would disagree that Trebuchet’s offering is inexcusably awful.
At the very least we should all be confident what this decorative squiggle actually means.
The term ampersand, as Geoffrey Glaister writes in his “Glossary of the Book,” is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means “(the character) & by itself (is the word) and.” The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for “and.”
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James Pardey, he of The Art of Penguin Science Fiction, has curated another fine collection of book covers covering the gaudy, cut-up, geometric art of the Fontana Modern Masters.
The books, published from 1970 to 1983 with ten in each series, were pocket guides to artists, writers, philosophers and other members of the 20th Century thought leaders.
However James’s site extends beyond a showcase as he tells the story of the Fontana Modern Masters from the twentieth century abstract art that inspired the covers, through to the recent work by the young British artist Jamie Shovlin who reproduced all forty eight covers as watercolours, creating his own ‘Fontana Colour Chart’ to complete the covers for those titles that were scheduled to be published but were never finished.
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As an antidote to the charming, eccentric science-fiction illustrations (‘Steampunk’ if you will) that we rely on when discussing the industry and innovation of the Victorian age, BibliOdyssey recently published a range of Victorian posters, pages and pamphlets selected from the David Rumsey Historial Map Collection that reveal the theories, beliefs and understanding across the science and humanities. They also prove the enduring power and beauty of infographics.
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Perhaps 2010 is going to be the year of collections. Lisa Congdon, an illustrator from San Francisco, has decided to photograph, paint or draw one of her collections each day.
Since I was a young girl, I have been obsessed both with collecting and with arranging, organizing and displaying my collections. This is my attempt to document my collections, both the real and the imagined.
Another ‘post a day’ project of note is Rachel Loshak’s A Year in the Day, 2010. Back in 2000 Rachel completed a daily photograph project and is now repeating the exercise ten years later. Each post pairs the past with the present and are unburdened by lengthy explanations or comment.
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Despite the cultural legacy of being the largest closed system ever built resulting in an abundance of scientific endeavour the three acre site known as Biosphere 2 (Earth is number one), abandoned since the premature end to the second mission in 1994 and sold to a private developer in 2007, has been photographed by Noah Sheldon in its beautiful, moribund state.
Notwithstanding the tales of personal conflicts, thwarted scientific ambitions and arguably the most productive half-acre of land in farming history, Biosphere 2 offered a unique lesson on the potential of imbalance in closed eco systems. Now this ‘biological folly’, poignant and beautiful in it’s decay and once lost in the Arizona desert is close to being consumed by the ever increasing conurbations of Tucson and Pheonix.
Bldgblog has more information. (via coopette.com)
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