Lined & Unlined

A Collection of All Possible Patterns

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:17:00 -0500

From the BBC’s wonderful podcast In Our Time comes an episode on Unintended Consequences in Math, in which Cambridge Prof. John Barrow observes:

A good way of thinking about mathematics is that it’s just the collection of all the possible patterns there could be. It’s a great catalog of every possible pattern. Some of those patterns are interesting, some are not, some are useful, some are not.

See also: Steven Strogatz’s incredible series that reintroduces the principles of math in a more thoughtful way for the NYTimes’s Opinionator blog. In terms of patterns, start with Rock Groups and continue with The Enemy of My Enemy.

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Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:12:00 -0500

Those interested in a Serial Series will surely enjoy this episode of NPR’s On the Media, which came out just days after the The First/Last Newspaper concluded—one of those “in the air” kind of moments. The episode begins by quoting a historian from 1685 who worries there are simply too many books (an anxiety others have expressed in later years, and on which I’ve ruminated as well). It continues by looking at some emerging models for publishing that challenge the way that books are typically selected, marketed, and produced. (Last week’s announcement of the iPad prompted John Gruber to point to this useful summary of collapsing supply chains in publishing as well.) Host Brooke Gladstone then interviews author Neil Gaiman, Instutute for the Future of the Book founder Bob Stein, and professor Ann Kirschner, who each, in different ways, seem to deal with Charles Dickens and his publishing legacy. Gaiman begins by recounting Dickens’s struggles with piracy in the U.S. and his attempt to profit off the colonies by providing himself in lieu of his books. His American tours from 1842 and 1868 are evidence of the experience economy in action. Stein debates the idea of authoring as a private practice, and instead describes reading and writing as public activies that are shared by many, not owned by one. He observes, as a way of underscoring the nascency of our current media environment, that the idea of page numbers did not develop until 50 years after the printing press had been invented. Finally, Kirschner explains an experiment she undertook to read Dickens’s Little Dorrit four ways: in paperback, on a Kindle, as an audiobook, and with her iPhone. Her preferred method is the latter (“My iPhone is always with me,” she says), but each is its own distinct experince. The paperback offers an encounter with her earlier self through notes and marginalia, while the audiobook prompts a reverie about Dickens’s own performances at his readings. She concludes—as long as there were a way to make a buck from each format—that Dickens would’ve embraced them all. I’m inclined to agree.

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Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:41:28 -0500

I am on the record as a fan of Rosecrans Baldwin’s series The Digital Ramble for T Magazine’s The Moment blog, but, in the eyes of many typographers out there, this Ramble may be Baldwin’s finest.

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Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:09:00 -0500

Allan McCollum’s extraordinary Shapes project from 2005 continues this month at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery with Shapes from Maine, a collection of over 2,200 unique shapes created by McCollum in collaboration with local Maine craftspeople. In their hands, McCollum’s systematic forms become cookie cutters, wooden ornaments, rubber stamps, and cut-paper silhouettes. An interesting bit of craft conceptualism, and, if you missed the show in 2005, well worth a look. (via)

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Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:01:23 -0500

Are politicians responsible to a different moral code? Are there extreme situations where even non-politicians might follow a different moral code than they otherwise would? These are the issues at the heart of the philosophical problem of Dirty Hands, which is also the subject of this typically thought-provoking episode of Philosophy Bites. Of course the first example that comes to mind is the 24esque ticking time bomb scenario, but philosopher Tony Coady teases out a more nuanced case he dubs “extrication morality,” in which a political succsessor might be forced to extend the moral wrong of his predecessor into his own administration rather than immediately reverse it and risk further harm to the public.

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Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:35:18 -0500

Trend tracker: cinematic screenshot blogs. Here are two fine and varied examples: 1) Michael Crowe’s To e (via). 2) Justin Ouellette’s Screen Caps.

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Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:17:59 -0500

Three sentences, courtesy of H&FJ: 1) Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. 2) James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher. 3) That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is. Reading these, I found myself looking for my copy of J&L Books’s thoroughly inquisitive (and endlessly excellent) What Does “Why” Mean?

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Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:12:16 -0500

Highly recommended: this episode of the UK’s South Bank Show on composer Steve Reich. Reich talks about the development of his work and process in the most casual but fascinating way, it’s well worth a look. Also interviewed are composers like Michael Nyman and Brian Eno. Eno describes Reich’s tape pieces (like “It’s Gonna Rain”) as “aural moiré patterns.” He goes on, “[The pieces] take advantage of the fact that your brain is very creative. [Reich’s] tranferring the job of being the composer into the brain of the listener, saying to the listener, ‘Your brain is actually making this piece of music,’ because you knew what ingredients were, there’s nothing mysterious about how the piece works.” Perhaps that explains my love for Bruno Munari’s Original Xerographies.

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Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:45:26 -0500

Linked by Air, designers of the wonderful new Whitney.org, share some of their class syllabi, including a chess-visualization assignment that’s after Duchamp’s, Hartwig’s, and my own heart.

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Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:17:39 -0500

The School of Life’s Catherine Blyth weighs in on the peculiar mechanics of diplomatic gift-giving: “As each exchange is a diplomatic act, similar rules apply to presents as to flattery. When Gordon Brown welcomed Barack Obama to Britain with a pen holder whittled from timbers of a sister ship of the Resolute, out of which the Presidential desk in the White House is made, plus a seven-volume, first edition Churchill biography, Obama gave him 25 DVDs including Psycho. Commentators scorned Obama’s ‘insult,’ but the error was Brown’s. His presents were too great to be returned.”

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Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:11:42 -0500

Man, I love Stuart Brand: “When roles shift, ideologies have to shift, and ideologies hate to shift. The workaround is pragmatism — a practical way of thinking concerned with results rather than with theories and principles. The shift is deeper than moving from one ideology to another; the shift is to discard ideology entirely.” More on pragmatism here.

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Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:07:24 -0500

The origin and examples of purple prose.

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Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:50:41 -0500

To my emerging collection of paradoxes, I now add another: the joyfully alliterative Parrondo’s Paradox, which states that “Given two games, each with a higher probability of losing than winning, it is possible to construct a winning strategy by playing the games alternately.” The paradox was discovered in 1999. This article from the New York Times written shortly afterward describes one of Parrondo’s experiments with two games involving weighted (non random) coins: “when a person plays either game A or game B 100 times, all money taken to the gambling table is lost. But when the games are alternated — playing A twice and B twice for 100 times — money is not lost. It accumulates into big winnings. Even more surprising, he said, when game A and B are played randomly, with no order in the alternating sequence, winnings also go up and up.” When visualized, these games take on a rachet-like shape — a shape central to the explanation of trivial phenomena, like the Brazil Nut Effect, and more fundamental matters, like the design of enzymes and proteins.

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Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:57:17 -0500

Yesterday I was lucky enough to get an advance look at the Guggenheim’s newest show, a project by Tino Seghal. While I don’t want to say too much about it — it’s something best experienced for yourself — I will say that it was remarkable and highly thought-provoking, a deceptively simple mix of walking, talking, and the Guggenheim’s remarkable architecture. In advance of the show’s opening, the New York Times Magazine’s Arthur Lubow penned a profile of Seghal, a man whose life and art are intensely intertwined. I particularly enjoyed Lubow’s description of selling and staging one of Seghal’s works: “As far as money goes, at a museum-discount price of $70,000 it was a minor MoMA purchase; but [Director Glenn] Lowry was not overstating the cost of time and energy. Since there can be no written contract, the sale of a Sehgal piece must be conducted orally, with a lawyer or a notary public on hand to witness it. The work is described; the right to install it for an unspecified number of times under the supervision of Sehgal or one of his representatives is stipulated; and the price is stated. The buyer agrees to certain restrictions, perhaps the most important being the ban on future documentation, which extends to any subsequent transfers of ownership. ‘If the work gets resold, it has to be done in the same way it was acquired originally,’ says Jan Mot, who is Sehgal’s dealer in Brussels. ‘If it is not done according to the conditions of the first sale, one could debate whether it was an authentic sale. It’s like making a false Tino Sehgal, if you start making documentation and a certificate.’”

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Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:54:57 -0500

Three recent articles with online product reviews at their center: 1) Alice Twemlow’s Design Observer post on the “Poetics of Amateur Product Reviews,” which includes an introduction to writer Geoff Dyer’s concept of “imaginative criticism,” found in his wonderful jazz book But Beautiful (and used in my own article, “Pärt Notes”). 2) Nick Bilton’s data visualizations of Kindle user reviews, which he used to draw his own conclusions on Amazon’s consumer responsiveness for the New York Times’s Bits blog. 3) Virginia Heffernan’s article “The Reviewing Stand” for her column The Medium in the New York Times Magazine, which cites a review of the self-help best-seller The Secret that is simply too kooky to miss. See also: Harriet Klausner, and Justin Ouelette’s opinionated-but-hyperminimalist The Shit to Get.

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Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:22:36 -0500

Khoi writes in with more on space and film: “For a great example of effective spatial narrative in film, watch (or re-watch) Soderbergh’s underrated Out of Sight. The last act of the film is about a gang of thieves taking over a home; they’re all split up in different parts of the house, but somehow Soderbergh makes you understand exactly where they are in relation to one another. It’s something very few directors can do.” While we’re on the subject of Soderbergh, I’m reminded of this excellent appraisal A.O. Scott wrote about the director back in 2000, as Soderbergh was preparing to release Traffic. Ten years later, the article remains insightful and fresh. Here’s one of Scott’s takeaways from The Limey: “[The] director uses the plainness of the story as an opportunity to linger over telling details and explore its rich subtext. The movie, with its jump cuts and its forays into fantasy (Mr. Stamp’s character imagines the death of his antagonist many times before it happens), becomes an extended meditation on the puzzling relationship between personal and historical time. Specifically, it’s about the 60’s, a much-mythologized decade evoked not by costumed flashbacks but by the flickering shadow of Mr. Stamp, a young, brash, beautiful star of the period, in clips from one of his old movies.”

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Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:54:14 -0500

An absolutely fascinating interview with ECM founder Manfred Eicher on the occasion of the label’s 40th anniversary last November is now online. Though he downplays the importance of the label’s cover designs, they were tremendously influential in shaping my initial interest in graphic design. Lars Müller’s book of ECM covers Sleeves of Desire is almost always in reach of my desk, and another, Windfall Light, is soon on the way. In answering jazz critic Gary Giddins’s question about the sleeve designs, Eichner cites Gertrude Stein’s maxim to “think of your ears as eyes.” ECM often uses the quote in its materials, but Eichner says it was used first in liner notes for the elegantly understated design of Keith Jarrett’s 10-LP box set The Sun Bear Concerts. (Eichner also playfully describes designer Barbara Wojirsch’s choice for the box binding material as “trash paper.”) The Tokyo concert’s meditative second section continues to be one of the most remarkably evocative things I’ve ever heard on the piano—play it, and you’ll no doubt see the rain falling.

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Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:25:07 -0500

David Shen asks, “Why aren’t there more graphic designer venture captialists?” His answer: fewer designers relative to other disciplines, lower chance of designers receiving a large cash windfall to get started, general fear of higher-risk investing among non-investors combined with lack of venturing know-how and adequate time horizons, and atypical skillsets vs. standard VCs with business and management backgrounds. His post was written at the end of 2009 and cites Method and Fuseproject as counterexamples, design firms that have worked for part-equity stakes (rather than service fees) in the past, and commenters rightly include 37signals and Coudal Partners as well. However, many of the obstacles Shen mentions are already in flux: there are more design grads, more designers owning their own small businesses, more designers seeding other designers’ startup projects, etc. In short, I think we’re on track to see more and more designer VCs in the years ahead, and Shen agrees. Here’s hoping.

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Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:59:15 -0500

Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in Die Hard and his exploration of Nakatomi Space: “Over the course of the film, McClane blows up whole sections of the building; he stops elevators between floors; and he otherwise explores the internal spaces of Nakatomi Plaza in acts of virtuoso navigation that were neither imagined nor physically planned for by the architects. His is an infrastructure of nearly uninhibited movement within the material structure of the building.” (via DO) The spatial dynamics of films fascinate me endlessly. A few other great spatial films: The Shining, North by Northwest, and The Limey. There are surely many more. Also of interest: Steven Jacobs’s recent book The Wrong House.

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Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:41:34 -0500

Seth Godin channeling Lewis Hyde at Cool Hunting on behalf of his new book, Linchpin: “What’s a gift? If I see a Chuck Close painting in a museum, I didn’t pay for that painting, I just get the benefit of seeing it. If I see a Karl Lagerfeld outfit walking down the street, it didn’t cost me anything to see it. If someone takes the time to use a beautiful Bodoni typeface kerned properly, it doesn’t necessarily communicate the words more clearly, but there was a gift element associated with it. We need to start with this idea that there isn’t just a transaction every time—I do something, I get money, we move on—that what gifts do is they create a connection, because they’re not even. Someone gave me something, I couldn’t give them anything in return. We’re not even-steven.” Also worth noting is Godin’s innovative PR model: “We started by offering a review copy to the first three thousand people who gave a donation to the Acumen Fund, which is a charity I support. And it didn’t take very long to have more than 2,000 people do that. We raised $100,00 in about a day and a half, exceeding our goal. So those books went out yesterday. We also sent 250 people who live internationally a shorter digital version (about a fifth of the book) so that they wouldn’t have to wait for shipping. It’s already showing up on Twitter. It’s already being reviewed. Some people don’t like it, some people like it a lot. What will end up happening, my prediction is, that between 500 and 1,000 reviews of one sort or another will get posted online, which will certainly reach far more people than a review in The New York Times ever could. My principle goal is to leverage personal interactions so that this book reaches the people it needs to reach, the people who are open to hearing what it has to say.”