An Adrian Fisher Maize Maze
What brilliance.
http://www.maize-maze.com/
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
J. G. Ballard
"We take ...our everyday external reality very much for granted: the room that we sit in, the streets around us, the virtual space of billboards, and movies and TV ... we take all this for granted. But in fact it is, literally speaking, an illusion generated by our central nervous system. It's as much a virtual reality as the one the cyber people are working on ...Within our minds all these different planes of spatial reality are intersecting."
(J.G. Ballard, KGB 7, KGB Media, 1995)
(J.G. Ballard, KGB 7, KGB Media, 1995)
Paul Graham
"Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.
When I was a kid I was always being told to look at things from someone else's point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it.
Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success. It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations-- in war, for example-- you want to do exactly the opposite. [4]
Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need. Nearly all the greatest paintings are paintings of people, for example, because people are what people are interested in."
from http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
When I was a kid I was always being told to look at things from someone else's point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it.
Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success. It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations-- in war, for example-- you want to do exactly the opposite. [4]
Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need. Nearly all the greatest paintings are paintings of people, for example, because people are what people are interested in."
from http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Joel-Peter Witkin
Mr. Witkin's work has always fascinated me. It exists in that same realm of experience as Story of the Eye by Bataille (which changed me forever), The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński, the works Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco Goya, and Pieter Breugel. I always imagine these worlds as the everyday turned inside out. All those dark crevasses between our liver and kidneys, the folds of our intestines, their moist accumulations thrust out into the open.
I can't recall who said it now (thought it did come out of Conversation with Contemporary Photographers) but a photographer said, and I paraphrase, that photographs should show us what we cannot see in real life. Of course there are obvious refutations to this statement, but when it comes to 'fine art' photography the observation opens up a very appealing lens of understanding. From what I have read of Witkin he is, among other things, very interested in suffering and pain -- two states which are singularly personal experiences. We cannot know or see the suffering and pain in other people, or animals and plants for that matter. The experience cannot be expressed adequately through language (the wonderful book The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry analyzes the inexpressibility of pain and how in experiencing it a person's world is contracted until noting exists but the pain and its source) nor through conventional documentary photography (do we truly feel the pain of a napalm victim when we look at photograph of them?). Witkin, with his symbolic props and art historically referenced tableaus, seems able, at least for me, to tease out and make visible that timeless and epic suffering. Perhaps because he is able to extract that suffering from the individual/situation in the photograph and present it as Suffering in the universal Plato-esque sense, that it becomes so much more powerful to the viewer.
Abundance, Prague (1997) Joel-Peter Witkin
Satiro (1992) Joel-Peter Witkin
Corpus Medius (2000) Joel-Peter Witkin
Ars Moriendi (2007) Joel-Peter Witkin
This one reminds me of this print I bought years ago. It pictures a traveling prince (or so I gathered form the other images I bought from the book/series) and three princesses buried up to their necks in the ground. Swirling hair just like these heads. The prince looks just as serenely contemplative as this woman, and the princesses just as helpless and possessed as these heads. Do you know the Ronald Dahl short story about this man who agrees to prolong his life by being preserved as merely a brain and a a set of eyes? He is fully conscious but unable to express himself in any way. He is married to a woman who turns out to be a vindictive and cruel, elated at her chance, finally, to take out all her pent up frustrations on the brain in the petri dish. In the last scene I seem to recall that she blows a plume of cigarette smoke into what is left of the man. When they were married he'd never have let her touch a cigarette.
I can't recall who said it now (thought it did come out of Conversation with Contemporary Photographers) but a photographer said, and I paraphrase, that photographs should show us what we cannot see in real life. Of course there are obvious refutations to this statement, but when it comes to 'fine art' photography the observation opens up a very appealing lens of understanding. From what I have read of Witkin he is, among other things, very interested in suffering and pain -- two states which are singularly personal experiences. We cannot know or see the suffering and pain in other people, or animals and plants for that matter. The experience cannot be expressed adequately through language (the wonderful book The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry analyzes the inexpressibility of pain and how in experiencing it a person's world is contracted until noting exists but the pain and its source) nor through conventional documentary photography (do we truly feel the pain of a napalm victim when we look at photograph of them?). Witkin, with his symbolic props and art historically referenced tableaus, seems able, at least for me, to tease out and make visible that timeless and epic suffering. Perhaps because he is able to extract that suffering from the individual/situation in the photograph and present it as Suffering in the universal Plato-esque sense, that it becomes so much more powerful to the viewer.
Abundance, Prague (1997) Joel-Peter Witkin
Satiro (1992) Joel-Peter Witkin
Corpus Medius (2000) Joel-Peter Witkin
Ars Moriendi (2007) Joel-Peter Witkin
This one reminds me of this print I bought years ago. It pictures a traveling prince (or so I gathered form the other images I bought from the book/series) and three princesses buried up to their necks in the ground. Swirling hair just like these heads. The prince looks just as serenely contemplative as this woman, and the princesses just as helpless and possessed as these heads. Do you know the Ronald Dahl short story about this man who agrees to prolong his life by being preserved as merely a brain and a a set of eyes? He is fully conscious but unable to express himself in any way. He is married to a woman who turns out to be a vindictive and cruel, elated at her chance, finally, to take out all her pent up frustrations on the brain in the petri dish. In the last scene I seem to recall that she blows a plume of cigarette smoke into what is left of the man. When they were married he'd never have let her touch a cigarette.
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