Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
- Sonorisms I
- More than just a machine that runs along
- Nobody was doing anything
- NYLA
- Aggressively Zen
Because the approach to the room is along a long corridor, the attentive visitor might at first think that three light squares had been affixed to the windows or, as one gradually came closer, that the tinting of the windows had simply been removed in these three lighter near-square areas. Davies continues: "only at this point do the other senses kick in. The visitor begins first to hear and smell the ocean and then to actually feel the outside air entering the gallery; this sensory experience is in complete contradiction to the faulty first impression."
One of the responsibilities for an architect is to provide a space that is usable and enhances the possibilities for what you do. But mostly, museums are just the opposite; they're horrible spaces, anti-art, they can't be used. They can't function, they overwhelm it. So in a way, they become objects in themselves many times, almost sculptures, and they get a lot of aggrandizement out of it...In terms of Bilbao, the one difference there is that they did not really want a museum, they wanted a monument. They wanted a thing that would bring people to the Bilbao.
Lawrence Weschler:
The red, for example, wasn't simply red – or rather it was: the surface was covered over in a completely even gloss of lipstick red paint – but (had it been doing that before?) the panel was reflecting ambient conditions like crazy, so much so that in fact almost none of the surface, strictly speaking, was red. Pool-like, it was reflecting the yellow ceiling panel beyond, whose own color was in turn being affected by the blue floor piece beyond that. There were purple effects and green, a sort of even bruise-brown hovering over the entire array when one now viewed the gallery from the side.
In order: Kenny Price, Blue Lou, Legacy, Fourfold, Niagara.
Irwin has explained that he decided to use the fluorescent tubes in the "dumbest" way possible, but, as one critic cautioned, "dumb, it turns out, has a special meaning for him: It's a form so simple that you end up not paying attention to it as a form." Irwin's interest was, rather, in the range of light, color, reflection, and shadow interaction made possible by combining tubes with different hues and finishes by wrapping them with theatrical gels.
EVER PRESENT NEVER TWICE THE SAME
EVER CHANGING NEVER LESS THAN WHOLE
I'd been talking about this idea of a conditional art for a very long time, and what I did was actually accomplish it, the idea that there was not a normal structure to it, that every decision had to be intuitive or instinctual or tactile. You decide to go this way or that way, but there was no beginning, no middle, and no end and so there's no hierarchical structure to it at all. And at the end of it, I mean, after you wander for a while, you just ended it yourself because there was no solution to it.
Photographs of 5 Openings 2 + 3, Untitled, and Double Diamond.
Black Line Volume, String Line-Light Volume, Corridor String Piece, Line Rectangle
"The resultant black rectangle was not what you "looked at" – there was actually nothing to focus on – but soon it brought the space into focus with a distinct visual snap. From inside, the light in the area seemed different, more substantial, and the wall color began to shift ambiguously. From outside the area, the tape seemed to lift the plane of the floor upward in your field of vision, and it also made the room seem wider and shallower than it really was." — Roberta Smith
"Quality is only there," Irwin explained, "if you pursue it all the way to the last bolt." Consequently, how joints are finished must be specified in the contract. "And believe me," he added ruefully from experience, "there is a real discrepancy here. The difference [in] how we interpret the word finish or this word quality is really disparate."
"When you bring them in and get them to be part of it," he noted, "the workmen themselves start to take pride in it. And when they start taking that pride in this idea of quality, ...it starts becoming theirs, something important to them, that they in fact do know what we are talking about."
I know some people are going to say: "Hey! That's Dan Flavin's act. Why in the hell is Irwin doing a Dan Flavin? Why is he suddenly so inconsistent – fluorescent one day and Cor-Ten the next?" The key to all of this is that we have to examples what we mean by consistency. And here the critical question is: "what do we use to measure consistency with?" If you measure consistency in terms of material, or gesture, then I will be found inconsistent. But, in all of the recent pieces and proposals, if you go to the actual site and look at it, you will find that the solution is absolutely consistent on the grounds within which it responds to its environment. This in turn is consistent with my development of the implications implicit in non-object art.
Irwin also included as part of the expanding network of aesthetic experiences radiating out from the museum a series of what he termed "incidental" sculptures, or phenomena of perceptual interest...
"Continuing Responses" began formally in the museum as a series of situations in direct response to the already existing spaces and their uses. At first easily accessible but then moving to consider more and more those previously unacknowledged and covert events. This project now moves outside the museum beginning with a window of the museum and then to include a series of "concrete" and "incidental sculptures" on sites throughout Fort Work and vicinity. These responses already number twenty-five and are referenced by a map of locations in the lobby of the museum.
I tilt the room just enough, the space just enough that you may not be able to use your normal mode of placing yourself in that space, forcing you for one second to make a perceptual read and become aware that you are the perceiver and that all information comes through that perceptual act and that when you walk out of there, ...if you take that with you, you will begin to see things everywhere around you and that you are the one that is changed and you are there and that is what changed things.
I cannot perceive for you. I can conceive for you and we can then in a sense hold a general agreement about quality of conception and we may all operate under it and that's what is known as a common agreement. But the area of perceiving as such is totally individual, there's no way that we carry it in that sense.
This is not an antisocial gesture; it is in fact a highly ethical one, since trying to get another person to see what and how you see has the potential to become a violation of the other's own autonomy:
There is nothing more unethical than having ambitions for someone else's mind.
Someone said to me the other day that there's nothing really ever new. That everything really repeats itself, you know, is repeating itself all the time, and they were showing me a Carl Andrew and they were also showing me some aborigine art and there really was a very strong similarity. And so I got to thinking about it and it came to me that if everything is really repeating itself constantly and that there's nothing ever really new...at the same time it's equally true that nothing is ever exactly the same. That everything is different every single time even though it's repeated constantly and all the same things keep passing through. They're never exactly the same so that the nature of change is not about something wholly new. It's actually about the subtlest slightest kinds of differences.
The column essentially disappeared into the space. It was there but it wasn't. As you walked around the room, suddenly, it might flash. Or, because I'd notched a little facet along one side, there might appear, for just an instant, a single white line, or a thin black glint.
The column was an indication of my wanting to get out and treat the environment itself, I don't mean in the sense of building buildings or being an architect, but rather of dealing with the quality of a particular space in terms of its weight, its temperature, its tactileness, its density, its feel – all those semi-intangible things that we don't normally deal with.
Irwin had begun his disc paintings with what, in retrospect, he described as a simple question: "How do I paint a painting that does not begin and end at an edge but rather starts to take in and become involved with the space or environment around it?"
Artwork and detail.
I took the surface of the canvas and curved it slightly in all directions, so slightly that you did not see it as being curved, but sensed its added physicality...The beauty of it for me was that you were not aware of it first as an idea, but only aware of it on this tactile level.
Black rakuware tea bowl (late sixteenth century), Kyoto, Japan. Freer Sackler Museum of Asian Art.
For Irwin, the lesson of [the raku tea cups] was twofold: first, their presentation was important, insofar as the ceremony involved a gradual preparation of the audience's aesthetic attention. Then, when the time came to handle the cups, the intimacy of the experience fused visual and tactile sensations into a single continuum. As he also noted:
he would set on the table this box with a beautiful little tie on it – very Japanese – and you untied it, you opened up the box, he let you do that. And then inside of it was a cloth sack. You took the sack out, and it had a drawstring, and you opened up the drawstring and you reached inside and took out the bowl. By that time, the bowl had you at a level where the most incidental detail – maybe even just a thumb mark – registered as a powerful statement.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance.
Names of the Holocaust victims from Czech lands on the synagogue's inner wall.
During reconstruction in 1950–1954, the original floor-level as well as the appearance of the synagogue were restored. In following five years, the walls of the synagogue were covered with names of about 78,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims of Shoah. The names are arranged by communities where the victims came from and complemented with their birth and death date.
Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again.
In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by hypertext reference. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is normally automatic and transparent to the end user. The result of transclusion is a single integrated document made of parts assembled dynamically from separate sources, possibly stored on different computers in disparate places.
Transclusion facilitates modular design: a resource is stored once and distributed for reuse in multiple documents. Updates or corrections to a resource are then reflected in any referencing documents. Ted Nelson coined the term for his 1980 nonlinear book Literary Machines, but the idea of master copy and occurrences was applied 17 years before, in Sketchpad.
Phonaesthetics is the study of beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by J. R. R. Tolkien, during the mid-twentieth century and derives from the Greek: φωνή (phōnē, "voice-sound") plus the Greek: αἰσθητική (aisthētikē, "aesthetic").
A rage room, also known as a smash room or anger room, is a business where people can vent their rage by destroying objects within a room.
Truchet tiles are square tiles decorated with patterns that are not rotationally symmetric. When placed in a square tiling of the plane, they can form varied patterns, and the orientation of each tile can be used to visualize information associated with the tile's position within the tiling.
Wang tiles (Hao Wang, 1961) are a class of formal systems. They are modelled visually by square tiles with a color on each side. A set of such tiles is selected, and copies of the tiles are arranged side by side with matching colors, without rotating or reflecting them.
The basic question about a set of Wang tiles is whether it can tile the plane or not, i.e., whether an entire infinite plane can be filled this way. The next question is whether this can be done in a periodic pattern.
In 1966, Wang's student Robert Berger solved the problem in the negative. He proved that no algorithm for the problem can exist, by showing how to translate any Turing machine into a set of Wang tiles that tiles the plane if and only if the Turing machine does not halt. The undecidability of the halting problem then implies the undecidability of Wang's tiling problem.
The linear city was an urban plan for an elongated urban formation. The city would consist of a series of functionally specialized parallel sectors.
As the city expanded, additional sectors would be added to the end of each band, so that the city would become ever longer, without growing wider.
Tactical urbanism includes low-cost, temporary changes to the built environment, usually in cities, intended to improve local neighborhoods and city gathering places. Tactical urbanism is also commonly referred to as guerrilla urbanism, pop-up urbanism, city repair, or D.I.Y. urbanism.
The Street Plans Collaborative defines "tactical urbanism" as an approach to urban change that features the following five characteristics:
- A deliberate, phased approach to instigating change;
- The offering of local solutions for local planning challenges;
- Short-term commitment and realistic expectations;
- Low-risks, with a possibly high reward; and
- The development of social capital between citizens and the building of organizational capacity between public-private institutions, non-profits, and their constituents.
An inglenook, or chimney corner, is a recess that adjoins a fireplace. The inglenook originated as a partially enclosed hearth area, appended to a larger room. The hearth was used for cooking, and its enclosing alcove became a natural place for people seeking warmth to gather. With changes in building design, kitchens became separate rooms, while inglenooks were retained in the living space as intimate warming places, subsidiary spaces within larger rooms.
Front of the Library of Celsus with aediculae in Ephesus.
In ancient Roman religion, an aedicula (plural aediculae) is a small shrine.
Many aediculae were household shrines that held small altars or statues of the Lares and Penates, household gods guarding the entire house.
Other aediculae were small shrines within larger temples, usually set on a base, surmounted by a pediment and surrounded by columns. In ancient Roman architecture the aedicula has this representative function in the society. They are installed in public buildings like the triumphal arch, city gate, and thermae.
From the 4th century Christianization of the Roman Empire onwards such shrines, or the framework enclosing them, are often called by the Biblical term tabernacle, which becomes extended to any elaborated framework for a niche, window or picture.
Caustics made by the surface of water.
In optics, a caustic is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface. The caustic is a curve or surface to which each of the light rays is tangent, defining a boundary of an envelope of rays as a curve of concentrated light.
Terroir is a French term used to describe the environmental factors that affect a crop's phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices and a crop's specific growth habitat. Collectively, these contextual characteristics are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.
A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.
American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Percy's Reliques, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" as "Lady Mondegreen".
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Eating your own dog food or “dogfooding” is the practice of using one's own products or services. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers confidence in their own products.
A city block on Passeig de Gràcia in the Eixample district of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. The block is noted for having buildings by four of Barcelona's most important Modernista architects, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Antoni Gaudí, Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Enric Sagnier, in close proximity. As the four architects' styles were very different, the buildings clash with each other and the neighboring buildings.
Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth.
The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains derives from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style salaries, the managers may decide to quit to get a job at an automobile factory, where salaries are higher because of high labor productivity. Thus, managers' salaries are increased not by labor productivity increases in the retail sector but by productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.
"f/8 and be there" is an expression popularly used by photographers to indicate the importance of taking the opportunity for a picture rather than being too concerned about using the best technique. Often attributed to the noir-style New York City photographer Weegee, it has come to represent a philosophy in which, on occasion, action is more important than reflection.
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.