The Aesthetic Experience of Words and Phrases
Sleepers
To call each thing by its right name
Upstream Color Original Soundtrack
The alchemists in their mixings
Gifts and occupations
Various titles of Bruce Nauman artworks
- Sound Breaking Wall
- Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room
- False Silence
- Flayed Earth Flayed Self (Skin/Sink)
- Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care
Ever Present, Ever Changing
EVER PRESENT NEVER TWICE THE SAME
EVER CHANGING NEVER LESS THAN WHOLE
Slant Light Volume
Sonorisms VI
A small corner of the world of things
This tactile form of doodling
The crowded past of reality
Infundibular cores
Whose form our hands have often grown to gloveRunning into the sand
His whole creative history is that of great rivers running into the sand
Some secret stirring in the world
There is some secret stirring in the world,
A thought that seeks impatiently its word.Shortlist of interesting spaces
Sonorisms V
Leave space between them for the things that words can't really say.
To suggest more than the words seem to allow.
Perhaps it renames the world.
The Anxiety of Sequence.
It was all change until the very last second.
The debris of someone else's thinking.
You'll never run out of noticings.
Names that announce the whatness of the world.
What were you trying to protect?
You were protecting the memory.
The tyranny of what exists.
Do any of them sound first?
It sets an echo in motion.
Try writing for the reader in yourself.
So call it "perfection enough".
Toward the name of the world—yours to discover.The beauty of odd numbers
Kasuri is thus a textile that appears to have been rubbed. Since the edges of the pattern do not align, they take on the nature of an odd number rather than an even number. Without this rubbing or smudging, kasuri could never have been. However, since it is precisely this misalignment and blurry effect that is the source of kasuri’s beauty, we are presented with an interesting problem. I will call this problem ‘the beauty of odd numbers’.
This is how time is forgotten
This is how time is forgotten;
this is how work absorbs
the hours and days.The doctrine of salvation by bricks
When we try to justify good shelter instead on the pretentious grounds that it will work social or family miracles we fool ourselves. Reinhold Niebuhr has called this particular self-deception, “The doctrine of salvation by bricks.”
Sonorisms IV
'an unending rainfall of images' (Calvino)
a cancerous growth of vision
we are unable to see or imagine life behind these walls
the patina of wear
to carve a volume into the void of darkness
time turned into shapeSonorisms III
One way not to be there (without dying).
"Yes, we have felt happy and alive together."
The Finnish word loyly, meaning "the steam which rises from the stones" originally signified spirit, or even life.
The tradition of the great shade tree.
Sonorisms II
the symbolic weight of stairs
the regulation of obnoxious uses
a collector and transmitter of memory
Dubai is the world made Disney
people whose traditions and desires cannot be repressed by mere architecture
the annihilation of space by time (Marx)Sonorisms I
the authenticity of the gesture
as if the air had taken on substance
representation and re-presentation
a first order of presence
this painterly game of pick-up sticks
Irwin's "fetish finish"
questions all of whose possible answers would never exhaust them
the art is what has happened to the viewer
an art of things not looked at
a dialogue of immanence
the information that takes place between things
your house is the last before the infinite
his "project of general peripatetic availability"
that shiver of perception perceiving itself
a desert of pure feelingThe Great Blight of Dullness
(an architectural stem cell that might transform itself into any organ for living)
I walked the crest of the dune
Thus piece by piece I walked the crest of the dune, and each time the solution slipped on one side or the other I knew what to do to get back on the track.
Bonewalks
Example of a standardized field data collection form used to record all the fossil bones encountered along a transect.
Informally I refer to these as “bonewalks.”
Architectural dark matter
Every building had its rhythms. These service corridors were the internal hinterlands—the architectural dark matter—so beloved by Bill Mason.
Phonaesthetics
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").
The Blue Cliff Record
A Book by Yuanwu Keqin, Thomas Cleary & J.C. ClearySome Remains of My Heroes Found Scattered Across a Vacant Lot
An Essay from Every So Often a Talking Dog Appears by Smiljan Radićthe speed of God
An Article by Alan Jacobs[Andy Crouch] quotes the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama saying that “the speed of God” is three miles an hour because that was the speed at which Jesus moved through his world. So maybe, and I think this is one of the chief burdens of Andy’s book, what makes the most sense for us is to try whenever possible to move at the speed of God – and in that way refuse the offer of superpowers.
Of course, this dovetails with a lot of things people have been writing lately about slowness, but what I like about Andy’s book is that it specifies why we can find ourselves responding so warmly to the possibility of slowness. What happens when we seek superpowers, and especially super-speed, is the sacrifice of what I want to call our proper powers – the powers through the exercise of which we (heart-soul-mind-strength) flourish in love.
A few things that could be poetry
An Article by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels- The right combination of street signs, viewed from a artful vantage point
- Words on bit of packaging, torn to reveal and conceal as needed
- The output of a command line tool, perhaps unexpectedly
- Overheard words, drifting along, liberated from their initial context
- A form, at first appearing bureaucratic, revealing humanity on deeper reflection
- An idea, if you consider it divine enough
Imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting
A Fragment by Geoff Manaugh“Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”
In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are catalogues of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open.
Four years of noting down my favourite words
An Article by Matt WebbI like words, and I note down ones that catch my eye as we cross paths.
Sometimes I read over the list, random access style, just to remind myself of forgotten thoughts. Each word is a bookmark into a little cascade of concepts in my brain.
So because I’d like to keep these words somewhere I can find them in the future, I’m putting them here.
Storm Doris Mimecom Cloudbleed Athleisure Cromwell H7N9 Trappist-1 ... (+448)
I Swear I Use No Art At All
A Book by Joost GrootensThe Shape of Time
A Book by George KublerThe Rake's Progress
An OperaPellucidity
A DefinitionFree from obscurity and easy to understand; the comprehensibility of clear expression
You're living in your very last house
A Song by Lo-Fang
Spatial Interfaces
Software applications can utilize spatial interfaces to afford users powerful ways of thinking and interacting. Though often associated with gaming, spatial interfaces can be useful in any kind of software, even in less obvious domains like productivity tools or work applications. We will see spatial interfaces move into all verticals, starting with game-like interfaces for all kinds of social use-cases.
There is no app that replicates a deck of cards
It seems that the only way to build an app that replicates the full functionality a deck of cards is to build a 3D simulation or game. Model the cards in 3D and put them on a 3D table. As long as you have controls for reaching out and picking up the cards, and moving them in space, you can do anything you can do in real life.
Preserving the higher dimensionality makes it simpler and more intuitive, not less.
Humans are spatial creatures
Humans are spatial creatures. We experience most of life in relation to space. We sit in a circle with our family. We drive down the left side of the road in Ireland and try to stay in our lane. We ride scooters down a path along the water. We sculpt a human body out of stone. We follow signs to our train. We walk, through arches, or on crosswalks beside bike lanes, or to follow our brother across a bridge. We position our camera to frame the shot while our friend leans out over a balcony. We sense ourselves in space in relation to all of the other objects in our environment.
And this is powerful knowledge that we've left out of lots of software. In fact, while most obvious in 3D, this thinking does work outside of just three-dimensional software. Almost any software can use spatial concepts to become easier to understand.
Web trails
There's more room for spatial concepts to become part of our web browsing experience.
One example is an idea I call "trails." It's based on the story of Hansel and Gretel walking through the forest and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind them, so that they could find their way back later. What if you could do this on the web?
A breadcrumb in this case is a single pixel that you can place in a precise location on a webpage. Placing a breadcrumb could be as simple as Option + click. While navigating the web, you could leave breadcrumbs on different pages you find interesting over the course of a browsing session. When you're done, that sequential "trail of breadcrumbs" would be saved. You could then jump back into the trail and navigate "forward" and "backward" through the things you found interesting in that browsing session. Or share the trail with a friend, and they could step through your spatial path of navigating the web.