The feeling of fortuitous gratitude at coming across unexpected information is something most of us who’ve done any research, have experienced — that kismet of finding the perfect book, one spine away from the one that was sought. In the field of art and image research, this sparking of transmission, of sequence and connection, happens on a subconscious level.
…Why is the vernacular image still being dismissed as ephemera? Why is its study not being prioritized? All languages are alive, but visual language is galactic. Keywords are not eyeballs, and creating rutted pathways to follow is the antithesis of study. A century of visual language, knowledge, and connectivity is marching toward a narrow, parsimonious basement of nomenclature. The NYPL takes a step backward if it models its shelves and research on a search engine. Spontaneity is learning. Browsing is research.
I want to show you that that Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present.
So it's a search engine. It's perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there, instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn't even know you were looking for.
The process of designing a product at Apple was integrally related to how it would be engineered and manufactured. Ive described one of Apple's Power Macs. "We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential," he said. "To do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing team. We kept going back to the beginning, again and again. Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?"