Time
The glow of grime
Two hours closer
And thus the heart will break
From the head of Jove
The productions of time
Ise Shrines, Nagoya, 685–Present
To know the place for the first time
A time when time was not
A little dose of time travel
Parkinson's Law
This is how time is forgotten
Good design is timeless
From body to body
Time turned into shape
Eternity was in our lips and eyes
Reverse chronology bias
Because I could not stop for Death
I know all about entropy
Endurance
She was the universe
The lapse of many years
The dignity of age
Typography exists to honor content
Already memories
Unpossessed places
Dead branches
A coherence in things
Do I dare disturb the universe?
A little thing
Hours
We have turned our faces towards the future
A timeless space
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Ever, Never
I can't remember
Deprived of all thickness
No place it hadn't already been
Primer
How Buildings Learn
Human kind cannot bear very much reality
Home Star
One Tenth of a Second
An Article by Venkatesh RaoThe details are fascinating, but the central argument — that the birth of modernity can be traced to a meta-crisis spawned by the 0.1s problem — is worth understanding and appreciating whether or not you’re a time nerd like me.
There is no convenient leitmotif, comparable to the 0.1s problem, for our contemporary version of the rhyming conditions, but something very similar to the “tenth of a second crisis” is going on today. I suspect our Great Weirding too involves some sort of limiting factor on human cognition that we haven’t yet properly wrapped our minds around. It isn’t reaction time, but something analogous.
The Shape of Time
A Book by George KublerThis place is a message
A FragmentThis place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
What will be has always been
A Quote by Louis KahnHofstadter's Law
An Idea by Douglas HofstadterIt always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
The Waiting Place
A Poem by Dr. SeussWaiting for a train to go or a bus to come,
or a plane to go or the mail to come,
or the rain to go or the phone to ring,
or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.Everyone is just waiting.
The Microsoft Sound
A Quote by Brian EnoThe thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
Ideas of permanence
A Fragment by John PawsonOne of the interesting aspects of photography is the way it loosens our instinct to draw distinctions between the permanent and the temporary. In these enduringly fixed compositions, the detail of a mark scratched into the surface of a wall carries no greater weight of reality than the frozen swirl of light on plaster or the calligraphic-like shadows of chair backs cast across a floor.
- async
To supersede the span of individual life
A QuoteNothing gives man fuller satisfaction than participation in processes that supersede the span of individual life.
— Gotthard Booth
Navigation by shibboleth
An Article by Dorian TaylorThe inverse-chronological colly on the front page is exactly what I didn’t want to end up with. I have tried my damnedest to keep everything on this site as temporally neutral as I can make it. I even intentionally leave the dates off the documents. Temporality only matters if you’ve already read everything and you want to see what’s new or changed, like if you’ve subscribed to a feed. Which is exactly what that is on the front page.
Fragments of time
A Quote by Italo CalvinoLong novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
All in & with the flow
An Article by Buster BensonWhen decades happen
A Quote by Vladmir LeninThere are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen.
BLDGBLOG
A World Where Things Only Almost Meet
Recall that great line from Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose
How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.
Only, here, it’s some lonely postal worker—or a geography Ph.D. driven mad by student debt—out mapping the frayed edges of the world, wearily noting every new dead-end and cul-de-sac in a gridded notebook, diagramming loops, sketching labyrinths and mazes, driving empty streets all day on a quest for something undefinable, some answer to why the world’s patterns have gone so wrong. A self-diverging world, where things only almost meet.
Buttresses
Buttresses, Ruskin writes, are structures against pressure: a cathedral’s walls want to fall outward, for example, pushed aside by the relentless weight of the roof. But this gravitational pressure can be stabilized by an exoskeleton: a sequence of buttresses that will prevent those walls from collapsing outward.
However, Ruskin points out, there is a similar kind of pressure from the waves of the sea. Think of the curved hull of a ship, he writes, which is internally buttressed against the “crushing force” of the ocean around it. It is a kind of inside-out cathedral.
The Gosling Effect
I’m sure we’ll see the rise and widespread use of authoritarian AI analytics, fed a constant stream of images and audio recordings, finding crimes that never happened in the blur of a street scene or hearing things were never said in a citywide wiretap—call it the Gosling Effect—resulting in people going to prison for the evidential equivalent of faces that were never really there.
Auditory Hallucinations from Offworld Megafarms
"The combination of a worldwide shift to GM crops and rising global temperatures led to a series of global disasters, destroying many natural resources and causing a permanent environmental imbalance. Earth’s leaders make the choice to outsource all food production to off-world corporately owned farm planets, known as ‘flatlands’." — Luke Sanger on the album Onyx Pyramid
The music, Sanger writes, is a kind of fictional soundtrack for a landscape of offworld megafarms, where a human skeleton crew has been reporting “auditory hallucinations” amplified by the effects of an artificial atmosphere. Audio scifi.