Words, Symbols, Icons, Pictograms
Shortlist of interesting spaces
Mondegreen
Sonorisms I
What you're trying to swim
Let the meaning choose the word
An affection for words
z-z-z
No words to describe
If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary.
Good morning, Vincent
Perhaps I shall name the cat that scratches at my broken window Van Gogh.
Or Vincent.
One does not name a piece of tape, however.
There is the piece of tape, scratching at my window. There is Vincent, scratching at my window.Good morning, Vincent.
As if a word were no more than coordinates
The New Oxford American dictionary, by the way, is not like singularly bad. Google’s dictionary, the modern Merriam-Webster, the dictionary at dictionary.com: they’re all like this. They’re all a chore to read. There’s no play, no delight in the language. The definitions are these desiccated little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more than its coordinates in semantic space.
A soft and fitful luster
Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle “a soft and fitful luster”? I can’t help but think something has been lost. “A soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface” doesn’t just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, “the fitful luster,” of, for example, an eye full of tears — which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than “a wet sidewalk.”
It’s as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poet’s ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.
Big things and little things
It is hardly possible that human beings could have decided logically that they needed to develop language in order to communicate with each other before they had experienced pleasurable interactive communal activities like singing and dancing. Aesthetic curiosity has been central to both genetic and cultural evolution.
All big things grow from little things, but new little things will be destroyed by their environment unless they are cherished for reasons more like love than purpose.
Vibrations in the air
Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, and on more powerful objects.
Le ☀️ est caché par les ☁️
Reference and Is-ness
There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call ‘inherent meaning’ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is ‘Is-ness’ meaning. Inherent meaning is a word’s identity, and reference merely its resumé, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. ‘Is-ness’ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing – the word – appear to be many things – its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.
It flows out and fills
This deeper meaning of a word isn’t confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crew’s actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend.
The demand of a new word
Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand ‘felt’ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that ‘jerk’ and ‘twerp’ and ‘punk’ and ‘nitwit’ and ‘dork’ and ‘ass’ and ‘goon’ and ‘twit’ and ‘dodo’ and ‘bum’ and ‘nerd’ and ‘dunce’ and ‘turd’ and ‘boob’ and ‘chump’ and ‘bitch’ and ‘bastard’ and ‘prude’ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add ‘turkey’ and ‘squirrel’ as well?
Numeric anagrams
"Eleven plus two" is an anagram of "twelve plus one".
— Craig Sharp
/
Twelve + One = Eleven + Two
I love the beauty of this numeric/anagram equation for 13— Linda Vanderkolk
Safety cut rope axe man
In the first nuclear reactor, constructed by Enrico Fermi in 1942 under the bleachers of the University of Chicago football stadium, the control rods were held up by a manila rope. A man with an axe was told to cut the rope if the reactor got out of hand. This "safety cut rope axe man" is supposedly the origin of the term SCRAM for an emergency shutdown procedure.
He had but to speak
He had but to speak aloud the words that came into his head, and those around him would fall in line.
Fish and water
How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?
Perilous to be sure
It would not be clear where the boundary of sanctioned speech lay until an attempt had been made to cross it and that attempt had failed. Such efforts Wittgenstein regarded with benevolence. He treated them as reconnaissance expeditions, perilous to be sure, but well worth the effort expended on them.
The word invents itself
Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessity—his words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself.
Words and Images
An Essay by René MagritteBook from the Ground: From Point to Point
A Novel by Bing Xu- z-z-z
There Is No Word
A Poem by Tony Hoaglandwhat I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all themisunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.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
A brief foray into vectorial semantics
An Article by James SomersOne of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”:
Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
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)
The primacy of interpretation over sensation
A Fragment by Mark LibermanOur memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings.
More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest.
These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.)
Derrière les fagots
A DefinitionA fagot is a bundle of branches tied with a string. They used to be kept in a corner of a barn or shed, and people used to hide things (wine, valuables, etc) behind them often for a long time, and forget about them. It is a way of saying that [a thing] is very good, but has been forgotten for a long time and recently re-discovered.
The monkey, the tiger beetle and the language of innovation
An Article by Courtney HohneWhat we’ve learned from 10 years of moonshot taking about choosing your words wisely — and the many benefits of doing so:
- v0.crap
- Tiger Beetle Moments
- Killing our projects
- In the fog
- The Altimeter
- The Icebergs
- Headwinds & Tailwinds
- Chaos Pilots
- Patiently impatient, responsibly irresponsible, passionately dispassionate
Old words
A Quote by Winston ChurchillShort words are best
and the old words, when short,
are the best of all.A lightbulb is not an idea
An Article by Ralph AmmerWith conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.
When you draw something you are forced to be specific — and honest.
Our illustration of an “idea” from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.
And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use “words in disguise”. Take a common illustration for “idea” for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.
The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word “idea”. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations — they are empty.
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
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 feelingMore than just a machine that runs along
"As far as I'm concerned, a folk art is when you take a utilitarian object, something you use every day, and you give it overlays of your own personality, what it is you feel and so forth. You enhance it with your life. And a folk art in the current period of time would more appropriately be in the area of something like a motorcycle. I mean, a motorcycle can be a lot more than just a machine that runs along; it can be a whole description of a personality and an aesthetic."
Nobody was doing anything
"The thing that amazed me is that they had these drawing classes, and I'd be in there drawing like a son of a bitch, and then I'd go around and look at everybody else's drawing boards to see what was going on, and there wouldn't be anything on them! They were all talking and going through these weighty things, and nobody was doing anything."
NYLA
"See, what I've always liked about Los Angeles is that it's one of the least restrictive towns in the world. You can pretty much live any way you want to here. And part of that is because the place has no tradition and no history in that sense. It doesn't have any image of itself, which is exactly its loss and gain. That's why it's such a great place to do art and to build your ideas about culture. In New York, it's like an echo chamber: its overwhelming sense of itself, of its past and its present and its mission, becomes utterly restricting."
Aggressively Zen
"He was dealing with Zen in the most aggressive way Zen has ever been dealt with." — Irving Blum
Flurry and lapse
"The process in creating that kind of canvas was like—what?—10 percent action and 90 percent ass scratching. First you prepared yourself, cleaning up and arranging your palette and tools, sweeping the floors, and then finally, when you were ready, you faced the empty white expanse of white canvas and made your first stroke."
No reason for being
"A lot of what I had been doing in those large gestural paintings seemed to me afterwards as being not very controlled, in the sense that a lot of stuff that was going on in them had no reason for being there. There were just too many things that were accidental, too much incidental, too many contradictions."
Oil
Irwin even disdained artificial products when polishing the wood frame, confining himself solely to the natural oils of his hands, his forehead, the sides of his nose, and so forth.
All the way through
"There's a consistency to physical objects that somehow reads all the way through, so that when you make a physical object, if it lacks the proper amount of weight or if it lacks a certain density...I mean, if its outside says, 'I weigh so much and I have such-and-such a density,' and when you pick it up, you discover an inconsistency there, then you can sense that, you can see it, even without picking it up. It's absolutely essential that everything be done all the way through."
Over and over again
"I found a certain strength in sustaining over a period of time my attention on a single point...Like you paint a painting, and then you paint another painting, but each time you take on a whole other mouthful, and you're only able to chew each one just so finely. So anyway, I did just the opposite."
Which is to say, over the next two years Irwin did nothing but paint the same painting over and over again.
Leaving
After a while, if you don't leave, then everything else begins to leave.
What the painting was not about
That is why for many years Irwin declined to allow his work to be photographed, because the image of the canvas was precisely what the painting was not about.
Indeed, the problem is even more complicated than that. For in a very real sense the achievement of these paintings was in their making, and the finished canvas at one level is only an incidental relic, a fossil of that original process of discovery: not only do you have to be present before these paintings in order to experience them, it may be that you have to have made them as well.
Attention over focus
"When I look at the world now, my posture is not one of focus but rather of attention."
Three or more
"One and one don't make two, but maybe five or eight or ten, depending on the number of interactions you can get going in a situation."
Finished on the inside
"Those stretcher bars were finished on the inside in ways no one will ever know; I spent days, weeks, months finishing things no one is ever going to see. But it had much more to do with the fact that I couldn't leave them unfinished. I just had this conviction that in the sense of tactile awareness, if all those things were consistent, then the sum total would be greater, even though that might not be definable in any causal, connected way."
Grace
Grace: you work and you work and you work at something that then happens of its own accord. It would not have happened without all that work, but the result cannot be accounted for as the product of the work in the sense that an effect is said to be the product of its causes. There is all that preparation—preparation for receptivity—and then there is something else beyond that, which is gratis, for free.
Object and environment
"The marriage of figure and ground—which is how they always term the cubist achievement—of necessity leads to the marriage between painting and environment; essentially they are the same thing, just taking it one step further. When I married the painting to the environment, suddenly it had to deal with the environment around it as being equal to the figure and having as much meaning."
There and not there
For what Bob was trying to capture in these efforts was the incidental, the transitory, the peripheral—that aspect of our experience that is both there and not there, the object and not the object of our sensations, perceived but seldom attended to.
A gesture
"With the lines I'd been trying to paint a painting without the means of painting, but I didn't know how to do that, so I ended up using the means of painting. They made a gesture toward where I was going, but still, finally, they were very much tied to where I was."
Ambitions for someone else's mind
"One of the first things I learned about teaching is that you have to respond to each student individually. You don't start with any idea of what they should be doing, who they're supposed to be, or what their performance level is, and you don't compare them to one another. You simply start with each one of them wherever they are and develop the process from there.
"...I would think that the most immoral thing one can do is have ambitions for someone else's mind."
Technical viruosity
"You have to develop students' confidence and prove to them in their own performance that there isn't anything they won't be able to accomplish technically, eventually, given a lot of application, before you can begin to convince them that that kind of technical virtuosity doesn't deserve the focus they have been led to believe it does by a performance-oriented culture."
Learning how to learn
"Once you learn how to make your own assignments instead of relying on someone else, then you have learned the only thing you really need to get out of school, that is, you've learned how to learn. You've become your own teacher."
Art and science
"What the artist does is essentially the same as the scientist. In other words, what you do when you start to do a painting is that you begin with a basic idea, a hypothesis of what you're setting out to do. Then it's just a million yes-no decisions. You try something in the painting, you look at it, and you say, 'N-n-no.' You sort of erase it out, and you move it around a little bit, put in a new line; you go through a million weighings. It's the same thing in science, the only difference in the character of the product."
Off to the races
"You get to the point where you're about to place your wager; the race is about to be run. You evaluate the sum total of the information, which has to do with how the money has been bet, what the horses looked like on the track, all this information—and it's like you run your hand over the race—I've had this happen so many times, it's the only way to explain it—you run your hand over the race. All the information is logically there, but there's something wrong. You don't know why something is wrong, but something is not correct. Then I have to reevaluate everything in terms of this feeling I have about the thing, which is derived from information, but which is so complex and so intricate and so subtle that there's no way you can put a tag on it."
Interlocking
"The art world is highly invested in the idea that you can take an object and set it in a room, and the internal relationships will be so strong and so meaningful that all the kinds of change that take place on the object as a result of its being in a new environment will not critically affect our perception of the object. If that is the given assumption, then the object can be moved from one environment to another without its being critically altered, which then gives rise to the illusion that it can be moved from culture to culture, that it has the ability to transcend its cultural specificity, which in turn gives rise to the ultimate illusion that the object can transcend time. Because what is being claimed is that there exist certain objects isolated and meaningful enough to be transcendent, that they have the power to go on and on, that they are, as it were, timeless.
"Well, one of the things that I was becoming involved in at that point in playing artist was the growing suspicion that this breaking down of the edge, the idea of the painting's moving into its environment, was putting the whole heightened rationale of the art object into doubt. There is simply no real separation line, only an intellectual one, between the object and its time environment. They are completely interlocking: nothing can exist in the world independent of all the other things in the world."
Overlays
The awkwardness of the room itself forced Irwin toward the next phase of his endeavor: each installation from there on would have to arise out of the unique configurations of each new site. As Irwin put it, "Instead of my overlaying my ideas onto that space, that space overlaid itself on me."
Pointing
"Originally I marked these places, quite literally. I laid a small concrete block flush to the ground at the place where I was standing and stretched a stainless steel piano wire out toward the horizon. It might go off a mile; it simply pointed in a direction. And that was the piece."
Don't mistake my finger for the moon
Many people mistook the string itself for the work of art ("When I point my finger at the moon, don't mistake my finger for the moon" is a Zen aphorism that Irwin is fond of citing). By mid-1976 Irwin himself was prepared to Jettison—along with figure, line, focus, permanence, and signature—the very requirement of any overt activity of making as a necessary prerequisite for artistic viability.
The core assertion
Sitting there in the Whitney's coffee shop, Irwin pointed through the glass wall up at the play of shadows on a building facade across the street. "That the light strikes a certain wall at a particular time of day in a particular way and it's beautiful," he commented, "that, as far as I'm concerned, now fits all my criteria for art."
At the terminus of Irwin's trajectory, when all the nonessentials had been stripped away, came the core assertion that aesthetic perception itself was the pure subject of art. Art existed not in objects but in a way of seeing.
Waiting there to be experienced
"Paintings are like what you can barely make out through a keyhole compared with the richness of perception that's just waiting there in the world to be experienced all the time. It's strange. With food, for instance, people seem able to understand what's involved: you savor the taste rather than just feed the body. But people have a hard time understanding that it should be the same way with visual experience."
It passes by the river
"Artists need to be in there from the start, making the argument for quality. The key to this thing is, for example, if you give an engineer a set of criteria which does not include a quality quotient, as it were—that is, if this sense of the quality, the character of the place, is not a part of his original motivation—he will then basically put the road straight down the middle. He has no reason to curve it. But if I can convince him that quality is absolutely a worthwhile thing and we can work out a way in which the road can be efficient and also wander down by the river, then we essentially have both: he provides his sort of expertise in that the road works, I provide quality in that it passes by the river. In that way, art gets built into the criteria from the beginning rather than being added on afterward."
Rapport
"Bob's rapport with the workers is extraordinary. Reminds me of something Noguchi once pointed out about Bernini during the days he was building St. Peter's in Rome: how what made him so special, aside from his own obvious gifts, was his ability to extend himself through the work of others, to get them on his side and working in his direction."
Ever, Never
EVER PRESENT, NEVER TWICE THE SAME EVER CHANGING, NEVER LESS THAN WHOLE
The palette of nature
"What nature does with its colors is invariably—the palette of nature is twice as complicated, at least twice as sophisticated, as anything any artist can ever come up with. On a couple levels.
To start with, there are these amazing combinations of colors, filled with surprises and almost never wrong. I don't know how Nature ever conceived to put, say, those together. But, boy, are they right on the money!"
Screening out the world
"The point is to get people to peel those visors off their faces, to remove the goggles, to abandon the screens. Those screens whose very purpose is to screen the actual world out. Who cares about virtuality when there's all this reality—this incredible, inexhaustible, insatiable, astonishing reality—present all around!"
The human reality of perception
"The great misinterpretation of twentieth-century art is the claim advanced that many people, especially critics, that cubism of necessity led to abstraction. But on the contrary, cubism was about the real world. It was an attempt to reclaim a territory for figuration, for depiction. Faced with the claim that photography had made figurative painting obsolete, the cubists performed an exquisite critique of photography; they showed that there were certain aspects of looking—basically the human reality of perception—that photography couldn't convey, and that you still needed the painter's hand and eye to convey them." — David Hockney