396. “We can divide the computational universe into three sectors: computable problems; non-computable problems (that can be given a finite, exact description but have no effective procedure to deliver a definite result); and, finally, questions whose answers are, in principle, computable, but that, in practice, we are unable to ask in unambiguous language that computers can understand. We do most of our computing in the first sector, but we do most of our living (and thinking) in the third. In the real world, most of the time, finding an answer is easier than defining the question. It’s easier to draw something that looks like a cat, for instance, than to describe what, exactly, makes something look like a cat. A child scribbles indiscriminately, and eventually something appears that resembles a cat. A solution finds the problem, not the other way around. The world starts making sense, and the meaningless scribbles (and a huge number of neurons) are left behind.” George Dyson meditates on Turing and von Neumann in the age of Google.
395. A description of Joseph Beuys’s famous Action from May 1974, entitled I Like America and America Likes Me: “Beuys spent three days in a room with a coyote. After flying into New York, he was swathed in felt and loaded into an ambulance, then driven to the gallery where the Action took place, without having once touched American soil. As Beuys later explained: ‘I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote.’ The title of the work is filled with irony. Beuys opposed American military actions in Vietnam, and his work as an artist was a challenge to the hegemony of American art. Beuys’s felt blankets, walking stick and gloves became sculptural props throughout the Action. In addition, fifty new copies of the Wall Street Journal were introduced each day, which the coyote acknowledged by urinating on them. […] At the end of the Action, Beuys was again wrapped in felt and returned to the airport. For Native Americans, the coyote had been a powerful god, with the power to move between the physical and the spiritual world. After the coming of European settlers, it was seen merely as a pest, to be exterminated. Beuys saw the debasement of the coyote as a symbol of the damage done by white men to the American continent and its native cultures. His action was an attempt to heal some of those wounds.” This image documenting the piece is haunting. Update: Reader Christopher King just wrote to let me know that artifacts leftover from Beuys’s performance are on permanent display at Dia:Beacon.
394. Please spend five quality minutes of your day on Books at Home, the blog about bookshelves.
393. Freeman Dyson writing in the New York Review of Books on William Nordhaus’s idea of the “future discount” as it applies to global warming: “If we can save M dollars of damage caused by climate change in the year 2110 by spending one dollar on reducing emissions in the year 2010, how large must M be to make the spending worthwhile? Or, as economists might put it, how much can future losses from climate change be diminished or ‘discounted’ by money invested in reducing emissions now?” I’m just beginning my research for my contribution to the Green Patriot Posters campaign, which seeks to mobilize citizens for energy independence and awareness of climate change by taking as its inspiration some of America’s most iconic WWII-era posters, including Rosie the Riveter and many more. The campaign’s first initiative is a bus advertising campaign in Cleveland by its multitalented native son, Michael Bierut.
392. “37signals does not enter award competitions. We believe that the marketing and communication awards ‘industry’ encourages agencies to misplace their priorities on the opinions of their peers, rather than the needs of their clients’ customers.” Discuss.
391. 37signals has a great write-up on some of their early projects and experiments. The most intriguing to me is 37express, which “offered quick, effective, subtle revisions done for a fixed price in one week. It was our way of getting work done quickly without having to deal with all the back and forth headaches that typically accompany client work.” To me, you could build an entire studio practice around this idea. I love the notion of framing projects so that they’re fast, cheap, and fun. Designers have more impact over a shorter period of time, and clients get a few simple ideas on how to make some dramatic impovements to their existing design solutions.
390. Juggler Michael Moschen’s jaw-dropping performance art piece, The Triangle.
389. More great work from Martin Frostner, here’s a project that converts fleeting SMS messages into permanent rubber stamps for envelopes: “Disappointed by the fact that there’s no way to save the humorous, strange or loving text messages that we send and receive—and that ultimately they have to be erased—we came up with a novel method by which they could be retained. By designing a series of rubber-stamps, we allowed the best messages to be stamped anywhere, perhaps to be used again with the postman as courier this time.” See also: Posts by Post.
388. The Zöllner illusion is a classic optical illusion named after its discoverer, German astrophysicist Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner. In the illusion, parallel black lines seem to be unparallel because shorter lines are added angling away from to the longer lines. These angled lines help to create the impression that one end of the longer lines is nearer to us than the other end. This illusion was used to beautiful effect by supertalented Swedish designer Martin Frostner in his catalog design for Carsten Holler, One Day One Day. See also the Orbison illusion, the Müller-Lyer illusion, the Poggendorff illusion, and the Hering illusion.
387. I’ve recently become enamored with Ryan Nelson’s Film Still Archive series on his personal blog, Making Known. Ryan’s a Design Fellow at the Walker Art Center who’s also written some great posts about typewriter type, Pistilli Roman, and my favorite used book find Color By Overprinting, not to mention this spot-on post on balloons, spilt liquids, and paper constructions.
386. I nabbed this from Renda’s Delicious feed so I hope she doesn’t mind, but André Mintz’s Chronotopic Anamorphosis is just too freaking cool not to share. Rated MB for “mind blowing.”
385. Track designer John Morgan’s typographic decisions as he makes them in this wonderful account for Typography Papers on his design for Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England. I own a copy of Common Worship, and I get endless pleasure in looking at this modern, beautiful, minimalist book of prayer.
