Greg Linch's Commonplace Book

Oh, hello there. Welcome, interweb traveler. Here's where I share interesting and inspiring links. I hope you enjoy!

[greglinch]

Embedded in Tanizaki’s lament about how Western innovations have infiltrated Japan’s traditional use of materials is a reminder that every technology is essentially a technology of thought.

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A central message of the science fiction genre is: for a time, don’t worry too much about how it’s all going to happen. Let’s just take the time to imagine the future first: people communicating telepathically, prospective partners chosen by brilliantly accurate computers, robots with deep emotional lives… The fact that we don’t at present know how to do any of these things shouldn’t hold us up. We need practice at concentrating on the way we want things to be.

Innovation and Science Fiction | The Book of Life

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I was never interested in art as simply making objects, but as a natural philosophy through which you find something out about the state of the world and your own self.

GALLERY VIEW - PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG COMPUTER - NYTimes.com

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Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. Since the notion of an algorithm or a computer program provides us with an extremely useful test for the depth of our knowledge about any given subject, the process of going from an art to a science means that we learn how to automate something.

Knuth: Computer Programming as an Art

[washpostpr]

The Washington Post has an opening for a Digital Projects Editor, a multifaceted role that demands a fine-grained feel for political news and a commitment to the effective and elegant presentation of the projects and longform work produced by the National staff.

The ideal candidate will be a...

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Oh, hey, you should check out and apply to this awesome job opportunity.

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He is one of my favorite artists not only for his surrealism, but for his reuse in different elements of his paintings. Those who study art might call them "recurring themes," but "reuse" makes more sense to me as an engineer. Those of us who write code every day find ourselves reusing elements of our work in different projects – be it formatting, framework, algorithms, etc. The same goes for most artists.

var t; //magritte

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"The camera introduces us to unconscious optics just as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses." In other words, the camera's-eye point of view is a privileged perspective. It does show us things as they are or, perhaps if not as they are, at least it reminds us that things as we see them with the naked eye aren't necessarily "as they are." It's not, perhaps, so much a notion of privileging what the camera sees as real over against what I see. It's a question of the camera reminding us--demystifying our ideology, in short--reminding us that things as we see them aren't necessarily the way things are. The camera, too, may have its bias. Slow motion is an obvious bias, speed-up is an obvious bias; but the speed at which we see things may be a bias, too.

Open Yale Courses

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Distraction is the atmosphere or medium in which the shock of revelation can take place, and that's the advantage of distraction.

Open Yale Courses Prof. Paul H. Fry discussing Walter Benjamin

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What's so special about all those amazing British children's writers, those who gave us Alice in Wonderland and Robinson Crusoe and Pooh Bear and Peter Pan and Peter Rabbit and the rest, was that they didn't set out to seduce. The great children's writers were authentic, they copied no one, they didn't set out to make money or to preach ideas. They just transcribed their dreams.

Luc Besson - Biography - IMDb

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The art of the page is as different from the real art as a map or an atlas is to the real geography. It’s meant to guide you through, so I’m very focused on how someone looks at this page and use it as a jumping-off point. I want their mind, not the panels but their mind, to be moving–connecting things and adding to it, bringing their life experience to it, and completing it all in the mysteries of their head and connecting to it inside them. That’s where the real art of comics are for me. When they’re done right, when they’re done at their best, the real story happens completely in the reader’s head, and the comic itself is just a really fun artifact and by-product to get them there.

Comics as Poetry: An Interview with David Mack (Part Four)

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I don’t think the original is the real art. I think that the real art of what happens isn’t in the page; it is what happens in the reader’s mind when they’re connecting it. The actual art page and the printed version of it are really my best way of making a navigational instrument for the reader to complete that piece in their head.

Comics as Poetry: An Interview with David Mack (Part Four)

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“There is sometimes a sense that we’ve decoupled computing from its cultural and artistic and humanistic context, and some of the trouble we might point to in the world we are living in—run by Wall Street and Silicon Valley—is perhaps a result of thinking of everything as just an engineering problem.”

A New Department Marks the Rise of a Discipline: ‘Computational Media’ – Wired Campus - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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whereas the early African art depicts abstract geometric patterns, the early European art is figurative, showing naturalistic representations of animals and humans. So did early modern humans from Africa enter Europe with abstract, nonfigurative art and then develop naturalistic representations gradually in their new homeland? Or had they already developed this sophisticated style of cave art in Africa, before they reached Europe?

Ancient Indonesian Cave Paintings Force Rethink of Art’s Origin | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network

[greglinch]

Comics start with two images, each slightly different from what came before, but, when you put these two images together, it’s just human nature to construct a dialogue between them. We construct a continuity: whatever happens in this image was before in time, and this happens after it. Nothing’s moving at all; nothing’s said in between. Even if things are completely different from this panel to that panel, our natural instinct is to construct order out of that juxtaposition and to create a narrative in between those images. So what I love about comics is that the readers themselves are really making what’s happening in comics in their own mind. When comics are done right, when they meet the reader halfway, when they don’t give too much… I think if they give the reader too much information, the readers don’t have to use their minds as much. But, if you finesse it and give them just the right amount, the readers then really start actively completing everything inside their minds. This makes the reader an active participant in what’s happening.

Comics as Poetry: An Interview with David Mack (Part One)

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A characteristic feature of Imagism is its attempt to isolate a single image to reveal its essence. This feature mirrors contemporary developments in avant-garde art, especially Cubism. Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called "luminous details", Pound's Ideogrammic Method of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image.

Imagism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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the choice of programming language greatly affects the perception of a piece of software. Some programming materials allow working quickly, some require intense attention to detail, and all modify the way the programmer thinks about the structure.

{Software} Structures by Casey Reas et al.

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"The by now familiar name of this paradigm is hypertext, a kind of writing that like its science fiction namesake, hyperspace, allows effortless travel through a discontinuous space, which allow its readers and writers to make connections between any two points of the literary universe."

Epen Aarseth review of Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics by Michael Joyce