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Light reflected from the past. My great-grandfather Murray and his sister Mabel. (Photo from Judith Stein)

Venice, CA.

Goodman 1968, Languages of Art

Photo by DespiteSnow.

Bentley’s Hotel, Bombay. Patterns at work: patterns as decoration, in the floor tiling; patterns for practical function, as air grating in the elevator shaft, and grips on the stairs; and patterns for spiritual function, in the tiny chalk designs at each corner of the door.

Culver City, LA. U-Haul. It's hard to draw arrows that point to actual elements of a truck's occluded interior. Instead, these arrows point to elements of an in situ depiction of the interior, painted on the visible exterior.

By Jim Woodring

Mitochondria, from Allen Cell Explorer. “Z-stack movies of live hiPS cells.. Images start from the bottom of the cells and end at the top. The [movies] include fluorescent dyes that label the cell membrane (magenta) and the DNA/nucleus (cyan).”

Painting by Matthew Cornell.

Gelson’s Market, Santa Monica. Pictures stuck onto a deli display window. As the note on the 4th container points out, in this system of depiction, the size of the image itself does carry semantic significance.

Leaflet advertising “Semantography” (1965) by C.K. Bliss. Here is the book and the story behind it. (h/t Andrew Lavin)

Visualization of quantum chromodynamics, by Derek Leinweber.

From Karl Sims: “This video shows results from a research project involving simulated Darwinian evolutions of virtual block creatures. A population of several hundred creatures is created within a supercomputer, and each creature is tested for their ability to perform a given task, such the ability to swim in a simulated water environment. Those that are most successful survive, and their virtual genes containing coded instructions for their growth, are copied, combined, and mutated to make offspring for a new population. The new creatures are again tested, and some may be improvements on their parents. As this cycle of variation and selection continues, creatures with more and more successful behaviors can emerge.The creatures shown are results from many independent simulations in which they were selected for swimming, walking, jumping, following, and competing for control of a green cube.” (h/t Sam Cumming)

Joshua Tree, CA. Inter-diagetic discourse relations and anaphora.

Our visual system organizes the patterns of light and darkness that arrive at the eye and attempts to make sense of them. The visual system is extremely well adapted to bad input: We can take a black-and-white photograph and add noise (grayscale variation) to it and still be able to recognize the objects in it. We can recognize our homes even in a rainstorm. We can recognize a friend in bright sunlight or in a dark room. In fact, our visual systems are so well tuned to seeing shapes that even when we are watching the static patterns on an old analog television, we occasionally believe we see recognizable patterns. One consequence of this adaptation to bad input is that any stimulus that triggers approximately the right responses leads to recognition: A photograph of a pair of dice, a pencil drawing of them, and a bad computer graphics rendering of them all generate in our brains the perception that we are seeing a pair of dice.

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by John F. Hughes, Andries van Dam, Morgan McGuire, David F. Sklar, James D. Foley, Steven K. Feiner, and Kurt Akeley (h/t Sam Cumming)

Livingstone, Zambia. Warning in linear perspective.

Livingstone, Zambia. Colonial mimesis: The Royal Livingstone Express.

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