As you may have noticed, we have a thing for images of people flying and leaping, free falling and sailing through the air – to where? – with no constraints. (Because it’s what we want to do). Today we found a delicious trove on John Foster’s Accidental Mysteries column on Design Observer...
(Video link here.) When our mind starts running hot like a machine overworking – fast and full of ideas and writing and deadlines – we welcome ways to slow down. This little film does the work of meditating, chilling us out while connecting us to a broader view of the life we are living. (The lovely music is “Aerial” by Moby, who allows free use of his music for independent film makers at MobyGratis.com - yay Moby!).
“This is a year-long time-lapse study of the sky. A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.”
(Video link here.) After hearing a lot of very kind and reverent words about Steve Jobs lately, Walter Isaacson’s new biography about him, apparently balancing the picture, which we can’t help but think is a good thing. The guy was brilliant, but no angel; he was deeply flawed. Ryan Tate of Gawker wrote just this in his piece What Everyone Is Too Polite To Say About Steve Jobs an outline of the other side of Jobs, which include authoritarianism, rough treatment of underlings, tolerant of abusive working conditions in Apple factories overseas….This is the same guy who gave his famously uplifting commencement speech, who said “Death is life’s change agent.”
We’ve heard similar combo-platters of gifts and faults with a number of famous people (and experienced it working for some). And this past year, three of our dear friends passed away. The were all much loved, creative, valiant and very generous people who had harsh, often dark, sides as well.
(Video link here.) After we posted a video of Bjork frolicking in her “bell dress”, we got an email from a reader alerting us to the “sonic fabric” designed by Alyce Santoro. It’s a fabric made from polyester thread and audiocassette tape recorded with intricate collages of sound so that it is, literally, woven with sound. This video tells the story of Santoro’s inspiration and process in making this wild stuff; it’s an interesting, curiously relaxing inside-look at the unexpected connections and associations that carried her along, as one idea led to another to another…
Meanwhile, here’s a 1 minute video of musician Jon Fishman wearing and playing his sonic fabric dress… read more…
Even though many of us are on email all day, there is absolutely no substitute for coming home to an actual letter or postcard you can hold in your hand. We recently tried out Postcardly, a service that melds our online lives with the magic of good old-fashioned mail. You upload a photo or graphic, add a message, supply the address, and Postcardly prints and delivers your postcards. We sent ourselves one of our graphic signs, and a photo from Ellen Silverman’s wonderful Cuban Kitchen archive. They took a week to arrive, but we were pleased enough with the quality, especially with photos. You can send an image directly from your phone, turning a snapshot into an instant postcard.
This is a great way to drop a line to someone who doesn’t use email, but it’s also a neat way to keep the printed photograph alive. Since getting a digital camera, we rarely print photos. But it used to be fun to give a friend a photograph they could tape on the wall and have on hand to look back to. read more…
While we were away, we discovered that SayMedia has included Sally and ‘the improvised life’ Say 100: The Voices that Shape Opinion. They polled ten category experts to identify ’100 Voices that Matter’. Thanks to Julie Carlson, founder of Remodelista, we share the Shelter category with the likes of The Selby, Desire to Inspire, and Design Sponge, among others...The 100 includes some seriously great blogs on the subjects of Food, Travel, Entertainment, Thought Leaders, Technology…and is a great resource for finding new sources of information.
When our friend Andrea Raisfeld sent us a compelling scan from Malcolm Gladwell’s piece Creation Myth in the May 16th issue of The New Yorker, we went online to find the story and explore its ideas more fully. In the process, the post we intended to write about the creative process turned into a post about bad design.
While trying to use the New Yorker’s digital archive (as print subscribers, we theoretically have access) we inadvertently encountered an avalanche of ill un-considered technology. Our established password didn’t work, even when we reset it; the website didn’t recognize the email address we’ve used for years. Our first three emails to Customer Service went unanswered (There is no phone number for Customer Service on their Contact Us page). Then we began to receive robo-messages repeating the same instructions after each subsequent email asking for help. When we finally created a NEW account on our desktop, it would not work on our iPad.
Finally, we sent a very specific email outlining our experience and wrote HUMAN BEING PLEASE in the subject line. We got another non-sequitur robo-message, repeating previous instructions, this time signed “Shar”.
For ten days running, the digital New Yorker broke the record for website glitches, ineffective instructions, horrific customer service and pure wasted time. Bad design.
Our experience mades us hate a magazine we love. That’s REALLY bad design. But it also made us realize the simple key to good design (of anything): read more…
In 1977, as NASA was preparing to launch two spacecraft as part of the the Voyager Interstellar Mission, they enlisted astronomer/astrophysicist Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, the creative director of the project, to create a golden record that would be sent into space on the spacecraft. It was to be the ultimate mixtape of the human experience, an audio introduction to humanity to whatever unknown life form listened to it; it included a kiss, a mother’s first words to her unborn child, greetings in 59 different languages, music from all over the world.
In the course of working together to find just the right mix of sounds and music, Sagan and Druyan fell in love, in a stunning, immediate and completely unexpected way. And that inspired read more…
When she was two years old, Aelita Andre, now four, created paintings so sophisticated and beautiful, they fooled an art dealer, who thought they’d been done by an adult and wanted to represent her. Since then, Andre has gained worldwide fame, and her own website and dealer.
Seeing her gallery of paintings makes us think that some adult had her hand in at least the naming and marketing of them, and possibly guiding their making. (What kid would call something “Coral Nebula”? Is the perfectly split image below really the work of even an extraordinarily gifted 4-year-old?) But there seems no doubt from this video that this little girl is seriously into painting, following all kinds of ideas, and her own sensuality along as she works on canvases. Watching her work is mesmerizing; read more…
“One of James Thurber’s most famous cartoons is of a man and woman lying in a bed, and the woman is saying to the man, “All right, have it your way–you heard a seal bark!” Meanwhile, behind the bed’s headboard, and partly hidden by it, a large seal looks off to the left…The drawing came about by chance. Originally, he was trying to draw a seal on a rock looking at two small figures in the distance and saying to itself, “Hm, explorers.” When the rock Thurber produced looked more like a headboard, he adjusted and kept going.”
This Saturday afternoon in New York City, The Calder Foundation is sponsoring a twelve-hour one-day event that presents a continuous series of artist film screenings, performances and music. It takes its name from Alexander Calder’s response to Work in Progress, his 1968 theatrical production, Maybe I should have called it ‘My Life in Nineteen Minutes’. An extraordinary group of artists will be showing work, Calder, Yves Klein, Eva Luna, and William Wegman to name only a few. Holton Rower, whose wondrous Pour Painting we posted about last week (the video went seriously viral) will be doing a “live pour”, guaranteed to be an unforgettable experience (we know, we once watched him make one).
“….Influenced by Calder’s investigations into improvisational performance, appropriated materials and continual change through the development of his iconic ‘mobiles,’ Maybe I should have called it ‘My Life in Nineteen Minutes’ will traverse history by reading it through the present moment, zigzagging through different scenarios via the slippage of time and space. It will engage an active audience through different media and temporalities via numerous set-changes, playfully interrogating life’s intermissions.
…Inspired by the long history of improvised DIY art performances as cultural strategy read more…
We found this wonderful Tubby comic (a character in the great Little LuLu comics of the ’30′s and ’40′s) during our weekly visit to Accidental Mysteries on Design Observer.
, apparently balancing the picture, which we can’t help but think is a good thing. The guy was brilliant, but no angel; he was deeply flawed. Ryan Tate of Gawker wrote just this in his piece 
