Ten-Minute Art School Course
brought to you by Alexander Calder
How can art be realized?
Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe.
Out of different masses, tight, heavy, middling— indicated by variations of size or color— directional line— vectors which represent speeds, velocities, accelerations, forces, etc.— these directions making between them meaningful angles, and senses, together defining one big conclusion or many.
Spaces, volumes, suggested by the smallest means in contrast to their mass, or even including them, juxtaposed, pierced by vectors, crossed by speeds.
Nothing at all of this is fixed.
Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe.
It must not be just a fleeting moment but a physical bond between the varying events in life.
Not extractions,
But abstractions
Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting.
- From Abstraction-Création, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, 1932.
![The Secret Life of the Photocopier
[via]](http://www.secretlifeofmachines.com/images/photocopier.gif)
![Sharpest ever images of Pluto show mottled world
by Rachel Courtland, reporter [via New Scientist]
Pluto may take 248 years to orbit the sun, but its surface is changing at a much faster rate, new images reveal.
The erstwhile planet, which celebrates the 80th anniversary of its discovery this month, has long been a fuzzy dot to telescopes. But new Hubble Space Telescope images unveiled today reveal the best views yet of Pluto’s mottled, multi-coloured terrain.
Creating the images from data taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys was no small feat. Each image was only a few pixels across, and hundreds had to be combined together to produce the relatively high resolution images, the LA Times reports. “This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish,” says Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The team also created a video of Pluto rotating; watch it here.
Pluto is being spritzed with grayish dust by two of its three moons. But it maintains an overall red colour because its surface harbours methane frost, which breaks down into a dark red, carbon-rich residue when exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation.
The new images, taken in 2002 and 2003, confirm that Pluto’s surface is actively changing. For reasons that are still mysterious, Pluto’s appearance remained constant for some 50 years of observations before its surface colour became 20 to 30 per cent redder over two years at the beginning of the decade. Over the same period, Pluto’s northern hemisphere also brightened, while its southern hemisphere darkened. This appears to be due to ice vaporising in the sunlit north and refreezing in the wintry south, NASA says.
These observations could help reveal more about the dwarf planet’s weather, which is affected not only by its tilt but by the planet’s elongated – rather than circular – path around the sun.
The atmosphere of Pluto has baffled astronomers because it has continued to warm and thicken even as Pluto has moved away from the sun. This could be because of a greenhouse effect: methane ice may be warmed enough by the sun to turn into gas when Pluto is close-in. This gas could then keep temperatures up, warming more ice as the dwarf planet recedes from the sun.
The new images could help NASA target observations for the New Horizons spacecraft, which will fly past Pluto in 2015 so quickly that it will only be able to photograph one hemisphere in detail. One intriguing locale is an unusually bright spot that other observations indicate is rich in carbon monoxide frost.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kxdsgsqfV51qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Sharpest ever images of Pluto show mottled world
by Rachel Courtland, reporter [via New Scientist]
Pluto may take 248 years to orbit the sun, but its surface is changing at a much faster rate, new images reveal.
The erstwhile planet, which celebrates the 80th anniversary of its discovery this month, has long been a fuzzy dot to telescopes. But new Hubble Space Telescope images unveiled today reveal the best views yet of Pluto’s mottled, multi-coloured terrain.
Creating the images from data taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys was no small feat. Each image was only a few pixels across, and hundreds had to be combined together to produce the relatively high resolution images, the LA Times reports. “This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish,” says Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The team also created a video of Pluto rotating; watch it here.
Pluto is being spritzed with grayish dust by two of its three moons. But it maintains an overall red colour because its surface harbours methane frost, which breaks down into a dark red, carbon-rich residue when exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation.
The new images, taken in 2002 and 2003, confirm that Pluto’s surface is actively changing. For reasons that are still mysterious, Pluto’s appearance remained constant for some 50 years of observations before its surface colour became 20 to 30 per cent redder over two years at the beginning of the decade. Over the same period, Pluto’s northern hemisphere also brightened, while its southern hemisphere darkened. This appears to be due to ice vaporising in the sunlit north and refreezing in the wintry south, NASA says.
These observations could help reveal more about the dwarf planet’s weather, which is affected not only by its tilt but by the planet’s elongated – rather than circular – path around the sun.
The atmosphere of Pluto has baffled astronomers because it has continued to warm and thicken even as Pluto has moved away from the sun. This could be because of a greenhouse effect: methane ice may be warmed enough by the sun to turn into gas when Pluto is close-in. This gas could then keep temperatures up, warming more ice as the dwarf planet recedes from the sun.
The new images could help NASA target observations for the New Horizons spacecraft, which will fly past Pluto in 2015 so quickly that it will only be able to photograph one hemisphere in detail. One intriguing locale is an unusually bright spot that other observations indicate is rich in carbon monoxide frost.
“Going To Where The Tea Trees Are” by Peter Von Poehl
This one’s for you, Toothpick.
Haikuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Is there anything
better than staying under
a blanket with you?
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles for Good Design
Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?
As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.)
Here they are:
Good design is innovative
The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
Good design makes a product useful
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
Good design is aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
Good design makes a product understandable
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
Good design is unobtrusive
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
Good design is honest
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
Good design is long-lasting
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.
Good design is thorough, down to the last detail
Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
Good design is environmentally friendly
Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
Good design is as little design as possible
Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.
Back to purity, back to simplicity.
[via]
I’ve been waiting for it to snow in Charlotte, just so I could post this.
What a great weekend to be a shut-in…
Synesthesia - from the Ancient Greek σύν (syn), ‘together,’ and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), ‘sensation’—is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.
(via xn—7xa)
