Artists have been pushing back against ideological cultural imperatives since forever. An interesting example is three Chinese artists who called themselves the New Measurement Group. In an attempt to push back against cultural ideological...
Two pages ago, faithful reader Robert seems to suggest that my John Berger quote (STONES IN YOUR POCKET), is taken out of context. So I went back to the section that Berger’s stones in...
Let’s attack another binary, representation (or depiction) vs abstraction. The representation / abstraction binary has informed our thinking in these pages since the beginning. This was first broached on the page LETTER TO HELEN....
During a day trip to Sintra which is about an hour by train outside of Lisbon, we were walking hurriedly to catch the train. I was taken by this building. Yet there was no...
If we don’t see in pictures, then why do we think it is so important to draw pictures? Steen Eiler Rasmussen gives us the following thought: “Ordinarily we do not see a picture of...
John Berger, in the following passage, exhorts us to beware of the habitual gesture, the habitual line, and maybe all habits in general: “The lines of a sign are uniform and regular: the lines...
What shapes a plane? What is a plane? In our Transparent Drawings, we draw planes all the time. You might say that to draw an enclosed and resolved form, all we are drawing is...
“But Kelberman’s project is, in addition, a visual world-building that explicitly sidesteps not only the language of antiquity and classicism but also any suggestion of “artistic” image making. Her choices are brightly colored,...
A passage from John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook: “Where there are no words, knowledge comes through physical acts and through the space through which those acts are made; by permitting each act the space conferred...
A robot makes transparent drawings. As faithful readers of these pages will attest, I am always on the lookout for transparent drawings. And here we have transparent drawings. And they are done by a...
Let’s put the following all into one bowl and stir: lingual characters, scientific graphs, pictograms, logographic characters, petroglyphs, transparent drawing, heiroglyphics, etc. All of these we produce with a pencil and paper. Ergo, they...
Mike makes a really good point. In his reply to The Pencil Marks On The Paper, he states that engineering graphs give a more complete and intuitive understanding than the mathematical characters which produce...
You have an idea. You draw the idea on your paper. Then you describe the idea in words. That description, using words, makes your concept static. Think about it. There you are, happily drawing...
We were hungry for lunch. Trip Advisor said there was an interesting spot not too far from where we were. After making our way thru the streets of Lisbon, a small courtyard opened before...
The true design icon in Barcelona is a cemetery. Contrary to what you are fed to believe, the most iconic design in Barcelona is not the Barcelona Pavilion or Casa Batllo, both of which...
Maybe it is just me, but it seems that everywhere I read, very negative things are said about language. I have recorded some of these examples in these pages. It is becoming clear that...
Imagine that you have a pencil and a piece of paper. You proceed to make a few marks with your pencil on your paper. Now stop and look what you have done. You have...
How do you generate new forms? More to the point, can there be a method which can be used to for novel form and enclosure generation? This question is one of the central points...
I’ve come up with a great new digital interface. It’s called the Stickboard. This new product has been designed to eliminate your laptop’s keyboard by fitting directly over it. The Stickboard provides an analogue...
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