1 week ago
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In 1975, Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno created the original pack of Oblique Strategies cards, through thinking about approaches to their own work as artist and musician. The Oblique Strategies constitute a set of over 100 cards, each of which is a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist in creative situations. These famous cards have been used by many artists and creative people all over the world since their initial publication.

2 months ago

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

10 months ago
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André 3000’s thrashed army jacket, decorated with a picture of his son printed at a mall kiosk on tour with Outkast.

11 months ago

Crows Are White

1 year ago

A music video directed by Miyazaki in the mid-90s during a writer’s block for Princess Mononoke.

1 year ago
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“[A]n artifact of such utter simplicity and perfection that it seems it must be either the first object or the last…”

— William Gibson

1 year ago

There is a concept in physics called resonance. In lay terms, it describes the fact that for any given object there are natural frequencies at which the object “likes to vibrate”. A simple pendulum’s natural frequency is the rate at which it swings back and forth; if you wiggle the pendulum at the same frequency, the pendulum will swing farther and higher, but if your movements don’t match its own natural rhythm, it will only dampen the swing instead.

If you have two objects, like guitar strings held taut, with different resonant frequencies, and one vibrates, the other will lay still. The distance between them is dampening any energy thrown out into space by the vibrating string. But if you have objects with the same resonant frequency next to each other, vibrations in one will reinforce vibrations in the other, and rather than dampen each other’s sounds, they will bring out the latent voices in each other to vibrate together louder.

If you have a piano at home, you can try to feel this for yourself. If you sing into the sound chamber of a piano at a specific pitch, then stop and listen carefully, you’ll hear the few strings that were tuned to exactly your note continue to vibrate.

A few times in my life I’ve been struck with chance encounters and longer relationships with people who I felt resonated deeply and naturally with some part of me. I didn’t have to sit them down and patiently tell them my life story. They just got it, probably because somewhere within each of them was something that shared some resonant frequency with something within me. When we spoke, our movements reinforced each other and educed into the often unforgiving void of time an unmistakable sound, perfectly tuned to each other. Sometimes these are shared personal pasts, like family stories or cultural context. Sometimes these are just interests, like computing or writing. Most magically, sometimes these are communities or ideas that are at the core of who we are.

What’s most surprising is that more often than not, these are not people whom I’d gotten to know for months and years. They are a stranger on a balcony at a party. A fellow traveler looking for the last seat at a crowded airport terminal. A lost voice on the internet. I was pulled towards them by their frequencies, before I even knew them. A few times, I have been lucky enough to resonate with them, and them with me, long enough to leave lasting echoes in my memory.

The trouble with people who resonate with us seems to be that inside each of us are many different people and histories that vibrate at different frequencies, and as rare as it is to stumble into someone who can speak to just one of them, it feels tragically rare to find someone whose disparate selves can shake apart the many different parts of us that sing at different frequencies. Often when I had felt that I had found someone who so deeply resonated with some part of me, I later saw that there were parts of me that dampened who they were, and parts of them that dampened who I was. And when I’m with someone who so deeply resonates with one part of me, it can be confusing and painful to feel the other parts lay so silent.

This, I think, is the challenge in finding precious people — it’s hard enough to listen for people who resonate with us; to find the one who can stir up a chord seems at times a mathematical impossibility, like trying to fit two puzzle pieces together in some 10-dimensional space. But I’m hopeful that, perhaps by paying careful attention to the sounds of my own strings and listening carefully to the vibrations around me, I might be lucky enough to notice when someone so deeply resonant with me is in my midst.

1 year ago
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Cartier Tank given by Prince Stanislaw Radziwill to his sister-in-law Jackie Onassis, to commemorate a 50-mile beach walk they had completed in 1963. It states the time they set off, 2.05am, and the time they finished, 9.35pm.

1 year ago
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In the “Peanuts” strip from Sunday, June 9, 1963, Charlie Brown and Sally admire the night sky as he explains the future movement of the stars that make up the Big Dipper. All eight panels depict the same scene: Charlie Brown and Sally atop a patch of earth, the dark sky engulfing their bodies. Nothingness surrounds them—both formally, on the page, and literally, in the black yawn of space. Nothing much happens here, yet, in its openness and conversation, the strip is alive with wonder, possibility, and humanity. Schulz does a lot with nothingness.

1 year ago
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Immediately following WWII, the United Nations was formed with a mandate to promote international peace and security throughout the world. Branding for the UN was designed by a team of designers led by American architect and industrial designer Oliver Lundquist. The result was a logo consisting of a map of the world encircled by olive leaves. White and blue became the official colours of the United Nations. White, a colour synonymous with peace, was paired with light blue and its association with calmness, trust, stability and peacefulness. Some say that blue was chosen because it is “the opposite of red, the colour of war”.

Since 1948, the UN has been deploying military personnel for various peacekeeping missions. These operations are comprised of troops from many different countries, wearing uniforms accented by the unmistakeable UN blue. “The blue beret and helmet were created by Secretary-General Hammarskjöld during the formative days of UNEF (United Nations Emergency Forces)”, says Brian Urquhart in his book An American Life. “What was needed was distinctive headgear easy for a distant sniper to recognize.” The blue helmet has become a symbol of the UN and can be seen worn by as many as 70,000 military personnel across the globe. -Colour Studies