Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: Ernö Rubik’s “Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All” (2020)
“I had no deadline. I simply enjoyed the problem I had stumbled upon and knew that, for me, working on a problem is a prerequisite for fostering–or liberating–my imagination.” “At its core, design is the link to nature for artificial objects. Nature does not know strict borders; it only knows transition. An understanding of the… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Zeynep Tufekci On Attention
“We lived in a world in which mass attention was mediated through the mass media, was necessarily public and not largely uniform. Everyone saw the same thing on the same media. Now we live in a world mediated by a few giant understaffed companies, individualized based on data collected on the individual user and not… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Daphne Oram’s “An Individual Note” (1972)
“The resulting flow is a complex pattern of tensions and relaxations which evolve as the musical material is worked out. The words ‘controlled’ and ‘worked out’ do not really convey what I mean. There seem to be no suitable English words. I am hunting for some word which brings a hint of the skillful yachtsman… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Autechre On Building Things
“I quite like to build things and then forget how it works and then use it later on, and not really be able to remember what I was thinking about when I built it. It’s a little bit like working with yourself in a way, but from a time when you’re not aware of what… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Nassim Taleb On Tinkering
“It is in complex systems, ones in which we have little visibility of the chains of cause-consequences, that tinkering, bricolage, or similar variations of trial and error have been shown to vastly outperform the teleological —it is nature’s modus operandi. (…) Take the most opaque of all, cooking, which relies entirely on the heuristics of… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Tom Jenkinson (aka Squarepusher) On Instruments
“With some of the instruments I’ve used, people would be surprised about some of the results I’ve got out of them because they’re not designed to do certain things and yet, if you put your mind to it and really get to grips with how it’s built and not the manufacturer’s intentions, any machine will… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Francois J. Bonnet’s “The Music To Come” (2020)
Advent of the Musical “The challenge of any musical creation must be to invent the conditions of possibility for an appearing of the musical, but nothing else, because that is all that lies within its power. You don’t create music; you create environments condusive to the advent of music” (30). On Music “Books about music… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Brian Eno On Moire Patterns In Music
“A Moiré pattern is an interference pattern produced by overlaying similar but slightly offset templates. A simple example is obtained by taking two identical ruled transparent sheets of plastic, superposing them, and rotating one about its center as the other is held fixed.” – wolfram.com “Now a moire pattern… is actually a very good analog… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Donella H. Meadow’s Guidelines for Living in a World of Systems
Get the beat of the system. Expose your mental models to the light of day. Honor, respect, and distribute information. Use language with care and enrich it with systems concepts. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable. Made feedback policies for feedback systems. Go for the good of the whole. Listen… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Matthew B. Crawford’s “Why We Drive” (2020)
“In the affluent West, many of our energies of innovation seem to be channeled into creating experiences for the consumer that will make him feel good without making demands on him. This trend has been called ‘affective capitalism.’ Examples include computer gaming, pornography, psychoactive drugs, or a well-curated ecotourism adventure. Manufactured experiences are offered as… Continue reading
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