Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: Christopher Alexander’s “The Timeless Way of Building” (1979)
“Each pattern helps to sustain other patterns. “The quality without a name occurs, not when an isolated pattern occurs, but when an entire system of patterns, interdependent, at many levels, is all stable and alive. We may see the sand ripples anywhere where we choose to put loose sand under the wind. But when the… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: John Berger’s “Portraits” (2015)
“The gestures come from his hand, his wrist, arm, shoulder, perhaps even the muscles in his neck, yet the strokes he makes on the paper are following currents of energy which are physically his and which become visible only when he draws them. Currents of energy? The energy of a tree’s growth, of a plant’s… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Alessandro Baricco’s “The Game” (2020)
“There is a deep-rooted suspicion that the perception of the world that has been shaped by new technology is missing a whole segment of reality, perhaps the best part: the one that pulsates under the surface of things, where only patient, laborious, and sophisticated attention will lead. This is a place for which a word… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Paul Morley’s “A Sound Mind” (2020)
Everyone could find what they wanted now, quickly and efficiently, guided by genial, anonymous calculations, by ever-increasing playlists, by a proliferation of genres that almost bureaucratically processed and filed music for driving, sleeping, motivating, studying, eating, chilling, isolation, concentrating, shopping, swapping, dancing, night-time, Thursday. It became a world that was looking for user-friendly tips and… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Leonard Koren’s “Musings Of A Curious Aesthete” (2020)
“Beauty is typically associated with bringing new things into existence: A beautiful painting. A beautiful musical composition. Beautiful architecture…But beauty, I realized at that instant, can also be created and/or restored by removing things from existence. Like eliminating the visible consequences of thoughtless human action. That is what I did when picking up litter in… Continue reading
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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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