The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. Don’t design for average. It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience. A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.  The problem with logic is that it… Continue reading

“[David] Hockney valued painting because of the medium’s relationship to time. According to him, an image contained the amount of time that went into making it, so that when someone looked at one of his paintings, they began to inhabit the physical, bodily time of its being painted.” -Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing (2019). Continue reading

“It is this matrix that our passions, our desires, are accumulated as data, the better to manipulate and manage them. We confess to the machine while we walk, offering little ambulatory prayers. In doing so, we become cyborg beings: an assemblage of organic and inorganic materials, bits of technology, flesh and teeth, pieces of media,… Continue reading

“If you really want to separate your work from everyone else’s, every time you come to a Y in the road, don’t think about which way to go; automatically take the toughest route. Everybody else is taking the easiest one.” – Richard Serra in Leonard Koren’s What Artists Do (2018)   Continue reading

“You do it again and again, and you sense that the thing is beginning to have a form that looks strong. And all the time you’re thinking, and making decisions. The making, the devotion to making, is what gives it an emotional quality.” – Vija Clemins  • “What makes her images so alive is the… Continue reading

  “What do you pay when you pay attention? You pay with all the things you could have attended to, but didn’t, all the goals you didn’t pursue, all the actions you didn’t take, and all the possible yous you could have been, had you attended to those other things. Attention is paid in possible… Continue reading

  “Play with something ordinary and make it extraordinary. Don’t worry what you might be destroying; think about what you’re creating.” Erik Kessels, Failed It! (2016), p. 120 Continue reading

“What’s really interesting these days for me is people’s idea of sound. We’ve got a whole new generation of musicians—people who, for instance, program a beat box without any experience of a real drummer. When we first got beat boxes, we tried to program them to do what a drummer would do. Nowadays people haven’t… Continue reading