RIP Steve Jobs

Amazing. Inspirational. Revolutionary. Legendary.

Apparently this has been around for a bit. I just heard about it yesterday. Awesome.

Dhammakaya

Apparently there’s some sort of controversy about this organization, but I’m just blown away by the visuals. This group is organized enough to get hundreds of thousands of people together wearing the same clothes and do the same thing with remarkable spacing.

For more stunning photographs, Foreign Policy is the place to go.

Last living US World War I veteran dies in West Virginia at age 110

Wow. Frank Buckles – thanks for your sacrifice and RIP. Amazing.

Hunting Greens from Mirko Schmidt on Vimeo.

Sara Naim - Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata

As if my mind hasn’t expanded enough through all the readings, exercises, lectures and related course material. I was flat-out bowled over when I came  across the work of Sara Naim.

She photographs sounds.

Crazy, right? Sara is an internationally-acclaimed photographer who, as you could imagine, is doing some pretty interesting work. Her photography of sounds was part of a study she did of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

From her site:

This body of work looks at translating sound into a photographic image. Ludwig Van Beethoven’s symphony vibrates through milk. He composed this piece in the early 1800’s for his blind pupil and lover, Giuletta Gucciardi. Gucciardi said to Beethoven that she wished she could see the moonlight. Beethoven then composed a piece about the moonlight’s reflection off Austria’s Lake Lucerne, called Moonlight Sonata.

What she does really changes the perceptions we have of information and opens up the mind to many new perspectives.

I think she’s really done a phenomenal job at revising how people view and interpret information; more than just making it useful, meaningful, and understandable, we now, through her work, see it in a whole new way.

We did an interview which you’ll see below.

Joshua Kitlas: What is information?

Sara Naim: In my opinion, information is once experience of knowledge. X + Y = Z for example. This is a basic and factual piece of information, but how you process it and experience it is also how you become informed of such a fact.

JK: How did you come up with the concept of viewing sound, and how did you execute it?

SN: I knew I wanted to photograph sound; it was just a matter of how. I once stood my camera, which had a slow shutter speed, on a speaker and photographed the movement of the sound as it penetrated the camera. I experimented with the alike, but in the end I felt that milk had good consistency to portray what I wanted to portray. It also spoke well metaphorically with the sonata I was playing. I placed milk above a subwoofer and played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I photographed throughout the sonata to have one visualize the complete piece. The photographed moments portray the ‘al niente’, ‘crescendo’, ‘fortissimo’, ‘sotto voce’, etc, within the symphony. This piece describes the moonlights reflection off a lake in Austria, in dedication to Beethoven’s blind lover whom once told him she wished she could see the moonlight. Beethoven gave Countess Giulietta vision through sound; this was the essential metaphor for my work.

During the making of ‘Beethoven – Moonlight Sonata’ I was photographing the ‘crescendo’ point within different genre’s of music, whether it be Dubstep, Classical, Jazz, Electro. I wanted to compare these different points within such different genres. My tutor, however, pointed out the truth that within each genre there is so much material, or more specifically, within one piece of music. So I looked for that one piece of music which had conceptual significance, and that was Moonlight Sonata. I needed it to come into a full circle, and thankfully it really did.

JK: How does this change peoples interpretations of information?

I think crossing different mediums adds dynamics, it gives people a different structure to how they often see and digest something. Hopefully one will reconsider their predisposition to the 5 senses being so categorical and separate.

JK: What kind of response have you received from this work?

SN: To be honest not so much, positive responses but not critical. It would be nice to hear some critical analysis of the work. I did it for my third year of university, and my tutors were really positive about it and pushed it towards different competitions, but that’s it really. I also recorded the milk movements on video, and muted the sound which turned out quite nice. I wanted to play it whilst having the stereo beneath the viewer as they sat on it. I was considering dubbing the sound so it would just be the vibrations beneath and the visual reference (the two synchronized). I think the piece still has a lot of room and I would like to eventually pick it back up and rework or expand it. (What do you think?)

JK: I personally think there is a lot of room to explore a variety of ways sound intersects with vision (and possibly with taste if you were to mix ingredients using sound, though it may have to be really loud!). Maybe photographing fluids of different viscosities (Oil, Jell-o, etc.) and not just from the top but if you could get a horizontal view, it may yield some very interesting results. Also two liquids together (like olive oil and water) might turn up something unexpected. Maybe even overlaying results — like a picture of Beethoven music over NWA music. The only other thing I could think of that may be interesting would be to get a song from Girl Talk take pictures of it and do the same for the track he’s sampling from. That may be neat also.

JK: What has been your greatest discovery about the crossroads between sound and vision (I think that was a David Bowie record)?

SN: Well it wasn’t mine at all, but cymatics. It’s the study of visible sound and vibrations. There have been a lot of experimentation within the field and it’s very interesting. I feel that my work tapped into it but this piece, along with a few other projects I have done, I prefer to take it out of the science domain and move it back into the arts. That’s where the conceptual and aesthetics part of the work places in, to distinguish itself from being a cymatics piece of research or other!

JK: Do you plan to explore this more?

SN: As I said hopefully make the piece into a film and play around with how I present the work. Maybe reshoot the project on 5×4 as well. As you see it now it was shot on 6×7 (medium format). I would even love to do it with 10 x 8, though I have never used it before. The detail would really emphasize the dramatics of the symphony, sound in general, and vision. I’ll let you know if I do reshoot.

JK: Any parting thoughts?

SN: Not really, but if you have any further questions don’t hesitate! Would be interesting to get one response question/answer thing going, if you wanted me to elaborate on something or discuss it together.

COMICS + INFORMATION DESIGN By Austin Kleon

The first class was really an eye opener for me. I wasn’t really sure what to expect going in, and what we intend to cover is pretty broad.

In the days following, I met common everyday instances with a very fresh and critical, as well as different, perspective.

Our daily challenges of information distribution and retrieval challenged prior notions of mine about our daily interfaces with information. I peered deeper than ‘Why would they design this that way?’, or, ‘Who got paid to do this? It makes no sense.” Alternatively, I kept a keen and watchful eye on information that made sense as there were. Fortunately more often than not, there are numerous and simple design decisions that made the day easier. Whether it’s determining where to put laundry in commercial washing machines or something as simple as the minimum of effective instructions on a tube of toothpaste, simply comprehensible information makes a huge difference in our lives.

There were a few themes that popped out to me. This is a short, and growing, list:

• There are a lot of assumptions that we make about information, and probably the chanciest one is believing that people will easily comprehend what we’re trying to convey, that our information design makes sense. For example, the entrances to the Carrier Dome on some sides have an upper and lower entrance to different levels of the Dome. Another side of the Dome only has one entrance to an upper level. The entrances are labeled with an uppercase alpha character, yet they’re not always in alphabetical order and at one point it appears that only consonants relate to the upper level entrances and vowels relate to the lower entrances, yet this is not the case. The information designers here assumed that people would easily be able to make sense of the entrances, but, at least in my reality, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
• People make expectations about information decisions or information offerings. I imagine that, on some level, the information designer of the Carrier Dome entrances expected that patrons or visitors to the Carrier Dome would be able to understand the logic of his or her system for classifying entrances to the Dome. In the case of me and my friend, this past Saturday, that wasn’t the case. Alternatively, my friend and I had the expectation that a massive structure like the Carrier Dome which cost millions of dollars and was designed by an engineering firm, would have done, on some level, a usability test on the entrance naming convention. Perhaps it was, but it wasn’t necessarily thorough enough.
• Constraints - those that are seen and unseen. When an information situation that challenges us is presented, many of us, well at least me, think, ‘Duh, why did him/her/it design this so poorly? It’s so confusing!’. Continuing with the Carrier Dome theme, perhaps the information designer was given only certain letters to use, or a superior of his or the client put the kibosh on a more functional system s/he came up with. I’ll probably never know. More commonly, I’m sure we all have encountered a situation where a product, shipped and created in another country arrives before us and we chuckle at all the misspellings or quirky grammar. Perhaps the company was constrained by lack of language speakers native to the export country or a poor choice of translators. The possibilities are endless.

Information is a conversation, a language that can be spoken or unspoken. Our responses, interpretations, presentations and understanding of information can have dramatic impacts on our lives.

I chose this image because, when I first saw it, it captured the feeling I was having after class. Very bold and plentiful thoughts, but not necessarily a coherent grouping of the elements that help to define, shape and interpret the organization of information.

I thought this was kinda cool.