"Actor Patrick McGoohan's words are becoming less and less true as technology extends its cheerless remit. "I am not a number," he declared in the cult TV series The Prisoner, "I am a free man."
But increasingly we are numbers , digitized and quantified, rewritten as algorithms and asked for our personal codes to confirm who we are before call center workers will deign to bandy words with us. As if to prove the point, from last Tuesday morning in the UK anyone with a chip and pin card will be obliged to use their pin number and not their signature when making a purchase..." (Stuart Jeffries / THE GUARDIAN)
more @: TaipeiTimes.com
Friday 11 March 2011
Monday 7 March 2011
Writing with a sphere...
When László Bíró saw a ball rolling through a puddle on the street and leaving a trail of water behind it, he conceived an idea that would go on to change everyday life forever. Based on what he had seen, the hungarian journalist along with his brother Georg, began to work on the first commercially successful ballpoint pen...
"The whole is greater than the sum of the parts"
"All the optical units on a picture-surface derive their quality in relationship to their respective backgrounds, ranging from the immediate surrounding surface to the optical field as a whole." (Language of Vision, Gyorgy Kepes)
Objects and background
"Figure or ground, at first glance do you see the figure in front of you or the background?" (Edgar Rubin)
Playing with colours...
Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hands which plays touching one key or another purposively to cause vibrations in the Soul. (Kandinsky, 1912/13)
The ZEN circle
A circle is one of the simplest forms imaginable, yet Zen Buddhists believe this unassuming shape holds great meaning. For centuries, Buddhist monks and artists have created these brushwork circles to express their truth. Some of these artists even hold that the Enso, or Zen circle, is a graphic depiction of enlightenment itself. Ensōs have been painted by Zen masters, monks, and others since the eighth century. The ensō is best known to most people from the Japanese Zen Buddhist tradition, most often associated with Zenga-art produced in the Zen tradition. The ensō is generally done as a spiritual exercise in a meditative state or no-mind, a single brush stroke without hesitation or thought. The idea is not to paint a perfect circle, but to paint one that captures the spontaneity, playfulness, and spiritual state of the painter and the moment. Many in the Zen Buddhist tradition of Japan say the ensō is a symbol of connectedness or unity of all things. Some Zen masters refuse to define or name the ensō and leave it to the viewer. Others say the ensō represents perfection, enlightenment, formlessness, emptiness, void, true void, timelessness, placelessness, oneness, infinity, mind-body, unity, nothing, everything, nothing-everything, abyss, universe, no-mind, awareness, connectedness...
Vasilij Vasil'evič Kandinskij
In a composition in which corporeal elements are more or less superfluous, they can be more or less omitted and replaced by purely abstract forms, or by corporeal forms that have been completed abstracted. ("Making abstraction", 1912)
Saturday 5 March 2011
Fourth, comes knowledge...
"...A circle is a thing spoken of, and its name is that very word which we have just uttered. The second thing belonging to it is its definition, made up names and verbal forms. For that which has the name "round," "annular," or, "circle," might be defined as that which has the distance from its circumference to its centre everywhere equal. Third, comes that which is drawn and rubbed out again, or turned on a lathe and broken up-none of which things can happen to the circle itself-to which the other things, mentioned have reference; for it is something of a different order from them. Fourth, comes knowledge, intelligence and right opinion about these things. Under this one head we must group everything which has its existence, not in words nor in bodily shapes, but in souls-from which it is dear that it is something different from the nature of the circle itself and from the three things mentioned before. Of these things intelligence comes closest in kinship and likeness to the fifth, and the others are farther distant. The same applies to straight as well as to circular form, to colours, to the good, the, beautiful, the just, to all bodies whether manufactured or coming into being in the course of nature, to fire, water, and all such things, to every living being, to character in souls, and to all things done and suffered.For in the case of all these, no one, if he has not some how or other got hold of the four things first mentioned, can ever be completely a partaker of knowledge of the fifth..."
(Plato, Lett. VII)
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