Somewhere in Iraq…
From today’s New York Times feature: “4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images:” clearly, the U.S. military has been controlling the dissemination of graphic imagery of deaths and injuries resulting from the illegal, immoral, and unjustified war this “superpower” has been staging for over five years on the hapless citizens of Iraq (estimated Iraqi war casualties are between 90,000 and 700,000, depending on which source you cite). Read the story in the New York Times here, and view a slide show here.
“We don’t do body counts.”—U.S. General Tommy Franks
The human brain can and does (re)construct internal 3-dimensional worlds modeled on flat retinal images…
From Michael Bach’s ‘Optische Täuschung’ (Visual Illusions): “The upper contraption consists of the so-called “devil’s fork” (top right, also known as “blivet”), the “Penrose Frame” (centre) and the “hexnut” (3 of them at bottom left, an enlarged specimen at bottom right)—mind-boggling to envisage building such an object.”
M. C. Escher’s 1960 lithograph “Ascending and Descending” based on the Penrose stairs.
Melbourne, Australia
Spark was recently commissioned by Australia Post to develop a series of stamps utilizing landmark modernist architecture. Their successful design depicts the buildings in their purist form, expressing each as a sculptural piece and focusing on the play of light, shade, and form.
To learn more about Australian graphic design, you can access a PDF of the feature article “Design down under…” that I wrote for Communication Arts magazine last year here.
A clever response to the seemingly ever-more-ubiquitous surveillance camera… source: Banksy.
London, U.K.
Furniture designer William Warren has come up with a practical set of solid plywood shelves that… when your time arrives, can be taken apart and reassembled as a coffin. As Warren explains: “We’re all going to die and we will need a coffin in the future, so why not make your coffin from something you’ve owned and loved for years and save your bereaved family having to choose one (and pay for one) at an already difficult time?” Why not indeed.
The Shelves for Life retail for £350. (seen in a back-issue of Wallpaper)
It’s Pi (Approximation) Day today ( 22/7 ) first celebrated 20 years ago by Larry Shaw at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Pi or π is the mathematical constant which represents the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean geometry—it’s also an irrational number (it cannot truly be expressed as a fraction, and its decimal representation never ends or repeats), as well as a transcendental number (no finite sequence of algebraic operations on integers [powers, roots, sums, etc.] can ever produce it). More on Pi here or here.
Happy Pi Day :-)
Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba
We’ve spent an interesting day of serendipitous garage-sailing along the lake… lots of stimulating objects (old tools, whatchamaycallits, etc.) that will find themselves repurposed and/or fashioned into art objects.
Stimulating images of reuse near and far… sources unknown.
Winnipeg, Canada
So… I’ve been thinking a lot about “bias” of late (“a tendency or preference towards a particular perspective, ideology or result”) and the not-so-nuanced role that it plays re: objectivity in this communication age… especially cognitive bias, for which Wikipedia offers an excellent resource list here.
Thanks Chris Lee (an intern at Circle last year) for the brain-image; thanks Marie-Aline Oliver (in Ottawa) for pointing me to the bias list.
