Meanwhile #025
Increasingly irrelevant in the continual and independent interaction between objects.
Remembering Gerald Holtom, designer of the CND symbol.
“Nobody had rights to it. Holtom himself had never claimed copyright; he wanted the design to be freely available to any group who fought the same cause. It success was almost immediate. The rest of the world adopted it for other movements – in the US, it stood for feminism and civil rights as well as opposition to the Vietnam war – so that it slowly lost its strict association with the phrase 'ban the bomb' and came instead to represent peace and justice more generally, especially when those ideas conflicted with the establishment view. … The encircled A of anarchism may have its roots in the 19th century; the A may stand for anarchism and the O for the order that A is the mother of; but it’s hard not to suspect that its popular form as a punk monogram took Holtom’s design as its inspiration.”
“The interesting, or alarming thing (depending on how you look at it) in all of these developments is the displacement of the notion of control. In each case – the thermostat, the toilet, the floor, the window, and on a larger scale also the traffic and weather sensors in our smart cities – the devices are designed to both react to and trigger changes in circumstances. In doing that, these devices introduce a fundamental ambiguity of who is in charge. They analyse our behaviour over a longer period of time, which they then transform into an automated pattern that regulates the world around us, until eventually this world, continuously doctored and perfected, fits us like a glove. The patterns we leave, however incidental or random, become automated, eternal. They are our new truths. (Is it a coincidence that there is an acute resemblance between smart city marketing speak and biblical language?) The more our patterns are engrained, the more they become a straightjacket. Our unique identity, our behavioural DNA, becomes a form of solitary confinement, from which there is no escape.”
“Within a few minutes of my meeting him, he was putting things in my hands. He handed me, for instance, a 1,000-year-old Chinese porcelain plate — the kind of object you would expect to see in a climate-controlled glass case in a museum, protected, at great expense, from clumsy, meaty, oily, inexpert hands like mine. De Waal just passed it to me as if it were nothing. To understand an object, he believes, you have to touch it. In my fingers, the plate felt both fragile and indestructible. It was older than printed books, older than every traceable generation of my family. I could have snapped it in half or thrown it on the floor. Instead, I just stood there, probing its edges with my finger pads, weighing it in my palms, tracing the precise volume of space that it was displacing in the world. If all went well, this delicate thing would outlive us all by many more generations. My fingers felt this as they felt the plate. I was touching not only space but time.”
Maria Popova reviews Lisa Randall's Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs.
“How humbling to consider that a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos millions of years ago hurled at our unremarkable piece of rock a meteoroid three times the width of Manhattan, which produced the most massive and destructive earthquake of all time, decimating three quarters of all living creatures on Earth. Had the dinosaurs not died, large mammals may never have come to dominate the planet and humanity wouldn’t be here to contemplate the complexities of the cosmos. And yet in a few billion years, the Sun will retire into the red giant phase of its stellar lifetime and eventually burn out, extinguishing our biosphere and Blake and Bach and every human notion of truth and beauty. Stardust to stardust.”
Bowie, Barnbrook and Blackstar.
“The point behind the lengthy explanation [for The Next Day] was just to put into context what was quite a difficult cover for many people to accept. Also, I wanted do graphic design a bit of a wider service by showing that design is very much a conceptual process, not just a commercial one. There isn’t enough clear explanation of work by designers, not about why they did such a nice branding job, but the larger cultural and conceptual issues that designers do face when sitting down to do their work. … There will be less direct explanation for ★ as it is much more within the tone of the music to leave it open. Bowie also taught me a very good lesson when he saw that I had put the roughs of The Next Day covers in the V&A’s David Bowie Is … exhibition. He asked me to be careful because these change the final design – I think it was a lesson that he had learned through making music. Roughs are not just roughs, they can dilute the concept of what you are trying to say with the final work.”
That is all.