non sequitur

“Curating can take the lead in pointing us towards this crucial importance of choosing.”

Quote | | Paul Greer

“Lately, the word “curate” seems to be used in an greater variety of contexts than ever before, in reference to everything from a exhibitions of prints by Old Masters to the contents of a concept store. The risk, of course, is that the definition may expand beyond functional usability. But I believe ‘curate’ finds ever-wider application because of a feature of modern life that is impossible to ignore: the incredible proliferation of ideas, information, images, disciplinary knowledge, and material products that we all witnessing today. Such proliferation makes the activities of filtering, enabling, synthesizing, framing, and remembering more and more important as basic navigational tools for 21st century life. These are the tasks of the curator, who is no longer understood as simply the person who fills a space with objects but as the person who brings different cultural spheres into contact, invents new display features, and makes junctions that allow unexpected encounters and results.”

— Hans-Ulrich Obrist

(T)

Learning from Lombardi

Image | | Paul Greer


Learning from Lombardi

 

“…In Lombardi’s case, even his early scribbles on a project are more informative, because they show a fundamentally human thought process, of trying to draw the story out of the mass of data he had collected. This is the opposite of many computational approaches that begin with a mass of data, followed by an often failed attempt to simplify it.

As part of the research for his drawings, Lombardi assembled some 14,000 index cards, which are now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Each 3 by 5 inch card referenced a person or other entity. In the computational pieces that I just showed, it’s as if we’re looking at all 14,000 index cards at once. Having completed the research and data collection process, Mark knew that he must first synthesize that information into something useful. Too often, we try to make the machines synthesize for us, but in fact, synthesis—from the Greek and then Latin meaning “to place together”—is a fundamentally human task. It’s what separates us from Google…”

— Ben Fry

 

selection by ekstasis

One Hundredth Person

Aside | | Paul Greer
My Tumble Log is an ongoing collection of interesting stuff I stumble across on the internet, a commentary-free, instinctive train of randomness. It’s very self indulgent, and mainly focuses on alternative comics, interesting animation and new music, because that’s what I like, but the main aim is not to think it through too much, and just go with what feels right, because, as I may have mentioned before, I don’t have much spare time to lark about on the internet.
One hundred people have now seen fit to follow what goes on this tumblelog, which is very humbling, and also makes me feel slightly frightened, in a nice way, though.
Thanks to you 100 mostly strangers for the support.
You can also find it on Tumblr’s Artists page.
Trumpet blowing ended.