quotes & thoughts

Mahatma Gandhi: It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.
SELFHOOD

Maya Angelou: You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.

Jonathon Keats: In an age of head scans and neural implants, why not augment your appearance with neuroscience.

Georges Bataille:  Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. The 21st century will be feminine or not at all.

Jean Baudrillard: All societies end up wearing masks.

Marina AbramovicWe are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute.

JR:  With humour, there is life.

Patti Smith: Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been… Paris for me was a Mecca.

Philippe Starck: When I design, I don’t consider the technical or commercial parameters so much as the desire for a dream that humans have attempted to project onto an object.

Charles Baudelaire: What strange phenomena we find in a great city… life swarms with innocent monsters.

Steve Jobs:  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Nolan Bushnel: What young people need is a place that has the feel of an unhosted party where they find themselves interacting with like-minded strangers.

Erik Adigard: Nothing changes until we do.

Andrei Tarkovsky: Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count. Sculpting In Time (1986)

Honore de Balzac: An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.

Bruno Latour: There is no control and no all-powerful creator, either – no more ‘God’ than man – but there is care, scruple, cautiousness, attention, contemplation, hesitation and revival.

NON-HUMAN
Donna Haraway: There is no becoming, there is only becoming-with.

Jiddu Krishnamurti: You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

Charles de Gaulle: The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.

Albert Einstein:  If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.

Victor Hugo:  Alas! alas! small things come at the end of great things; a tooth triumphs over a mass. The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale, the book will kill the edifice.

Umberto Boccioni:  We are passing through a stage in a long progress towards interpenetration, simultaneity and fusion, on which humanity has been engaged for thousands of years. (from Plastic Dynamism, 1913)

PROCESS
Otl Aicher: in design, man takes his own development in hand. For human beings, development is no longer nature, but self development. […] In design man becomes what he is.

Tim Parsey:  Our opportunity, as designers, is to learn how to handle the complexity, rather than shy away from it, and to realize that the big art of design is to make complicated things simple.

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville:  If the designer is to make a deliberate contribution to society, he must be able to integrate all he can learn about behavior and resources, ecology and human need. Taste and style just aren’t enough.

Joseph Beuys: Research and experiment have replaced form as the guiding force.

EXPERIENCE
Guy Debord: The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. »Comments… + »NYT article

Nolan Bushnel:  What young people need is a place that has the feel of an unhosted party where they find themselves interacting with like-minded strangers.

Deiter Rams:  Space does not exist for objects, space exists for people.

Erik Adigard: Life is like a river. In the week we try to go upstream, on Sunday we let it carry us downstream.

Lev Manovich: The flaneur navigates through the flows of passer-bys and the city streets, enjoying the density of stimuli and information provided by the modern metropolis. He can intensify his experience of “being in the flow” by choosing particular places and times of days.

H.U. Obrist, curator: The one who observes becomes the one who is observed?

Steven Pinker on Plato:  The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows. The information in an internal representation is all that we know about the world.

MACHINISM
Ray KurzweilThe story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

Dorothea Olkowski : desire is simply machinic . . . it makes connections”  … It is these connections or assemblages which allow desire to flow and which have the capacity to transform bodies and produce new social formations.

Marshall McLuhan: It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.

Karl Gerstner: The process of designing is reduced to an act of selection: crossing and linking parameters.

Ben Cerveny:  There’s always been a network connected to an iconic image.

Mark Wigley : Well, the Bauhaus is like a virus. …from what seems like a human project, let’s figure out the dimensions of the human body, let’s organize a system that takes care of that body. Soon it’s like: “Let’s make a new body! Let’s make architecture and furniture and equipment that shapes a new human!” Ah, then it’s like: “Let’s make a super-human!
We are the victims of the Bauhaus. …/… It’s fine to have an iPhone, it’s not so fine to BE an iPhone. …/… Before we kill ourselves, let’s kill the Bauhaus.

REPRESENTATION
Marie-José Mondzain:  Image is a fundamental condition for thought.  »What Does Seeing an Image Mean? 2010

Paul Virilio, theorist: Images contaminate us like viruses.

Umberto Eco: A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection— not an invitation for hypnosis.

Marshall McLuhan: The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

Michael RennerThe key issue of the creation of visual messages for the purpose of social interaction is the generation of images and the analysis of their perception by an audience. (from Visible Language, 2017)

Boccioni: What needs to be painted is not the visible but what heretofore has hitherto been held to be invisible, that is, what the clairvoyant painter sees.
Marshall McLuhan:  Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

Régis Debray: Everything that was from the realm of representation has migrated to that of experience.

Paul Cezanne, painter: Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

Chuks Ogene:  Artstraction is a philosophical contemporary-art experiment involving the ‘extraction’ of art from a particular subject which may already (or not) exude artistic properties and values.

Jeff Hawkins: The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation.

Thom Mayne: Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality.

Noam Chomsky: The landscape of generative tools is revealing a new language whose components are both visual and verbal. These components can be combined in an infinite variety of meaningful ways, much like the linguistic elements we use in speaking and comprehending.

Erik Adigard: Who controls our retina controls our mind. Who controls our gaze controls our thoughts.

Walter Benjamin:  The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

Ben Cerveny:  The modern icon is only a doorway into the outward. _

Roland Barthes:  The photographic image… is a message without a code.

Aristotle:  The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance

.Erik Adigard:  Image brings reality everywhere at the same time.

Lissitzky:  In contrast to the old monumental art [the book] itself goes to the people, and does not stand like a cathedral in one place waiting for someone to approach . . . [The book is the] monument of the future.

Robert Smithson:  Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.

Ben Shahn:  I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.

Julian Barnes:  It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist’s studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.

God, Genesis 1:26-28: Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth.

RUINS
Alfred Jarry: You won’t have destroyed everything until you have destroyed the ruins.

William Faulkner: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery: A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. _

Erik Adigard: While productivity is overrated and Earth is on death row.

ART
Marcel Duchamp: It is the spectators who make the pictures.

Anish Kapoor: Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Pablo Picasso: I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

Camille Paglia:  Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years.

André Malraux:  Art exists for its role of permitting men to escape their human condition, not by fleeing it, but by possessing it. All art is a means of taking hold of human destiny.

POLITICS
Simon de Montfort: Kill them all and let God sort them out.

Maurice R. Stein & Larry Miller: Modernism at this moment must be considered the end of the Renaissance. (1970)

Pablo Neruda:You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep Spring from coming.

MLK: We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.  +  The time is always right to do what is right.

Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world.

President Obama: The future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create.

PHILOSOPHY
Deleuze & Guattari: Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess.

Gilles Deleuze: A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

George Kubler: We always may be sure that every man-made thing arises from a problem as a purposeful solution.