too good to be true?

awesome old school artist books (the likes of lawrence weiner and bernd & hilla becher) scanned and on issuu to flip through and even download as pdfs? believe.

question everything

let me know when you figure this one out, italy.

pretty paris/montpellier

turns out one of my teachers at parsons paris (taylor holland) happens to take really awesome photos. (in addition to teaching design management kids that pie charts don't count as information graphics...) the shots above are the kinds of moments i was constantly hoping to stumble apon abroad. love them.

la photo du jour.

oh, canada!

pretty much the sweetest data visualization in defense of buying local food from our friends up north.

new books are the best

i've been going to town lately with amazon.com used books. these four feel pretty epic. i'm kinda wondering why it's taken me so long to find them...

rules for radicals

"an organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma. to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. he is a political relativist. he accepts the late justice learned hand's statement that 'the mark of a free man is that ever-gnawing inner uncertainty as to whether or not he is right.' the consequence is that he is ever on the hunt for the causes of man's plight and the general propositions that help to make some sense out of man's irrational world. he must constantly examine life, including his own, to get some idea of what it is all about, and he must challenge and test his own findings. curiosity becomes compulsive. his most frequent word is 'why?' does this mean that the organizer in a free society is rudderless? to the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations our society presents. in the end he has one conviction - a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions."

placing words

"any thing that you see, hear, smell, or touch may make you think of something else. any element of the surrounding scene may serve as a link to memories of past events and distant places, to narratives that you have heard, and to facts that you have learned. these linkages may derive from reflexes, as with pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of a bell. they may operate through resemblance, visual metaphor, metonymy, or synecdoche. they construct a virtual mise en scène on the substructure of the immediate physical one... the introduction of technologies for inscribing physical objects with text, and the associated practices of writing, distribution, and reading, created a new sort of information overlay."

relational aesthetics

"this 'chance' can be summed up in just a few words: learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution. otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist."

pedagogy of the oppressed

"in problem-posing education men and women develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation."

j'aime beaucoup

paris vs. nyc

project projects

a partner from project projects came and lectured yesterday. i was especially digging all their bilingual exhibition graphics for the canadian center for architecture and the compact lil' inventory books books. seriously cool work. check 'em out y'all.