Frank Chimero, a man full of good ideas, shared another one recently: a text playlist. Basically, it’s a selection of readings that he revisits on a regular basis, “almost a pep talk in text form,” as he describes it. Frank’s list included a ton of good stuff (I’ve done some thinking about “stock and flow” myself), and the wonderful Liz Danzico responded in kind with a great list of her own.

I’m still working on my list, but while I’m in the process of pulling it together I decided I had to share one reading that I’ve been revisiting a lot over the last few days. It’s from Lawrence Weschler’s incredible book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, which is about the artist Robert Irwin. Chapter 15 is called “Being Available in Response,” which is also the name of a project initiated by Irwin.

The first time I read this chapter I nearly lept out of my chair — I got so excited I reread it three or four times right away.

Rather than trying to explain the project too much, though, I’ll let Irwin (and Weschler) tell you about it as they do in the book. Here’s Irwin:

“I just sort of let it be known that I was available, in a way like I’m saying it to you. I mean, I didn’t put out any ads or anything, but word got around. And you could be, let’s say, up at UCLA, and you’d say, ‘Well, let’s take advantage of that. We’ll have him come up and talk to the students.’ And that’s what I’d do. Or, ‘We’ll have him come up and do a piece on the patio.’ And I would just come up and do that.

“There’s an important distinction to be made here,” [Irwin] continued, “between organizing and proselytizing, on the one hand, and responding to interest, on the other. I was and continue to be available in response. I mean, I don’t stand on a corner and hand out leaflets. I’m not an evangelist. I’m not trying to sell anything. But on the other hand, if you ask me a question, you’re going to get a half-hour answer.’”

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Taking a break to set my fear aside while reading this NYT review of former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke’s new book, I was reminded of how much I enjoy the language of hacking:

North Korea is suspected of being behind the cyberattacks of July 2009 that took down the Web servers of the Treasury, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department and is thought to have placed “trapdoors” — code that allows hackers future access to a network — on computer networks on at least two continents.

Trapdoors are just one device that rival nation states and cyberterrorists can use. There are also “logic bombs” (code that can set off malicious functions when triggered), Distributed Denial of Service (D.D.O.S.) attacks (in which a site or server is flooded with more requests for data than it can process), and foreign-manufactured software and hardware that might have been tampered with before being shipped to the States.

For more — including rock phish, flip buttons, and of course, Trojan horses — consult Wikipedia’s “malware” category page.

As is now widely known, and as NYT reports, Twitter has donated the tweets from its public timeline to The Library of Congress. The data takes up much less physical and digital space than you’d think. Ten billion tweets occupy just 5TB of storage space, enough to easily fit on a desktop. But dealing with the onslaught of primary source material may require a new kind of historian:

A tool like Google Replay is helpful in focusing on one topic. But it displays only 10 Tweets at a time. To browse 10 billion — let’s see, figuring six seconds for a quick scan of each screen — would require about 190 sleepless years. […] [History professor Daniel J.] Cohen encourages historians to find new tools and methods for mining the “staggeringly large historical record” of Tweets. This will require a different approach, he said, one that lets go of straightforward “anecdotal history.”

Rather than telling and retelling history, then, the new historians’ role will be to edit history. Liz Danzico explains,

[I]nformation overload is not a new problem and therefore does not accurately describe what’s at issue today. The critical issue is simply a failure of filters.

Enter the editor.

There has long been an invisible tribe, a mysterious group, who transform scattered thoughts into compelling stories, who splice hundreds of hours of video into feature-length films, who segregate the semicolons from the em dashes. These are editors working across media sectors — publishing, film, music, more — to deliver transformative stories with clarity and grace.

Whether we see it or not, we’re becoming editors ourselves. In the Gutenberg era, the one-to-many relationship, in which an editor dictated the content for the masses, was common. In the post-Gutenberg era, our reliance became more democratic: We sought out editors who could sift through the staggering amount of information for us, signal where to look, what to read, and what to pay attention to. Now there’s another shift at play; […] We are, for the first time, accepting the role of editor, and exhibiting our editorial qualities outward.

What’s interesting in comparing these two articles is the push and pull between the kind of bottom-up, user-generated editing that Liz describes and the kind of top-down, authority-driven editing that historians represent. My suspicion is that we’ll need a blend of the two — historians who are also users, who are sensitive to the kind of spontaneous, networked editing that Liz describes, but who are also comfortable taking a broader view than anyone in the midst of a historical moment ever could. Digital humanities, indeed.

Above: A West German “‘book forest,’ where people can leave or find old volumes.” Photo by Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times.

Michael Kimmelman pens an ode to Germany’s “D.I.Y. Culture” in the NYT. He inquires about the high volume of bookshops:

Berliners looked nonplussed when I asked them to account for all the bookshops. Along with currywurst and nude saunas, bookstores have long been such a banal fact of life here, as they are across Germany, that only an outsider might bother to think their number was remarkable. The proliferation turned out to derive from a very conscious decision after the war to restore civilization in West Germany by supporting a kind of ecosystem of small publishers and small bookstores to which, in certain small towns, trucks that delivered books to the bookstores overnight also delivered drugs to the drugstores: drugs for the body, books for the mind, a metaphor of recovery.

More on the effects of portability and movement on books here. More on the relationship between writing and pharmacology here, thanks to Plato.

Today’s NYT has an interview with Lost’s Executive Producer Carlton Cuse that touches on Charles Dickens and the act of writing serially:

The thing that we actually do is we take the nemesis of network television — the act structure — and we try to turn it to our advantage. We have six commercial breaks in an episode of “Lost,” and so our goal is when we’re breaking stories, how are we going to really make each one of these commercial breaks really exciting. Those questions led to a lot of really intense scenes and cool reversals and surprises, and I guess it must have been how Dickens would cliffhanger the end of his serials in the newspaper when he was writing them to try to get people to show up the next day.

More on seriality and Dickens here — otherwise, be sure to push the button.

Above, from top: Vendors for Ooga Booga, Sister, and The Holster, at the 2009 NY Art Book Fair, PS1, Queens NY. Photos taken by Martine Syms, Golden Age, Chicago IL.

In 2004 the New York Times Magazine’s annual Year in Ideas issue included an entry for the “Anti-Concept Concept Store,” which detailed a series of “guerilla stores” Comme des Garçons had opened in “hip, yet-to-be-gentrified areas in cities around the world, including Berlin, Barcelona, Helsinki, Singapore, Stockholm, Ljubljana, and Warsaw.” The article continues to describe the shops, “which are installed in raw urban spaces,” and their inventory: “‘seasonless’ merchandise drawn from current and past collections.” Comme des Garçons would keep the shops open for a single year, and then close up and move on. The new format enabled “companies to tap into new markets at low cost” and “to reduce inventory by recycling old merchandise. The pop-up shop, at least in contemporary retailing circles, was born.

But pop-up shops, by another name, are as old as human society itself. As long as we’ve been gathering in urban spaces we have built markets to trade, and those markets have sustained nomadic, made-to-order commerce, a mentality of sink-or-swim success, the retrading or recycling of used goods, and the aspirational promise of buying one’s way into a better life. The bazaar seller, the flea marketeer, and the street hawker all run pop-up shops, as do the pushcart vendor, the stadium winger, the traveling salesman, the Avon girl, and the Good Humor man. Tupperware Parties are pop-up shops. So are book signings and lemonade stands.

Shops are public spaces. For each of its objects available for sale, a value is assigned. Together, a shop’s setting and prices help its objects to become socialized. We collectively answer questions like: Which objects do we value and why? What can we do with these objects once they’ve entered our community? How do the objects gathered here represent us? The shop is a natural habitat for design.

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Above: Interior of Interaction of Color from Eye 75. Photo by Noah Kalina.

There are two types of primary colors: additive and subtractive. The subtractive primaries (CMYK) are made of pigment and become darker when combined, while the additive primaries (RGB) are made of light and become brighter when combined. In this formulation, Yale University Press’s new expanded edition of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is distinctly additive, brightening the corners of this influential classic and broadening it to a two-volume slipcased set.

With colored bindings inspired by one of Albers’s lessons, these volumes operate in concordance: one carries the text, the other an expanded set of 145 plates created by the artist and his students. The reworked design brings Interaction of Color closer to its original 1963 edition, which, according to Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, was a “set of unbound folders […] heavier and larger than anything Yale University Press had ever published.”

Once again more suited to a museum patron’s coffee table than an art student’s backpack, this comprehensive set changes our interaction with Interaction, insisting we clear a space, spread the book of plates beside Albers’s descriptions, and learn the act of seeing color afresh. In lesson after lesson, Albers shows the mutability and pliancy of color as a creative material, how it is changed by the colors surrounding it, by the time we spend looking at it, by its distance from our eye, and by our eye’s own imperfections as a perceptual apparatus.

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Above, top: The Hamilton Digital Watch, the world’s first digital watch, released in 1970. Above, bottom: Emmett Williams, “IBM,” 1973.

One of the most important things I’ve ever read about typography is Paul Elliman’s essay “My Typographies.” Here’s the sparkling gem of it that I’m so fond of quoting to my students:

Writing gives the impression of things. Conversely, things can give the impression of writing.

Beautifully put. In the essay that follows, Elliman dances among several examples of things that give the impression of writing, each of which is connected powerfully to our own origins and the rhythms of life on this planet. He reads the types of clouds in the sky, looks at constellations and signals sent to outer space through the Arecibo Message, unpacks the passing of Uruk tokens, scans the Talmud, finds our flickering digital beginnings in ASCII text and LED watches, then turns to alphabetic codes, GPS messages, and more. Perhaps his most intuitive example, though, is the alphabet of DNA, on which he quotes genetics professor Steve Jones:

It has a vocabulary (the genes themselves), a grammar (the way in which the inherited information is arranged), and a literature (the thousands of instructions needed to make a human being). The language is based on the DNA molecule, the famous double helix; the icon of the 20th century. It has a simple alphabet, not 26 letters, but just four, the four different DNA bases, A, C, G, and T for short.

And now, via Kottke, we learn of Christian Bök, who will encrypt a poem on a particularly resilient bacteria called Deinococcus radiodurans. As Wired describes Bök’s process, part of the appeal of doing this (apart from seeing if it Can Be Done) seems to be about constraint:

Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

In many ways, Bök’s project reminds me of Emmett Williams’s work — Sweethearts, of course, but also his lesser-known IBM poem, which uses a technique called “expansion by alphabet,” a process I intend to write more about in the future. However, for the time being, let me just say that no sooner had I found a computational method for collecting Williams Words then I found out that Williams himself had been experimenting with computational verse using this form. Williams is always one step ahead — beautiful. More on the IBM poem here and here.

Peter Mendelsund points to an interesting book by architect François Blanciak. From the MIT Press description,

What would happen, he asks, if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published.

The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain-link towers, ball-bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing — and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from.

Metropolis’s blog has more:

Taken together, the drawings are meant as a tonic, Blanciak writes, to architectural theory’s “sole focus on writing,” offering “a creative alternative to critical academic literature.”

I’ll be interested to pick this book up. There’s a bit of Harris Burdick in it — the kind of book that sets the reader’s imagination to work.

I’ve got a review of the new edition of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color in the most recent issue of Eye, but there’s also an interesting piece about the future of typography online that collects thoughts from Chester Jenkins, Jonathan Hoefler, and Stephen Coles that’s a good overview for those new to the subject. Titled “The End of Default,” this bit from Simon Esterson and Jay Prynne’s introduction caught my attention:

Clients such as corporations and publishers who were accustomed to branding every visible square inch with their custom fonts had to accept the default nature of the Web, and many designers have long resigned themselves to living through the typographic equivalent of the dark ages, relieved partially by the advent of Cascading style sheets (CSS) which allow much greater control over the styling elements of a website, including the size, weight and style of the (still limited range of) fonts.

For a significant minority of designers, the limited type palette became a signifier of authenticity, a cool hair shirt they could wear with pride. The “default look” of non-Flash websites has spilled into books, magazines and music design as a conscious style choice rather than necessity.

Back in 2003, I wrote a piece about defaults for Emigre that tried to present them as the thorny, complex topic that they still continue to be. Defaults still serve to self-reflexively critique their own making (as diagnosed above), but they also extend Modernist concepts into the present and update them. I wonder if they will continue to be a productive area of critical inquiry. Historically, they were an intriguing response to the ’90s debates about the possibility of designer-authors. Where once the question was, “How do designers assert themselves as authors?”, defaults countered, “What if you take designers out of the system altogether?”

While the Eye quote above has a slightly skeptical bent about this work, I see it today with more positive eyes. Rereading “Default Systems in Graphic Design” now, I feel increasingly distant from my point-of-view then. That tends to happen with certain kinds of critique; they become dated faster than the work they describe. My goal these days is to write things that, whenever possible, are slower, richer, and hopefully more enduring.

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