Mon, 20 Jan 2003
Nixie tube digital clocks
This is just so cool.
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posted at: 20:18 | path: /toys | permanent link to this entry
Speaking of art as communication ...
Is this
art?
(It's certainly an infectious meme, as witness its spread via LiveJournal. But
what, exactly, is it communicating?)
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posted at: 11:53 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
Tolstoy on Art
Leo Tolstoy's essay on the nature of art (written in 1896) is still
worth reading today; in particular, his analysis of art as a form of
communication, and of the quality of at as a function of a work's
ability to infect other minds, is a striking foreshadowing of the theory
of memes. (Other bits -- his insistence on sincerity as the highest
value, and its presence in peasant art but not upper-class art -- look
somewhat irrelevant or dated from a century's remove, but the core
diagnosis seems sound to me.)
William Burroughs said "language is a virus". Well, I suspect if Leo
Tolstoy were around and writing today, he'd probably say "no, language
is an operating system; art is a virus."
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posted at: 11:52 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
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