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"Everything you can imagine is real."— Pablo Picasso

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Archive

Apr
7th

Sun

“Dare to be naïve.”

— Buckminster Fuller, an American engineer, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist (1895-1983), Motto of R. Buckminster Fuller; used in many of his speeches and writings, including Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking 1975

Apr
5th

Fri

An abstract gets close scrutiny

At the San Francisco Museum of Art (taken before 1975, Life Magazine)
“What I think is so interesting about this photograph is the way that the girls are responding to the space of the modern art gallery: they are not merely ignoring the art on the walls, but literally looking beyond those walls. It is not a quick glance or sneaky peek, either. This is intense, curious looking that requires them to physically crouch down and brace themselves against the grate in order to get the closest possible view through the vent. The square grid-like vent seems congruous with the canvasses of the modern art gallery, and the children are inspired to look beyond the surface of lines and shapes. (…)

As Clement Greenberg, that stalwart champion of abstract expressionism, once said: “To hold that one kind of art must invariably be superior or inferior to another kind means to judge before experiencing; and the whole history of art is there to demonstrate the futility of rules of preference laid down beforehand: the impossibility, that is, of anticipating the outcome of aesthetic experience.” (From his Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961), pp. 133).

So, the girls might not be looking at the abstract art on the gallery walls, but who is to say that their examination of whatever lay beyond that vent is any less of a valid aesthetic experience?”

— The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things, 22 Dec 2012.

Nov
19th

Mon

— Bruno Munari, Italian artist and designer (1907-1998), cited in Keri Smith, How To Be An Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum, Penguin Books, 2008, p.116.

Jul
19th

Thu

“He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.”

— Elie Wiesel, Romanian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor (b. 1928), Night, Hill & Wang, 1960.

Jun
28th

Thu

“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, a multilingual Russian novelist, poet and short story writer (1899-1977), cited in Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran, 2003. Illustration

Jun
6th

Wed

“I hate a Roman named Status Quo!” he said to me. “Stuff your eyes with wonder,” he said, “live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

— Ray Bradbury, American writer (1920-2012), Fahrenheit 451, Ballantine Books, 1953.

May
22nd

Tue

“Eve and the apple was the first great step in experimental science.”

— James Bridie, was the pseudonym of a Scottish playwright, screenwriter and surgeon whose real name was Osborne Henry Mavor, Mr. Bolfry: a play in one act, Constable, 1948, p. 45.

Jan
14th

Sat

The Future Belongs to the Curious

“We’re all born with it. Albert Einstein dubbed it “holy,” Alistair Cooke called it “free-wheeling intelligence.” It’s that piquing force that nudges us to try it again, explore it some more, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out. From the moment we open our eyes, it fuels our existence. With each new answer we find, our world expands and our passions grow. We can’t wait to share what we’ve learned and teach others how to do it themselves. (…) The future belongs to the curious. The ones who are not afraid to try it, explore it, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out.”

— Manifesto, Skillshare, Jan 10, 2012

Jan
12th

Thu

“Now, why should the universe be constructed in such a way that atoms acquire the ability to be curious about themselves?”

— Marcus Chown, award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster, currently cosmology consultant for New Scientist magazine, The Magic Furnace: The Search for the Origins of Atoms, Oxford University Press, 2001

Oct
1st

Sat

“Beauty is a particularly potent and intense form of curiosity. It’s a learning signal urging us to keep on paying attention, an emotional reminder that there’s something here worth figuring out. (…)

The beauty keeps us from looking away, tickling those dopaminergic neurons and dorsal hairs. Like curiosity, beauty is a motivational force, an emotional reaction not to the perfect or the complete, but to the imperfect and incomplete. We know just enough to know that we want to know more; there is something here, we just don’t what. That’s why we call it beautiful.”

— Jonah Lehrer, American journalist who writes on the topics of psychology, neuroscience, and the relationship between science and the humanities, ☞ Why Does Beauty Exist?, Wired science, July 18, 2011

Aug
2nd

Tue

“A philosopher once asked, “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?”

Pointless, really…”Do the stars gaze back?” Now that’s a question.”

— Neil Gaiman, English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre and films

Rolf-Dieter Heuer on the limits of human knowledge

“Q: Can something as vast and as complex as the universe ever be reduced to the scope of human mental capacities, or are there natural limits to what we can know?

That is a difficult question. Every time we discover something, we open the door to new knowledge but find new sets of questions that are more complex and dig deeper into the subject. So there is no real limit, the process of discovery never stops. Maybe the time to answer these questions, i.e. to open these new doors, will increase, but eventually we will be able to open them. ”

— Rolf-Dieter Heuer, German particle physicist and the Director General of CERN since 2009, “We Are Crossing the Boundary Between Knowledge and Belief”, The European, 17.05.2011

Aug
1st

Mon

“I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. (…)

Neither do I believe that the spirit of adventure runs any risk of disappearing in our world. If I see anything vital around me, it is precisely that spirit of adventure, which seems indestructible and is akin to curiosity.”

— Marie Curie, Polish physicist–chemist famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. The first person honored with two Nobel Prizes (1867-1934), cited in Madame Curie: A Biography (1937) by Eve Curie Labouisse, p. 341.

Jul
31st

Sun

Jul
30th

Sat

Stewart Brand: ‘Look At the World Through the Eyes Of A Fool’

“I think we have become too shortsighted. (…) When everything is moving fast, the future looks like it is next week. But what really counts is the future ten or hundred years from now. And we should also bear in mind that the history that matters is not only yesterday’s news but events from a decade or a century or a millennium ago. (…)

When NASA released the first photographs of the earth from space in the 1960s, people changed their frame of reference. (…) We began to talk more about “humans” and less about Germans or Americans. We began to start talking about the planet as a whole. That, in a way, gave us the ability to think about global problems like climate change. (…)

We like to think that we are living in a very violent time, that the future looks dark. But the data says that violence has declined every millennium, every century, every decade. The reduction in cruelty is just astounding. (…)

The internet is better than any catalogue or encyclopedia could ever be. (…) When you give internet access to people in the developing world, they immediately start forming educational networks. They expand their horizons, children teach their parents how to read and write. (…)

Q: “Stay hungry, stay foolish”. Why?

It proposes that a beginner’s mind is the way to look at new things. We need a combination of confidence and of curiosity. (…) It means putting aside the explanations provided by social constructs and ideologies. (…)

Ideologies are stories we like to tell ourselves. That’s fine, as long as we remember that they are stories and not accurate representations of the world. When the story gets in the way of doing the right thing, there is something wrong with the story. (…) Marvin Minsky has once said to me that the only real evil is the idea of evil. Once you let that go, the problems become manageable. (…) No theory can be coherent and comprehensive enough to provide a direct blueprint for practical actions. That’s the idea of foolishness again: You work with imperfect theories, but you don’t base your life on them. (…)

Good is what creates more life and more options. That’s a useful frame. The opposite of that would not be evil, but less life and fewer options.”

— Stewart Brand, American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, ☞ “Look At the World Through the Eyes Of A Fool”, The European, 30.05.2011 ☞ See also: Whole Earth Catalogue