Culture Making Articles items tagged contemplation

The paper wins

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Andy
: ?I've expressed my admiration before for John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design. But I think my admiration just went up another notch, upon the discovery that he carries this 18-year-old academic paper (literally, on paper) by Pixar's John Lasseter with him wherever he goes. The excerpts from the paper he links to are well worth reading. And I love the photo, with a sheet of paper in the background containing, over and over, the handwritten words, "raison d'être." Three cheers.?

from "My Favorite Research Paper," by John Maeda, Our (and Your) RISD, 4 November 2008

I have carried a reprint of John Lasseter’s seminal paper on computer animation, “Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation,” for the last 18 years. This hardcopy document has been to Japan, both coasts of the US, and has really been near/dear to me and is yellowed from age and embarassingly food-stained and so forth. It occurred to me today that maybe this paper might be available online, and I just found it in excerpted form here. I’m not sure what to call it … but maybe I had a kind of myopia when it came to this one document in my life. I felt that unless I held onto it in print, that I would never be able to handily access the information. Discovering that the content is available online right now seems truly freeing to me. And yet oddly enough, I am still hesitant to place my tattered reprint into my recycling box before I leave to my next engagement this evening.

There’s always the “just in case” when it comes to any information around you. Even in this digital era we know it’s easy to lose information forever. Nothing is truly permanent. But I’ve carried this paper around for 18 years — hmmmm, as old as an RISD freshman. Ah. The power of perspective. Looks like this paper will be sticking around me for many more years to come. Dilemma resolved. Paper wins.

For one minute please stand

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Nate
: ?An invitation to urban contemplation: sometimes what we need most to make something new of a particular place are a few simple instructions.?

"114 (sutter)," by Flickr user heather, 23 April 2008

The Lacemaker (detail), by Johannes Vermeer

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Nate
: ?Lawrence Weschler writes far better than I could about this painting in his book Everything that Rises: "how everything in it is slightly out of focus, either too close or too far, except for the very thing the girl herself is focusing upon, the two strands of thread pulled taut in her hands, the locus of all her labors. This painting is about concentration: gradually, spiralingly, we come to concentrate on the very thing the girl herself is concentrating on (everything else receding to the periphery of our awareness), like nothing so much as a painter lavishing his entire attention on his subject (or else, perhaps, like what happens as we ourselves subsequently pause, dumbstruck, before his canvas in the midst of our museum walk). Are we perhaps exaggerating here? Look more closely at the threads themselves, how they arrange themselves into a crisp V, couched in the M-like cast of shade and light playing upon the hand and fingers behind them. The girl, godlike, momentarily focues all her attention onto VM, the very author of his existance."?

detail from The Lacemaker, by Johannes Vermeer (oil on canvas, c.1670), The Louvre, Paris