rkjd

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

— Brian Eno
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996) 

(Source: imathers)

For a material that’s so familiar as to be practically invisible, modern industrial glass is formidably complex. Standard soda-lime glass works fine for bottles and lightbulbs but is terrible for other applications, because it can shatter into sharp pieces. Borosilicate glass like Pyrex may be great at resisting thermal shock, but it takes a lot of energy to melt it. At the same time, there are really only two ways to produce flat glass on a large scale, something called fusion draw and the float glass process, in which molten glass is poured onto a bed of molten tin. One challenge a glass company faces is matching a composition, with all its desired traits, to the manufacturing process. It’s one thing to devise a formula. It’s another to manufacture a product out of it.

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Bryan Gardiner, “Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future”

via: Wired

It’s misleading to narrate technology-and-society as if it were a screenplay or even social movement. The way we use technology is inseparable from the marketplace, and the marketplace is only as linear as we consumers are rational, a notion that depends on all sorts of assumptions about how mankind thrives and revises itself. Yet there are moments that equate to an internet version of “bottoming out,” a place so low that change becomes the only realistic option. When things get too corrosive, too stupid, to continue on, you switch directions. It’s the dialectic of embarrassment.

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—Bethlehem Shoals, “The Condition: Chronic Self-Disclosure”

via: The Awl

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection.

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Jonathan Franzen, Technology Provides an Alternative to Love

via: NYTimes