Working over the past few months on a fairly large web application with a lot of moving parts, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about abstraction in the design process, about how best to break it down so that my co-coder and I don’t go crazy wrestling with the complexity. Thankfully, I found a book written over 40 years ago that addresses these design problems directly, in a formal writing style both lucid and technical.

Patterns and models

Christopher Alexander, the architect and theorist best known for popularizing the pattern language method of analyzing design problems, wrote Notes on the Synthesis of Form in 1964, when he was 28 years old. The book was hailed as a breakthrough in design theory, but it also quickly gained notoriety in computer science, as the pioneers in that field recognized that the framework could be adapted to the nascent language structures they were developing (Alexander’s later book A Pattern Language is cited as one of the most influential works leading to the invention of modern object-oriented programming). Instead of a bottom-up approach that seeks to gather existing pattern recipes from those working in the field, Notes outlines a process by which you can methodically break a problem into related sets of diagrammed models, yielding a top-down solution.

To understand the human body you need to know what to consider as its principal functional and structural divisions. You cannot understand it until you recognize the nervous system, the hormonal system, the vasomotor system, the heart, the arms, legs, trunk, head, and so on as entities. You cannot understand chemistry without knowing the pieces of which molecules are made. You cannot claim to have much understanding of the universe until you recognize its galaxies as important pieces. You cannot understand the modern city until you know that although roads are physically intertwined with the distribution of services, the two remain functionally distinct.

One of the comforting sentiments in the book is his recognition that individual humans are unable to intuitively solve complex, modern problems without a visual model or mathematical structure to illustrate how the individual components interrelate (Alexander includes some nifty diagrams and sketches throughout the work).  The epilogue of the book states his focus succinctly:

My main task has been to show that there is a deep and important underlying structural correspondence between the pattern of a problem and the process of designing a physical form which answers that problem. I believe that the great architect has in the past always been aware of the patterned similarity of problem and process, and that it is only the sense of this similarity of structure that ever led him to the design of greats forms.

A design problem is not an optimization problem

A basic tree of possible requirement sets for a kettle

His approach to design is essentially from the negative: given the yin-and-yang interplay of form (e.g. ‘teakettle’) and context (e.g. ‘person wants to boil water for tea in a kitchen’), the best way to the design the form is to develop sets of intuitively clear misfit variables, binary “good/not-good” properties. He describes this relationship in terms of “goodness of fit”:

Again, it is obvious that a kettle which is uncomfortable to hold causes stress, since the context demands that it should be comfortable to hold. The fact that the kettle is for use by human hands makes this no more than common sense. At the opposite extreme, if somebody suggests that the ensemble is stressed if the kettle will not reflect ultraviolet radiation, common sense tells us to reject this — unless some special reason can be given, which shows what damage the absorption of ultraviolet does to the ensemble. […] A design problem is not an optimization problem. […] For most requirements it is important only to satisfy them at a level which suffices to prevent misfit between the form and the context, and to do this in the least arbitrary manner possible.

Potato peelers and pruning shears

One of the crazier diagram sketches from the book's appendix, depicting an optimal layout for a rural Indian village that was planned by Christopher Alexander

If you’ve seen Gary Hustwit’s documentary Objectified, about industrial and product design, you might remember the segment about potato peelers and pruning shears. The designers relate that in their work they seek out the “outliers” first, in this case that these tools need to be comfortable and usable in the hands of a hypothetical elderly, arthritic mother. If you’ve baked in that level of accessibility into your design, then a fortiori you’ve already solved much of the problem for the rest of your users.

In the field of web design and development, this is implemented as progressive enhancement, layering additional presentation and functionality layers on top of an already well-formed, accessible system.

Alexander’s method of breaking down the problem into functional sets makes it easier to recognize these widest-angle “misfit” outliers, and to design with them in mind from the outset, before you begin to design the actual physical form of the building, city, software, etc. If you apply this approach to all of the other aspects of the problem, an individual designer can achieve a solution that is inherently simple and orderly, rather than having to prune down and optimize a cumbersome structure. He makes a compelling case, and I see myself doing a lot more up-front consideration before jumping into my next large project. One final quote to tie things together:

Consider the design of the now familiar one-hole kettle. The single wide short spout embraces a number of requirements: all those which center round the problems of getting water in and out of the kettle, the problem of doing it safely without the lid’s falling off, the problem of making manufacture as simple as possible, the problem of making manufacture as simple as possible, the problem of providing warning when the kettle boils, the need for internal maintenance. In the old kettles these requirements were met separately by three components: a spout for pouring, a hole in the top for filling and cleaning, and a top which kept the steam in and rattled when the kettle boiled. Suddenly, when it became possible to put non-corrosive metals on the market, and cheap, available descaler made it unnecessary to get into the kettle for descaling, it became apparent that all these requirements really had a single center of physical implication, not three. The wide spout can be used for filling and pouring, and as a whistle, and there is no top to fall open and let scalding water out over the pourer’s hands. The set of requirements, once its unity is recognized, leads to a single physical component of the kettle.

(Image at top adapted from photo by Flickr user Todd Ehlers)

I once again had the honor and pleasure of working with my favorite contemporary artists, Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, this time to redesign and refresh the duo’s web presence. I created the first version of their site back in 2004 and it was time for an overhaul. This design is much cleaner and brighter, highlights their excellent body of work, and creates a framework that can be built upon as new pieces and publications are added. Some portions of the site are still a work in progress, so check back soon for further additions.

Always an honor to get to improve upon a personal favorite!

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of reading the newspaper comics: youthful confusion about the differences between Garfield and Heathcliff, Marmaduke and Howard Huge, the Lockhorns and the Family Circus, wondering who was reading those giant-yet-boring Prince Valiant strips on Sunday, pondering the bizarre evolution of Robotman. I’ve read the comics religiously ever since, missing only a handful of days over the past 20+ years. But there were so many strips I simply ignored, convinced they were stodgy hangers-on from decades long past, or else that they were unfunny legacy soap operas not worth the time to investigate.

Thankfully in 2004 Joshua Fruhlinger started reading the comics so we wouldn’t have to. His curmudgeonly commentary had an opposite effect, though: hundreds of thousands of people suddenly began to appreciate Mary Worth for all of her meddlesome glory, found themselves able to recite the sordid back stories of the girls of Apartment 3G, and learned new ways to determine whether or not you might in fact be a Plugger.

The Comics Curmudgeon is one of the few sites that I visit multiple times a day right in the browser (despite its handy RSS feeds), so it was a great honor to be given the chance to do a facelift of the site. Since I look at it so often, I figured I’d better do a good job. Not to mention that if I broke what was already a cherished site, I’d surely be mauled by his sizable community of rabid comics fans!

Some of the highlights of the redesign:

• An awesome new logo up there in the header depicting Josh as drawn by Ces Marciuliano, writer of Sally Forth and creator of Medium Large
• Brand new, handcrafted WordPress theme, designed to retain some of the lo-fi, Verdana-heavy charm of the old site while cleaning up the layout and typography considerably
• A new jQuery-based @reply system for the comments section, modeled after the ad hoc format that his community evolved and had been manually typing in — his posts often reach 500+ comments, so this helps keep track of who’s talking to whom a bit
• A new Advanced Archives page that lets users build the archive they’d like to see (ex: “Show me this month’s posts about Mary Worth that contain the word “meddle”, in ascending order, five per page”), also allowing for easy bookmarking of their search query
• Cleaner, lighter code and speed optimizations on the server side to help offset the time it takes to pull down the large daily comics
• A flexible “jello” layout that expands and contracts depending on the size of your browser window, to add a bit of whitespace and breathing room without breaking things for folks on smaller screens
• iPhone and “other” mobile versions of the site (which double as low-bandwidth alternatives for those on dialup who’d like a speed boost) with AJAX comment loading

Hopefully it’s all a change for the better (I think it is!), and I look forward to hearing the feedback!

So what I do is I collect stories, stories and songs and poems. I seek out the elders and garner stories and songs and poems. Stories characterized critically as “oh that’s that 60’s stuff”, like suddenly doing old rock n’ roll will be doing “that 50’s stuff”, well, this is the 90’s you know — I have a good friend in the east, a good singer and a good folk singer and a good song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says “Uh, you sing a lot about the past.” So I sing about the past. You can’t live in the past, you know? And, I say to him, “I can go outside and pick up a rock that’s older than the oldest song you know and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn’t go anywhere, did it? It’s right here, right now.” I always thought that anybody told me that I couldn’t live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered would get them in serious trouble. It’s not that 50’s, 70’s, 90’s…that whole idea of decades packaged, they don’t happen that way. The Vietnam war heated up in 1965 and ended in 1975. What’s that got to do with decades? No, that packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize important events and important ideas. I defy that.

Time is an enormous long river. And I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders were the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to and every song they created and every poem that they laid down flows down to me. And if I take the time to ask and if I take the time to seek, if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs, I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world. Bridges — from my time to your time, as my elders from their time to my time, and we all put into the river, and we let it go, and it flows away from us and away from us until it no longer has our name or our identity. It has its own utility, its own use, and people will take what they need, and make it part of their lives.

— Utah Phillips - Bridges

As we kick 2009 to the curb and bid a not-so-fond farewell to a rough decade, let’s not forget all the good things that happened, the great stories told, the friends made and the good people lost. Whether 2010 is really the turn of a new decade, or even just a journalistic convenience as Utah says, it’s never a bad time for a fresh start. Just remember that the past didn’t go anywhere, so make good use of it.

(Photo via Ben Harris-Roxis on Flickr)

Another freelance project from this Fall: a minimalist and crisp portfolio website for Austin-based photographer/artist Adam Schreiber. This hand-built site leverages clean HTML and jQuery to display his works in a custom set-based image gallery. He’s had great shows at the CRL and Art Palace, and is currently featured in his first museum show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston until February 7, 2010, so if you’re in the area be sure to check it out!

Last Summer I was asked to help design a website “brochure” for the new eClass Distance Education program, a new graduate-level legal education offering at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. I designed the basic look-and-feel of the site for them and the structure of the single-page concept with custom jQuery scrolling effect. The final coding and layout was handed over to the JMLS web team, who fleshed it out very nicely.

Trying to keep up with the proverbial Joneses, today we launched an iPhone / iPod Touch mobile web app for the University of Texas School of Law. If you want to check it out on your iPhone right away, fire up the following link in Safari: http://www.utexas.edu/law/m/

I built it from the ground up with PHP, JavaScript, and a bit of elbow grease, pulling data from a handful of existing sources both on-campus and off. It makes use of the iUI JavaScript framework, which is a great resource for getting up and running quickly (but which also has some drawbacks — I’ll likely switch to pure jQuery for the next major version, but I’m also keeping an eye on the jQTouch project). A quick rundown of the features of the web app:

• Directory Search — if you’re affiliated with UT Law School you can search our internal phone and email directory by name or department, using the native iPhone apps to place calls and send emails directly,
• Event listings and Notices pulled from our existing calendar and Law Mail announcement systems,
• RSS feed view of our press releases,
• Recent Twitter posts from our Communications office (this will make more sense when/if we have more than one Twitter account posting official news, and can combine them into one stream here),
• Maps: detailed building maps, Google maps that use the iPhone location services to guide you to our building, KML-based maps of public parking, nearby hotels, and restaurants,
• and a psuedo-iPhone style photo gallery that’s pulled from our existing mini-gallery on the regular website, adding the ability to flick through the images (did you know that Mobile Safari adds nifty JavaScript events for multi-touch gesture support? I didn’t until this project…)

There are a lot of things already in the works for the next iteration. The number one goal is to support other popular devices, to live up to the ideal of “one web, any browser”. As a developer who has wrestled against the wide range of inconsistent desktop browsers and all of their HTML and CSS inconsistencies over the years, though, it was really, really, nice to work with a single browser that already supports HTML5 and CSS3 presentation out of the box. Now I’m spoiled.

I have been quietly posting stuff, though! I’ve moved most of my side-note activities over to Tumblr, which is usually more fun for me to play with (hey, it’s got graphics and video posts in addition to links!). If you’d like to follow along, head over to debris.adamnorwood.com or sign up for my new “side-channel” RSS feed. That feed will eventually track my other linked entries around the web, from del.icio.us, YouTube, Vimeo, and whatever else I feel should be annotated and passed along and shoved into your reader. I’ll also soon be offering a firehose feed, in case you want to keep up on all of these posts from both the full blog as well as the side items. Just got to figure out how to keep Yahoo! Pipes! from chopping and screwing my media <embed>s beyond recognition…

Okay, get back to reading the rest of the web!

The first of my summer freelance projects is now live: the portfolio site for fabulous packaging designer, Christy Carroll. Love her work! Christy crafted the visual design for the site, and I implemented it in WordPress with a completely hand-tailored jQuery portfolio browser for the homepage. More to come soon…

In one of the best eye-tracking technology projects I’ve seen, the folks from the Graffiti Research Lab and FAT Lab have teamed up with Theodore Watson, Zachary Lieberman, and Christine Sugrue to tackle a novel accessibility problem: enabling pioneering graffiti artist Tempt, hospitalized for over two years with the muscle atrophy of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), to be able to tag again. Out of all of the things I heard about at SXSW this year, I think this project was the thing that excited me the most — open source hardware + software hacking, vision work, accessibility concerns, graffiti and a great story!

The system they’re developing is using the excellent openFrameworks library and two small cameras: the left can be used as a “mouse button” event by holding that eye closed, and the right eye’s pupil is tracked for gesture. The result is a simple hands-free drawing app, which they will connect with the GRL’s laser tag tools, giving Tempt the ability to express himself through graf writing again.

You can check out the rest of their videos under the TEMPT1 tag on fffff.at (“Release early, often, and w/ rap music.”), but here’s a good one to get you started:

Day #6: From Beyond from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

As reported already by many other local sources, the Paramount theater will host our latest and greatest mayoral and city council candidates for a public forum to discuss their positions on art and culture in Austin. The event is this Wednesday (April 1), at 7p.m. With politicos slashing budgets left and right to stem the economic crisis (or at least give that appearance) arts funding often gets kicked to the curb, despite the considerable income the creative community generates for the city and state. Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle says it best:

“But when money gets tight, if anything gets cut faster than library hours, it’s arts and culture. And part of the reason is we don’t show up. Let’s not make that mistake this time. A packed Paramount would send a pretty powerful message to City Hall.”

Might be worth getting to know the folks who are lining up to be Austin’s next mayor (I’ve included their Twitter @name where applicable as it’s hopefully a good way to have a conversation with them directly or at least with their campaign):

• David Buttross (and here too): independent candidate, real estate proprietor, @DavidButtross on Twitter, alternate site
• Josiah James Ingalls: democrat? can’t find an official site but he’s got a Flickr profile… UPDATE: Ingalls talks a bit about public art and his stance on public arts funding in this March 31st Austinist interview UPDATE 2: his official site, @josiah_ingalls
  
• Lee Leffingwell: democrat, painted by some as an advocate for the status quo and seems a bit cautious on arts funding, but otherwise heavily endorsed, his campaign is @TheLeeTeam on Twitter
• Brewster McCracken: democrat, also heavily endorsed. the only mayoral candidate who has a page dedicated to “creative class” issues on his official site [that I’ve found, at least…please correct me!], but mostly mentions musicians, filmmakers, and ‘digital media specialists’ — where does that leave visual artists? theater? @bmccracken
• Carole Keeton Strayhorn: democrat to republican to independent to ???, former Austin mayor and Texas comptroller, has a long history overseeing the city and state treasuries, @Carole4Austin

and city council candidates:

• Perla Cavazos: democrat, served as bond campaign manager for the Mexican American Cultural Center, responds to questions about public art for the Austinist’s Urban is Core interview, @voteperla
• Sheryl Cole: current Place 6 council member, has served on the City of Austin citizen bond committee, I don’t know her stance on the arts
• Mike Martinez: democrat, current Place 2 council member, @place2mike
• Sam Osemene: libertarian? I don’t know much about him beyond what’s on his site and memories of the contentious place 4 race against Laura Morrison
• Jose Quintero: place 2 candidate — can someone help fill me in on his info? does he have an official site?
• Chris Riley: democrat, place 1 candidate, mentions both art and music in his statement about preserving Austin’s character, talks a bit about public art in his Austinist Urban is Core response, @ChrisForAustin
  
• Bill Spelman: democrat, unopposed for place 5, PhD in public policy, former council member
  

That about sums up what I know of the candidates. I’m a bit of a local politics neophyte, so can anyone elaborate for me on what to be looking out for at the forum this Wednesday? For the candidates that already have a local or state-wide history, what do we know about their support for the arts?

(photo via shadowstorm)

Freshened up my personal blog and portfolio site for 2009. While similar to the transitional look and content that you’ve seen for the past couple of years, this theme has been hand re-written from scratch and features many advancements over the old style. The entire site is better integrated through WordPress than ever before using features newly available in WP 2.7.1 (gravatars, per-post styles, threaded comments, etc), a handful of customized plugins, subtle jQuery enhancements, and Subversion to tie it all together on the backend. I’ve also moved to a new domain after about ten years of being at asnorwood.com. All of the old links should still point to the right place (or get you pretty close), but let me know if you find something missing.

The bulk of the improvements are behind-the-scenes, but I can at least say that the following changes make my life easier and me happier:

• Uploading new portfolio work is much more straightforward.
  No more need for a separate gallery plugin!
• The category and link organization is more sensible! Tags, too!
• Better error-handling — hopefully you won’t end up 404 Not Found, but you at
  least have a sporting chance of getting unstuck now!
• The search engine optimization (I hate that term) seems to be working
  already, too. Thanks, Google!
• The search form pulls up better, more accurate results!

All of this tech stuff is secondary, of course, and I’m still trying to decide how best to balance the blog entries between my different interests. Maybe I’ll eventually split off into two or more distinct sites to keep things from rambling together. I’d also like to figure out a better way to incorporate the side-channel links (currently I’m using del.icio.us) and scrap-collecting elements (I love Tumblr for gathering quotes and other detritus, but not sure how best to tie that content in with my main site). Being nearly the fifteenth anniversary of my first website, you’d think I’d have this all figured out by now!

What do you think? What would you change?

Another fairly straightforward WordPress theme built from the ground up. This time it’s for Marsha Riti’s secondary blog, MIXED BAG, which collects her project instructions, recipes, and Craigslist finds from around Austin (are you obsessed with midcentury modern furniture and weird old junk, too?).

Hey kids! I’ve relaunched my site, moving it to its new official home at adamnorwood.com (goodbye, asnorwood.com). It’s got a new, hopefully better design, a stronger WordPress backend (the bells and whistles have all been polished), and I’ve got a slew of new content coming down the pike (I know, the last real post on here was from…last July? Uh-oh). I’m launching it into the yawning chasm that is SXSW2009, so maybe everyone will be too distracted to notice any temporary glitches or missing bits. For you faithful who are reading this in a feed reader, I thank you and ask your forgiveness for the horribly jumbled updated feed that probably greeted you this morning!

Things to look forward to:

• More posts on art from someone who’s trying to figure it all out, with more of a focus on the local (Austin, Texas) art scene
• Posts on design and technology, including some lessons learned while building up my WordPress chops
• More signal, less noise

As always, I’d love to hear any criticisms, complaints, questions, comments, or commiserations. Leave me your good words!

Another simple site for the University of Texas School of Law, this time for a working group dedicated to investigating the political and cultural implications of the Texas/Mexico border wall currently being erected. The main challenge for the design was to appeal both to the general public looking for basic information about the activities of the group while primarily serving as a clearing house for hundreds of declassified government documents and other academic material about the wall.

A quick but cute WordPress site for budding Austin children’s book illustrator Marsha Riti, designed to highlight foremost her paintings and sketches. After looking at so many other illustrators’ sites with slow-loading Flash intro pieces, broken navigation, and missing content, I vowed to keep this one clean, accessible, and friendly.

Archival digital photography and collage. 2006.

Archival digital photography and collage. 2006.

Every urban population believes in having its own collective psychology. One can ridicule this belief, but it has produced a lot of poetry, music and cinema that we are accustomed to valuing. The volume of poems about Parisian air or St. Petersburg’s weather is a sufficient justification for their architecture. However, if we don’t speak about art that is stimulated by a city but about art in the public space, then one should be very careful. The chance that any really good artwork can go through all possible channels that evaluate it is minimal. And, in general, art that is exhibited outside of arts institutions has to additionally identify itself as art. That makes art shown in the public space even more conservative than art shown within the framework of institutions.
—Boris Groys, excerpted from “6 Questions for Boris Groys”, Art Lies no. 58, p. 19

It is not important at all to me that you or anyone else should have this or that knowledge of anything written or recorded about my pictures of anyone else’s. It’s about experiencing the pictures, not understanding them. People now tend to think their experience of art is based in understanding the art, whereas in the past people in general understood the art and were maybe more freely able to absorb it intuitively. They understood it because it hadn’t yet separated itself off from the mainstream of culture the way modern art had to do. So I guess it is not surprising that, since that separation has occurred, people try to bridge it through understanding the oddness of the various new art forms. Cinema seems more of less still in the mainstream, as if it never had a ‘secession’ of modern or modernist artists against that mainstream. So people don’t tend to be so emphatic about understanding films, they tend to enjoy them and evaluate them: great, good, not so good, two thumbs up, etc. Although that can be perfunctory and dull, it may be a better form of response. Experience and evaluation — judgment — are richer responses than gestures of understanding or interpretations.
— Jeff Wall, excerpted from ‘An email exchange between Jeff Wall and Mike Figgis’, Contemporary, no. 65, 2005

There’s been plenty of talk lately in the news about the role of public art as Olafur Eliasson’s quartet of waterfalls were turned on last week. Some see the display as a way for the public to newly experience their urban surrounding (Mr. Eliasson has said that his intention was to draw fresh attention to the NYC’s waterways more than to himself or the art). Others questions the price tag: a bit over $15 million of privately-donated funds, although the money generated for the city by the tourism could well exceed that amount according to some sources.

As someone who doesn’t know very much about the critical discourse on public art (heck, I barely claim to understand “institutional” art), I find it useful to gauge the art by how the people who live around it interact with it. My first visit to Chicago coincided with the opening of Millennium Park, and I was engrossed by the sculptures, even if they are more “conservative” than the works shown in the nearby Art Institute. Perhaps not because of any transcendent message or societal insight, but because the crowd that had gathered there both day and night were having such a good time enjoying the works on display. Seeing kids laughing and playing around the Crown Fountain, adults smooshing their faces up against Anish Kapoor’s still partly-under-wraps Cloud Gate, it was all very fun and engaging. Not like other sculpture gardens I had been to! (Check out this relevant 37Signals article to see what I mean…) Another good example is Richard Serra’s Vortex at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: it’s beautiful visually, but step inside and the sculpture takes on a totally different level of interactivity, with museum-goers quickly discovering the loud reverberations they can make by clapping, jumping, shouting, screaming.

Public art seems to draw suspicion from both the citizens that pay for it and live around it as well as the art critics — is that suspicion unfounded? Does public art suffer from those who regard it too highly (the “don’t touch!” signs at the Seattle garden) or from those who feel that art has to be understood rather than experienced? I’m glad that we have the AIPP here in Austin, and it’s good to see their map dotted with “in progress” works, I just hope they don’t turn out like the ill-fated and much-maligned Moments project.

I like this quote from Sports Illustrated writer Peter King that S.C. Squibb brought up on the ArtCal Zine blog:

Saw The Gates… Nice. Unusual. Great to see Central Park so packed with people and transformed into a pretty sight in the middle of a harsh winter. An enjoyable experience. But art? I don’t see it.

Even though the fogged photograph is not in itself pure absence, but rather the eclipsing of an image, we know that what we are seeing is a representation that has been spoilt, a calamity that no technology can ever repair. The image is there, but hidden, ‘fogged’, concealed forever by a curtain of shadow, which no one is capable of raising.
— A Short History of the Shadow by Victor Stoichita, in reference to an 1839 cartoon by Cham (Amédée de Noé) from the book L’Histoire de Monsieur Jobard

Segueing nicely from their book on Gothic literature and art, I’ve been plowing through another great edition from Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series: The Cinematic. The editor has assembled critical essays on photography, its relation to cinema and video, to temporality, to narrative, to contemporary art practices — all with a fluid sense of motion conducive to making connections across the gamut of the 20th Century art world. Many of the essays touch on photography’s nature as a perverse mirror capable only of capturing what was, the inherent implications about death and impermanence corresponding to much of the Western catalog of art from the past couple hundred years. Other essays deal with the conflict and interaction between still photography and the re-playable, less-bounded world arising from Sergei Eisenstein and his early modernist contemporaries. In short, it’s right up my alley, and I hope the library here gets more from this series soon.

With these thoughts in mind, I was pleased last weekend to find the theater series of photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto sitting quietly by themselves on a side wall in the otherwise colorful LEWITT×2 show at the Austin Museum of Art. These photographs, seemingly simple shots of the interiors of old American movie palaces, speak volumes about these issues of time, death, photography, cinema, and reflection. The burning white oblivion central to the frame, created by setting up a large format camera with its shutter open through the duration of a feature film, softly illuminates the space surrounding it, highlighting the emptiness as though time itself has run its course. The blur of human motion on the screen over time adds up to a brilliant nothingness, irretrievable. Somewhere on the boundary between conceptualism and zen meditation, these were easily my favorite pieces in the show.

See also:

• Edward Hopper’s New York Movie
• Hubbard/Birchler’s Arsenal and Grand Paris Texas
• Christian Metz, Photography and Fetish on JSTOR (may require a login)

Photo above: “Canton Palace, Ohio (1980)” by Hiroshi Sugimoto. From the Hirshhorn Museum collection.

Update:

Flipping through the New York Times the day after I posted this, I was very surprised to see this photo from Fred R. Conrad’s Geometry series. Spooky!