Expressways and Networks

I. Focus

Filming through the wire mesh of a highway overpass during evening rush hour, I finally discovered how to mess with the videocam's focus, on purpose. (How can I practice shifting my inner focus?)

I think this is my most beautiful micromovie yet.
Light is just so, so amazing... What is it?

Expressway (1:01 min.)



Making these flicks is like creating building blocks or learning basic vocabulary words.
They become the components of possibility.
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II. Social Networking without a Phone

[This part of the post got edited for legal reasons, so it may not make a lot of sense, but I wanted to keep the image references anyway.]


As I've been thinking about the connections between ideas and design, I've been looking at design books and came across the designer Charles Eames's diagram of the "social network" (what used to be called friends and acquaintances) of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

(Wouldn't these big talkers have loved a BlackBerry like Obama's?)

I've been wondering if I should get back on FB--at least for a while--and start twittering (is that the verb?).
What am I missing?

BELOW: Eames's diagram "Friends and Acquaintances" for the 1976 U.S. bicentennial exhibition The World of Franklin and Jefferson.
Ben and Jeff in the middle, and the names around them are J. Adams, T. Paine, Lafayette, Washington, etc. [click to embiggen]


I wonder if anyone has done a text message/twitter version of something like the Constitutional Convention, the way people have done Twitter versions of Jane Austen novels, say.

Here's a sample of Pride and Twitterverse, from Under the Mad Hat:

LizzyB:
@JaneB Get this! We have to review Darcy’s blog. He has the most beautiful template I’ve ever seen.
LizzyB:
@JaneB Holy crap! He just tracked my IP through site meter. AM MORTIFIED!!!
LizzyB:
@JaneB But for some strange reason, he friended me on FB instead of getting mad. Colour me confused.

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* Diagram from The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (Abrams 1997), posted at Ask Edward Tufte (author of Beautiful Evidence).

Philip Morrison, in an interview on Ray and Charles Eames:

"They really loved the world and how it looked and they tried to understand why it looked that way and what it meant for people and what it meant to see beauty and to see form and to see the absence of those things and everything else and they just went around the world doing that for people--in buildings, and in text, and in film..."