Wednesday, October 27, 2010




I'm a big fan of Alan Kay (inventor of Object Oriented programming, and general interesting thinker) so I bought the Points of View book.

As usual, this is a connection competition. Suggest interesting parallels, contrasts, connections between the different recent acquisitions shown here.

5 comments:

John Powers said...

As an aside I wanted to share a link and Googled your blog. Not very efficient-- even my habit of putting links here instead of FriendFeed or somewheres is suspect--but what's cool about it is landing randomly on previous posts. You've covered a lot of ground over the years.

The link is to Robert Patterson pointing to "The web is the dominant force in the UK economy."

I'm struck how my friends--people my age--think about interactivity online. Some of the most concerned about "privacy" Google lots better than me and I wonder if they even know it. Like it or not the patterns we make are being made visible online. I don't think that withdrawing or not contributing online does what my friends think it does. They are still visible, still made into artifact people. What's missing is consciousness of their craft.

What I like about online is how our artifacts are displayed. Much like vernacular architecture does. In the USA there's a tradition of African American gardens to use painted stones and make bottle trees. My brother in law takes a slightly circuitous route when travelling to a certain part of town just to go by a garden like that. It makes him happy even if it's not the sort of garden he makes.

The connection I make between these titles is there are ways that we can be makers and not just artifact people made by anonymous processes only vaguely brought into consciousness.

Composing said...

Hey John. I like it (the connection) Particularly the parallels between our traces on-line and vernacular. That's something to think about.

BTW : I'm reading this guy's book on African Fractals at the moment (http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/afractal/afractal.htm) fascinating stuff if you haven't seen it.

phil

Composing said...

Try that link again African Fractals

Composing said...

Try that link again African Fractals

John Powers said...

I haven't read Eglash's book but have been very interested in his work. He's a teacher so on one hand I'm fascinated how ethnomathematics might play out in learning settings. On another hand it's just so intriguing there's a big body of mathematical tradition few have paid any attention to, so I like that he's drawing some attention to it.

Here's a review of Form & Code In Design, Art and Architecture seems directly connected to your book set.