Monday, May 03, 2004

I guess it speaks to the company I keep that I only use my securest securest passwords not for banking on the internet, accessing e-mail, signing in for any shared applications, but for kingdomofloathing.com where I could see some of the company I keep getting online and messing with an online perona using my name. 11:49:49 PM

I was just thinking that the one really positive aspect of viruses is that they focus a bright light on the vulnerabilities of the information technology we rely more and more on in our daily lives. I think people will take security and information technology more seriously if they face the reality that the same virus that took out his or her computer could have potentially knocked out a power grid or a hospital operating room. Creating fear, cranking up the limbic brain a little to let the cortex catch up with the technology we're playing with. 11:44:08 PM

I think the best way to convey the kind of design we're talking about is to draw from a variety of media, including architecture, painting, video, audio, music, writing, to show analogies. I picked up a copy of the Architectural Digest design issue and was immediately taken by how some of the most striking design was not defined by complexity or filigree or even expense or luxury but by the sheer beauty of form and function intermingle. You think of the classics that we think of in western architecture, the Wright, the Ando (while, more eastern, part of that growing fusion), the Mies Von der Rohe, the le Corbusier (all of this is making more interested in furniture ceramic textile industrial fashion design, but I regretably can't bring any to mind, being more focused on the obtuseness of my physical surroundings, I suppose.) and yurts and woven huts and they are not remarkable as some curiousities, but because they are beautiful and elegant like a perfect callow lily that even among every other callow lilly in the florists deepest fullest cooler of callow lilies it speaks to you as if outside outside the cave in Platonic parallel universe of ideals that help illuminate my very understanding of a callow lily or a skyscaper or a beach home or the idea of portable community sustainable shelter. And they, buildings especially for me, invite you in, into a richness that says with every turn, every corner, every cast of light, you are loved. That this thing of wonder was built for you, for the moment you walked in the door, every design detail is attended to, including where you might want go inside, even if you are not there right now - and I just completely trust the builder, the architect, from that split second on. And the visual memory of those architectural experiences are more vivid for me than any other form of art, precisely because good architecture to me is the art of forms. The visual forms itself around those structures, edifying both in the process, so each fills my memory still. Other places, I remember, because they are made of forms as well, but good space, good architected spaces, those are the images that I revisit in my head in times of need, whether for a grounding in good design, a place to go, or reassurance that out of all of this mess of being human that we can accomplish improving good, better good, if despite ourselves, little by little, helping our collective conciousness see the callow lilies among all creation. 11:38:46 PM