The Air Billboard
It's one thing to consider design as: performance, entertainment, strategic foundations, sketching, statement impressions -- or, all of the above. In thinking about the legacies of environmental meditations on the efforts of Turrell, Goldsworthy, Lin -- these are combinant. The perceptions of place transformed. This: from friend, composer and digital publisher, Stuart Balcomb. Kind of embarrassing, the idea of an LA insight about a Seattle design firm -- but to each the circumspection of their...
Matthew Girvin | Ten Years
Matthew Girvin, on the day of his receipt of his Unicef passport - the global passcard of commitment to humanity It was today, ten years back, that my father called me to let me know that we'd lost my brother Matthew Girvin. Matt was on a helicopter -- during a rescue mission, for Unicef -- to the remote Uvs, a nomadically inclined provincial region in the deep winter of Mongolia. The helicopter crashed. The layering of those stories can be found here:...
METAPHORS OF THE LUMINOUS INTELLIGENCE
BRIGHT LIGHT LIGHT MIND. METAPHORS OF THE LUMINOUS INTELLIGENCE I've been working with scientists, these days, exploring ways to tell stories in a manner that people can understand. Or better still, ways that truly celebrate the power of what they are accomplishing, or dreaming of, in the nature of their work. The issue is that scientists are really great, telling stories to each other, about what they are doing, and what they believe in - for themselves. But the translation of that text --...
SHADOW AND CLARITY
Even when the winter emerges, Fall is tinting what's left of the leaves, there is a chance to find a flower or two, hanging on -- yet still resplendent, blasting color into the softened palette. Looking at the wet flowers, drops of water, thriving in the crisp light, there's a beautiful balance in the quality of the burst of brightness, and the precise shadowing of those details. Seeing that, I wonder: there is the flower, there is the shadow -- and what lies between? tsg | nyc BUILDING BEAUTY...
The Mist of Knowing
I was in an alley, early morning, only days ago -- and the cold was almost unbearable. This, 5am -- and walking the alley, steam rose up into the light, creating a kind of painting. A misted water-coloring, awash in seething color and watered plumes of fog and uncertainty -- formless steaming, streaming and gleaming in the light. And I thought about that word, that moves between the space of the certainty of the idea of light, and the painting -- if not spoken and written -- gestures of how...
RINGS OF THE IDEAL
As I touch an idea, another comes forth, and I contemplate the strength of the ringed expression of that thought (a story, perhaps,) moving outwardly -- this, arranged on a Fresnel lens -- touching like ripples, but made of glass. Light as idea. I carry the symbolism of this lens - the lensing of the lighthouse, taking the concentration of the idea(l) and beaming that illumination outwardly, in the succession of waves and circles that take us from one positioning of insight to another of...
SAVORING THE SHINE
SAVORING THE SHINE Today, in NYC, the sun is out, it's brilliantly shining. And in standing near our offices, off Madison Park, I'm looking up into the sun and savoring the shine of the light. A truck with a heart(full) calligraphy, sits there, contemplatively -- light glints off the building. I love that shine. Shine, shrine. The presence of that light emits something joyful, and being in Seatttle's perpetual oysterlit haze -- that luminous low clouded -- "where is the sun, exactly, anyway?"...
THE CENTER OF THE STORM
I SAVOR THE STORM - AND THE STORY OF ITS SPINNING Sometimes, the most utilitarian is the most beautiful evocation. I think of seeing things as voice -- there is a calling to the eye. Walking down an alley, in the lushly posh places made in South Beach (Miami Beach, FL) -- so early in the morning that the lights were out nearly everywhere. I saw three people, in a place normally thronged. Nimbus clouds unfurled in the starred morning. Walking there, alley way, I spied this piece of metal on the...
Slow attention: spinning life in the Everglades — primeval “swamp time”
Girvin, Inc. EXAMINATIONS OF FOCUS AND PRECISION | SLOW TIME, SLOW OBSERVATION -- the art of looking slow. I spent some time, working in, and exploring, Florida. I will have to confess that -- of all the places that I experienced -- even while working there, the Everglades was one of the most fascinating. And supremely undervalued, in terms of the amount of time that I needed to be there, exploring. There were so many things happening in those ecosystems that I could only just began to sense...
Flow | The Tides, the River, the Sea, the Stairs
EARLY MORNING I was out walking, just dawn, the southern shoreline -- at the southernmost reach of the United States. Out there, the birds were extraordinarily friendly -- it was like being there, at the southern border, nearly 200 miles downwards of Florida, they weren't so discontent with the condition of the human order. They lined up, moving away -- just slightly -- as I walked the pier. These were plovers, gulls, pelicans. In fact, the pelicans were the most unconcerned -- they flew...