native mark-up language or cadence and marshalling

I have mused before on the exacting, formal language and grammar of heraldry (Heraldik), wonderfully medieval words and painstakingly florid descriptions in a tradition frozen and not liable to relaxing in rules and terminology due to the fact that such detailed and consistent instructions were necessary since there was no other way of transmitting an image, a coat-of-arms, short of recreating in full, with at least a sketch if not wholly with expensive tinctures and gilt. It is strange to think of pictures and impressions exclusively conjured up by the imagination and not communicated directly and I suppose it would be strange for our ancestors to experience anything otherwise. The economy of heraldry reminds me of a passage from A Canticle for Leibowitz when a monk depletes the cloister’s supply of blue tint faithfully reproducing a blue-print (Grundriss) and regrets later the waste, not realizing what was the cogent matter being conveyed with the floor-plan. All elements and attributes in blazons, on the other hand, have symbolic meanings. In adding a caption, however, even when not confined to a limited amount of characters, it’s always a choice about what details, style, emotion, likeness to focus on. I wonder if input and interface will progress to the point where one can summon up a picture with the imperfections of memory or the faulty conception of a non-artist. How many images have that same fimbriation in the dark clouds being pushed aside, and when inarticulate demands are materialized, how many chances for finding something new, different or tangential would be missed? Focusing on certain criteria, would we then miss the bigger picture and how style, likeness, nostalgia and influence hang together?

time in a bottle or pluperfect and future-tense

Bottles of wine are a bit like little secondary time-capsules, necessarily so as part of the manufacturing process, hermetically sealed and stored up, sometimes for years and years—although it’s a misconception that all wines improve with age and many times will sour or become corked. This unintentional archive, however, does resemble some of the criticisms of time-capsules in general, those walled into cornerstones or buried under pyramids and parking lots, of being unreliable narrators (unzuverlässiges Erzähler).

Those who act as curators of the past and assemble artefacts of the present for inclusion generally are not futurists and professional thinkers condemn them for not stocking their treasure chests with items that would give archeologists a useful and complete picture of their lives, etc. The critics strike me as a little bit unfair and matriculating kindergarteners should not be discouraged from hiding away something as a class and as individuals. Picking up the gravel drive way, I hesitate a bit over tossing an old screw, bit of glass, cigarette butt in the kip to eventual become the strata of a landfill and usually just knock it aside into the tall grass—for the benefit of future explorers. I wonder if any more historical elements are accidentally transmitted with the bottle under seal, other than the craft of wine-making and the quality of the growing season, the chemical signature of the terroir. While those characteristics are certainly sufficient, I do wonder if there’s not some other wayfarer (Anhalter) that’s been overlooked with the vintage, some snap-shot of a quality or quantity that isn’t recognized until later, like the growth rings of trees or ancient insects captured in amber (Bernstein).

stranger danger

Not that a day passes in the office without some sort of productivity disruption, which are mostly generated from within, conflicts and incom- patibilities among systems and safeguards, like some great, counter-adaptive lupus, but I’ve never prodded around enough to see this message and illustration before. The empty park bench symbol conveys something shady and sinister, like the perch for an electronic eavesdropper or a meeting point for something off-the-record. I wouldn’t necessarily think that the platform felt that way about public internet, but I do think that it fits to the attitude in the IT department that would go into conniptions over the idea of anything unregulated or anonymous—otherwise unsecure but not optimal for functionality either.

a series of tubes or recursive doodle

Via Colossal, photographer Connie Zhou brilliantly documents her privileged and exclusive visit to one of Google’s data centres. The organization and complexity of this wondrous information factory seems unreal, like a bonus level from Super Mario world manifest in reality. Getting this glimpse of where the internet lives reminded me of another fantastic piece of plumbing, one of the buildings of the National Library system in Paris (Bibliothéque nationale de France), which also has hot and cold running knowledge.