Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu – Underwater Inventor
Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu [above] holds the world record for inventions – over 3,000 in total – including the floppy disk, the karaoke machine, the taxi meter, the CD, the DVD and the digital watch.
He claims that many of his best ideas come underwater, at the moment half a second before death due to oxygen deprivation, and between midnight and 4am – what he calls ‘the golden time’ – after which he gets four hours sleep – he says any more than 6 hours sleep a night leads to decreased brainpower.
“Underwater there is no oxygen, therefore, just before death, 0.5 seconds before death, I can suddenly create new invention, because of lack of oxygen – brain condition is completely different from normal condition… Brain becomes completely different power and creates completely different new idea. Under the water suddenly comes from another world, different idea comes”
[I’m quoting verbatim, so as not to misquote]
In order to write down his ideas in the moment just after he has had them, he has also invented a notepad which can be used underwater.
He also doesn’t seem too hot on brainstorming for the purposes of invention:
“Completely alone is very important – you know this so-called exchanging ideas several people discussing this, mean nothing to create new invention. Invention submit to only one person… every discussion is waste of time”
As for his motives for inventing:
“I’m not doing invention for make money, my special invention is love. By my invention, every people in the world will become happy – that is my love to them”
As heard on ‘Jon Ronson on Being Alone‘, radio program on BBC Radio 4.
Werner Herzog – The Harmony of Overwhelming and Collective Murder
Watching Werner Herzog’s ‘Encounters at the End of the World‘ last weekend, and hearing him refer scathingly to ‘tree-huggers’ and ‘whale-huggers’, reminded me of his comments about the cruelty and disharmony of nature in ‘The Burden Of Dreams’, Les Blank’s documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo.
[I could listen to that awesome accent all day..]
Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back, it just hits back that’s all, and that’s grandiose about it, and we have to accept that it is much stronger than we are.
Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements, I don’t see it so much erotic, I see it more full of obscenity, it’s just… and nature here is violent and base – I wouldn’t see anything erotic[al] here, I would see fornication and asphixiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away.
Of course there is a lot of misery but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery and I don’t think they sing they just screech in pain.
It’s an unfinished country, it’s still pre-historical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape, and whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse – so we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It’s the only land where creation is unfinished [yet].
Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of a harmony; it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder . And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.
And… we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe, we have to get aquainted with this idea; there is no real harmony as we have concieved it.
But when I say this I say this full of all admiration for the jungle, it is not that I hate it, I love it; I love it very much – but I love it against my better judgement.
From another segment of ‘The Burden Of Dreams’:
It’s not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well, and the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about; it’s as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else, and I know I can do it to a certain degree, and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves otherwise we would be cows in the field.
A good article by Jessica Hopper here: ‘In Which Nature Is Lars Von Trier’s Satanic Church‘, where she puts Herzog’s comments into the context of what she sees as Lars Von Trier’s misogynist ‘Antichrist‘ [I haven’t seen it – and not sure I really want to], and argues that here “nature = evil, nature = woman’s nature, women = naturally evil”.
Time Hates Art
“Time cracks foundations, erodes borders, erases anything Man creates; civilisation, art – particularly art – time hates art, that’s why museums have restorers.”
From WNYC Radiolab show ‘Beyond Time‘.
Voronoi Diagrams & Entopic Graphomania
The Voronoi Diagram was codified by the Ukrainian/Russian Mathematician Georgy Voronoi in the early 20th century. It is a method of subdividing space based on a set of input points. The Voronoi diagram can be used to describe almost literally anything – from microscopic organisms to cell phone networks, and it exists at every scale, from cosmic foam to quantum foam. This series is concerned with attempting to draw the Voronoi diagram, usually generated with a computer algorithm, by hand, starting from a number of everyday situations.
Found on ske765book’s Flickr photostream.
His website.
His work on a Baltimore Artist’s Awards site.
How to [here]:
More Voronoi Diagrams here (portraits) and here (magnetic)
See also Romanian surrealist Dolfi Trost‘s entopic graphomania:
From A Journey Round My Skull (where there are 8 more of these illustrations):
Richard Shillitoe describes “entopic graphomania” on his Ithell Colquhoun website :
A method developed by the surrealists in Bucharest, in which a dot is made at the site of each impurity or difference in colour in a blank sheet of paper, and then lines are drawn between the dots. The connections may be by curved lines or (Colquhoun’s preference) straight lines only. This leads, in Colquhoun’s own words, to “the most austere kind of geometric abstraction.” The word “entoptic” derives from the Greek word meaning “within vision.” It refers to images that arise from within the optical system rather than from the outside world (for example, the common experience of floaters in the eye). Strictly speaking, therefore, the name is a misnomer. Despite her comments about favouring straight lines, only one such example, an untitled pencil drawing published in Athene is currently known. Torn Veil, a graphomania dating from 1947 incorporates shading that softens the austerity and develops the image.
N. E. Thing Co.
From Wikipedia:
N.E. Thing Co. was a Canadian art collective producing work from 1967-1978. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia., N.E. Thing Co. was run by co-presidents Iain and Ingrid Baxter.
Seminal figures in the emergence of conceptual art movement in Canada during the late sixties, NE. Thing Co. used corporate strategies to generate and frame its artistic practice.
Essay by Nancy Shaw: ‘Siting the Banal, The Expanded Landscapes of the N. E. Thing Co.’, here.
Another essay ‘N.E. Thing Co.: The Ubiquitous Concept’, by Derek Knight, here.
All images from here.
Found via.
Exiles in Nellcôte
Walking down to investigate the beach at Villefranche-sur-Mer, we came across the entrance to Villa Nellcôte [Map], once the headquarters of the local Gestapo, and in the summer of 1971, where the Rolling Stones recorded ‘Exile on Main Street‘.
I remembered reading about it, and seeing some photos of the house in ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez’s ‘Up and Down with The Rolling Stones‘, but we couldn’t see much beyond the main gates.
Dominique Tarle took some amazing photos there when he was allowed full access to the house that summer, published in a limited edition book ‘Exile’ – you can see quite a few of them here, and there’s a nice feature KEITH RICHARDS & GRAM PARSONS 1971 | SUMMER IN EXILE @ VILLA NELLCOTE, over on the ever excellent The Selvedge Yard.
Filament Shadow
Dirty Yellow & Ivy
The plastic awning of a French pizza restaurant.
Mala Beach Sunset
Mala Beach, Cap d’Ail, Côte d’Azur. Bliss.
Consignes d’Incendie
From the Hotel Eden in Nice.
Marey’s Chronograms
Dr. E. J. Marey – Chronographic image of a man in black clothes with a white stripe on the side walking past a black wall. 1884. From ‘Uit De Geschiedenis van De Fotografie’ p.132
Having read and been inspired by J. G. Ballard’s description of ‘Marey’s Chronograms’ (shouldn’t that be ‘Chronographs’?) in ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, I assumed this was a clever Ballardian concept.
A couple of weeks ago, leafing through a flea market find ‘Uit De Geschiedenis van De Fotografie’ [From the History of Photography], I was surprised to to see an actual Chronograph made by Étienne-Jules Marey.
Dr. E. J. Marey – Chronographic image of movement phases of flexible reed. 1884 (The man is probably Marey). From ‘Uit De Geschiedenis van De Fotografie’ p.133
I was aware of Eadweard Muybridge and his motion photography, but had never heard or seen anything by Marey, who’s work pre-dates Muybridge.
From Muybridge’s wikipedia entry:
“Recent scholarship has pointed to the influence of Étienne Jules de Marey on Muybridge’s later work. Muybridge visited Marey’s studio in France and saw Marey’s stop-motion studies before returning to the U.S. to further his own work in the same area.
From ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ – Marey’s Chronograms
Dr. Nathan passed the illustration across his desk to Margaret Travis. ‘Marey’s Chronograms are multiple-exposure photographs in which the element of time is visible – the walking human figure, for example, is represented as a series of dune-like lumps.’
Dr Nathan accepted a cigarette from Catherine Austin, who had sauntered forward from the incubator at the rear of the office. Ignoring her quizzical eye, he continued, ‘Your husband’s brilliant feat was to reverse the process.
Using a series of photographs of the most commonplace objects – this office, let us say, a panorama of New York skyscrapers, the naked body of a woman, the face of a catatonic patient – he treated them a if they already were chronograms and extracted the element of time.’
Dr Nathan lit his cigarette with care. ‘The results were extraordinary. A very different world was revealed. The familiar surroundings of our lives, even our smallest gestures, were seen to have totally altered meanings. As for the reclining figure of a film star, or this hospital…’
J.G. Ballard – The Atrocity Exhibition p.6
From the notes, p16:
‘An Individual is a four-dimensional object of greatly elongated form; in ordinary language we say that he has considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space.’ Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation