Straight Lines and the 100th Water
"Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting." - Hundertwasser
I need to keep munching on this concept - while I don’t take it as extremely as Hundertwasser, I do think there is something to be said for this query. Straight lines being everywhere is certainly a good mirror for our world: a focus on rational logical linear as the ‘true’ explaination (and reason) for how things are.
Even our computers, unless we use a drawing tool, make it difficult to make curvy swirly curly shapes…
I wonder if straight lines take away our fun? Perhaps it is straight lines over other lines…ie not enough variety in line-li-ness.
This thought it but a seedlet - would like to water it and grow it a bit more. Any thoughts sparked already please do share…in the meantime, do enjoy Hundertwasser. His art and architecture is beautiful!
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January 23rd, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Still on Straight Lines - one of my laughs the other day was about how in Manhattan we crisscross uptown downtown acrosstown…and we don’t even get to go around in circles because we are on a grid. Turns ou tsome mathematicians had some fun with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_distance
January 24th, 2006 at 4:12 am
TO reveal and spoil — the carcass of the whole city is kept together by the shapes of Guggenheim. And inside the building there is Kandinskys Taut Line. That must be the engine. Or was it the Böcklin’s Island in Metro..? Please investigate!
January 24th, 2006 at 10:02 am
I took a figure drawing class this past fall and everything was curves. Only man made items ever really have straight lines. There are very rarely any straight lines in nature.
A different line of thought. Our economic system is based on both curved lines (coins) and straight lines (paper currency). We give the straight lines more value.
January 24th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
MC and Gere - thanks for extending this dialogue…
Gere - love the Kandinsky comment!
(look here if you want to see the artwork: http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_lg_71_51.html)
MC your concept on everything has curves…reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Paul the other week about computers v humans on straight lines. We actually can’t draw perfectly straight lines, only computers can…it is the curves and ‘imperfections’ that make things ever so beautiful - the line of a nose, the curve of a … well you get it.
And the note on money (pardon the pun) feels very important!
January 26th, 2006 at 1:55 am
Oh, computers. This morning I was using an ATM and it suddenly struck me that a lot of my activity during the day is mechanized, meaning involves interaction with a machine. It troubles me because it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that these simplistic, stereotyped actions (like punching buttons on an ATM) take up a large fraction of our mental space and activity. The machines are dictating the shape of that interaction; they’re not as malleable as we are, so we adapt to their limitations. Even on a blog as interesting as yours Natalie, we’re restricted to typing words into this little box, versus doodling a picture, or humming a song, or…
In my thinking, straight lines and machines go together, and not just because the shape of most machines is straightish. Boundaries, hard limits, emphasis fof function over form, foregrounding stasis while backgrounding dynamics … those are the problems, no?
January 26th, 2006 at 11:43 am
Straight lines are OK, (or should I say K as O has none). I have exercised thousands and probably millions of straight and curved lines railing against straight lines as the products of mechanisation and making all sorts of possibly false assumptions about straight lines because there are no straight lines in nature. But I got the idea that there are no straight lines in nature from reading it somewhere else originally, thinking Oh yeah that’s right so everything people say about straight versus curved must have some relevance so let’s go swimming (not zooming, potentially too straight) off on that tack.
There are no completely straight lines in nature. So we shouldn’t challenge nature into straight lines for our convenience. That much is obvious and lies at the root of many environmental problems (particularly with water). Curved lines and circular spaces are more nurturing through their energies and organic nature and beauty and form BUT straight lines are not the bad guys , it’s what we do with what we have, straight lines can also be thoroughly convenient and not harmful in any way. (And I wish I’d got to grips with this before going down the circuitous route of building a curved house with a curved roof and no two measurements the same, would have been much simpler to be less circularly didactic) Would it be any more satisfying to punch round buttons on a curved atm for example, would that make them any more malleable? It’s true that we spend countless minutes each day enthralled to simplistic mechanistic activities but could it be that those simplistic mechanistic activities actually liberate us to spend more of our time creatively? Or is it that they lead us into more mechanistic activities? Digressing as ever, sorry, back to another swift defence of straight lines. As a writer I’m happy to write in a line, there’s a long tradition of straight lines of words and print. I’m also happy to write in a glorious doodle going here and there and not possible when adding to this dialogue unless I spend hours doing simplistic mechanistic activities just to produce a curvaceous line of text.
Everything has its place. We mustn’t criticise blindly. Think about it. Then criticise with vision. I have never defended straight lines before.
January 27th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Everything does have its place, and everything seems (much to my sometimes frustration and or its…patience??…) its time.
charlie - I am so enamoured that you have taken this and pleeded for the straightlines.
i think that we are lumping a lot into ’straight’ lines - I do think that there is a tendency for straight to be overshadowing things…and the mechanical model ANthony is referencing certainly is NOT the ideal model for our world - not that models ever should be ideal in any case, as they are a necessary simplification intended to help us ’see’, not to be used as a substitute for ‘what is’ and then used to inform poolicy…
No, we should not criticise blindly…but lately I have been feeling we are somewhat blind…in that we can’t see all, only better and better parts…
What amazes me also is how many opinions so many of us have on this comment/post…perhaps it is not even about straight or curly or other lines.
thank you and looking forward to reading more!!
January 29th, 2006 at 12:06 am
I like “criticize with vision” a lot charlie. When I’m reiviewing an article I remind myself to criticize constructively. The task is to find what’s “wrong” with the article, but I’ve never been comfortable doing only that. I try to see where the author is going with their work and suggest ways to crystallize that vision more succinctly and clearly. Then the purpose of criticism is to help them express themselves more clearly, which maks me much happier. I’m understanding what you said to mean something like that.
I had articles in mind when I wrote the above. I’ve read close to 1,000 by now in my graduate work. There’s the problem of organizing and recalling these. I know I read an article two years ago about X, but where is it? Who wrote it? Over the years I’ve tried all sorts of databases for storing these, but eventually gave up. Databases are very good at storing the “who wrote it” sort of information. They excel at that, and if that’s all you care about they make life quite a lot easier, sparing you cognitive load the way scratching a note on a pad spares you the need to remember that note. However, I care more about the “about X” part. “This article was about X” is a judgment I made, based on my own thinking about the article. “X” may never appear anywhere in the article. The authors may not have intended their article to be about X. That’s how I interpreted it, though, and that’s how I’d like to be able to recall it. Databases don’t help me.
You know what I do now? Remember. Use my memory. And, I reread the same articles over and over. My interpretation of them shifts as my thinking shifts. If I come up with a new way of thinking about some topic, I reread articles around that topic and reinterpret them. They get recategorized; instead of being about X, now they’re about Y. The interpretation is contextualized, in other words, which is exactly where databases are weak. Databases can store “context-free” information such as who wrote an article, but they have a terrible time storing contextualized, modal sorts of information which change meaning. For all its shortcomings, my brain’s a lot better at that kind of storage and recall.
So, good, recognize the strengths and weaknesses of a tool and use it appropriately. You don’t hammer nails with a screwdriver, either, but of course screwdrivers are handy nonetheless. What troubles me relates to what natalie said. I see people try to force information into databases which doesn’t belong there. I see people narrow their thinking around the capabilities of the tool, instead of forcing the tool to expand into their thinking or using other tools instead. The ubiquity of this technology, the dramatic and “cool” things you can do with it, make that kind of slip very easy. There’s a sort of idolatry of technology; that’s what bothers me. When you have a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
To me, it’s important to take a responsible stance vis a vis our technology. It’s good for some things, not good for others, and we need to know both to make an informed choice about when to use technology and when to try something else. I think the trend these days is to believe that technology will solve all the world’s woes. What’s going to happen if enough people in power take this stance and force technological solutions to problems? I think we’ll lose a lot of humanity. I think we’ll become round pegs forced through square holes. Yuck, what a mess.
I’d even go so far as to say that what we identify as “problems” needing “solution” often comes from over-mechanized thinking. But I’ve been alarmist enough for one day so I’ll stop.
February 10th, 2006 at 3:40 am
sacred geometry:-
straight lines but also circles and the vesica pisces
so as in chaordicism mixing the “orderly and chaotic”(AND NOT JUST TO MAKE “VISA INTERNATIONAL” A BETTER BUSINESS!)
we have both straight lines and curvy circles and the mathematics herein(the vesica pisces PYTHAGORAS LOVED a right cool geezer that one!)
and can be female or male or both!
February 10th, 2006 at 3:41 am
straight/linear leading to chaos
curves/circles leading to order
or the other way around/vice versa!
February 10th, 2006 at 3:47 am
oh and I plugged your website on GOLDIE LOOKING CHAIN’S website:-
GLC/GOLDIE LOOKING CHAIN=WELSH/uk pop band full of “CLARTS”:-
CLARTS = FOR “CLARITY’S SAKE”=the followers of that band ;
whose member “Maggot” was in celebrity big brother 2006 where they evilly bullied Jodie Marsh mercilessly and got her first to be evicted but sadly that /thus is the nature of that show full of hatred and bullying even though she is an Ambassador for BEAT BULLYING UK CHARITY (although they got £25000 raised for them by her being on that tv show )
but only “Beltane” named forum member appreciated it AND the fact I recognised her name as a Wiccan festival!Roll on May 2006 and Beltane and Spring!!!
TRACI BINGHAM(USA) was in celeb big brother 2006(uk version ) too as was DENNID RODMAN(USA) and they found the uk people a bit strange although MAGGOT treated her like a gentleman and romantically explained everything to her patiently as he is a sweet Welshperson/man!!!