Clips and collected ideas from a life of reading on- and off-screen

Mar 3, 2016

A man bound me with boards

One of my enemies ended my life, sapped my world-strength
Afterward soaked me in water.
Set me in sun, where soon I lost the hairs that I had.
And then the hard knife-edge cut me,
Fingers folded me and feather of bird traced
All over my tawny surface with drops of delight…

Rob Giampietro

Mar 2, 2016

The network message can in effect be in the present

Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the…

Rob Giampietro

Mar 1, 2016

Things are clearly not to be trusted

And that’s how it is with the rest of Buster’s universe. Things are clearly not to be trusted. The chair will collapse, the plank will hit you in the face, the gun will misfire, the car will die on the railroad tracks, the boat will sink, the balloon will escape…

Rob Giampietro

Feb 29, 2016

Telecom Year Zero

Literature more or less begins with an account of a signal crossing space — to be precise, with an account of the network along which this signal travels. In Act 1 of Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” (458 B.C.), Clytemnestra appears outside her palace, supposedly to announce the news that Troy has fallen…

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Rob Giampietro

Feb 27, 2016

Neither capital nor labor

Unwittingly, the federal government did its part to create the modern consulting business. Starting in the last part of the nineteenth century, Washington made periodic regulatory efforts to curb the power of big business, including the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade…

Rob Giampietro

Feb 27, 2016

The postmodern attitude

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a…

Rob Giampietro

Feb 20, 2016

Pop Michelangelo

A strong part of Denniz PoP’s vision […] was that songwriting should be a collaborative effort; no one was supposed to be proprietary about his work, and Martin has passed these principles onto two generations of songwriters. Songwriters are assigned different parts of a song to work on; choruses…

Rob Giampietro

Feb 13, 2016

Keys vs. combinations

[T]he law has always drawn a distinction between objects and what’s in your brain. And even though the key to a lock and a series of numbers that’s the combination to a combination lock are functionally the same thing, the law draws a distinction and says that under the Fifth Amendment you…

Rob Giampietro

Feb 10, 2016

How to work better

1) Do one thing at a time
2) Know the problem
3) Learn to listen
4) Learn to ask questions
5) Distinguish sense from nonsense
6) Accept change as inevitable
7) Admit mistakes
8) Say it simple
9) Be calm
10) Smile

Fischli & Weiss.
See also: Ryan Gander.

Rob Giampietro

Jan 30, 2016

Adding to design education

[T]here are other things that must be added to the education of designers to enable them to participate as something other than visual packagers […]: writing as a means of conceptual and expressive development; techniques of verbal expression, rhetoric, narrative and storytelling…

Rob Giampietro

Jan 23, 2016

Even no order is an order

There is an exercise I had students do. There would be two tables in a
room, and we would videotape what went on. One table would be piled with junk, and the other table would be vacant. The instructions to the
students were to move the junk to the table and organize it, and we…

Rob Giampietro

Jan 21, 2016

Conceptual pricing

I was making conceptual and ephemeral works, but I needed money to survive. So I proposed an I.O.U work to Leo Castelli. Borrowing money would be the content of the work — a transaction between artist, collector and dealer. He said: ‘We don’t borrow money, Billy. We make money.’ On my 1979–80…

Rob Giampietro

Jan 7, 2016

The origins of Dymaxion

Fuller’s favorite neologism, “dymaxion,” was concocted purely for
public relations. When Marshall Field’s displayed his model house, it
wanted a catchy label, so it hired a consultant, who fashioned
“dymaxion” out of bits of “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “ion.” Fuller was so
taken with the…

Rob Giampietro

Jan 5, 2016

The values of friendship

What I want to be able to say, in the end, is that friendship is
incredibly valuable in life, and in fact is not just valuable but
absolutely necessary — that you can’t live without it — but that its value,
distinct as it is, is not the “values” that our moral behavior exhibits
or…