Joseph Mallord William Turner. How grand. How sovereign. I'm deeply impressed and honestly moved. Born 1775 in an age of purest romanticism he started painting like an impressionist. Out of nowhere he was chasing for color, for light and nothing more than that. Objects, people, scenes, historical events quickly became just bystanders for him. At least that's the private Mr. Turner. His public appearance held on to more traditional concepts and approaches for a little longer. Young Turner entered the Royal Academy at the age of only 14. His first paintings were accepted for the Royal Academy summer exhibition only a year later. Even at that young age Joseph Mallord William Turner was already a star, today we would call him a superhero. read more…
blog: photography
If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.
—Jim Richardson
It's not always the case that you have the opportunity to stand in front of interesting things. Sometimes the world around you is just gray and mundane, boring, dull, conventional and without any surprises. The days, the weeks go by without any noticeable differences. You might feel stuck, bored, left behind and unattractive. You have no clue of what you are doing or what you are supposed to do. Having a look at your social media feeds just worsens the situation. Out there everything feels polished, unreachable, far away, exciting, dramatic and simply perfect. read more…
Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy.
—James Gleick
Everything tends toward entropy. Entropy means disorder and chaos. Entropy means the final state of everything. Sooner or later everything will be in the state of entropy. That state will be totally random and unable to produce any meaningful work anymore. The energy left in the system is completely dissipated. In short it's pretty close to our understanding of chaos. In general entropy is a concept used in many varying fields, such as physics, information theory, and thermodynamics. It always refers to a measure of disorder or randomness in a system. read more…
In today's world information is ubiquitous. It's everywhere, you can't escape. All these libraries, books, social media accounts, YouTube videos, PDFs and Websites need to be processed at some point. The relevant information needs to be taken out, all the irrelevancies need to be left behind. But it becomes increasingly difficult to do something meaningful with all that information. Filtering and sorting seem to become key.
If we start looking at the history of information it's not so much the process of storing and organizing all this data that seems to be a burdon, it's the act of forgetting that consumes most of our energy. Forgetting is work, forgetting means effort. You could even go as far as to say that forgetting is as important as remembering to process data successfully. read more…
There's something eternal about all these Roman ruins, artifacts and buildings all over Europe. Still today it's hard to imagine how an empire could operate on such a huge territory and in such high precision. The Romans really have been planers, builders and organizers. I wonder how much of that legacy is still present within the tribes, rites and morals of today. Europe is still full of Roman artifacts, but nonetheless you need to have a closer look on the map in order to find them. One of the best preserved aqueduct bridges is for sure the Pont du Gard in southern France. It was build in the first century AD and carried water over 50 km from the area of Uzes (Ucetia) to the Roman colony of Nimes (Nemausus). Near the town Vers Pont du Gard it crosses the river Gardon. Here the bridge needed to be exactly 48.8 m high in order to transport water from one end to the other without losing too much height. read more…