New Things

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal”

-William James

Theo Jansen, I believe, should be the idol of our class. Nothing in my day has sparked my sense of novelty and unison. Nothing has leaped forward in time and space, utilized everything coming before to synthesize something completely natal.

Utilizing sacred geometry, which we find everywhere in nature, and seemingly imbued into the basic human aesthetic, (not to mention the proportions of the human body), Jansen utilized perhaps the only known universal constant, Phi. Phi is a simple ratio that can be approximated like this: A is to B, as B is to A+B. (It is the only pattern of numbers that can be expressed with only two numbers. All other patterns require three.) The patterns of sacred geometry (such as Metatrons cube, which actually contains the possible projection of a hypercube, which is a four-dimensional object) were revered by ancients such as the Egyptians, Greeks, and Hebrews. (not to mention some pretty far-out new-agers) Anyway, Jansen draws upon this universal for the purpose of creating life! To not fear being the creator, as Rilke wrote, is the raison d'etre! This also perfectly represents the liminality of truth that I wrote about previously.

In a vastly different space, novelty arises from the utter rejection of history and human endeavor, a rejection of past and future that seeks the present through embodied motion. In the film Dogtown and Z Boys, we find a much less integrated invention. Skateboarding and surfing became cool not because of the multitude of connections, but becasue of the outcast-status and exclusivity engendered by the image. The film captured the culture well by focusing in so specifically on the coolest of the cool, the "originals". It shows another seemingly universal truth: that what is exclucive and specific will be desired by the masses. But there is another level to it, one of motion, of freedom, and of innovation.

Other cool scientific/artistic/begging the question of the basics of life:

Ferrofluid

Walking Cornstarch