Keltai book issuu

he a rt rhythm in ar t

edite d b y A gnes ke ltai

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h ea rt rhythm in art

edited by Agnes keltai

This book was designed for GR 330 Typography 3 Class Academy of Art University San Francisco Supervising instructor William Culpepper All photographs and illustrations are by Agnes Keltai except Alvar Alto by unknown photographer (p. 75) and Il pleut by Guillaume Apollinaire (p. 45) Printhouse Percprint Budapest Typefaces Bebas & Merriweather Budapest 2017

h ea rt rhythm in art

de d ic atio n

To my loving father who is an expert in the heart.

Stairway in Budapest

10 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

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co n t en t s

11 Introduction

1 experimental music 16 What Does Experimental Music Even Mean Anymore?

24 An interview with Philip Glass 36 Ten rules by John Cage

2 experimental poetry 44 Concrete Poetry in America 56 Rhythm and Meter in English Poetry

3 rhythm in architecture 66 Expression of rhythm in building compositions

4 rhythm in photography 84 A Thousand Words: Writing from Photographs 94 Index

in t r o d uct i on

My father is a professor in cardiology so I grew up talking about heart and pace over the dinner table. The rhythm set by this fascinating organ is unique in all of us yet we can follow other people’s rhythm through different forms of art. This book is a personal collection of all kinds of writings and images as a contribution to family dinner talks.

15

1

cham be r 1 e x peri m ental m usic

Today experimental music is more like a creative form concerned with vocal sounds, phonetics, typography and calligraphy, irrespective of more complex meaning.

Industrial paint on concrete

What Does Experimental Music Even Mean Anymore?

Adam Harper

What is experimental music, and what does it want from us? As a term and as a field of music-making, it’s widely accepted but fits so uncomfortably and is never well defined. “Experimental music” was a phrase used in the mid-twentieth-century to describe a range of ultramodernist compositional techniques as being a form of quasi-scientific research. John Cage was careful to point out that the term should apply to music “the outcome of These days, to be experimental is to begin to speak a language that not everyone speaks yet.

which is not known”that is, music with chance elements or improvisation built into it, since a composer ought to have completed all the necessary experiments before the piece was about to be finished. And yet in everyday parlance, especially in today’s music, “experimental” music has come to refer to music that seems radically unconventional, pretty weird, as if to experiment with the very building blocks of musical beauty.

20 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

In the underground, experimental currents have been around for decades, the magma bubbling away beneath the crust of more traditional musics, slowing feeding it as it surfaces and hardens. Every now and then, we see however, flesh becomes stone and stone becomes flesh:

Most interestingly this moment in electronic adventuring seems to open the door for a wave of even stranger artists, labels exploring what it means to be experimental

something that glows and burns, thrills and terrifies,

in the techno-mediated

flies out from the deep. I’m talking about the recent New

spaces and tense moder-

York School of enterprising electronic music: Claurel

nities of the 2010s.

Halo, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Holly Herndon (while not NYC-based, there’s an affiliation), together with the associated music labels, various Altered Zones and GHE20G0TH1K alumni, and the network that links them up and spreads out from them at all. The bizarre albums produced by this crew have been some of the biggest and most surprising hits in a community that was more concerned with indie-pop, folk, and rock just a few years earlier. Much like the recent resurgence of science fiction in cinemas, what used to be only for weirdos has taken centre stage.

To what extent is this stuff “experimental”? The musi-

Traditional or stable genres

cians and their fans may well argue that the material

of popular music are like

isn’t experimental in the sense of being provisional, but

languages.

that it’s fully considered and not particularly strange.

But I think that these days, to be experimental is to begin to speak a language that not everyone speaks yet.

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22 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

Cables on Brooklyn Bridge

Traditional or stable genres of popular music are like languages that, while in flux, are basically pre-given and complete, and have their specific ways to use certain musical structures to communicate within certain limits. Experimental music doesn’t base itself on an established language like this, but is more like a creativity concerned with vocal sounds, phonetics, typography and calligraphy, irrespective of more complex meaning.

It’s involved with the building blocks that musical languages are made of. When you put it like this, it’s odd to think that people find experimental music “difficult” – it’s a radically simpler experience, assuming much less semiotically. And that’s where experimental music’s appeal lies. It reconnects you with the fundamental life of sound and music, and entices you to search for meaning in a language you cannot yet speak. You ask yourself, “What sort of subjectivity would make art like this?

What does it perceive that I don’t (or don’t yet)?”

And perhaps this music is so enticing because it has something to say that can only be said in the near future, that’s stuttering to come out and is on the tips of everyone’s tongues. Perhaps it’s something to do with the interaction of machines and intelligence, human, post-human or otherwise.

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So much of this music suggests a strange and vast intelligence newly awoken, confused and trapped within its confined technological systems and yet vastly, ominously powerful for its presence within them. From the other end of a series of tubes through which the outside world is mediated, it coolly builds a representation of its life and experiences from the snippets and scratch of the digital, and using its own algorithmically generated structures and differentiations as it moves restlessly from one scenario to the next. While this image could describe the modern homo sapiens walking in the our world, it could also describe its dark mirror in intelligence either artificial, corporate or mobilized for the purposes of security, gathering data for inscrutable, non-human ends. Whether in an optimistic or pessimistic light (and imagine at its best when you can’t tell the difference between the two), it’s the next step in evolution on this planet.

Perhaps this music is so enticing because it has something to say that can only be said in the near future, something that’s stuttering to come out and is on the tips of every one’s tongues.

In fact, some of this music makes its connection to the internet age fairly explicit. I’m always cautious about term “internet music” because it effects a crude conflation of music that is about or reflective of the internet in some fashion with the simple fact that the music is distributed online, with the latter not inherently presupposing any genre, aesthetic or concept. You wonder what it is that the internet is supposed to sound like, given that it’s a representation system that can and does include just about anything. Nonetheless, it’s fascinating to see on the internet associated with some very particular sounds and ways of putting sounds together, because it hints at a particular perspective on the overwhelming technological development of our age.

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Always hovering somewhere between hypnagogic retro and the deliriously hi-tech, the Columbus, Ohio-based Bandcamp-and-physical label Orange Milk has been exploring all kinds of more experimental musics since 2010. Only last autumn, they released DARK WEB by known Columbus producer Giant Claw. The promotional write-up described it as “drawing inspiration from latenight hours spent digging through the internet’s infinite crates. It’s an analysis of art and artist in the digital age, where one’s cultural heritage and personal artistic work is informed and bombarded by constant stimuli, whether it be social media, YouTube videos, message boards, or otherwise.” The classical statue on the album’s cover is a nod to the visual style of vaporwave, and the music underneath has the same frenetic mash of ersatz timbres and pop hooks as L.A. artist James Ferraro’s 2011 album Far Side Virtual. But rather than pastiche, DARK WEB is clearly and curiously unstuck: juddering, dissonant, stop-start, crazed, obsessive. It’s like a robot failing at human entertainment, and a rejected intermediate of all forms generated by whatever algorithmic process then went on to produce the less uncanny.

Far Side Virtual, which resonated more comfortably with human needs and desires. And if human music were a CAPTCHA, DARK WEB would fail it. Or perhaps DARK WEB resonates better than Far Side Virtual does, but at a frequency that human intelligences can’t perceive.

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26 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

Lamps in Milan, Italy

An interview with Philip Glass The American composer Philip Glass, 80 this month, has been one of the dominant, boundary-cwrossing influences of the past half century. He first won a worldwide following around the 1970s with Koyaanisqatsi, Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, and has collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Wilson, Doris Lessing, Martin Scorsese, Ravi Shankar, David Bowie, Paul Simon and many more.

Glass’s birthday will be marked with a production by Scottish Opera of his opera The Trial and a Philip Glass at 80 weekend at the Barbican.

It seems that no one – not you, or Steve Reich, or John Adams – likes being called a minimalist. What do we call you if not that?

Let’s talk about this. The problem is no one is doing minimalism now. It’s music we wrote in the 1970s. It’s over 30 years out of date. It’s a crazy idea to use a description made up by journalists and editors to cover all kinds of music. It’s more confusing than descriptive. What do I really do? Listen to me. I’ve written 26 operas, 20 ballets, I don’t know how many film scores. I write theatre music. I write concert and symphonies too. I’m working on a new film score right now.

Then I’ll start a new stage piece. My problem is people don’t believe I write symphonies. But I’m premiering Symphony No 11 in a couple of weeks. These are all different forms of music. Maybe I do too many things.

28 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

THE PE DON’T MUSIC THEIR OUTLI YOU’R

EOPLE WHO T WANT YOUR C DON’T CHANGE R MINDS. YOU IVE THEM, IF RE LUCKY. But it’s the description that sticks: Philip Glass, the great American minimalist…

If people called me an American opera composer it would have the virtue of being what I actually do. This is my reality. God forbid we should be more accurate. I’m not making this stuff up. Would it be easier to say I’m an Icelandic composer who writes serial music? Would that be helpful? [Silence, laughter.] I’m a theatre composer.

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A lot of people want to hear my music of the 1970s and 1980s. And do you know what I do? I play it. I talk to Paul Simon or anyone like that and it’s the same. I say, ”what do you play live, Paul?” and he says ”I play my new songs and I play my hits” And it’s true. If you go to hear Paul Simon, you want to hear Bridge Over Troubled Water.

The new work, by the way, is beautiful, but it’s not why you buy the ticket. You want to hear the old ones. It’s the same for me when I play with my ensemble [the Philip Glass Ensemble]. We’ve been together 40 years. We play the familiar stuff, the highlights.

So you’re saying, then, you play… minimalism!

Well, yes, I admit I am part of the confusion. We’ve reworked a piece from 1971. And, guess what, it’s minimalist! OK OK OK, I’m just as bad as the journalists [more laughs].

Growing up in city of Baltimore, Maryland, you stoked your own musical curiosity by listening to unsold stock in your father’s record store. Was there one really striking discovery?

Not one, though I listened to everyPhilip and his brother,

thing — what we called “hillbilly” and Buddy Holly and

Marty worked in their

R&B, as well as Beethoven quartets and things that were

father’s record store on Saturdays and holidays when they were kids.

quite modern then Shostakovich and Bartók. But as far as records in the shop were concerned, there was always lots of contemporary music like Charles Ives, the great American composer. And the Second Viennese school Alban Berg, Webern and, to a lesser extent, Schoenberg.

I sent off for his book on basic harmony — couldn’t find it in Baltimore bookstores — and followed it to the letter. See, it was very traditional!

30 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

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32 HEART RHYTHM IN ART Hallway in the Hungarian Public Radio Building, Budapest

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But look, I was devouring a whole range of repertoire at that stage. I was studying music at Peabody Institute. As a nine- or 10-year-old I was taking part in Bach masses in church performances. At high school they wanted to put on shows, so what did they do? Gilbert and Sullivan!

I played flute in the orchestra. I got to understand how theatre works: the musicians in the pit, the timing, the getting singers on and off stage. It’s not a bad way to learn your craft. It gave me a good solid background.

When, years later, I came to write opera, I felt comfortable about all that.

Your long immersion in Indian music and philosophy, trying to go beyond cultural tourism, has shaped your outlook, practical and aesthetic…

That time in India, which included long stays as well as many shorter ones, visiting frequently from the late 60s until 2001, opened a door to the world of global music. Until then I’d been immersed in European art music. In Kerala I encountered kathakali, the classical Indian dance theatre which had an influence on my own operas, such as Satyagraha. Back then, hearing anything beyond western music wasn’t easy. You couldn’t find records, except a few specialist discs of music collected by anthropologists. If you wanted to hear Balinese music you pretty much had to go to Bali. It’s hard to believe that now.

Do you feel you have done what you set out to achieve as a young man? Or does it only make sense now, looking back?

Stairway in Corsica, France

34 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

I decided early on I wouldn’t be a music teacher or an academic. So as soon as I got back from my studies in Europe in 1967 I formed my ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified, fed through a mixer… I felt I had no choice but to be a performer. By then my flute playing had dropped but I’d sharpened my keyboard skills. The point of the ensemble was to play the music I’d written. We rehearsed in my house, we played my music! That was the deal. Those audiences were tiny at first of course. Sometimes just 20 or so people. And then we got more successful, but it was a long, long time before we made any money. That took another ten or fifteen years.

Einstein on the Beach was a massive hit in 1976 yet you still had to drive a yellow cab and work as a plumber.

Yes, after Einstein on the Beach I went back to driving a New York cab. I didn’t mind that.

It was interesting work. I didn’t have an agent. I ran all the business side of it and the box office myself. I enjoyed it. I grew up in the music business. I was happy to do it.

But it took at lot of time and work. In 1979 when we did our first Carnegie Hall concert we had to pay for it, and sell the tickets! Eventually I formed a publishing company and had people doing it for me.

Have the old divisions between musical styles now healed? Do people now accept your chosen path of tonal harmony, melody, repetitive structures?

No no no no no. Those divisions never healed. Those people just died! The people who don’t want you don’t change their minds. You outlive them, if you’re lucky. They’re all dead now, the older guys. The battle was never won or lost. The army just went away.

What can I tell you? Isn’t that the truth? It’s biology.

Nothing more than that. They’ve just gone away… and we carry on playing.

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Ceiling of the Hungarian Public Radio Concert Hall in Budapest

36 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

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i

no t i n g

a m i st a k

h

s

e CHAMBER

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Ten rules by John Cage

Avant-garde composer John Cage started out as a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg. He greatly looked up to the exiled Austrian as a model of how a true artist ought to live. Cage, in turn, inspired generations of artists and composers both through his work which incorporated elements of chance into his music, and through his teaching at various institutions.

One of those whom he inspired was Sister Corita Kent.

An unlikely fixture in the Los Angeles art scene, the nun was an instructor at Immaculate Heart College and a celebrated artist who considered Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and Cage to be personal friends.

In 1968, she crafted the lovely, touching Ten Rules for Love by Sister

Students and Teachers for a class project. While Cage

Corita Kent

was quoted directly in Rule 10, he didn’t come up with the list, as many website sites claim. By all accounts, though, he was delighted with it and did everything he could to popularize the list.

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John Cage didn’t come up with this list.

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2

cham be r 2 e x p e r i ment al

poe t r y

my back to the front of the house inside inside what is the sense through life

of moving

Curtain in the Hungarian Public Radio Building

44 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

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Sun lounger covered with snow

during my worst times on the park benches in the jails or living with

Charles Bukowsky: how is your heart

whores I always had this certain contentmentI wouldn’t call it happinessit was more of an inner balance that settled for whatever was occuring and it helped in the factories and when relationships went wrong with the girls. it helped through the wars and the hangovers the backalley fights the hospitals. to awaken in a cheap room in a strange city and pull up the shadethis was the craziest kind of contentment and to walk across the floor to an old dresser with a cracked mirrorsee myself, ugly, grinning at it all. what matters most is how well you walk through the fire

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Concrete Poetry in America

In the 1960s, the American variant of Concrete poetry was

influenced

by

manifestos

and

poems

from

Europeans and Brazilians as well as the vibrant international art scene in New York City, the anti-war and procivil rights protests throughout the States, and popular culture’s fascination with systems and technology.

These cultural influences made the United State’s version of Concrete poetry unique and particularly popular.

An exemplar of these tendencies appeared on the dust jacket of the definitive anthology, Concrete Poetry: A World View. The editor-poet, Mary Ellen Solt (19202007), composed her poem, “Moonshot Sonnet,” from reformatted diagrammatic-codes initially used by NASA-engineers to plan and execute the moon landing.

The engineers placed the diagrammatic-codes over photographs of the lunar surface, and Solt abstracted the diagrams without any photographic reference. Using the codes, she transformed the result into a sonnet, with the codes appearing in “exactly fourteen “lines” with five “accents,” a Petrarchan or Italianate sonnet.

Her poem is a distinctively American sonnet. It is not just an iconic concrete poem, but also a poetic emblem of a national identity.

48 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

It’s raining. Poem by Guillaume Apollinaire

Brazilians and Europeans The literary poetics reduce language to an eloquent semiotic code system and universal visual language.

Although the poet-editor, Solt, describes her influences Guillaume Apollinaire is

as arriving from the Brazilians and Europeans, the

considered one of the most

actual poem is also unmistakably alluding to geometric

important literary figures

minimalism, Pop art, and ready-mades. The designers

of the early twentieth century. His brief career influ-

of Solt’s anthology, at Indiana University Press, insisted

enced the development of

that the poem adorn the back cover of the dust jacket in

such artistic movements as Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism,

part to highlight the editor’s contribution to the

and Surrealism, and the

International Concrete poetry movement, but also as an

legend of his personality

entreaty to the American reader to appreciate the

bohemian artist, raconteur, gourmand, soldier

importance of a real “world view” in the age of peaceful

became the real model for

lunar exploration. The poem concretely suggests that,

avant-garde deportment.

although the International Concrete poetry movement was launched from Brazil and Europe, it would reach its largest audience when it landed in the United States.

When other poets’ sonnets, from Shakespeare to Poe, allude to the moon, it is usually a melancholic and romantic trope, rather than an allusion to scientific discovery. Solt’s poem spoofs the old forms by presenting a poem without words, and by composing a cold paean to the moon without romance. Beyond the parody of sonnets about the moon, Solt’s “Moonshot” also presents an entirely new form of poetry.

50 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

Lunar landing This poetry about a global view responds to the supranational and even supra-lingual world that moonshots created. In that sense, the moonshot itself produced the cultural circumstances, and literal view, for the “world view” of this supranational poetry and for Solt’s anthology’s world-view. Solt’s later poem, from the late 1960s, perfectly illustrates an anti-war politics, presenting a literal target but this time using it for the peaceful purpose of lunar exploration. Contradictory to that politics, the image of the lunar landing, demonstrated the power

The term ’concrete poetry’ was coined during the 1950s in 1956 an international exhibition was shown in São Paulo, inspired by poet Carlos Drummond de la Andrade. After two years,

of the American media empire to focus, and spread, the

a Brazilian concrete poetry

message of a lunar landing globally and throughout our

manifesto was published.

universe. Solt’s “Moonshot” could express this ubiqui-

Augusto de Campos, one of the earliest pioneers,

tous image, and all of its socio-political meanings about

assembled a web site of

America’s media colonialism.

both old and new work,

Beyond the “Moonshot Sonnet,” Solt’s entire anthology,

including the manifesto.

as an object of study itself, and not simply a collection of poems and theoretical essays, is a key part of the story of the Concrete poetry movement in the United States as it inextricably links the poetry to publication, distribution, and the intermingling of the international movement with other currents, and lineages in art, poetry, and design. The volume won three design awards the year it appeared, and opened typography, layout, and design world to a new language.

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Glasses and bottle in a hotel room in Vienna

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In the American context, it seems that the poet-publisher, or poet-editor, are more fitting terms for the expression of the Concrete poetry movement since distribution was inextricably linked to the visual-semantic meaning, and among the major poet publishers of concrete and visual poetry one would include Solt, Emmett Williams, Eugene Wildman, Dick Higgins, and Jonathan Connors. Solt explained decades later that her editing and publishing activities, began, in part, from her isolation Bloomington, Indiana, far from the major centers of Concrete poetry in Europe, the UK, and Brazil. She wanted to find a way to collect the exciting new work, and share it with a wider geographically dispersed audience that, like her, might not live near the center of activity. She also wanted to bring the Concrete poetry movement to Bloomington, and she describes Haroldo and Augusto de Campos visiting Indiana University for an intense visit in 1968. The Brazilians’ visit influenced the young Claus Clüver, one of the editors of this volume and an advocate for, and scholar of, this movement for nearly half a century; the Concrete poets also influenced Tom Ockerse, the designer, at Indiana then, and later at RISD, who championed the Concrete poets’ typographic design strategies. With the publication of Solt’s anthology more Concrete poets, like Emmett Williams, trekked to a Bloomington, and an exhibition organized there.

54 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

Anthology of Concretism Much of the poetry was produced elsewhere, but found its most dedicated distribution networks in the North American context.

The anthologies on Concrete poetry published in the United States, especially Eugene Wildman’s Anthology of Concretism, published initially in 1967 as an issue the Chicago Review, Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, published by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press in late 1967, and Solt’s anthology, released in 1969 with a 1970 publication date, all reached a larger audience, remain in the definitive collections of this movement’s work, and also all intermingled works that were drawing influences from other movements and practices like conceptual art, instruction happenings, Fluxus, machine made, found, ready-made and aleatory practices. The anthologies had much larger print-runs, and a wider scope of influence in the US, than anywhere else during the 10/15 years following their publications.

To set the scene and lineage of when and how concrete poetry emerged in America, it is useful to start back in 1913 to the few years after the publication of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and the influence of Ezra Pound’s Imagist ideas on the American poets.

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Moon Shot Sonnet.

Poem by Mary Ellen Solt

56  HEART IN ART

The Others Magazine Especially those involved in publishing The Others magazine. Constructing a lineage for later poetic or artistic practices and movements is always done in hindsight, and, through the nuances of that diachronic description, an implicit argument appears. Others in this volume, and elsewhere, most notably the editors, have discussed in great detail the subtle distinctions between strictly defined Concrete poems and other types of visual poems, but the precursors experimented with a figurative rhyme between visual, semantic, and sonic elements. That experimentation led to more formally defined constraints, in Concrete poetry, and an increased appreciation of expressionistic possibilities of spacing, layout, and design in relation to the condensation of poetry down to single words rather than the line of poetry. The Concrete poems took advantage of the entire page, and referenced aspects of the page, effaced by traditional poetry’s emphasis on lines of metered language. Earlier “pattern poems,” some from Ancient Greece or Egypt, often shaped words into representations of literal objects, like an egg, or animals.

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Botanical Garden in Budapest

Rhythm and Meter in English Poetry

English poetry employs five basic rhythms of varying stressed (/) and unstressed (x) syllables. The meters are iambs, trochees, spondees, anapests and dactyls. In this document the stressed syllables are marked in boldface Each unit of rhythm is called a “foot” of poetry.

type rather than the tradition al ”/” and ”x.” The meters with two-syllable feet arew` IAMBIC (x /): That time of year thou mayst in me behold TROCHAIC (/ x): Tell me not in mournful numbers SPONDAIC (/ /): Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! Meters with three-syllable feet are ANAPESTIC (x x /): And the sound of a voice that is still DACTYLIC (/ x x): This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock (a trochee replaces the final dactyl) Each line of a poem contains a certain number of feet iambs, trochees, spondees, dactyls or anapests. A line of one foot is a monometer, 2 feet is a dimeter, and so on– trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter (6), heptameter (7), and o ctameter (8).

The number of syllables in a line varies therefore according to the meter.

60 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

Here are some examples of the various meters. iambic pentameter (5 iambs, 10 syllables) That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold trochaic tetrameter (4 trochees, 8 syllables) me | not in | mournful | numbers

A good example of trochaic monometer, for example, is this poem entitled “Fleas”:

anapestic trimeter (3 anapests, 9 syllables) And the sound | of a voice | that is still

Adam Had’em.

dactylic hexameter (6 dactyls, 17 syllables; a trochee replaces the last dactyl) This is the | forest pri | meval, the | murmuring | pine and the | hemlocks

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Metal pipes in MIlano

62 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowsky

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3

cham be r 3 RH Y T HM i n archite ctu re

Reflections in New York City

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Stairway in Budapest

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Stairway in Budapest

“Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.”

Le Corbusier

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Expression of rhythm in building compositions Chiu-Shui Chan

It is interesting to investigate the factors that cause rhythm to appear in design. In fact, rhythm is not just one of these design methodologies used for form generation, it also is the result of the cognitive processing and only comprehended through human perception. In this article, concepts of design cognition and perception are discussed from an

Design is a product of human cognition. Every designer has their own way of thinking, each with a different background and approach to design that generate unique, individual design results. Among other end products done by any different designers, some phenomena will do recur in the appearance of certain forms. Some of them are visually appealing and attractive due to the visual expression of specific qualities. All these visual qualities are accomplished by special compositional old methods applied in the process of creation.

Some of these phenomena could be seen, measured, and analyzed to get more understanding on both the quality of design and on the process of design creations. Rhythm in design that has a clear pattern recognized by human perception is one example of the phenomena occurring in the design products.

70 HEART RHYTHM IN ART

approach treating design as a way of organizing an information through human reasoning.

Theoretically speaking, all design thinking is a part of the human cognitive with process of gathering, recognizing, collecting, memorizing, recalling, and processing design information by designers, whereas perception is another part of the human cognitive process of recognizing and interpreting external information obtained through sensual input by beholders.

Explained from the point of view of cognition, rhythm could be seen as an entity, generated by designers through some cognitive processing, and recognized visually as appearing in design products. Rhythm, as created by the same processes and revealed in the products of human cognition, is ingrained in our consciousness and therefore should be a key component of all design applied everywhere universally.

Building in New York City

Rhythm has been defined in various fields of arts and performing arts, sharing the central meaning of a patterned recurrence, repetition, or movement in actions or artifacts. In design, rhythm is the regular, harmonious recurrence of a specifiwc element, often the single or curious entity coming from other categories

In learning, the practice of learning by repetition, which is called rote learning or rehearsal, is another form of cognitive strategy.

Rehearsal serves the purpose of maintaining a small set of items in short-term memory by repetition, and

The definition of rhythm, how it is

of line, shape, form, color, or light,

created, and why it will be a part of

shadow, and all sounds. If a designer

human design cognition and science

chooses some elements from these

are explored through case studies.

categories and creates some compo-

Even though rhythm is seen as a

sition of these new elements, then a

phenomenon, it has not really been

motif or pattern that is generated.

approached from a phenomenologi-

The designer could also repetitively

cal point of view on what thing

apply a single element, a composed

means. Instead, the study quantifies

motif or pattern at regular mode. As

positive facts and observable event

long as a visually or auditory har-

that can be seen, measured, and be

monious composition is generated,

counted as the facts, which is best

Roof structure of

through repetition rhythm is created.

Milan Expo, Italy

any information in shortterm memory is transferred to long-term storage.

described as a positivist perspective. Thus, rhythm as a product of design cognition is a phenomenon that we believe can be seen, measured, and analyzed to get more understanding on the quality of design and the process of design.

Studies in this approach would generate more theoretical and scientific contributions to the fields of design studies and design thinking.

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Of course, a hybrid composition of such entities across all categories should also serve the same purposes. However, without having or experiencing the comfortable visual or auditory results of element repetitions, rhythm would not exist. On the other hand, designers working with singular massing and uniform detailing strategies might have produce different outcomes.

Rhythm, as defined, is created by repetition. Repetition is a cognitive way of processing information. In language arts, music, repetition is a persuasive strategy used to affect or coordinate attitudes, and especially when terms are used repeatedly in question begging form. In writing, repetition is a rhetorical device used to emphasize a point, notion, or even meaning.

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Stairway in Budapest

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Stairway in Barcelona

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Rural façade in Beyreuth, Germany

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As long as a visually or auditory harmonious composition is generated, through repetition, a rhythm is cre ated. Of course, a hybrid composition of such entities across categories should also serve the same pur-

There are a number of methods used

poses. However, without having or

in writing, for example, the repeti-

experiencing the comfortable visual

tion of a single word with no words

or auditory results of element repe-

in between; or sometimes in various

titions, rhythm would not exist. On

places throughout a paragraph, or

the other hand, designers working

used a word at the end of a sentence

with singular massing and uniform

and then used it again at the begin-

detailing strategies might have pro-

ning of the next sentence; or some

duce different outcomes.

repeating a word or phrase at the

Rhythm, as defined, is created by

beginning, in the middle or the end

repetition. Repetition is a cognitive

of every clause.

way of processing information. In language arts, repetition is a persuasive strategy used to affect or coordinate attitudes, and especially when terms are used repeatedly in question begging form. In writing, repetition is a rhetorical device used to emphasize point, notion, meaning.

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“Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to develop into a fully grown fish, so, too, we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in the world of ideas.

Architecture demands more of this time than other creative work.”

Alvar Aalto

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Stairway in Budapest

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Cities with the most skyscrapers

257

New York City

143

139

Tokyo

Chicago

105

Chongqing

101

Metro Manila

87

Chengdu

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317

Hong Kong

173 Dubai

119

Guangzhou

81

Singapore

79

Jakarta

72 Seoul

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4

cham be r 4 RH Y T HM i n photo graph

y

Street in New York City

A Thousand Words: Writing from Photographs Casey N. Cep

I can’t remember exactly when I stopped carrying a notebook. Sometime in the past year, I gave up writing hurried descriptions of people on the subway, copying the names of artists from museum walls and the titles of books in stores, and scribbling down bits of phrases overheard at restaurants and cafés.

It’s not that my memory improved but, instead, that I started archiving these events and ideasw with my phone, as photographs. Now, if I want to research the painter whose portraits I admired at the museum, I don’t have to read through page after page of my chicken scratch trying to find her name. When I need the title of a novel someone recommended, I just scroll back to the day we were at the bookstore together.

Office folders at a

Looking through my photo stream, there is a caption

consultancy firm

about Thomas Jefferson smuggling seeds from Italy, which I want to research; a picture of a tree I want to identify, which I need to send to my father; the nutritional label from a seasoning that I want to re-create; and a man with a jungle of electrical cords in the coffee shop, whose picture I took because I wanted to write something about how our wireless lives are actually full of wires. Photography has changed not only the way that I make notes but also the way that I write. Like an endless series of prompts, the photographs are a record of half-formed ideas to which I hope to return.

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Last year, I wrote something about a leech salesman whom I’d met in Istanbul. Weeks later, a friend who had been with me in Turkey wrote to say how impressed she was by the particulars that I had been able to recount day. “Did you make detailed notes that day, or do you simply remember all this?” she asked. In fact, I had written the essay after studying photographs that I had taken of the man and his leeches.

When she praised a specific bit of description, I had to admit that it hadn’t come about spontaneously, was only after looking carefully at the photographs and trying out various metaphors that I settled on the idea that the leeches were gathered around the middle of the bottle like a belt.

Even when I’m writing longhand, it’s rare that I do not have my photo gallery open, or have a few photographs in front of me.

If I am trying to describe a place, I find some pictures that I took of that place; if I am sketching any human subject, I look for images of her. When my own albums fail me, I go down the rabbit hole of Google image search.

James Wood, in his “How Fiction Works,” writes that photographs can deaden prose. “There is nothing harder than the creation of a fictional character,” the section on character opens. “I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photoraphs.” By way of illustration, he skewers the kind of writing that is drawn from pictures. “Well, you know the style: ‘My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant… my father, however, is in his element, irrepressible as ever, and has on his head that gravy velvet trilby from Prague I remember so well from my childhood.”

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Digital photography, endless and inexpensive, has made us all into archivists.

Wood’s perfect parody concludes with the indictment that an “unpractised novelist cleaves to the static,

And the very act of taking

because it is much easier to describe than the mobile.”

a photograph, now so in

By contrast, Don DeLillo has said that single images

common, affects how we remember an event.

inspired some of his novels. “Falling Man” came from the curiosity generated by the photograph of that same title, by Richard Drew, a haunting image of a survivor from the attack on the Twin Towers. “Underworld” was sparked by juxtaposed headlines in the New York Times “I saw these two headlines, literally, in a pictorial way,” DeLillo said, “the way they were matched, each followed by three columns of type.”

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Whole writing exercises are devoted to photographs: choose a picture and create a narrative from its visual content; provide a photograph and ask a writer to use a person or an object in it as a character or prop for a story.

Both fiction and nonfiction writers walk with this crutch, hobbling their way through writer’s block or memory loss. Photographs that may deaden the prose of a fiction writer might enliven the work of an essayist; the same photographs that enable the precision of the journalist might inspire the whimsy of a poet.

A new study by Linda Henkel, appeared in Psychological Science last year, tried to measure the effect of photography on the memory. “Point-and-Shoot Memories: The Influence of Taking Photos on Memory for a Museum Tour” documented Henkel’s findings after taking two groups of students through an art museum. The first group was instructed to observe works of art for thirty seconds, the other group observed the art for twenty and then photographed it; the next day, both groups were surveyed about what they remembered.

Henkel found “a photo-taking-impairment effect”– photographing the object led students to remember fewer objects and fewer details than those who simply observed the art. In a second study, she asked students to observe the objects and then to photograph them using the camera’s zoom. Instructing students to zoom in reversed the impairment effect, improving the memories of the photographers over those of the observers.

The study is small but fascinating: taking photographs changes the way we experience the world.

Shadows on wood

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Railway crossing in Ajaccio, France

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Street art in Budapest

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But reviewing them can change the way we remember the experience. In the article, Henkel relates her findings to other research on taking notes: “Similar to the finding that reviewing notes taken during class boosts retention better than merely taking notes, it may be that our photos can help us remember only if we actually access and interact with them, rather than just amass them.”

Writing from photographs seems as though it should produce the same effect, sharpening the way we convert exwperiences and events into prose. I suspect it will also change not only what we write but how we write. It’s no coincidence that the rise of the selfie coincides with the age of autobiography.

Photography engenders a new kind of ekphrasis, especially when the writer herself is the photographer. That is why I have found myself so willing to put down my notebooks and rely fully on my photo stream. My photographs are a more useful first draft than my attempted prose was, a richer archive than the pages of my binders. Even this essay came from a “collection” of images: the old book cover of Joan Didion’s “Slouching Toward Bethlehem”; a few pictures of some specific paragraphs; screenshots of the e-mail from my friend and of my essay on the leech gatherer; photographs of the leech salesman, and of two paragraphs from James Wood’s “How Fiction Really Works.” As I made my notes, I was scrolling through these images in an album called “bower-bird bric-a-brac nest”, a phrase borrowed from Ted Hughes’s “The Literary Life”, itself a snapshot of he writer at work.

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Motion blur

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in d e x

Alto, Alvar 74, 75

DeLillo, Don 86

Ancient Greece 53

Didion, Joan 91

Apollinaire, Guillaume 45, 46

Drew, Richard 86

Bartók, Béla 26

Egypt 53

Bass, Saul 36

Far Side Virtual 21

Beethoven, Ludwig van 26

Flixus 51

Berg, Alban 26

Fuller, Buckminster 36

Bowie, David 24

Glass, Philip 24-31

Budapest 32, 54, 64, 76, 68, 90

Hughes, Ted 91

Buddy Holly 26

Immaculate Heart College 36

Bukowsky, Charles 59

Jefferson, Thomas 84

Cage, John 16, 36, 37

Kent, Corita Sister 36

Campos, Augusto de 47, 50

minimalism 25, 26

Chicago Review 51

New York City 31, 44, 62, 66

Concrete poetry 44, 51

Pop Art

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46

Reich, Steve 24 Satyagraha 24 Schoenberg, Arnold 26, 36 Scorsese, Martin 24 Scottish Opera 24 Shostakovich, Dmitri 26 Simon, Paul 24, 26 Solt, Mary Ellen 44, 46, 47, 52 The Others Magazine 53 typography 47 Wildman, Eugene

50

Williams, Emmett 50 Wilson, Robert 24 You Tube 21

INDEX 99

Cracks in Hvar, Croatia

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2 HEART RHYTHM IN ART