Quotes

The problem of the new world architecture is:
The finiteness of mechanics
plus the infiniteness of life.

It would be a sad irony if we were to end up creating a world too complicated for us to manage alone, and fail to recognize that some of our own inventions could help us deal with our own complexity.

The line between "fad" and ordinary product will progressively blur. We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs. The turnover of things in our lives thus grows even more frenetic. We face a rising flood of throw-away items, impermanent architecture, mobile and modular products, rented goods and commodities designed for almost instant death.

We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful media transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play of mirrors. These are images stripped of the inner inevitability that ought to mark every image as form and as meaning, as a claim on the attention and as a source of possible meanings. Much of this cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leave no trace in the memory, but what does not fade is a feeling of alienation and discomfort.

For intelligence regulates our passions – but the human spirit makes the law. Therefore technology ends with man himself. For once technology becomes an end in itself mechanical theory leads to an over-valuation of technical inventions and makes of technology an idol. Therefore no falsification of the human spirit through mechanization.

The organization of the entire economy toward the “better” life has become the major enemy of the good life.

Artists do not create objects, but create by way of objects.

Man is by all his senses and efforts directed to externals... It is only when he feels joy or sorrow that he knows anything about himself, and only by joy or sorrow is he instructed what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; He knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.

For rational beings to see or re-cognize their experience in a new material form is an unbought grace of life.

We haven't gotten any smarter, we've just changed our representation system.

The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.

The sea gulls circling on the invisible currents, the cat on my desk, the siren of a distant ambulance are not somehow distinct from the environment; they are the environment. To look at them I must look for what I take them to be.

We're still children in the computer age, and children like stability. They want to hear the same bedtime story or watch the same video again and again. But as we grow more capable and are better able to cope with a changing world, we become more comfortable with changes and even seek novelty for its own sake.

In the current historical climate, a domain where quantifiable measurement is possible takes precedence over one where it does not. We believe that things that can be measured are real, and we ignore those that we don’t know how to measure.

Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak human, not the other way around.

Much of what gives one's life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the "off time" that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.

The plow makes man the lord of a garden but also the refugee from a dust bowl.

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

The first computers were human, and the last computer may be human as well.

But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses—the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?

The work of past ages accumulates, and is remade again.

This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.

Truth is the invention of a liar.

For thinking is stoppage of the immediate manifestation of impulse until that impulse has been brought into connection with other possible tendencies to action so that a more comprehensive and coherent plan of activity is formed. Some of the other tendencies to action lead to use of eye, ear, and hand to observe objective conditions; others result in recall of what has happened in the past. Thinking is thus a postponement of immediate action, while it effects internal control of impulse through a union of observation and memory, this union being the heart of reflection.

...there are no new truths. The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance.

Technologies beget abstractions, and abstractions beget technologies, or become a different kind of technology in and of themselves.

Universe is finite: a process of decreation: the passing of the created into the uncreated. Decreation: the created passes into man-made invention. Reality passes into description.

...without embracing the relevance and importance of everyday, lived human experience, the power and sophistication of contemporary cognitive science could generate a divided scientific culture in which our scientific conceptions of life and mind on the one hand, and our everyday, lived self-understanding on the other, become irreconciliable.

Minds awaken in a world.

The culmination of experience in the first two decades of the cognitivist dominance can best be expressed by noting a conviction that grew gradually among the community of researchers: it is necessary to invert the expert and the child in the scale of performances. The first attempts were directed at solving the most general problems, such as natural language translation or the problem of devising a “general problem solver.” These attempts, which tried to match the intelligence of a person who is a highly trained expert, were seen as tackling the interesting, hard issues. As the attempts became more modest and local, it became apparent that the deeper and more fundamental kind of intelligence is that of a baby who can acquire language from dispersed daily utterances and can constitute meaningful objects from what seems to be a sea of lights.

...the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions.

We should do what pleases us in life and try very hard at it.

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul—let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!

Constraint is the mold of form.

Know the difference between the colour of the wine and the colour of the glass.

The general question revolving around "identity" is this: what does how we speak imply about what there is? Does the fact that there are vague expressions imply that there are vague objects?

The map is not the territory.

Nothing is itself anymore. Everything points to something else, has to be like that and this. A chair isn't a chair any more. It has to look like a sculpture, like a work of art.

When you speak of the photographer, there need be no distinction between the amateur and the professional. Photography is a skill in the hands of persons who may be primarily something else. The photographer who is only a photographer is not a photographer. The magazine photographer is first a journalist. The scientific or architectural photographer may be a scientist or an architect using the camera as a specialized tool. All photographers are part of their world. They know that there are two keys to the language of photography, akin to the examining and transmitting functions of the camera. The two keys with which one works are meaning and technique.

Failure - A subjective emotional experience caused by the interpretation of error as unrecoverable that yields negative attitudes towards continuing or pursuing a practice.

But there is always an avant-garde, in the sense that someone, somewhere is always trying to do something which adds to the possibilities for everybody, and that that large everybody will some day follow this somebody and use whatever innovations were made as part of their workaday craft.

Fuck them all! I just need me, you, the lightbulb, and the actor.

The scientist who has to keep his mind and concentration fixed upon an ever-narrowing field of study is in danger, and nowadays he admits it. He can become too concentrated or too diffused. His intellectual development is sometimes won at a sacrifice of emotional adjustment.

Your problem is that what you call intellect is really a series of ideas which alternately take possession of your consciousness.

Computers are always right but life isn’t about being right

I asked the skin-doctor why skin-doctors do such poor work. “Oh,” he said, “We don’t do any worse than the other doctors: it’s just that you can see the results of our work.

Even when told, the old timers will persist in the ways they learned, probably out of pride for their past and an unwillingness to admit there are better ways than those they were using for so long.

You establish in yourself the style of doing great things, and then when opportunity comes you almost automatically respond with greatness in your actions.

YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened. BUT the Future is only dark from outside. Leap into it – and it EXPLODES with Light.

IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed.

That by the term architecture is meant the endeavour to harmonize the environment with Man with freedom and great audacity, that is to transform the world of things into a direct projection of the world of the spirit;

How can anyone hope to order the chaos that constitutes that infinite, formless variation: man?

Embryologically and anatomically the eye is an extension of the brain; it is almost as if a portion of the brain were in plain sight.

Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.

Elegance is articulating the value of absence

I see so much more when I don’t know what I’m looking at.

WE MUST CREATE AT THE SAME SCALE AS WE CAN DESTROY

An inadvertent spin-off from technology will transform man into a transcendental being. Nothing we can conceive now will give us a clue to what that spin-off will be. But I suspect that vision will play an important role. The eye will have a lot to do with it.

Though much emphasis currently is placed on collaboration between artists and technologists, the real trend is more toward one [person] who is both artistically and technologically conversant.

All universities have been progressively organized for ever-finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable and desirable. Yet in observing a little child we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends and coordinates an ever-expanding inventory of experience.

The new artist and the new scientist recognize that chaos is order on another level, and they set about to find the rules of structuring by which nature has achieved.

Knowledge is not simply accumulated facts but the reduction of unrelated and often apparently irrelevent facts into new conceptual wholes.

Always keep in mind that no one person, in this post-tech society, can have, or supply, as much inspiration as the sum total of an interacting group, even if that group is primarily a loose knit, ad-hoc collective unable to work together on a daily basis.