Roblog

five posts about art

• 28 August 2025

  Filed under: art

  Dust – what time does to art

  A thoughtful and moving piece by Tom Cox on the effect of time passing on art, as experienced when watching Get Back:

  “It’s something very rare: a largely unaltered portrait of newborn art before any dust has settled on it. Time will make its refinements and adjustments to that art, just as it always does. You don’t have any control over that, even if you’re the most famous band in the world. All you can do is try to be as free as possible, give yourself space to fail, which is the same space that could very likely also permit you to flourish. Then it’s up to your other collaborators, which are the years that stretch out in front of you. They could be looked on as a kind of invisible post-production. They’ll sort it all out. They always do, even if they’re sometimes cruel or unsympathetic to your personal circumstances while going about it.”

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• 13 November 2024

  Filed under: art

  Cabel Sasser on Wes Cook

  I suspect this will do the rounds, as it thoroughly deserves to. Try to watch it without spoilers. It’s Cabel Sasser’s talk from XOXO this year, it’s about art and memory and what lives on of us after we pass, and it’s lovely. #

• 25 July 2023

  Filed under: art

  GRID WORLD by Alexander Miller

  A beautiful reminiscence on the power of grids, by Alexander Miller:

  “When I was a kid, my dad gave me a piece of paper with a grid printed on it. It consisted of larger squares than standard graph paper, about an inch in size. It was basically a blank chessboard. The columns of the grid were labeled with letters (‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, etc.), the rows labeled with numbers (‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, …). My dad then helped me draw a map of an imaginary island within the grid’s boundaries. I sketched the squiggly coastline of my island, forming a splattered blob shape, within which I added the obvious necessary features all mysterious islands require: forests of crudely draw trees, a mountain with a cave entrance leading to a secret underground network of caverns, an abandoned hut on the beach. There were variations of this game: sometimes the map was of a completely imaginary place, but other times we mapped a known area – like our backyard – and added fantastic elements.”

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• 16 October 2022

  Filed under: art

  Studio Ibbini

  Beautiful paper-cut artworks by artists Julia Ibbini and Stéphane Noyer that recall the geometry of Islamic art and architecture and are made possible by computer-controlled laser cutters:

  

  

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• 6 March 2021

  Filed under: art

  Looking Closely is Everything – Craig Mod

  The wonderful Craig Mod exhorts us to look – to really look:

  “This act of ‘really looking’ is deceptive. It requires an almost ‘unlooking’ to see closely, a kind of defocusing. Because: We tend to see in groups, not details. We scan an image or scene for the gist, but miss a richness of particulars. I suspect this has only gotten worse in recent years as our Daily Processed Information density has increased, causing us to engage less rigorously – we listen to podcasts on 2x speed or watch YouTube videos with a finger on the arrow-keys to fast-forward through any moment of lesser tension. Which means we need all the help we can get to prod ourselves to look more closely.”

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