The darkness was like nothing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; after a while I could barely believe that my hand was there, in front of my face, waving.

That darkness is what I think about when I think of black. I was going to write, the color black, but as every child knows black isn’t a color. Black is a lack, a void of light. When you think about it, it’s surprising that we can see black at all: our eyes are engineered to receive light; in its absence, you’d think we simply wouldn’t see, any more than we taste when our mouths are empty. Black velvet, charcoal black, Ad Reinhart’s black paintings, black-clad Goth kids with black fingernails: how do we see them?

According to modern neurophysiology, the answer is that photoreceptors in our retinas respond to photons of light, and we see black in those areas of the retina where the photoreceptors are relatively inactive. But what happens when no photoreceptors are working—as happens in a cave? Here we turn to Aristotle, who notes that sight, unlike touch or taste, continues to operate in the absence of anything visible:

Even when we are not seeing, it is by sight that we discriminate darkness from light, though not in the same way as we distinguish one colour from another. Further, in a sense even that which sees is coloured; for in each case the sense-organ is capable of receiving the sensible object without its matter. That is why even when the sensible objects are gone the sensings and imaginings continue to exist in the sense-organs.

We “see” in total darkness because sight itself has a color, Aristotle suggests, and that color is black: the feedback hum that lets us know the machine is still on.

{ Paul LaFarge/Cabinet Magazine | Continue reading }

{ Google Books | Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1888 }

Tell about places you have been, strange customs. The other one, jar on her head, was getting the supper: fruit, olives, lovely cool water out of the well stonecold like the hole in the wall at Ashtown. Must carry a paper goblet next time I go to the trottingmatches. She listens with big dark soft eyes.

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, published in 1922 | Continue reading | Ulysses contains approximately 265,000 words from a lexicon of 30,030 words (including proper names, plurals and various verb tenses), divided into eighteen episodes. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

images { Hilo Chen, Beach, 2005 | Huata, Open The Gates of Shambhala EP }

{ Courtney Love by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, Pop 14, 2006 | Madonna by Stephen Meisel, 1992 }

{ Pete Johnson | more }

{ The Shape of Manhattan in Subway Maps. Manhattan dominates in the new design, its girth growing by 31 percent over the current map.The island is depicted 83 percent wider than its actual proportions. | MTA will unveil a resized, recolored and simplified edition of the NY Subway map, its first overhaul in more than a decade. | NY Times |More }

{ Scott Musgrove at Jonathan LeVine Gallery, until June 12, 2010 }

{ What Makes The Pie Shops Tick? | more }

{ Mothe, Decay of a city | Thanks Colleen }

{ Anthony Gormley | more }

{ Chuppé | Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }

{ Frank Lloyd Wright, Johnson Wax Building, Wisconsin, 1936-1944 | Main room with lily-pad columns | more photos }

The construction of the Johnson Wax building created controversies for the architect. In the Great Workroom, the dendriform columns are 9 inches (23 cm) in diameter at the bottom and 18 feet (550 cm) in diameter at the top, on a wide, round platform that Wright termed, the “lily pad.” This difference in diameter between the bottom and top of the column did not accord with building codes at the time. Building inspectors required that a test column be built and loaded with twelve tons of material. The test column, once it was built, was tough enough that it was able to be loaded fivefold with sixty tons of materials before the “calyx”, or part of the column that meets the lily pad, cracked (crashing the 60 tons of materials to the ground, and bursting a water main 30 feet underground). After this demonstration, Wright was given his building permit.

{ Johnson Wax Headquarters | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related:

{ Bench by Kois Associated Architects | more }

Subjective experience poses a major problem for neuroscientists and philosophers alike, and the relationship between them and brain function is particularly puzzling. How can I know that my perception of the colour red is the same as yours, when my experience of the colour occupies a private mental world to which nobody else has access? How is the sensory information from an object transformed into an experience that enters conscious awareness? The neural mechanisms involved are like a black box, whose inner workings are a complete mystery.
 
In synaesthesia, the information entering one sensory system gives rise to sensations in another sensory modality. Letters can evoke colours, for example, and movements can evoke sounds. These extraordinary additional sensations therefore offer a unique opportunity to investigate how the subjective experiences of healthy people are related to brain function. Dutch psychologists now report that different types of synaesthetic experiences are associated with different brain mechanisms, providing a rare glimpse into the workings of the black box.

{ Neurophilosophy/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Werner Amann }

{ When it comes to secure messaging, nothing beats quantum cryptography, a method that offers perfect security. Messages sent in this way can never be cracked by an eavesdropper, no matter how powerful. At least, that’s the theory. Today, physicists say they have broken a commercial quantum cryptography system made by the Geneva-based quantum technology startup ID Quantique, the first successful attack of its kind on a commercially-available system. | The Physics arXiv Blog | full story }

photos { Guy le Baube | Daemian and Christine }

{ iPhone Deconstruction by Ben Millen | Enlarge/Zoom in | Barry Ritholtz }

In town to promote his new film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Banksy, the pseudonymous British street artist, has been leaving reminders of his visit around the city. But almost as soon as the paint was dry, the pieces were scribbled on overnight by taggers claiming to be the Smart Crew and Emjay, well-known local graffiti artists.

Some of Banksy’s pieces were also tagged with a picture of a man’s face and a stenciled message reading “Free Henry—Poster Boy,” a reference to the street artist Poster Boy (real name: Henry Matyjewicz), who was sentenced to 11 months in prison last week on charges of criminal mischief.

Street artists in the city seem to be under siege at the moment. The Banksy markings come on the heels of a massive tagging attack on Shepard Fairey’s mural on East Houston Street. (And that mural itself had already been targeted with a stop-work order by the city’s Department of Buildings.) Police say they’re investigating the tagging, and note that Banksy lacked a permit for at least one of his drawings.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

{ Glamorous Piles | more }

It ought to be easy ought to be simple enough
Man meets a woman and they fall in love
But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough
And you’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above if you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love

{ Bruce Springsteen, Tunnel of Love, 1987 | Thanks Jay }

video still { Pipilotti Rist }

bonus:

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

{ Anais Nin | Continue reading }

photo { Kate Moss photographed by Mario Sorrenti, Vogue Australia, March 2009 }