Austin Kleon – Page 535

HOW DO BABIES KNOW?

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Internet detox continues…hence the lack of posts. But I did want to point out this excellent discussion between musician/artist/awesome dude David Byrne and neuroscientist/musician Daniel Levitin. I find neuroscience endlessly fascinating, and if I had any kind of science background at all, I’d go get my PhD on creativity and the brain at UT Austin, where they have a great center for neuroscience. But alas…

One particularly great subject for neuroscience is babies. Here, DT and DB are talking about mirror neurons:

One of the great mysteries in human behavior was that a newborn child can look up at its parent, and the parent smiles, and the newborn will smile. Well, how does it know how to do that? How does it know by looking at an upturned mouth what muscles it needs to move to make its own mouth turn up? How does it know that it’s going to produce the same effect? There’s a whole complicated chain of neuroscientific puzzles attached to this question.

And:

DL: …There’s actually a theory that all infants are synesthetes, and that sensory differentiation takes a few months after birth to occur. And that infants live in this sort of psychedelic world of everything being jumbled together.

DB: Wow.

I love this stuff…

I have been sick and our bootleg wireless signal is down, so my past couple of days have been pleasantly lo-fi. I’ve been working with the brush a lot (see above), reading books, and staying away from the computer screen. The only hi-tech thing I did the past couple of days was play Super Paper Mario while listening to an Elmore Leonard audiobook (audio books + video games = a brilliant idea from my buddy Brandon).

I don’t know anything about Stephen Elliott, but he had a great article in Poets and Writers on living without the internet with some great advice:

Divide your day into online and offline. Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slows down productivity. As long as you read your e-mail and respond once every twenty-four hours, nobody is likely to notice. Dedicate at least half of your day to handling non-Internet tasks exclusively. Write a list of things you need to do when you do get online so your Internet time will be more productive. If the main thing I was doing in my life was writing a novel, I would resolve not to be online at all. I know people who have moved “off the grid,” to rural areas to escape any distractions to their work. But the reality is you don’t need to go anywhere, you just need a computer without a Wi-Fi hookup. The urge to screw around is always strongest when the work’s not going well. And if you work at a computer, screwing around is only a click away. But when the work’s not going well is exactly the time to turn the Internet off.

THIS BOOK IS GOING TO BE SO AWESOME

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Blessings on Tom Devlin’s head for posting these previews of Lynda Barry’s WHAT IT IS on the Drawn and Quarterly blog. I’ve only seen about 15 pages worth of it from the “graphic issue” of Tin House. The (official!) cover:

A fantastic excerpt which resembles part of a talk Lynda gave at Oberlin:

And finally, the cover for the sneak-preview D+Q is releasing for FREE COMIC BOOK DAY:

I really hope I can get my hands on this next Saturday.

My other rambles about how wonderful Lynda is, here.

KEVIN HUIZENGA ON DIAGRAMMING

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

There was this job I had where I was working at a place called XPLANE, which was an illustration company that did these visual explanation things, and a lot of times that amounted to these diagrammatic/comics illustrations. That really got me interested in diagrams. And after thinking for a while about diagrams, the stories that I did while I worked there have a lot of diagrams in them, and that carried on through. I started collecting old science textbooks and so forth that had these nice illustrated diagrams. It made me realize that since I was in high school and Understanding Comics came out, I’ve always thought about the comics form. And something I started realizing recently is that we talk about comics being a mixture of image and text, but it really seems to me that a part of the way comics works is in this sort of diagrammatic space. You have a pictorial space, which follows certain pictorial norms, and then you have the text part of comics, which follows the syntactical structure of text and language. What comics does is it has this particular way of diagramming those things together using the panel unit and the word balloon as symbols for certain things. I really realized that that was the part of comics that appealed to me the most. When I look at other cartoonists, I think that they’re real pictorial cartoonists. They’re really interested in the image part of comics. And there are other cartoonists who are really interested in stories and the subjects we associate with literary storytelling like character, plot and so on. I realized the thing that interested me in comics is the way all of that stuff is diagrammed on the page and the way that you read it.”

– Kevin Huizenga, interview

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