Thursday, October 09, 2008





I saw this book sitting on a table yesterday and decided to snap a couple of pictures because the content was related to our class discussion on wired cities.

It seems that one way to promote your message or vision is to produce graphs that don't level off in the way we discussed in class.

I will let you deconstruct the cover on your own.

1 comment:

Sarah said...

I saw a movie at Cinematheque about two weeks ago this reminds me of. It was from around 1952, and followed they agony of an upstanding American who was accused of being a communist. The American worked for the Pentagon, and his lawyer gets so worked up over the client's innocence in front of a high general, that the general decides to re-open the case. At this point, we go from a close-up shot of the resolved looking general to a long distance shot of office buildings and huge floors of people doing desk work on typewriters. A deep-voiced narrator comes on and says something like "And so the Pentagon focused all it's energy on setting this American's case straight...." It was almost comical how the writers failed to put the story in perspective, similar to these S curves. What followed were closer shots of Pentagon employees walking around town digging up evidence, and women on typewriters looking busy. The fact that the director took the time to put this series of shots in is a beautiful demonstration of the revolution in organization and hierarchy that we read about in the Crisis of Control. The general had the control over this giant machine of people, and it is still remarkable enough to be used as a film-making tool in 1952.

I wonder what today's movie moments that allude to organizations and machines that can help get work done and resolve the plot line for the protagonist look like? In other words, what is the filmic lopped-off S curve of today?

Maybe we should call these J curves.