The Music of Philip Glass, Visualized in Fractals

What fractals have to do with classical music and the secret of Einstein’s genius.

I’m obsessed with synesthesia and the visual language of music, and love the work of Philip Glass, often considered the greatest living composer. Naturally, I’m head over heels with these spellbinding fractal visualizations by Russian artist Tatiana Plakhova, abstracting Glass’s music graphically.

Plakhova got a Master’s in social psychology before finding her calling in visual language — a living testament to my wholehearted belief in the creative potency of cross-disciplinary eloquence. (Einstein, for instance, famously attributed his greatest breakthroughs in physics to his violin breaks — he believed they helped parts of his brain connect in new ways.)

See the rest of Plakhova’s stunning work on her aptly titled site, Complexity Graphics.

via @kirstinbutler

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Famous Creators on the Fear of Failure

Embracing what is, or how to fail like the world’s most successful creatives.

While failure may be an integral prerequisite for true innovation, the fact remains that most of us harbor a deathly fear of it — the same psychological mechanisms that drive our severe aversion to being wrong, only amplified. That fear is the theme of this year’s student work exhibition at Stockholm’s Berghs School of Communication and, to launch it, they asked some of today’s most beloved creators — artists, designers, writers — to share their experiences and thoughts on the subject. While intended as advice for design students, these simple yet important insights are relevant to just about anyone with a beating heart and a head full of ideas — a much-needed reminder of what we all rationally know but have such a hard time internalizing emotionally.

When you put love and enthusiasm into your work, even if people don’t see it, they realize that it is there, that you did this with all your body and soul.” ~ Paulo Coelho

It is very important to embrace failure and to do a lot of stuff — as much stuff as possible — with as little fear as possible. It’s much, much better to wind up with a lot of crap having tried it than to overthink in the beginning and not do it.” ~ Stefan Sagmeister

What it comes down to is accepting the fact that many ideas and many solutions that we provide to our clients may always, or sometimes, fail. The trick, I think, is to A) accept it and B) have the courage to accept it and move forward with what you believe in.” ~ Rei Inamoto

But my favorite has to be Milton Glaser:

A characteristic of artistic education is for people to tell you that you’re a genius. [...] So everybody gets this idea, if you go to art school, that you’re really a genius. Sadly, it isn’t true. Genius occurs very rarely. So the real embarrassing issue about failure is your own acknowledgement that you’re not a genius, that you’re not as good as you thought you were. [...] There’s only one solution: You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you’re capable of doing, and what you’re not capable of doing. That is the only way to deal with the issue of success and failure because otherwise you simply would never subject yourself to the possibility that you’re not as good as you want to be, hope to be, or as others think you are.” ~ Milton Glaser

Explore all the videos on the exhibition site and feel free to share your own recipe for dealing with failure in the comments below.

via Creativity Online

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DrawHappy: Ongoing Global Art Project on Happiness

What pie, cats and giant cheese have to do with life’s most elusive aspiration.

Happiness is a frequent subject here, from culling the most essential books on the art and science of happy to exploring various artists’ attempts to capture what lies at the heart of happiness. It’s safe to say the pursuit of happiness isn’t merely a constitutional right, but a human preoccupation as old as the world’s collective memory, yet we still don’t have even a remotely precise understanding of what truly makes us happy. That’s exactly what SVA student Catherine Young explores with DrawHappy — an ongoing global art project inviting people to draw what makes them happy.

The project began in Iceland, consistently listed as one of the happiest places in the world, where Catherine began asking people, both locals and tourists, what made them happy.

I realized that one of the most universal and clearest ways to record their responses was to ask them to draw what made them happy. Drawing is one of the earliest skills we learn; its basic elements are comprehensible to people of all ages, cultures and nations. I reasoned that if people knew that they were happy, they should be able to identify the source and moreover, visually embody this joy.” ~ Catherine Young

With its incredible cast of characters, from a theology-student-slash–dancer to a conservation-engineer-turned-hostel-housekeeper to a security-guard-slash-2D-animator, and its wide spectrum of happiness-markers ranging from the simple and poetic (“friends, family, love, cats, traveling, sunshine”) to the somewhat worrisome (“control, attention”), the project is an absolute delight of voyeurism and shared humanity.

House on a Hill

Okami Landa, 28 years old, New York, USA and Colombia; security guard, 2D animator, editor

Repeat, repeat, repeat

'I am happy when I feel the routine of everyday stuff. Repeat, repeat, and repeat.'

Sebastian Vidal, 32 years old; interior designer from Argentina but living in Barcelona

Pie

Britt, 36 years old, brand strategist; Atlanta, Georgia, now in New York

Me on a sailing cheese

'That's me on a piece of cheese, so I’ll never be hungry.'

Swantje, 26 years old, film student and receptionist; born in Germany, living in Iceland

Long leisurely dinner with family

'Having a long leisurely dinner with my close family in my lovely garden.'

Sif ,45 years old, director; Reykjavik, Iceland

Cats

'Cats make me happy. I love them. And having enough money makes me also happy.'

Ingibjörg Birna Steingrimsdottir, 52 years old, works in a museum; Reykjavik, Iceland

Stars, sky, books, dancing, dreaming, family

'The stars and the sky make me happy. Reading books makes me happy. Dancing and dreaming make me happy. My family makes me happy.'

Margrét Lilja Vilmundardóttir, 25 years old, theology student and dancer; Iceland

Colors, diversity, good energies

Zsofia, 26 years old; born in Hungary, living in Iceland studied nature conservation engineering, photography and furniture making; hostel housekeeper

After the 106th submission, Catherine decided to visualize the learning from the project thus far:

We found this Maslowian extrapolation most fascinating:

Submit your own drawing and join this wonderful global exercise in deconstructing life’s most elusive aspiration.

via Swiss Miss

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