Notes On the Margins

onthemargins.com

I remember first getting introduced to these in cartoons. The Rube Goldberg machine is an overengineered apparatus that performs a very simple task. Rube Goldberg himself was a 20th century political cartoonist who illustrated these kinds of machines in some of his comics, maybe to depict government or bureaucracy.

I vividly remember the Tom and Jerry cartoon which featured one. It was called “Designs on Jerry”,
and in it Tom attempts to build a better mousetrap. But while drafting the plans for the “improved” design on a blackboard, Jerry secretly changes the calculations to mess up the plans and survive. Needless to say, Tom gets a safe dropped on him in the end.

Whoa. Although I remembered the story, I have never read so much into it. Basically Tom attempts to redesign a tried and true device, which is risky to begin with. He takes the wrong approach and overcomplicates it, so it is almost destined to fail. And then he gets a safe dropped on him.

I don’t know if I buy into all that but….

What I’ve always pondered about these machines is that they are causation for causation sake. One thing influences another- an action sets off another which in turn….
But there is no real purpose to the series of events. Is this somehow a statement of truth? A poke at science or our tendency to explain things with meta-narratives? Perhaps this is the wheel of samsara. But it is amusing.

A bit long (but just a section of the piece) - Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s The Way Things Go

I haven’t read much on this far reaching combination of concepts, but I think very much about the relationship between them. At its very basic physical level, sound is a motion of the air, which gets transferred into the motion of the vibrating eardrum, which then gets interpreted as sound by the brain.

But I often think of the similarities between the two as lying more in the metaphysical than the physical. They both exist in space and time and have a sort of causal relationship.
I’m speaking about motion rather than just image or visual because motion particularly denotes some kind of change. Compared to the image or object of visual perception, motion has a particular temporal quality about it, although some would probably argue that what we perceive as static is still unfolding over time, in some kind of flux, or that through color and light all things visual are transmitted over time to our eyes.

But when we think about sound and its visual equivalent, its movement that captures our attention as the counterpart to sound. I think when Kandinsky was referring to the sonic qualities of point, line, and plane, he was speaking from his experience as a painter, an actor whose movement with the brush leaves lines which call up sounds, or whose motion with the pen makes points of silence.

A few other fragments that surround this idea:
An orchestra is comprised of moving bows, mallets, bodies, in order to create sound. (Motion causing sound)
Body movement is almost a reflexive response to sound (Sound causing motion)
Dance is our first expression of music, structured sound. It is our attempt to capture and communicate sound in a visual form. Complex and evolving music has challenged dancers to find more challenging body forms. From ballet to breakdancing.
Either we have all been brainwashed by the rise of music video and MTV, but many times when we see something moving while hearing music, our mind often tries to sync the two in some way.