Follow the friction and jankiness gradient
Five fragments for the week of October 28, 2024
Hello from Halloweek. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix in San Francisco leading pre-seed through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
Debates! Vintage cars! Good cheer! Two more days to Lightweight Debates at The Motoring Club in Cow Hollow. I’ll be bringing a handful of stickers from my personal collection to hand out, so come one, come all—and come up to me for a “sticker reading.”
And now, five fragments that stuck with me last week…
turns out AI-generated AI art is much better than human-generated AI art
I gave one of my glifbots access to a fine art camera glif and it’s doing way more interesting stuff with it than I ever have, inspired by its crazy online research into “sigils”
– Fabian Stelzer on X, October 20, 2024. The post features the image at the top of this edition. “Crazy online research into ‘sigils’” is quite relatable tbh.
It is only by Art, and especially by Poetry, that the imagination is regulated. Nothing is more frightful than imagination without taste.
– Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, 1892. Found on Carmen’s page of quotes. A new (old) entry into the current discourse on taste. I like the lens of “regulating” imagination.
So Frank went out of his way to make the Exploratorium as kind a place as possible. He wouldn’t allow games, because games have losers. Even the exhibit labels were worded so as not to put visitors on the spot. If a sign told the visitor to look through a prism, for example, it would say, “Notice the colors,” not “What do you see?”
– K.C. Cole, Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and His Astonishing Exploratorium, 2009. When is learning supported by being “put on the spot” (thinking here of the prevalence of cold calls at Harvard Business School), and when is it not?
Another nice thing: extreme rabbit-warren density against big, open, empty squares, rather than homogeneous spatial distribution. What is private is condensed and intricate, whereas what is public is expansive and open.
– Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary, 1996. Eno is back on my mind for two reasons. One: word on the street is that his “ambient painting” is back where it belongs above the bar at The Interval at the Long Now. Two: he has a new book out with a handpainted cover.
I’m fundamentally an emerging media guy looking for 2024 equivalent of janky Perl-cgi ezines in the pre-dawn grey of blogging. Plateaued media are for fine spit-and-polish craftspeople. I need the forgiving messiness and unfinished roughness of emerging under-construction media. To find the frontier, you have to follow the friction and jankiness gradient. But right now for text that doesn’t point in any consistent direction.
– Venkatash Rao on Substack Notes, October 1, 2024. A useful / haunting reminder that “fit and finish” can mark the end of an era.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com