Paul Kahn

Watching John Maeda's Nature

The geometry unfolds
That is the motion
The differences in location
Start with a pattern, a stroke
Repeated or amplified by the mathematics
Numbers I am seeing
A beautiful shape, an elegant curve

The movement will sometimes induce rhythm
In my mind, it is here
Much like the way notes strung together
A beat a beat a beat will
Small motion
FLASH

John wrote the computer
Is never tired of repeating
Instructions

Focus varied is like rhythm
What is sharp, the edge
The feeling of seeing a sharp shape
Everything is flat and a curve
Is calculated by whole numbers
Repeating with some dot variation dot

Can you hear a sound
In the dot another dot click
Click click
Shh
Sumptuous lugubrious voluminous
The beans of probability
Move by waves of muscle fibers
Tight then loose tight then loose tight then
Across the marvelous screen suspended
Depth of focus
I remember that light pattern how
Do you remember déjà vu
All over again
If you saw it again in a hundred years
I remember those cones and rods
A pattern I could not code
If my life depended on it, if my wife
And children depended on it

So much calculation going on in one
Place, moving from viewpoint to
Another. FLASH. Barnett Newman
Surfaces of flat pure color on walls
Entirely stationary dead blocks frozen
Only my eyes moving from
Surface surface surface broken by
White surface walked through. This memory
Did not occur in real-time in a dark room
Suspended screens lush it is not
Calculated light discrete light
Light imagine light someone shuts down
The machine black. Where
Did that idea come from Nature

Fondation Cartier, Paris, 14 February 2006