We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

We spend a great deal of our childhoods– our whole lives, even– within the confines of a schoolhouse. What effect, if any, does the concrete presence of our school rooms have upon us? Do our physical, literal surroundings help shape the person that we become? How do schools instill us with ideas about class and mold our personal values? Photographer Lissa Rivera’s study in the territories of academia, Places of Education, raises these questions without providing any easy answers. Gazing into these eerily still images of empty school buildings is like stumbling upon a polaroid of an old dream. Rivera’s images reaches through the blur of primary education and pull out sharply detailed representations of our collective forgotten past.

via Good Magazine.

Fact: newborn babies can detect light and dark but cannot yet see all colors. It figures, sort of. A newborn’s eyes are about half the size of an adult’s eyes. They grow quickly during the first year of life and then slow down, continuing to grow until puberty.

It makes sense, then, that a DVD series aimed at very young children would work with a vocabulary of black-and-white shapes. Wee See is a series designed by parent/designer Rolyn Barthelman and scored by parent/musician Tim DeLaughter, frontman of Polyphonic Spree.

The first collection includes fourteen animations, each 2-4 minutes long and featuring geometric shapes popping up, disappearing, scooching around the screen, rotating and otherwise moving in mesmerizing patterns. Twinkly sounds of rain drops, typewriting keystrokes, strumming instruments and ticking clocks accompany the bold shapes as they perform their dances.

The feeling of watching Wee See––if we can compare it to anything––is akin to that of being inside a planetarium. The DVDs invoke the same sense of wonder and visual splendor, and also induce the sort of hypnotized tranquility that an hour looking at faux stars produces. It’s not a bad feeling for babies to experience, nor, for that matter, adults.