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

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.

Ever since the earliest astronomer tried to make sense of the endless night sky, human beings have sought order in systems of chaos. We’re driven to control disarray by understanding it, either scientifically or poetically. Both of those widely divergent approaches to the unknown have been boosted by the last century’s giant strides forward in technology.

Not only can we now map the human genome and access centuries of human thought at the click of a mouse, but technology has also introduced vast new quarries of chaotic, random material for artists and poets to obsess over. And that’s just what Glitch: Designing Imperfection is about– it’s a book celebrating the anarchy of distortion, the creativity intrinsic to grisly computer crashes.

This illuminating volume meditates on the meaning and meaninglessness of glitch– the beauty and the terror of pixelated, involuntary abstraction– through enlightening interviews and work from dozens of rad digital media wizards like Johnny Rogers and Cory Arcangel. Sifting through 900 submissions, the curators of Glitch: Designing Imperfection have spent four years compiling the definitive resource on the visual art of synthetic chaos.

If only breakfast cereal came in James Siena shapes. This would mean corn pops that resemble distorted spirals and shaded hooks, and wheaties in the shape of combs and slices and forks. Delicious. The artist uses humble materials– graphite, gouache, enamel–to create works that are like Magic Eye stereograms for the aesthetically aware.