Friday, August 04, 2006

Convergences: RNA, Crop Circles, & Cartoons

My interest in maps of all kind and the visual depiction of data brought me to Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, and from there to McSweeney's, which is running a contest challenging readers to submit their own examples of convergences.

Weschler's convergences are images from vastly dissimilar areas that strike strange resonances when paired. One reviewer described the viewer's sense of frisson as "the pleasure of unlikely alignments and beguiling resonances." He continues: "Time (like mirrors, paintings, and the eye of the beholder) has its own capacity for creating sameness, for ignoring the different and competing politico-economic contexts of socialism and capitalism and finding between them the sublime commonality of a sailor slouching in Poland and a Santa Monica woman slumped in her cocktail dress."

Clockwise from left: RNA strands, alien crop circles 1 & 2, cartoon by Chris Ware.

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