Art

Quick vs. Slow (Quality Control in Art and Business)

Roskilde Univ. Prof says: Quick working = low quality (like fast food), slow working = high quality (fine food).

Interesting analysis. [via steverubel | Twitter University]

Related posts:

1. Not So Fast

   Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication

   By John Freeman

   The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capac­ity of our minds. "My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband," writes the poet Don Paterson. "I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die." We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down. Our society does not often tell us this. Progress, since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is supposed to be a linear upward progression; graphs with upward slopes are a good sign. Process­ing speeds are always getting faster; broadband now makes dial-­up seem like traveling by horse and buggy. Growth is eternal. But only two things grow indefinitely or have indefinite growth firmly ensconced at the heart of their being: cancer and the cor­poration. For everything else, especially in nature, the consum­ing fires eventually come and force a starting over. The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, emailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we have to change it. Of course email is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives. [Article continues here via Wall Street Journal] Photo Credit:  Mark Crossfield
2. The Beauty, Secrets and Utility of Twitter for Business Lots of people laugh at Twitter, call it a waste of time and worse, and, that's just fine with me. While they're laughing, I'm learning, listening, meeting, and enjoying a global view of an endless flow of creative thought - 140 characters at a time...[Continue reading here.] via What's Next | B.L. Ochman The above is from B.L. Ochman's business blog, but I'm posting here with the hope that those who aren't in marketing, tech, or business per se might be moved to sign up and join the conversations, offer their sage advice, and share a little of the priceless mundane with the rest of us. Follow me on Twitter if you'd like.  I've taken to calling it Twitter University after my uninformed, inexperienced knee-jerk reaction upon first hearing about the service.  Now I consider it an essential learning and communication tool (and then some).  Highly recommended.

3. Outside money is plan B The first priority of many startups is acquiring funding from investors. But remember, if you turn to outsiders for funding, you’ll have to answer to them too. Expectations are raised. Investors want their money back – and quickly. The sad fact is cashing in often begins to trump building a quality product.

   Constraints force creativity Run on limited resources and you’ll be forced to reckon with constraints earlier and more intensely. And that’s a good thing. Constraints drive innovation.

    

   via Getting Real Digest | Diigo 

    

4. Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) is a musical piece composed by John Cage and is the subject of the slowest and longest-lasting musical performance yet undertaken. It was originally written in 1987 for organ and is adapted from the earlier work ASLSP 1985; a typical performance of the piano piece lasts for about 20 to 70 minutes. The current organ performance of the piece at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, began in 2001 and is scheduled to have a duration of 639 years, ending in 2640. via Wikipedia | hat tip Overprocessed
5. It's easy to be avant garde when you don't know what you are doing. via @kirkmitchell on twitter

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