Studies in distortions
Manifestations, manifestos, and other inspirations by Agnes Denes.
Welcome to Chartography.net — insights and delights from the world of data storytelling. This week: two blocks of log-rolling, and then a pile of inspiration.
I’m excited to celebrate Info We Trust Remastered with so many of you soon:
🔴 Letterform Archive party March 20th in San Francisco
🌲 Rumsey Map Center afternoon public event April 4th at Stanford.
🏙️ New York City book events are coming mid-April. Details soon.
📖 Order your copy of Info We Trust directly from Visionary Press.
In my practice, I sell myself as "solves high-stakes problems with visual metaphors and persuasive graphics."
My best client work develops singular powerful images that can be used over and over to convey an idea—attract and inform minds. These artifacts are often simple, but it's also often hard to get to that simple image.
To do good work we would need to engage and collaborate in a way that has creative energy, iteration, and momentum. I need to learn lots from you to get you where you need to go. Learn more at infoWeTrust.com
Agnes Denes
A beautiful blue and silver book on the recent Agnes Denes show at The Shed recently arrived from New York.
Her visions are part mystical diagram and part geometric futurism. All inspiring.
Agnes Denes’s words are also quite compelling. They exceed any crash introduction I could write to her mathemagical catalog. So, below, I’ve threaded her 1969 “manifesto” with map projections from her 1976+ “study of distortions.”
I believe these text and projections are the right doorways for chartographers to her world. Enjoy! —RJ
working with a paradox
defining the elusive
visualizing the invisible
communicating the incommunicable
not accepting the limitations society has accepted
seeing in new ways
living for a fraction of a second and penetrating light years –
measuring time in the extreme distances –
long before and beyond living existence
using intellect and instinct to achieve intuition
striving to surpass human limitations by searching the mysteries
and probing the silent universe,
alive with hidden creativity
achieving total self-consciousness and self-awareness
probing to locate the center of things –
the true inner core of inherent but not yet understood meaning –
and expose it to be analyzed
being creatively obsessive
questioning, reasoning, analyzing, dissecting and re-examining
understanding that everything has further meaning,
that order has been created out of chaos,
but order, when it reaches a certain totality
must be shattered by new disorder
and by new inquiries and developments
finding new concepts, recognizing new patterns
understanding the finitude of human existence and still striving
to create beauty
and provocative reasoning
recognizing and interpreting the relationship of creative elements
to each other : people to people people
to god, people to nature, nature to nature, thought to thought, art to art
seeing reality and still being able to dream
desiring to know the importance or insignificance of existence
persisting in eternal search
About
RJ Andrews helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.
RJ’s next book, Info We Trust, is currently available for pre-order. He published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.