On Electricity and Electronics: An Essay about Art
One morning many years ago, when I was a young artist fresh out of grad school, new enough to New York to still be smitten with the city but seasoned enough to wear a cool detachment about it, I gathered up all the loose bills I could find stuffed into the pockets of various jeans, walked twenty-six blocks down to Barnes and Noble -- caffeineless, as I recall, having nothing to spare for the coffee -- and bought a 360-page book on electricity and electronics. It was called Electricity and Electronics . This book still sits on my bookshelf today, its pages just as clean as they were twenty-five years ago. I don’t know why I’ve held on to it, really. Perhaps I’ve kept it as a reminder. Perhaps exactly so that I would write this essay. While singular, perhaps, in the extremity it represents, in truth the book is not such an anomaly. Perusing its nearest shelf neighbors, we find, also from that era, a history of the microprocessor, a book on code breaking, something called Patterns of Soft...