Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Honda FC Sport

Honda FC Sport
Built as a design study, the FC Sport demonstrates Honda’s vision for making environmentally responsible vehicles that are also fun to drive. The "FC" stands for "Fuel Cell" as in hydrogen fuel cell—the same technology powering the FCX Clarity. With a 3-seat, driver-centered cockpit, a fuel cell powerplant opens the door for unprecedented engineering flexibility, allowing for a lower center gravity than any modern, piston-engined sports car. The FC Sport is symbolic of a future in which alternative fuel and zero emissions will rule the sports car world.

Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu, Ruffian Logistics, 5 ft. x 11 ft.,

ink and acrylic on canvas, 2001

Mehretu combines a personal language of signs and symbols with architectural imagery to create her elaborate semi-abstractions. Simultaneously engaged with the formal concerns of color and line and the social concerns of power, history, globalism, and personal narrative, she is interested in "the multifaceted layers of place, space, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity." The underlying structure of her work consists of socially charged public spaces--government buildings, museums, stadiums, schools, and airports--drawn in the form of maps and diagrams. She inscribes her own narrative into these decontextualized, highly controlled spaces through the layering of personal markings.



Mehretu_at the Walker

John Ralston Saul

(John Ralston Saul approaches) themes such as the dictatorship of reason unbalanced by other human qualities, how it can be used for any ends especially in a directionless state that rewards the pursuit of power for power's sake. He argues that this leads to deformations of thought such as ideology promoted as truth; the rational but anti-democratic structures of corporatism, by which he means the worship of small groups; and the use of language and expertise to mask a practical understanding of the harm this causes, and what else our society might do. He argues that the rise of individualism with no regard for the role of society has not created greater individual autonomy and self-determination, as was once hoped, but isolation and alienation. He calls for a pursuit of a more humanist ideal in which reason is balanced with other human mental capacities such as common sense, ethics, intuition, creativity, and memory, for the sake of the common good, and he discusses the importance of unfettered language and practical democracy.

Harold Bloom

Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development of Western literature as a process of borrowing and misreading. Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers; in order to develop a poetic voice of their own, however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably 'misread' their precursors' works in order to make room for fresh imaginings.