Rivers and Tides

Now, the last thing you'd expect to see in a blog that purports to be about user experience, design, and branding is a movie review, but nonetheless here goes:

If you get a chance, go see Rivers and Tides, a documentary about a Scottish artist named Andy Goldsworthy. (Here are the Yahoo and IMDB and Film Forum about-the-film pages, as well as the NYT review. Oh, and here are the play dates and locations around the U.S.) First, it's one of the most beautifully-filmed documentaries ever made, at least that I've ever seen. Second, Goldsworthy's nature sculptures are the epitome of less is more, simple yet deeply meaningful. Third, the movie gushes with creative power and it will make you think for days afterwards, much the way Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics did in print. Funny, if you've neither read that book nor seen this film it might appear at first glance that neither have anything important to say to interaction designers, visual designers, experience strategists, or information architects, but, in fact they have everything to say and will give you all kinds of ideas about constraints, balance, surprises, failure, materials, flow, light, space, and time --- all stuff that's relevant to architects, be they analog or digital.

In fact it's the constraints Goldsworthy encounters I found particularly interesting. Early in the movie he talks about how he sought the open outdoors to do his art instead of the tight, enclosed, restricting cubicles of his art college. And yet, he's simply traded one set of constraints for another. Out in nature he intentionally makes nature and the passing of time his new constraints, building rock sculptures along the beach at low tide, racing to be done before the famous Nova Scotia tides come in. Or ice sculptures, racing to be done before the rays of the sun melt them away. It's all about knowing your constraints and working with them not against them. In a way he hands off his work to the constraints themselves, letting them change his work in ways he might never have thought of. Run and see this movie.

Right down the street from where I live, out in front of the La Jolla, er, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, is a fascinating rock cairn I pass by frequently; it turns out it's an Andy Goldsworthy piece (click on link to see picture). Posted by brian at May 22, 2003 07:58 PM