2026-11-13 02:31:23
Some monks thought the hermits had it too easy.
That’s the detail that resonated most as I read from Jamie Kreiner’s The Wandering Mind. A man goes off to a cave to escape the distractions of the world, which sounds like the harder path, and his colleagues back at the monastery raise an eyebrow. Why? Because out there, nobody sees him. Nobody shares his purpose closely enough to tell him when he’s drifting — and with one instrument, there’s no way to tell drift from progress. Solitude, for a social animal, may be painful, but it also affords the bliss of ignorance. The monks who chose to live together were not choosing the pleasure of conviviality, but the accountability of others.
Living with twelve others was the harder practice. Not because of what they shared, but because of what they were submitting to: the watchful eye of their brother. The correction they obliged themselves to hear and share. The commune was withdrawal from society, yes. But withdrawal from exposure? No. The monastery was a machine for staying accountable while staying apart.
I’ve been reading that alongside a novel.
In John Crowley’s Engine Summer, published in 1979, a woman whose role is to carry the oral history of her village explains to a young man how the world before the collapse came apart. Among the culprits: phones. They let people speak to one another without being near one another, and what that permitted was a kind of carelessness. You could say a thing and not stand there while it landed.
Crowley was writing about household landlines. He had no internet to extrapolate from. And the passage still reads like a description of the device in my pocket, which is the part that fascinates me. Forty-seven years of engineering between his object and mine, and the complaint hasn’t changed.
The familiar form of that complaint is about cruelty — anonymity lowers inhibition, people behave in comment threads as they never would in a room. All true, and thoroughly established. But I think the more precise loss is duration. In a room you have to stay. You watch what you put out there land on a face, and then you keep standing there. Hanging up, closing a tab, leaving a thread — all of these are escapes from the obligation to witness.
The monks had two positions and knew the price of each. Isolation cost you correction. Immersion cost you protection from a culture that didn’t share your values. Every point on that spectrum charged something.
What the phone introduced is a position that appears to charge nothing. The trappings of isolation, in that you’re spared the friction of other people. The trappings of immersion, in that you can speak into the world at any hour. Expression without experience. You get to send; you don’t have to receive.
This is the hermit’s cave with better lighting — the same missing second reading, the same inability to tell connection from performance. But there is one critical difference: the hermit knew he was alone. He built a wall and paid for it knowingly. The phone hides the bill.
So why do we keep choosing it, twenty years into knowing better?
I have a colleague in Eastern Europe whose work matters enormously to me and whom I have never been in a room with. That relationship does not exist without the mediation. It isn’t a consolation prize, or a thinner version of a real thing. It’s load-bearing in my life, and no amount of monastic wisdom makes it otherwise. Three years ago, he joined a long list of people I know and care about but would never have met without the internet.
That’s the mechanism. The benefits are undeniable, which is what makes them such a good alibi. Tell someone they’re on their phone too much and they’ll tell you about their friend in Warsaw, and they won’t be lying. Every indictment meets a true exception. An appetite with no justification gets corrected eventually. An appetite that can always point at something good goes on indefinitely.
I was early to social media and early out of it. The friendships I made there — real ones, a few of them fifteen years old now — came from Twitter when Twitter was polite text and argument, and from the comment sections of blogs. Not one came from the platforms built to model relationships. Friendster and Facebook — that whole genre — assumed you arrived with your people and merely needed somewhere to keep them.
A social graph is a filter before it is anything else. It admits who you already chose. What produced the friendships was the opposite: encountering a stranger on the strength of something they’d said, with no prior claim on my attention. That’s something close to walking into a room full of strangers.
I may not be on much social media, but I still publish, and the publishing offers the same thing. I don’t choose who reads, and people write back. By every measure those platforms were optimized for, a personal website is the inferior instrument. It is also the one still introducing me to new people.
I’m still left with other questions.
We regulate appetite. Not perfectly, and not everyone — there’s a spectrum, with real suffering at both ends — but most people, most days, know when they’re hungry and when they’ve had enough, without deliberating about it. It’s close to autonomic. I’d like to think we get there with digital technology, that moderating mediation becomes something a person simply does, the way they put down a fork.
But the comparison turns on me the moment I lean on it any harder. Satiety is an ancient signal working in an environment we constantly redesign and rebuild to defeat it. We engineer flavors to stimulate more hunger, we increase portions, we sell candy as if it’s nutrition. Availability is made constant. Our regulators didn’t fail. They’ve been met by active opposition.
This is the same story a third time. A monk’s correction, defeated by a cave that feels like progress. Accountability, counterfeited by approval that costs the sender nothing. Fullness, counterfeited by food built to outrun it.
Whenever I consider the balances of modern life — of solitude and being together, of input and output, of the organic and the digital — I’ve always assumed the question was whether we can learn to moderate. Whether we have the wherewithal to choose the right things. But I’m not sure now. The question may be whether anything we’ve built a countermeasure against stays readable.
2026-11-11 02:37:19
Dava Newman seated in the MIT BioSuit, a close-fitting grey suit laced with red tensioning lines, wearing a bubble helmet, against a radial corrugated backdrop.
I published a mood board called Garment on Sunday. It contains six hundred and ninety images and no explanation at all, aside from a textual aperitif courtesy of Virginia Woolf: “They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”
A mood board is wordless by design. I want a board to be looked at before it’s read, and a caption under every picture would turn looking into reading. But the silence costs something. Months of hunting go into one of these, and almost none of that work survives into the thing you actually see. Somebody finds an image of a dress made of glass and has no way to learn that it is, in fact, a dress made of glass.
Liner notes solve this. You put the record on first. Then, somewhere in the second or third listen, you turn the sleeve over and find out who played the bass. So here are mine.
The folder is called “Garment,” which is about as wide a container as I could have chosen. I’ve written before about naming the collection first and letting the name do its own work. What the name doesn’t do is explain the imagined or final form of the board, because that is the result of a concept I begin with and rubric I use to keep the board in focus.
For this one, the concept was garments of the future.
The initial rubric was simple, mostly defined by what I didn’t have in mind: Not costume, and not fiction. (By the way, I keep a separate board for design fiction.) What qualified them was a claim: each one proposes something about what clothing could be, and most of them propose it in a way you can see without being told. These garments had to be real; they had to be made, worn, and photographed.
That’s the whole rubric; general, yes, but narrower than it sounds. It excludes nearly all of fashion, which is enormously inventive about silhouette and almost never inventive about what a garment is for.
As I gathered imagery and researched the history of garment futurism, the rubric took on a bit more detail: material innovation, clothing as protection, new functional purposes, technological integration, environmental interactions. The more I learned, the more fuel I had for discovery.
I never begin with themes in mind. One of the purposes of a board like Garment is to communicate themes and ideas visually without being didactic. This is meant to work for the viewer and for me. I want to be able to immerse myself in a board and discover what it presents — what a gathering of images around an idea can teach. And so themes are emergent; they show up afterward.
The first is the most immediate: the material is mostly not organic, and it shows.
A garment qualifies when the synthetic nature of the thing is the first fact you read off the picture. Libbey’s spun-glass gown. Rabanne’s plastic discs joined with metal rings. Chalayan’s Tyvek envelope. The Vollebak graphene jacket. Suzanne Lee’s bacterial cellulose reads as neither woven nor knitted, which is the point. Jen Keane’s shoe upper is grown around a yarn scaffold. On’s LightSpray, a filament sprayed around a body in about three minutes.
None of these are trying to blend in. They wear their innovation on their sleeve, pun fully intended.
What makes this theme argue itself is that its opposite is also on the board. Nylon stockings, the Dacron suit, the Qiana coat — all synthetics, all engineered to pass for organics like silk, wool, and cotton. Two chemical industries, same decades, opposite ambitions. One wants you to notice, the other wants you not to. The proof is in what the board does best: juxtaposition. Put the Libbey fabric close-up next to the stockings and the whole point is right there without a word under either one.
The second theme was the one that surprised me most, and will probably stick with me the longest.
So much of clothing history is containment. The body is pushed into a shape the garment has already decided on, and the person’s job is to fit. We’ve always approximated a body in our designs, no matter how unaccommodating our materials. A suit of armor is, by design, an inflexible weight welded into a body shape to protect what squeezes inside. A corset goes the opposite route, designed to reshape the body within. Our history is riddled with garments we accommodate or endure.
But what I kept noticing on this board is the reverse: garments where the material advance was motivated by its yielding to us. They are more flexible, more durable, more forgiving of a body in motion.
Thayaht’s Tuta, for example, is one piece, few seams, and free; its patterns given away in a newspaper. Stepanova’s production suit was made for an artist who intended to work in it. The Bloomer costume stands out, too, with the measure of the norm it broke how hard it was mocked at the time. Petit Pli is a contemporary example, engineered to expand in several directions so a child keeps wearing the same garment through a growth spurt. Miyake and Fujiwara’s A-POC is an entire wardrobe inside a continuous knitted tube that the wearer cuts out themselves.
And then I stumbled upon a cluster I didn’t know existed and had a name: adaptive clothing. A school uniform polo whose buttons are decoration over a velcro placket. A teal blouse that snaps open along the entire shoulder so it can be put on someone lying down. A hoodie with a one-handed hood, magnets where the buttons would be, and cuffs that adjust rather than pull over. Children’s sweatpants that open the full length of the side seam so they go on without raising the legs, and that clear a cast.
These complete the theme. Accommodation stops being a design value and becomes the entire function. They also sit at the far end of the board’s price range, which turns out to matter.
The third theme is the most obvious idea.
Yes, the job dictates the shape. Hard suits, flight suits, flame-resistant Nomex, Kevlar. But what makes those futuristic rather than merely practical is the ambition underneath them. These are garments that let a person occupy somewhere they cannot otherwise survive. Vacuum. Fire. Pressure. Depth. The suit is the condition of entry and expands the occupiable world.
Lucy Orta’s Refuge Wear is the purest version on the board, because it refuses to stop at the body — a garment that converts into shelter, which is the same idea taken one step further out.
Then dial it back toward ordinary life and the same logic works. Athletic clothing that lets a body do a thing it couldn’t otherwise do, and keeps doing it after repeated stretching and washing. Workwear customized down to a very specific gesture — the hammer loop being the obvious case, though the board has plenty of garments imagining work nobody does yet.
The boundary between this theme and the second one is porous, and I’ve stopped trying to seal it. A spacesuit accommodates the body in the most literal possible way. It’s armor against the crush of pressure, not the mace — armor of off-world exploration. A velcro placket is much more mundane, simply a function the form obeys. The themes have blurred edges, but I think they remain distinct points, and the blur is always where the interesting things are.
The Libbey Glass Company wove glass fibre together with silk and made a gown for the Chicago World’s Fair. A surviving skirt is at the Deutsches Museum.
The board has a full shot and a fabric close-up, and the close-up is the better image, because it shows the fibre. It is the oldest thing in the collection and still among the strangest, and it was made for a world’s fair, which tells you exactly what it was for.
I’d assumed this was a styling editorial. It isn’t. Vogue commissioned nine industrial designers — not fashion designers — to dress the woman of tomorrow, timed to the opening of the New York World’s Fair. Cooper Hewitt holds preparatory drawings.
The ensemble I kept is trousers for evening, gathered at the ankle, billowing at the hip and the knee. The accommodation is visible in the silhouette. It hugs where a body is stable and leaves room where a body bends. You could dance in it. Someone thought about that, in 1939, while being asked to imagine the future, and what they imagined was room to move.
Not the Tuta itself. The cutting plate.
The garment is interesting — one piece, minimal waste, designed to erase the distinction a tailored suit depends on. But the plate is the more radical object, because it’s the distribution mechanism. A newspaper pattern anyone could cut is a different species of futurism than a couture object, and it’s the kind that actually changes what people wear.
The MIT BioSuit applies mechanical counter-pressure directly to the skin instead of pressurizing a volume of gas around it. The board has a sleeve close-up with the MIT patch and a shot of Dava Newman wearing the full suit.
The visible lines on it are tensioning elements, and they’re routed along the body’s lines of non-extension — the paths on your limbs that don’t lengthen when you move. Find those, and the suit can squeeze without fighting you. The function isn’t merely the form here. The body’s own geometry is the pattern.
The newest thing on the board is Laura Civetti’s Adaptive System, and it landed there by a coincidence I only really noticed at the end.
Civetti’s method reads body curvature, perspiration zones and solar exposure off a wearer and varies the textile’s thickness, density and porosity across the body in response, the way biological tissue does — thicker here, more porous there. Adaptive, in the sense of a material that adapts.
Elsewhere on the same board are ten garments that are adaptive in the completely unrelated sense the clothing industry means: designed for bodies that the rest of the industry didn’t design for. Same word. No shared lineage. And they sit in the same collection, where the only thing holding them together is a word neither of them chose.
That’s the vibration I build these things for, and I didn’t put it there.
The board shows. These notes tell. I’m not convinced the telling improves the showing — if anything it domesticates it slightly, turns some of the vibration into information.
But the research happened, and it was most of the work, and it was going to evaporate otherwise. So it goes here, behind the board rather than on top of it.
2026-11-08 04:08:38
There is a folder on my computer called “garment.” Before that there was one called “time,” and before that, “disk,” “display,” “cybernaut,” “machine.” Each one began the same way: I came across an image somewhere it didn’t belong — in an article about something else, at the bottom of a search for something unrelated — and looking at it brought a theme to mind. So I made a folder, named it, and put the image inside.
Then I added to it, for months. Hundreds of images later, that folder is a mood board.
This started years ago as something entirely private — a reference collection I kept for myself, with no thought of anyone else seeing it. Somewhere along the way I began choosing themes I thought would work as public presentations.
If someone asked why I do this, the honest first answer is that I enjoy it. I suppose that’s fair enough, but it doesn’t actually explain anything. There are a thousand enjoyable things and I’m not doing those. The real question is narrower.
What is it about gathering images around a theme and arranging them that I enjoy; why not knitting or bonsai or chess?
I’ve written before about being fascinated by layout — about looking at a page as a child and finding wonder in it before reading a word. The ordering of symbols and the spacing of them across a surface communicates something before any of the words are decoded. A page has a temperature. You can know something meaningful about it before you’ve actually read anything.
Images do this more directly, and they do something else besides: what they communicate changes with what’s next to them.
An image of Bill Clinton using a laptop means one thing in a story about technology and the presidency. Put it beside an image that has nothing to do with either and it means something else. Nothing about the photograph has changed.
(Note to self: presidents using technology would make a great mood board.)
Kraftwerk performing in front of a wall of coloured light.
The screen of a Tamagotchi.
A robotic arm and hand holding a yellow block.
A technician beside the segmented mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope.
Bill Clinton using a laptop at a desk.
A small gold circuit assembly held between finger and thumb.
Red and green pedestrian crossing signals.
A person flying a small red human-powered aircraft.
I remember having this illustrated for me by an art teacher in middle school.
Mrs. O’Neil showed us a series of still life paintings from the 17th century, all depicting tables covered with a collection of mundane objects — flowers, books, instruments — and a human skull. Everything about the image described a life in progress, except for one, and its power was to redefine the others.
This, my teacher explained, is juxtaposition; it’s an arrangement that compounds meaning by engaging the formal elements of design — proximity and contrast, especially.
Those memento mori still-lives internalized the juxtaposition; it was the subject of the image. But the same thing happens when two images are placed side-by-side. It creates a kind of tension, but because, for me, it’s a pleasurable one, I think of it as vibration. It’s a tension that isn’t in either picture alone, but felt when they sit together.
This is, I think, the primary mechanism that defines a mood board against an image collection. There are a few things to look at in a board. The individual image. The vibration between it and its neighbors. And then the whole — the gestalt — which is the hardest to describe and the reason to build the thing at all.
Walking a gallery works this way. You stop at a painting, then you notice what the curator has hung beside it, and by the time you leave you’ve acquired an impression of the room that isn’t reducible to any of its parts. A board is the digital equivalent, with one difference: the hanging is the work.
Finding the images is a different kind of labor, and this is where the aesthetics step back and the work becomes more intellectual than intuitive.
Searching within a theme is a process of iterative description. I start with the word I named the folder with and then I try to say it differently — narrowing toward names, details, attributes, eras, materials — hoping each rephrasing shakes loose something I was after, and occasionally something I wasn’t. It’s a hunt. It takes patience and repetition and a tolerance for dead ends, and it can absorb months.
For the time board, the tree looked roughly like this. From clocks: ancient and historical clocks, clocks disguised as other objects, nature as a clock, scientific and astronomical clocks, clocks hidden in everyday life and biology, iconic clocks from history, extraordinary clocks that look like works of art. Then within one branch — ancient and historical — further down: the Ishango bone, the Clepsydra of Karnak, the Antikythera mechanism, al-Jazari’s elephant clock, a Chinese incense clock, the Samrat Yantra at Jantar Mantar.
Clocks
Scientific and astronomical
Ancient and historical
Nature as a clock
Ishango bone
Clepsydra of Karnak
Al‑Jazari’s elephant clock
Chinese incense clock
Jantar Mantar
Most of that tree is the point of the exercise. I didn’t know about the Clepsydra of Karnak.
Lately I’ve been using AI models to help me extend the tree. I describe the project, state the rubric — for the time board, real objects used for keeping time, no movie props, since I already have a design fiction board — and ask what’s missing. Not what images are missing, but what information. I’m looking for entirely new categories and concepts here, and then for specific examples within them that aren’t already on my radar.
With that research as a guide, I then go and find the images myself, the “old fashioned” way. I don’t want to give up the funnest part.
Searching for a thing you know exists will sometimes drop an unfamiliar neighbor in front of you, by accident. Asking a model for examples excluding the ones you’ve already listed does this same thing deliberately, and it always bears fruit. The models also differ from each other the way several knowledgeable people would — overlapping in the obvious places, diverging in the interesting ones. Asked what “time” could mean, each one proposed a different set of branches.
When it comes to AI, I’m measured about this. I care about keeping my own lines of thought, and about staying able to tell the real from the generated. But a question I continue to ask — having argued elsewhere that the slow labor of making something is where the understanding gets deposited — is this: if the hunt gets easier, does it do the work within me that it once did?
I think it does.
I still have to verify every reference, find a usable image of it, judge whether it belongs, and throw most of it away. What’s changed is the number of branches on the tree, and I’m still climbing all of them myself. For a person who loves climbing, AI is just giving me more to do.
The first board I made was limited to a hundred images, which is also what I called it. The assignment I’d given myself was to articulate an aesthetic sensibility and be forced to choose. I cheated slightly by including compound images, pictures with several objects in them.
The boards I have made since have been trending bigger. The time board has eight hundred and fifty-nine images in it.
A screen capture of the top of the 100 Images mood board.
A screen capture of the top of the Machine mood board.
A screen capture of the top of the Design Fiction mood board.
A screen capture of the top of the Display mood board.
A screen capture of the top of the Disk mood board.
A screen capture of the top of the Cybernaut mood board.
A screen capture of the top of the Time mood board.
Who could hold all of that? Not me! I can last about one hour in a good museum before new information stops staying in my brain. I assume a board has a similar threshold — some number of images past which the rest becomes a blur out of which perhaps only a handful are retained. By that measure, a board the size of “Time” is probably counterproductive.
But something else happens at scale: immersion. Time is an enormous subject; a maximalist board at least acknowledges that. After all, one could argue the other way and say eight hundred and fifty-nine isn’t nearly enough to cover the meanings and methods of marking time. Both arguments seem right to me.
When I had the models take inventory of the time board, they all had different takes — on the themes visible, the gaps, and how to fill them. But they all had one opinion in common: the collection was too heavy on mid-century modernist table and wall clocks.
They were right. It was, by a wide margin.
I kept them all in anyway! The rest of the board runs dense and dark and age-desaturated — archival photographs, stone instruments, museum objects shot against black. It needed moments of high contrast and bright color and geometric simplicity, and the mid-century clocks were where those moments were.
That’s where a board becomes personal. I could hand anyone the concept and the rubric — even a machine. What I can’t hand over is the whole purpose of the board: the mood, which is mine.
The first of these I ever saw was a site called But Does It Float, which I found years ago and still visit. It posts collections of images under long, quotation-like titles, and it’s edited by four people who sign with first names only. The mystery is intentional.
I’ve stuck with this site for years the way I stick with creators like Peter Gabriel, Julie Mehretu, or Céline Sciamma (just a few among many); I’ll give anything they make my attention. It’s a trust that is quickly, intuitively established and, counter-intuitively, harder to succinctly explain the longer it endures. We share a sensibility.
But as I have begun to assemble my own mood boards, I have noticed what I suspect is an important, procedural difference. Their collections look, to me, to be assembled first and named after, the way a painting gets titled. The name arrives as a work in its own right, an evocation rather than a label, and it sets the whole group vibrating in a particular key. That’s something that makes But Does It Float special, and something I wouldn’t try to do myself.
I name the collection first. The name is, usually, a big container. Inside and unnamed, is the conceptual rubric I use to give the collection a unique shape. That sounds like the less artful method, and in some ways it is. But a literal name produces its own vibration. You read time and you expect a watch face. You get the watch face, and then you get an ice core. “Time” becomes “a unique collection of objects that communicate the passage of it.”
I don’t know yet whether the gap between those two things is the point of the collection or just a side effect of how I work. It probably doesn’t matter so long as the board is surprising and inspiring to me and others, more than once.
P.S. You can browse all the mood boards here.
