Archive for Roba

Visual Order and Chaos and the Impossibility of Randomness

There is nothing harder than faking visual chaos. No. There is nothing harder than randomness in general.

As humans, we have this built-in need to organize the world around us; ideas, objects, even people. Life becomes less confusing when everything is recognized, differentiated, and understood. Classification is something I try to embrace wholeheartedly, to the extent that I have almost no issues with stereotypes, “-isms” (I classify myself as a feminist, for example), and other methods of uncomfortable classification. Consciously classifying myself clearly for others makes it easier for people to understand me, attracting and deflecting them accordingly to my benefit. It’s some sort of branding, I guess.

Last night, I was assisting some friends in setting up a booth at event. The set-up included pegging small packages on a clothesline.

They had started pegging the packages systematically.

The red packages were hung neatly behind each other, as were the blue packages and the green packages. The distance between each of the packages was exactly the same. Each clothesline had seven packages. Actually, the display looked like an exercise in mathematical precision.

The designer in me went crazy trying to hijack the display of packages to look much more random. But my friend looked at me with shock; I was, after all, ruining his perfect visual system.

Then I started thinking about randomness.

It goes against our nature to create randomness. Away from the field of visual arts, as humans, we can’t come up with truly random numbers without help. There have always been methods for generating random numbers — dice, coin flipping, roulette wheels. In IT, you can use computational algorithms that produce long sequences of apparently random results, which are in fact completely determined by an algorithm, and are thus inherently predictable. There are also quantum-to-classical randomness extractors, which are much better at generating randomness. We are incapable of randomness, in a way.

It’s very confusing. Here we are, anxious to make sense of the complicated world around us; we hate randomness. We systematize, classify, correlate, measure, notice, realize. Yet this instinctual hatred of randomness screws everything up, as our cognitively hard-wired brains are constantly finding meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model (this is called priming, and it is thought to play a large part in the systems of stereotyping), so we often systematize incorrectly, leading to disasters.

Confused enough? Let me confuse you further. Back to visual randomness.

Whether you brain is hard-wired to hate it or not, randomness is good, at least visually, and to an extent. Your eye does not like excessive orderliness. Take the rule of thirds, for example. It’s a “rule of thumb” or guideline which applies to composing visual images such as designs, films, paintings, and photographs. Basically, what the rule of thirds does is fake lack of balance using mathematics. It says: an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.

Here’s a picture cropped with and without the rule of thirds:

When the stone in the middle, it looks bad, even bordering on offensive. It looks like the picture is yelling at you. That’s why the rule of thirds is good; it helps set balance in a visual composition.

Take a look at these displays:


Pretty right? Look at how random the bottles look. How the balls hang at random heights. How the cages are random sizes. Imagine how they would look if they were perfectly aligned, if they were the same size, or if there was a distinguishable pattern. Not good. They wouldn’t look natural.

Of course, there isn’t anything random in how these displays were set. Someone painstakingly created the layouts to fake the perfect randomness. When I first started practicing design, I found it immensely difficult to fake randomness. Ten years later, I still have to work really hard on a random layout. A visually-untrained person will never be able to set the packages randomly, or understand why I had to set them randomly.

The non-randomness of randomness is beautiful.

If you were a person who isn’t aware of how randomness is awesome, impossible, necessary, and never random, I hope you start seeing how beautiful randomness is. It is never just there. It’s a conscious act in a world that inherently hates it.



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10 Years in Amman

I moved to Amman from Saudi Arabia in June 2003. I was 17. I got my driving license in August. I enrolled in Jordan University in September.

That first year was hard.

Amman is a tough place to be when you grew up sheltered in the compounds of Saudi Arabia. It is cold, for one thing (I know what you’re thinking, but trust me, try growing up in the real desert). I had never seen mold before in my life. I had never spent four solid months consistently cold, wet, and shivering. I had never owned a coat before. When I look back at my first year here, being cold is practically the only feeling I remember.

First snow 2003
The first time we ever saw snow in our life

Me and the boys 2003
My first car

Life in Amman is also not convenient; you don’t have the luxury of a driver chauffeuring you around, the convenience of entertainment venues within your compound’s facilities, or the buy-everything-you-want-instantly consumer lifestyle of the Arabian Gulf. Your life isn’t weather controlled. Money doesn’t come easy. I had to work hard on things beyond academia, and I got my first job at 19. I haven’t had more than 10 consecutive days off work since then.

Yet, the hardest part for me was the people, because people in Jordan are real. To an 18-year-old kid who never had to deal with reality before, everyone seemed mean, materialistic, and hypocritical. I hated the people I met. I hated their complexities. I hated their problems, their attitudes, and their toughness. I also really missed all the people I grew up with, who were more family to me than they were friends. My mother and father were also still in Riyadh, and I had to deal with three younger brothers (aged 15, 14, and 11 at that time), making sure they ate their meals, did their homework, and avoided stupidity.

Family
My boys and I during our first year here

It’s amazing how much I grew in my first year in Amman.

I started this blog a year after I moved here, in 2004, so everything I felt, experienced, or faced after that first year is recorded somehow. My first trip to downtown Amman. The awakening of Jabal Amman. My first art exhibition. My father’s death. My first full-time job. The first Souq Jara. My graduation day. My first party. My first trip outside the Arab world.

So yeah. Its been 10 years. I’m a very Ammani girl now (or shall I say woman, now that I’m close to 30). And yeah. I’ve met awesome people here. I’ve had amazing experiences. I’ve loved and hated. I’ve hurt and felt joy. Its been 10 years, damnit. That’s a damn long time.

So yeah. Amman.



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I think the world would be just fine without music.

Yes, I think the world would be just fine without music.

Don’t get me wrong; I do appreciate music. It’s very beautiful, after all. I just don’t think it’s important. Technology is important. Medicine is important. Laws are important. Music just adds a layer of romanticism to an otherwise cruel world. My interest in music is more cultural and anthropological.

With that said, my relationship with music has fluctuated a lot. At several low points in my life, I resorted to music to numb my brain and soul. When I was 19, I did systematic research about a certain genre with the purpose of faking musical taste and knowledge to impress a boy I liked (it was useful, as it turned out that rock really is my favorite genre). For a whole year at some point, I chose to not listen to music at all. Another year, I repeatedly listened to nothing but Radiohead’s “In Rainbows”. When I was 15, my musical taste was a copy of the musical taste of a random IRC user that I never spoke to, but who had his collection open to downloads. Sometimes, I get painfully addicted to a certain track or artist. Addiction, we already talked about that.

Lately, I’m in another unmusical phase. Music is agitating me. I keep forwarding tracks and getting pissed at my iTune’s choices. Tracks I loved a few months sound like nails on a chalkboard today.

It will pass though, I guess. It usually passes.

As a reminder to myself, mostly, here are musicians I’ve been addicted to at different points in my life:
1. Robbie Williams (he remains my guilty pleasure to this day)
2. No Doubt
3. Ane Brun
4. Damien Rice
5. Janis Joplin
6. Garbage
7. Led Zeppelin
8. Leonard Cohen
9. Matchbox 20
10. Muse
11. The Offspring
12. Pearl Jam
13. Pink Floyd
14. Queen
15. Radiohead
16. Red Hot Chili Peppers
17. Sufjan Stevens



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Things that cripple you

1. Fear
2. Expectations
3. Slow internet connections
4. Waiting



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On May

The summer has come. Happy, beautiful, sunny summer. The weather is warm. My bones are warm. The ice cream tastes better than ever. Sitting outside all day, all night, all month. The smell of jasmines. The sound of poplar trees. The crowded streets. The good spirits.

pool

Syntax

shehabi

my girls

bakehouse

boys

Summer

karmx

purple moon

meenie

mom

jimi

mojito

us as kids

bayt smile

cousins

tba

dancers

photoshoot

breakfast

Mojito

Meenie and fasfas

Jo Bedu at DumTak

Can you really archive time?

2007: On March | On April | On May | On June | On July | On August | On September | On October | On November | On December

2008: On January | On February | On March | On April | On May | On June | On August On September | On October | On November

2009: On July  | On August | On September | On October | On November | On December

2010: On January | On February | On March | On April | On May | On June | A Captioned July An UnCaptioned August  | On September  | On October | On November | On December

2011: On January  |  On February   |   On March   |  On April  |  On May  |   On July

2012: On April | On May | On June | On July | On August | On September | On October | On November | On December

2013: On January | On Februaury | On March | On April | On May



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Things that piss me off

Not just piss me off. Rage. Inability to function. ANGER.

1. A slow Internet connection.
2. A laggy computer.
3. Buffering YouTube videos.
4. People who speak in a low voice (also, inaudible noise thanks to a broken headset).
5. Bad kerning.
6. Terrible re-designs.
7. Bad user experience.
8. Run-on sentences.



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