What is a Line?

"A connected series of events, actions, or developmetns."

Well... i began by just typing 'line' into google to see what hits i got. I found myself on a strange string of thoughts which kept me sifting through google and the depths of the seemingly random things people have been doing with their time. Here it goes.

I typed 'line' into google and this was the first image that grabbed my attention. My initial reaction was hah! that's funny that someone has taken the time to do this. Then i thought about how it was interesting for the reason that the line avoided being broken.

So for my next search i typed in 'Broken Line' which go the hit Broken Line - Photographs by Olaf Otto Becker.

Written By Publisher

"Olaf Otto Becker, born in 1959, worked for almost four years and covered thousands of miles by boat creating these photographs of the Greenlandic coastline. The resulting images, made in the clear light of the midsummer night over long exposures, are worth the effort. Almost shadowless neo-romantic dreams capes, they are unrealistically beautiful. Becker sometimes waits days for the right image or condition to appear in order to produce a single image-a process that leaves him with only about 25 photographs per year. Though visually diverse, all of the pictures share the contemplative character of their creator. Becker, who was once a painter, doesn't photograph scenery: He builds compositions, using his eye and his patience to develop a work of melancholic beauty, in the powerful iconography of the nineteenth-century landscape. He has exhibited widely in Europe, and his previous monograph was short-listed for the Rencontres D'Arles Book Award."

I really like these photographs, they are very calm and glass like. Such a sharp image for such a long exposure gives an out of this world perspective on the terrain. I thought about why it was called broken line, instead of reading into it. I came up with the idea that the line was his journey around the Greenlandic coastline which was broken up into single moments in time or single images in the vast space of the bigger picture.

Also thinking about books i like the simplicity of it. I think it is the margin spacing which makes it look so neat.Another result i got from 'broken line' was these ink paintings/drawings byJulian Cox. I like the sway he has turned the complexity of the human form into a collection of very simple lines. Just using the thickness and density of the lines so convey form and shape.

Along with the hits for 'broken lines' i also found this image which was titled dissecting lines. I don't know who took this photograph unfortunately. But it reminded me of vapour trails in the sky and how they overlapped in smooth graceful curves.

So i typed it in and found these beautiful photographs of which there are many more.

I just love the way the curves are so gentle and graceful. It seems so serene in these photos. Also when you look up and see a plane high up in the sky on a clear day, you cannot hear the sound but you see the vapour trail or contrail and i find it very relaxing.. Brief wiki explanation "Contrails or vapour trails are visible trails of condensed water vapour made by the exhaust of aircraft engines. As the hot exhaust gases cool in the surrounding air they may precipitate a cloud of microscopic water droplets. If the air is cold enough, this trail will comprise tiny ice ."

This led me on to thinking about vapour trails of comets, however there were few interesting images of it, but i stumbled over this photo which is actually quite interesting to me. I cannot explain in my own words so I'll let a fella called Stuart explain what is going on here.

I had just got on my bicycle to go home from work when I saw a pretty amazing sight in the sky. Luckily I wasn't going fast, so I managed to stop before I went into a nearby hedge. There was the Moon in the east with Mars about 20 degrees or so away around to the right. Near Mars was something that looked a bit like a curved vapour trail. Looking more carefully I realised that it made a full loop of the Moon. This was no vapour trail but a Moon halo. Just as rainbows are caused when light from the Sun is refracted by raindrops, crystals of ice high up in the atmosphere can refract moonlight to create bows and dogs. Whereas rainbows require raindrops in front of you and the Sun behind your head, halos are seen in 22° arcs around a bright object such as the Sun or around the almost full Moon whenever there are hazy cirrus clouds about. As the light is refracted, different colours are bent through different angles just as in a prism. Although this happens with a Moon halo, the light is very weak so is difficult to pick up by eye. Hopefully, in the image above you can see the colours. Frankly, I am amazed that this came out on my camera.

What a lovely story.

But i did find this interesting, the idea of a perfectly spherical line in space so i used that for my next key words.

This is the only interesting result i found in pages and pages of google and blogs. All the rest were of line graphs and boring things like that. Line in Space... i thought about the implications of this image, what space was and what these lines were. An image sprung to mind of a clear perspex box with thread pulled tightly across the interior of it, creating a crazy net within the box like the image below.

I think all this will give me something to go on thinking about for a while.

I suppose what I've done, without really thinking about it is "a connected series of events, actions or developments." This could apply to any research or developmental stage of designing in a way.

Also my last idea about A line in Space ties in with "a mark indicating position, connection or boundaries" like a map a journey or a series of events.