The Art of Destruction

Though I think it's an aspect that Heather finds unsettling, I can often find there to be something awe-inspiring in catastrophe, in horror. Maybe that's the same side of me that often thinks the most interesting stories--the most moving and affecting--are the darkest ones. Whatever it is, it manifests when I try to put myself in the shoes of someone watching Hitler's rise to power, try to imagine what it would be like to have the realization dawn on you that a man you thought to be a charismatic dictator was actually a genocidal maniac.

I try to imagine what fits of imagination were required to assimilate the scale of destruction wrought by the atom bomb when nothing like it had ever been seen before--I try to imagine that watershed moment when the realization sinks in and your view of the world is upended by a weaponized piece of science fiction. I try to flesh that out to wonder what weapons we could never imagine are currently out there in development; I try to imagine what it will be like when they are released and we have to reformat our worlds to make them make sense.

It's something to do with the elements of awe in each case. There is death and destruction and tragedy, but somehow I slip between them: evaluating the event almost objectively, almost clinically, to tease out the wonder from between the shattered lives.

It was something like that when, upon stumbling on the following graphic depictions of the projected tsunami following the March 11th earthquake, I exclaimed "it's beautiful."

Heather, who was sitting on the other end of the phone line and is, likely, a slightly better human being than me thought differently.

Regardless, there I was separating the wonder from the tragedy again, much like I am, likely, doing now when I say that the following "Help Japan" designs have caught my eye in the unending parade of various "pray for Japan" graphics. I've happened upon all of them randomly, so I don't rightly know where they all came from, but I thought I'd share them.

But, before we get to those, here's something Heather put me onto: what is, likely, one of the most purely beautiful images to come out of all of this. It's a American carrier, arriving in Tokyo harbour (I think) to aid Japan, and the officers standing on its deck have spelled out "はじめまして", or for the uninitiated, "nice to meet you."

Now, onto designs:

And Here's something Mark linked me to from Information is Beautiful. It's a graphical representation of radiation dosages and effects: