Tag: moby dick

Weavers

Artist Unknown, (Weavers), Computer Graphics, Animation Gifs

“The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.”

– Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 102 A Bower in the Arsacides

Thanks to http://beesandbombs.tumblr.com

Herman Melville: “There is a Wisdom that is Woe”

Photographer Unknown, (The Catskill Eagle)

“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Robert Del Tredici

Robert Del Tredici, “Ubiquitous”, 2014, Mixed Media Print on Metallic Paper, New Bedford Whaling Museum

Robert Del Tredici started out as a pen-and-ink landscape-maker in the Marin county hills of California. His first big project was a series of 100 illustrations to “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville. He then took up street photography, made portraits of film-makers, and, with the near-meltdown at the Three Mile Island, started documenting the nuclear age.

His first book, “The People of Three Mile Island”, published in 1980, led to a 1987 book written about the entire US nuclear weapons complex, “At Work in the Fields of the Bomb”. Following its publication, he traveled to the former Soviet Union and photographed nuclear towns and facilities there.

Del Tredici is the founder of The Atomic Photographers Guild, an international collective of photographers dedicated to making visible the nuclear age. Since 2001 he has been creating collages depicting the era of the War on Terror, a series he calls “Evolution Pages 9/11”.

In the mixed media print “Ubiquitous”, artist Del Tredici captions an image of the phases of the moon, with Moby Dick breaching in between them. A quotation from Melville’s novel “Moby Dick” about ghostly sightings of the whale is written at the bottom left.

“One of the wild suggestions coming to be linked with white whale in the minds of the superstitously inclined was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous, that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.”