The Pale Blue Dot
In 1990 the Voyager 1 spacecraft was leaving the solar system, about 6 billion kilometers from Earth, when Carl Sagan requested to turn the camera in order to take a photo of Earth. That photograph is know as “The Pale Blue Dot” and inspired Sagan to write one of the most beautiful words I’ve ever read.
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
As a tribute to who filled my childhood with dreams about space, I spread this text over a portrait of Sagan. He is probably out there, somewhere, satisfying his curiosity.
Another version I was working on.
Sigmund Freud
A quote of the famous creator of psychoanalysis, “The first requisite of civilization, is that of justice”, spread over his portrait.
I have a dream
My little tribute to Martin Luther King . He said “I Have A Dream” during the March on Washington in one of the most wonderful speeches ever.
Martin, we still share the dream with you… a global dream!
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill has exceptional quotes. But I like the most one quite simple that summarizes the personality of this brilliant man: “Never, never, never give up”.
I spread the quote over his portrait.
In this second illustration I used a different quote: “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”. Totally agree!.
Simone de Beauvoir
I want to share with you my work in progress files of my new tool, still in beta stage. The goal is to be able to spread full phrases, instead of single words. It’s more complicated and I still need time to adjust the variables and the find the better way to get nice results, but you can take a look at my current tryouts.
I’m thinking that it will be very usefull to spread quotes, lyrics or even full books. There is a big scope ahead…
The idea of the program is to find the most energy paths in the image and put a full phrase in each valid path. I added a lot of radomness so paths don’t collapse at the begining.
For the image I took a protrait of Simone de Beauvoir and spread some of his quotes (in french!). here you have the quotes and the translation:
On ne naît pas femme: on le devient (One is not born a woman, but becomes one).
Choisir la vie, c’est toujours choisir l’avenir (Choose life, always choose the future).
L’art est une tentative pour intĂ©grer le mal (Art is an attempt to integrate evil).
Se vouloir libre, c’est aussi vouloir les autres libres (I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom).
A couple of tryouts…
To know more about this great woman visit her Wikipedia article.
Dedicated to Angel, who pointed me to Simone.
Download a resolution free PDF of this image: JO-D-101126-Simone
And finally another sample… some kind of remake of one of my old files, Lennon and the best song ever… Imagine.
Go ahead, make my day.
One of the most famous movie quotations spoken by Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan, or vice versa.
Download PDF JO-D-100706-Eastwood-ENG
A day without laughter is a day wasted
One of the famous quotes of Charlie Chaplin , “A day without laughter is a day wasted”, spread over an abstract image of the actor.
Download PDF JO-D-100622-Chaplin-ENG
The Scream
Based in the famous painting by Edvard Munch. As you can read in Wikipedia, Munch described his inspiration for the image thus: “I was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”
I took the last part of his description and spread it over the painting.
Download PDF JO-D-100618-TheScream-ENG
Humor is…
A portrait of Groucho Marx with his quote “Humor is reason gone mad”.
Download PDF JO-D-100510-Groucho-ENG (2.6MB)
You must be…
A Mahatma Gandhi portrait with one of his quotes “You must be the change you want to see in the world”.
Download PDF JO-D-100419-Gandhi-ENG (1.38MB)
Leonardo da Vinci
As a tribute to one of the most interesting characters in history, Leonardo da Vinci.
The image is a self-portrait with the quote “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” With which I feel quite identified.
The new thing is the addition of a transparent shadow below each word, sized proportionally to the font size.
Download PDFÂ Â JO-D-100330-LeonardoDaVinci-ENG (2.7MB).
Starry Night Quote
A beautiful Van Gogh painting with the words of his famous quote: “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day”.
Download PDF VanGogh-EN (957kB)