Theme 19: Minimal

Our ability to give and receive and reciprocate is all that matters. It's the most pure and human impulse; to escape the excess bullshit and rediscover the essential. What is essential is not ourselves: it is each other.

Creo que Minimal es una actitud y una idea, que tiene que ver con la posibilidad de no acumular sino contemplar y de transformar los materiales para encontrar nuevas posibilidades.

From a really early age it was about removing the familiar and expected.

Don't minimize the details

Stop thinking about the result, and start thinking about the process.

Minimalism is terribly serious.

Minimalism is a material truth.

Minimalism to me is about the truth of a thing, the thinginess of a thing, when you take stuff away from a thing and your left with a thing that works on its own.

One can have a pretty good life with a lot less.

The economy is just a set of rules that you use to interact with the resources. It is not fixed, and our current model is unfixable.

We hold up the economy or the monetary system as these unchangeable veins that give life to our society but that thinking is really an illusion.

Minimalism is good because it doesn't try to be attractive.

Simplicity lives longer

Less is more

I'll tell you what is interesting: When you stand on the other side of the fence and you have to actually sell your thing and actually put your product out in the market. Guess what? Your logo will be bigger.

I think the power of design is taking something that's very ordinary and making it extraordinary.

A lot of people think, "Let's go to New York, let's go to somewhere else, because is bigger, is better, is better than here." Well, no, make it happen HERE.

I think you need to stop and look at your life because you have a rich history. You are a tapestry, you are fabric, like every stitch. You can put an extra stitch into that fabric and all this is part of that.

I don't think deadlines are real. I think they're imposed on us. I think it's bad time management.

We are a museum without a building, we're a museum without a collection, but we're a museum with a hell of a lot of high hopes and goals.

Minimize the amount of bureaucratic crap between you and your audience.

It's about keeping everything minimal and having this maximal element.

I do like to strip things away to the bare essence of a structure but it's once I'm at that stripped away point I can't restrain myself, I have to maximise something, find a detail and dial it up.

I do believe less is more, but to a point.

I think of myself as more of a Maximilist.

The less you own, the more you have!

The reductive part of it is maybe less important than the additive part because eventually when you take enough stuff away, something is suddenly added by the absence of everything.

The mushroom theory was to keep them in the dark and to feed them a lot of shit... I was the mushroom.

Le cinéma est souvent trop pressé, trop préoccupé de raconter une histoire pour pouvoir vraiment arrêter, freiner, décélérer et se concentrer sur un moment.

Eating alone is no longer a social paradigm, but a chance to disconnect.

It's hard to create moments of disconnection.

Behind this facade of minimalism is a mess.

For me, minimalism is a subtractive process.

As I've been doing art, there's been this process of un-learning design.

Curiosity fuels discovery.

Somewhere in adulthood we begin to shed our childhood curiosity. This is a shame because curiosity fuels discovery.

Minimalism is asking what is important and letting it be just that.

How can we make objects where every piece is essential?

More minimal has the potential to lead to more freedom.

What does one really need to have a good life?

Whatever you do, don't approach the bison.

It [minimalism] really is about clarity over cleverness.

Meaning is the one thing that binds us together.

This guy could save a lot more time if he didn't spend so much time trying to figure out how to save time.

If you take a minimal approach to a project, this leads to a minimal solution.

All of a sudden, we realized that someone was paying us for having such a good time.

The beauty I see and that I receive from nature compensates the pain, most of the time.

Seek out uncomfortable situations.

The fact that we know that we are going to die one way or another should be motivating us to do exactly what our hearts tell us we should be doing all the time.

If you want to be a writer, you have to write.

I literally did not know what I was doing.

Our income went up, but our happiness went down.

We saw ourselves as just these two people who got lucky making these weird videos and now Google wants us to make one for them. It blew us away.

When we're in front of a frame, we go into a mode of 'I'm about to watch something'. This works against the impression of presence.

The frame works against the effect of cinematic presence.

Understand the DNA of the tools you work with.

At the end of the day, our ability to give and receive and reciprocate is all that matters.

Egos and power and politics and bureaucracy obstruct solutions.

At the heart of many stories, there is a problem that is waiting to be solved.

Eventually, when you take enough stuff away, something is eventually added by the absence of everything.

When you're early in your career, you can start with your tools too much instead of starting with the idea.

I erased the entire list [of tasks]. I just don't know if these things are the most important things to work on anymore. And, if they are important, they'll come back.

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. —Mark Twain

It’s easy to throw out bad ideas, but to throw out really good ones is hard.

I think minimalism, if approached in the wrong way, if it is approached in the aesthetic sense, can give people the wrong reaction.

I believe that minimalism is a process. It’s not an aesthetic. It’s not black and white. It’s the thoughtfulness that goes into creating these things.

Minimalism is not the lack of something. It is simply the perfect amount of something.