Identifying things

One thing I love doing to annoy my friends and family is yelling out loud things I know the name of.

Look! That’s Copperplate in that sign. And that’s Gill Sans.

I LOVED this minor 6th chord.

I love graphic (and typographic) design and music, so those examples are to be expected. But thinking about it in a more general fashion, I love identifying things, just for the sake of identifying.

Collectors mindset

I like to identify things from a collection point of view; just like collectors love to collect things. Collecting things feels good. Usually, collectors do not collect things for the sake of having more, but rather to fill in all the gaps in a set of related items. It’s taking the extra step to know everything about something. Most notably, people collect coins, stamps and such. These objects are filled with history and they do have, at least two stories to tell: how they were used back in their day, and how they got into the collection!

Collecting things forces us to know about the extent of our collection so as to not collect the same item twice, or at least doing it purposely. We develop great mental maps of all the things we possess, and where to find them.

Here’s Casey Niestat finding any clip in less than 45 seconds.

It’s super interesting how our brain works in this regard. You can very quickly, and quite accurately assess whether you have something or not, but you’ll have a hard time enumerating each and every item in your collection.

Think about it. Put simply: you know every person you know, you know whether you’ve watched a film or not. You know whether you’ve read a book or not. You may even know whether you already saw that tweet or not.

Yet, you will find it impossibly hard to name everything you’ve encountered. Or as we are going to call it: collected.

I love thinking about typography, chords and all things that interest me as collectible. I am always on the look for new typefaces and try my best at keeping them with me wherever I go. That is, in my head.

Pattern matching brain

For this to work, one needs to put great care into dissecting all the elements that conform a given thing. Searching for features. Making associations. You have to pay extremely close attention to find the subtleties needed to distinguish something.

Like a fine watch among a group of mediocre ones in a thrift shop. Or a beautifully woven dress that you are going to pay lots of money for. If you can’t tell, you won’t know if you are getting the real thing.

This has felt quite good for my memory. [also search for citations]. The idea of writing about this topic came to me as I was telling my girlfriend that I recognized a seemingly random person on the street. Turns out that one time, 2 months ago, they served us meal in a pancake place. Apparently, that’s all it took for me to stick with their face.

Our brains come equipped with state-of-the-art visual tools. Around 30% of the surface of our brain is devoted to processing visual input. And our eyes, even though not compound, have very sophisticated technology to produce great signals. This combination makes humans very dependent on their vision. And thus, why we can discern our collectibles so finely.

I bring this topic because collectibles are usually things we can see, and maybe touch, like the previously mentioned coins. But I like to collect all sorts of stuff, like chords. I try to remember chord voicings, as a way to both expand my chord palette and as a way of collecting. Which kind of are the same thing.

Other people also collect bugs, either taking pictures or capturing them. Or maybe even mushrooms. Again, the main goal is to have a myriad of options. Tons to choose from. A beautiful, curated collection.

People build entire playlists of specific songs that have something in common, not only genre. Playlists where a particular instrument is present, or that respond to a particular chord progression, that can be danced in a particular way, that evoke a particular feeling or that tell a story. Not to talk about the immense books on botanical research, enumerating an outstanding amount of different plants, each with their subtleties. Truly magical and special work.

Scale

In general, it’s truly surprising to see a very complete collection, or, at least, a ton of items of any kind. In generative art, a discipline that combines art and technology, one of the biggest aspects a piece would have in order to be successful was scale. A frame showing hundreds of thousands of points laid out harmoniously. Or a simulation with millions of agents interacting with each other.

Seeing a massive amount of things before you is dazzling. Even more so, if there’s a conceptual backbone that joins them all together.

Passion

This excitement to encounter different items in the wild you are very sensitive to is also often related with obsession, or passion, however you like to put it (and however far the craziness goes). People that love trains are often quite the rage on the internet, just as people that can recognize a specific model of a handrail mounting point.

There is also a trend of people finding nice sticks and identifying water fountain models. Some of these become a meme because it’s kind of hilarious that one could have such a deep interest in a topic. But the meme comes full circle where it actually makes the topic interesting because watching someone talk about their passion hits different.

Identifying something means two important things: you’ve researched enough to know about a particular item, and you’ve searched long enough so you could run into it. The wonderful combo of searching + researching.

These findings often come with their respective public, graphical document certifying that, indeed, a new specimen was found. That is where, to me, the collector mindset manifests. In the end, we have a collection of achievements, of landmarks to celebrate and the feeling that you’ve found something that no one has found before. Some sort of hivemind but for collectibles. Uncovering the unknown for anyone and everyone to enjoy.