Mister Norton, Poetics and Principles, Chapter 1: My Face

Garden gnomes were once eerie, 

because they held still, 

bleached ancient things looked at, 

But privately,

they bump and scrape the night,

thought bill as he looked out at his yard. 

I want a modern gnome:

one who carts his miniature wheelbarrow around cheerily, 

now, while I stare at it in my sunny yard.

The solar gnome eclipses the butterfly.

But when I sleep, 

he holds stillness, 

a bleached stone in the moonlight.

There are two Mister Nortons, Bill and ted, and they form the foundation of BT theory. Upstairs at the New Zork art gallery, video art was displayed. In the basement, Bill created a synthesizer on a piece of canvas, roughly 2 m long and half meter high, and filled with frames wooden frames, which formed the basis for hand etched circuit boards. He found oscillator schematics in the data sheet for Mr norton (Applcation Note 72, LM3900, A new Current-Differencing Quad of Plus or Minus Input Amplifiers, Texas Instruments). He had some in his Bronx basement, the head flooded many times and was filled with rat poop. At the same time as the exhibition, Ted was working, it was July 2nd 1993. Ted was working on repairing barbed wire and because of the damage to the barbed wire fence, he decided to create ultrasound circuits to control swine. He went to the shed where he had a tube of Mr Norton chips and a yellowed tobacco stained data sheet.
 

The first schematic is a picture of Mister Norton. It is a face. The face arises often in a circular circuit schematic. There's a triangle for the nose and curly cue for the eye and other riffles for the lips. Just the basic symbols of the analog world: triangles, swirls and curlicues.