Art/Media
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
from Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I heart culture jamming: Sniggle Net has lots of good stuff, including a bit on one of my favorite culture hacks ever, the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO).
So, the “first feature-length film shot on a mobile phone” looks about how you’d imagine a feature film shot on a mobile to look. But it doesn’t do so gratuitously (well, ok, no way am I going to watch the whole thing, but you quickly get the aesthetic point: voyeuristic, degraded, subjective, paranoid). I always like these moments of low-res injected into the endless march to higher definition, when the first people use the limitations of a transitional medium for art. (thanks, Tina)
Just wanted to give a shout out to June Cohen and the entire TED.com team on the launch of the new TED site. It’s a beautiful, exciting site (designed by Method and June’s team) and the content is as good as it gets. Do yourself a favor and check out some of the amazing talks from the past 5 years of conferences. (Oh, and Giant Ant played a minor, but we think valuable role in the project).
I just saw Serenity and it’s damn good and I just wanted to point out that to really understand what Joss Whedon is up to there, you probably ought to read Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America by Richard Slotkin. I took a couple classes with Prof. Slotkin at Wesleyan and Whedon undoubtedly did as well. It’s a trim 850 pages of mythopoetic cultural analysis that’ll help you go beyond “oh, the Reivers are like Indians” to the significance of the fact that they are settlers become indians. Slotkin is all about the cultural mechanism of genre narrative, and his approach feels more grounded to me, if perhaps less neat, than the psychological academic read (you know: the Reivers are the Id and the Alliance is the Superego, or whatever). Anyhow, thanks Joss for putting the western back in sci-fi and the funk back in the western.
These Marcel Wanders components are a welcome ornate antidote to the relentless flaccid placid futurism of the Apple ID group. And the TV/microwave is a lovely bit of design art: now you can watch TV while you wait for your TV dinner to cook (so you can eat while you watch TV). Brilliant.
Jet Set Ruins is Todd’s amazing flickr photoset of aircraft scrapyards.
Dale Chihuly makes amazing glass sculptures. When I was last in Atlanta I was able to see his installation at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, where he managed to create sculptures that transformed the gardens into a bizarre, otherworldly landscape and simultaneously fit into their botanical surroundings so well that you would miss them unless you looked really carefully. I’ll take this over “The Gates” any day.
Ourmedia: “We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever.”
RETROFUTURO is a nice collection of past visions of the future shiny and eerie. (via)
Polar Inertia: Journal of Nomadic and Popular Culture is a must for any fan of the urban limbic and interstitial. (via)
Floating Logos Project: “The poles are digitally removed from the image in order to give the illusion that the signs are disconnected from the ground as they ominously float above us.” (via)
“Cyberfem” Mariko Mori is an anime Cindy Sherman (that’s too easy, of course). (via somewhere bizarre)
The Decline of Fashion Photography | An argument in pictures is an excellent bit of design criticism, beautifully presented! (thanks to wendy for the link)
Golden Shower - Video Computer System: “Video Computer System (named for the deceivingly futuristic sounding subtitle of the Atari 2600)… won Best Electronica video at MTV Brazil’s 2000 award show, much to the chagrin of more established Brazilian techno heads.” Nostalgia-rific! (thanks, tim)
No idea whether this series of drawings during an acid trip are legit, but from *ahem* what I’ve heard they look to be for real. (thanks xblog)
“Opsound is a record label using an open source, copyleft model, an experiment in practical gift economics, a laboratory for new ways of releasing music.” (thanks kcole)
“Bad Toon Rising is a collection of drawings of well-known cartoon characters produced by amateur artists entirely from memory and without any reference materials whatsoever.” (via boing boing)
Stereo Images - Time for Space uses animated gifs to present the left and right views in time rather than space. (via 990000)
Wooster Collective is a collection of photographs of mostly NYC street art (stickers, stencils, grafitti, etc.), interviews with artists from around the world, and links to street artists you may have seen in one of those hip magazines you fancy. And from there, I’m sure you can find enough related sites to keep you clicking for days.
Lomography.com is a wonderfully playful site devoted to the pursuit of all things Lomo; soviet-era technology, lovely, saturated colors, and a kick ass manifesto (“take your camera everywhere you go,” “don’t think,” “you don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film,” “afterwards either”). (thanks, Jon!)
These early-20th century photos of plants taken by scuptor Karl Blossfeldt are wonderfully alien. (via kottke)
Hi-ReS! No Shnik-Shnak version. And the third place is some crazy-ass sheeit.
Samurai Jack is stunningly beautiful work. But you knew that.
Jail cells ‘made from modern art’. Wow:
A Spanish art historian has found evidence that suggests some Civil War jail cells were built like 3-D modern art paintings in order to torture prisoners….Nationalist prisoners in Murcia were [also] forced to watch Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s film Un Chien Andalou.Torture, indeed!
mytinygarden.com is a just plain lovely bit of flash and photography! (via k10k)
One for the reading queue: The Space of Flows (via the ever-thoughtful Andrew Otwell)
More Amazing Multimedia Demo Sites™…
setpixel.com
surface.yugop.com/
Radio Taxis is a London company that does something taxi-related (although I can’t quite figure out what from the pretty but frustrating site). One thing they do, though, is generate Taxi Art using GPS receivers in their cabs.
Very pleasing set of li’l skyscraper illustrations at SkyscraperPage.com (via xblog)
Animation tutorials: Illustrated Glossary of Animation Terms Anna and Emily’s Webmonkey animation tutorial (I especially like the design-focused sections)
Apparently people are recording alternative commentary tracks for DVDs.
Andy Goldsworthy is a wonderful artist. There’s also a beautifully-shot documentary of his work called Rivers and Tides.
More interactive art shtuff: [ uncontrol ]
And, already, k10k provides: Subway Life is a collection of drawings of subway riders from around the globe. Lovely!
onModular… Not only is the Flash work amazing, and the generative output satisfying, but there’s even code in there that you could build an actually useful Flash-based sitemapper/prototyper out of. (via andrew)
Creating a Walk Cycle in Flash… Webmonkey rules!
The Internet Archive: Building an ‘Internet Library’… holy terabytes! There’s so much here, from archived versions of web sites to public domain movies. Hooray for cheap disk space!
Some really interesting stuff going on on the Lord of the Rings set. Check out this Film & Video article on the production. Apparently the battle scenes are built out of thousands of AIs rushing around and fighting each other. Undeniably cool as heck, but I think my favorite part is the tricks used to make people playing Hobbits and Dwarves look smaller:
In some cases, sets were built as perspective rooms. Sets were often built in two distinct sizes to accommodate the scale issues and most of the props were created in two scales to serve the variety of characters on the project, from hobbit to Gandalf size.and check this out:
….the production crew came up with a trick they called “moving camera forced perspective.” Basically the shorter actor (farther away) is placed on a moving platform that is carefully choreographed to the camera moves in order to counteract the effect of parallax.
Nothing earth-shattering. Just a nice straightforward use of Flash for an infographic: Dale Earnhardt’s fatal crash
All about Giant Ants (the scary, human-non-friendly kind): Us and Them!
And, if you want some scientific perspective on the movie, check out what Stephen Jay Gould has to say about the physical impossibility of Them!
Rhizome.org: Interview with Jodi.. I like it when artists are able to talk about what they’re doing. And I hadn’t yet seen their spooky iconic no-texture version of Wolfenstein. (via currentform)
Also via currentform: The Art of Flash 5 Preloading, complete with sample code. Lots more code from Colin Moock’s O’Reilly ActionScript book up on his site (including such useful routines as a back button with history!).
So after regretting not entering last year, I of course waited until the absolute last minute and put an interface-metaphor entry together for the5k this year. I’d use that as a caveat, but I figure that’s what everyone does. It was fun, and led to some weird shite on the backside (like converting binary data to decimal to save a few bytes, then using a li’l javascript function to convert it back at run time. Heehee.)
Palm Computer Used in Contemporary Painting. To quote Robocop, “I like it!” (via xblog, as usual)
Just wanted to post a link to Jon Haddock’s screenshots so’s I could find it later. In case you hadn’t already seen this, it’s a series of paintings of iconic cultural scenes (such as Rodney King and Tianmen Square), using the isometric perspective of a video game.
As Peter pointed out, Scott McCloud’s new column “I Can’t Stop Thinking” is live. After reading the three issues there so far, I’m relieved that my disappointment with Reinventing Comics doesn’t carry over to the online continuation. It makes me wonder if Scott’s just so itching to do online comics that his interest in traditional pen and ink comics had waned. In any case, I’m looking forward to thinking along.
I also think Taylor’s analysis of RC is right on: the book just wasn’t written for me.
I guess I shouldn’t rush to judgement, but I didn’t much care for Reinventing Comics. I never expected it to be nearly as good as Understanding Comics and, of course, it’s not. But I did expect something more interesting than “comics need to adapt to exist online.” It’s weird because I know Scott’s done a lot more thinking about the possible mutations comics might make online than seems to have made it into the book. I suppose RC would be more interesting if you had never heard of the Web (which I have) or if you’re part of—or vaguely interested in—the comics industry (which I’m not). But for many of the non-comics-fanatic readers who were absolutely fascinated and inspired by the first book (which I was), the sequel is just a big disappointment.
ps—What’s more, I think I’m as disappointed with the actual comic as with what it has to say. It seems less well written than UC, and the images and words feel much more disjointed. Sigh.
I just noticed the online index to Understanding Comics.
taylor has some very smart things to say about the ways animation and comic and video game storytelling techniques are coming together online. One of the keys here is that so much of the engrossing-ness of comics comes from their very incompleteness. By forcing (allowing?) the reader to complete them—whether filling in the action between panels or imaginatively “fleshing out” cartoony drawings—comics become to some extent the reader’s creation. Comics are not just low-frame-rate animation, nor are they a debased form of books.. There is something specific and undeniably powerful in comics’ use of visual communication, something different than either text-only or video communication (I haven’t seen it, but I wonder how the gutter is used in Time Code).
This reminds me (tangentially) of how almost no Windows users name their hard drives while absolutely all Mac users do, and what this suggests about the relationships people are forging with their computers. As taylor implies, we need to be thinking about how closure works in human-computer interaction. What makes one interface design more identifiable-with than another? What goes on in the fuzzy borderland between tools and agents and locations?
The thing I find really interesting about all the silly culturual infatuations that get spread around the net is that they are the first baby words in a new literacy of graphics and animation. As a culture, we are beginning to communicate in motion graphics, which is, well, neat-o.
The California Department of Corrections has a new web site up! One of the most appealing things to me about culture hacking like this is that it changes what we normally think of as a one-way medium into a two (or three?) way interface.
Alex Wright pointed me to netomat, which is a crazysexycool browser-esque something. Useful? What do you mean is it useful? I dunno, but did I tell you it was cool? Besides, it’s always useful to imagine new ways of doing things. The interesting thing to me about netomat is that it forces you to consider that maybe there are completely different modes of information retrieval on the web. Not different phases (e.g. differentiating, monitoring, extracting), but different modes, and why shouldn’t ambient browsing be one of them?