Quotations

"The future is now." - Nam June Paik

Digital Inkblots

Images created using Tracy Hall's Inkblot Generator from the words andy and heather, respectively. As mentioned in my comments a few days ago.

I thought mine looked like a fat dragonfly, in flight, as photographed from above using a high shutter speed.

Heather thought hers looked like an owl about to strangle you.

Excited Light

After trying to define beauty for a reader who wrote, it's been on my mind. This animation of the Aurora Australis qualifies.

Radio Babylon

When presented with an object like this--a home-brew portable device capable of scanning for shared iTunes libraries on open wireless networks, and then shuffling the available songs for its user--I have a hard time defining it solely as a gadget. It possesses the beautiful-yet-utilitarian aura of the handcrafted, like an Appalachian basket or hand-glazed pottery.

As the Make culture catches on, and the label Outsider Art shifts to include such creations, the larger category Art will have to shift as well. And while I'll admit that Andy McFarland's Radio Babylon (the device in question) does not meet my personal definitions of an art object, I can see that his practice mirrors that of the fine artist. He is driven to answer questions about the state of our society through the design and production of objects that speak directly to others. I believe that as information and ideas float faster and freely, the walls between disciplines such as engineering and art will fade. Hacking, designing, crafting, and art-making are already, in many cases, near-synonyms.

From the perspective of a consumer I might add, "If this dude can fit this functionality into his pocket, then Apple can fit it into an iPod. Where are the WiFi iPods, and where are all the shared "radio stations" being beamed from people's bags on the street and on the subway?"

Clippings

Clipped from Nothing is True Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin by John Geiger

Balloons

Image by Jamie Boud

Sunrises

Image by Cityrag

Home Life

Please view the full-scale image as well.

Photocast Support in iTunes

Can I have iTunes subscribe to one of the new iPhoto Photocasts and then automatically sync my mom's new pix to my video iPod for mobile viewing? Will I be able to soon?

Eldert Trading

Please view the full image as well.

The entry to 345 Eldert is caged in steel mesh--they never took it out when the factory shut down. So as you go down the last few steps to leave, you have to pass by the top of the cage, a large flat surface at arm's level. The cast of objects that sits there changes by the hour. It's an anonymous communal swap meet, our own little Sal-val. Whenever Heather and I want to toss something that we no longer need, but feel guilty because it still has value, we walk it right out to the cage.

I picked up this photograph there just now. Dating from August 2002, it's pitted--clearly brought in from the street. The full image at full-scale, is trippy as shit.

Digital Inkblots

It dawned on me the other day, that if I knew Flash it would probably be pretty easy to design a lightweight app that uses a random number generator-based algorithm to create an infinite number of unique Rorschach inkblots. Each inkblot could be composed of black vector-rendered circles of varying sizes scattered randomly upon a white ground, then mirrored to produce a symmetrical image.



Working with the idea, I made a few sketches and then the comp above, with which I'm quite happy. I like these digital inkblots for their graphic beauty (they remind me of a piece I made freshman year in Elements of Visual Thinking for Nancy Roeder), and I like them for the very reason Rorschach (and later Warhol) did--when examined, they produce an internalized stimulation of our creative centers. We imagine, we dream.

As I stared more and more at my dots, making piles of PSDs, I began to enjoy them the way I do crosswords--or sudoku rather. The inkblot test, when self administered or casually shared between friends, is an entertaining and healthy mental exercise. I firmly believe that most folks--if sufficiently self-aware and intelligent--can teach their brains to do new things. Sometimes magical things. This self-programming necessitates tools and strategies, not all of which require rigor. I think simple mind-games like sudoku and my digital inkblots are easily embraced re-entries into this field of tools.



I can see a digital inkblot generator integrated into many of the devices we already carry. People peck at flip-phones, bowling--but what about the people out there who would rather have slightly more intellectual and constructive experiences facilitated by their devices? Picture a new iPod game that takes the data generated as you scrub your thumb back-and-forth over the click wheel at varying speeds--feeds it into the random blot algorithm and then out of your own gestures, makes a miniature artwork for you to consider. Or a cameraphone that takes a quick picture of whatever--feeds that data into the algorithm and creates a blot from your surroundings.

This is the direction I want to see casual gaming (particularly the mobile variety) go. It will take both technology and art to shift humanity towards a climate in which advanced self-understanding of thought processes is considered a priority, then later a responsibility. Our personal devices and what we choose to make them do for us can fundamentally change the way our brains work, don't think they can't.

In fact, I'd argue they already are.

Near-Subliminal Advertising

Please view the full-scale images as well - 1, 2, 3

Club Med's recently launched "Share the World With Us" campaign includes smiling faces layered into the background seascapes in a manner so subtle that it borders on subliminal advertising--which is to myself and many, completely unethical. I ride in this car a couple times a week, and no one is noticing.

Go-Sees Reduced

From Juergen Teller's Go-Sees:

A 'go-see' is a particular kind of vetting process in the fashion industry. Unlike a 'casting', the go-see is conducted without the prospect of a definite commission. As an open-ended yet structured encounter between the photographer and his subject, the stakes are nevertheless high, and the expectations intense. This is a model's testing ground, a trial of sorts, with the proviso that neither photographer nor model, who is also known as a go-see, is working to meet the requirements of a specific assignment.

In Go-Sees Juergen Teller chronicles a year of such meetings with women and young girls from all walks of life. Some of them are celebrated, most of them are not. The book is both a photographic journal and a record of the attendant pressures to find a 'new' face that dictate the form of the go-see itself. Shot in the doorway of Teller's London studio, this is a two-way exploration that recognizes the photographer's complicity in the framing of his subjects and in promoting a specific conception of the photogenic. The models in Go-Sees become much more than bearers of externally directed aesthetic values. While the photographic gaze is shaped by and reciprocally shapes the conventions of the go-see, Teller suggests that even within these parameters it is possible to find new ways of seeing.

These are photographs of arrival and departure, portraits of brief but loaded encounters that articulate underlying continuities and discontinuities. The changing texture of light registers the passing seasons, while the recurrent backdrop hints at an overarching narrative. The models become characters in a fiction that the viewer is invited to imagine.

I see go-sees often at work and all I could think after reading the book for the first time in years, was "where's the violence--how could they dare to ignore it?"

So I decided to remove everything Teller added and reduce his book back to the essence I see.


Please view the full images as well - Image 1, Image 2

Gnats

Image by Tonyz

Holiday

Heather continued napping as I left for lunch with her folks, behind plate glass poolside. Walking down the path from our room I noticed the scarred trees wore enormous leaves--a foot across easy, I now regret not having slipped my hand into the shot for scale.

Holiday

Twenty minutes in Spain, we crashed.

The Gallery Wall

The reflection added to Nick Waplington's images by the blogger's point-and-shoot makes them a million times more interesting.



Image 1: Nick Waplington
Image 2: Nick Waplington

Via Yasha Wallin

Another Born Inventor

Greedo Never Fired

Laptop Light

Please view the full-scale image as well.

Shutter: 10/1
Aperture: 4.5
Focal Length: 18.00mm
ISO Speed: 400

Ex. 3

A treehouse of only ropes and poles, from a blog of the same name.

Via Make

Holiday

Please view the full-scale image as well.

Halfway between JFK and MAD. Much as we assumed from the name, Air Plus Comet was hell.

Sell

We are pleased to announce that all CoverFlow technology and intellectual property was recently sold to Apple. It has been incorporated into the latest version of iTunes. Please visit www.apple.com/itunes.

Overlap

My Raymi/Jamie audience and my visual browsing audience just brushed up against one another. Even the internet is beginning to feel like a one church town.

Quotations

"write it vaguely and date it if you can and maybe eventually trends glow, you can't do anything more i haven't found" - ryan_r

Via TRUE

Small Fracture

My snack breaks like bones.

Doane Paper

"I was in a product design meeting and half the group was using legal pads, the other half was using grid paper. I combined the two paper designs and it turned out pretty cool." - Chad Doane

It's good ideas like this that help me keep faith that even at a standard nine-to-five, in a mid-day meeting--10 people there caffeinating--something might strike me, a small thing of beauty, or an innovation.

Waiting for those moments is how I spend most of my time.

Via Eyebeam reBlog

CoverFlow Hits Diggnation

We are pleased to announce that all CoverFlow technology and intellectual property was recently sold to Apple. It has been incorporated into the latest version of iTunes. Please visit www.apple.com/itunes.

Demand Exists

Halfway toward my iBook DS.

Via The Register

Shake

The South side of 14th, closer to Ninth than Eighth.

Quotations

"Innovation is not an event. It's a process." - Guy Kawasaki

Lost Lake

Leaving

Image 1: S. Meadows
Image 2: S. Meadows

White Noise

Today I rode the subway, alone and without headphones, for the first time in years. It was quieter than I normally assume through bass--just heavy breathing and hiss from other's ears.

Collective Screenshots

We are pleased to announce that all CoverFlow technology and intellectual property was recently sold to Apple. It has been incorporated into the latest version of iTunes. Please visit www.apple.com/itunes.

Home Lifes

Balloons

Image by Vince Dermody
Via Tiny Vices

Two Weeks

This past Friday, the last of six flights landed--New York to Madrid, Madrid to Prague, Prague to Stansted, Luton to Alicante, Valencia to Madrid, Madrid to New York. The two weeks I faded from this electronic ether were my first in Europe.

Back home, we slept little before the last leg of the trip, the drive in tandem cars to a New Year on Lost Lake. Now back at my desk, behind keys and glass--jet-lagged, hung-over, heavy-bearded and sore (Co-codamol helps)--I'm spitting bits again, filling in an identity that dims.

Expect a stutter as I regain momentum and refine the moments collected traveling. 3500 frames edited down to 1125, scraps of paper and random leaves--all fragments of an experience still sinking in--now fight to find their way to the page.