TRASH_AUDIO: Workspace and Environment: The Great Mundane
The Great Mundane Trash Audio Interview from push the button on Vimeo.
[via TRASH_AUDIO]
September 28, 2008
September 06, 2008
Heavy-Duty Sampling
Johannes Kreidler's "Product Placement" (above) a 33-second remix that uses 70,200 samples to create a glitch-heavy masterpiece. (I'm not sure what the criteria are for "masterpiece" in this genre, but Kreidler's clip makes Girl Talk seem like lazy muzak.) Create Digital Music has some background as well as a video of the phone call he made in his attempts to clear copyright for the samples for his work (the licensing agency requires an individual request form to be completed for each sample).
August 25, 2008
Infoviz Art
Check out Slate's slideshow (with commentary), Infoviz Art:
Display an unwieldy mass of data in clever visual form and you may gain über-insight into questions you hadn't yet put into words. That is the promise of information visualization, infoviz for short. The field has long helped scientists, engineers, and businesspeople see the unseen as it emerges from complex data: Users may spot promising molecules for pharmaceutical testing, for instance, or pinpoint glitches in a supply chain. As infoviz has matured, it has also caught fire as an art form, its center of gravity edging further from the pragmatic and closer to the expressive or the whimsically profound.
[via Fimoculous.com]
August 24, 2008
Typographic Zen
Web Zen this week covers typographic zen: the helvetica vs. arial videogame, typographic animations set to Dylan and Zeppelin tunes, Cooper Black: Behind the Typeface (a short documentary on Oz Cooper), and more.
August 22, 2008
Artist Studio Tours
NPR has a video and slideshow tour of artists' studios and work at the 52 0 Street complex, a renovated warehouse in DC.
[via To the Beat]
August 18, 2008
When the World Was Cool
Society in Decline has a great Flickr set on old commercial signage, which might be used as evidence supporting Aaron Draplin's [nsfw] rant on contemporary graphic design
August 04, 2008
Ambient Lapse
Kyle McDonald at MIT has created a bunch of interesting audio/video/music Processing apps, including the Ambient Lapse program shown above (which uses both Processing and SoundStretch).
"Ambient Lapse" is a simple technique for capturing the ambiance of spaces, especially their color and spectral characteristics. It operates on a principle similar to long-exposure time-lapse, but allows exposures to overlap. Instead of producing momentary bursts of specific images, individual objects and well-defined perspectives, we're given vague impressions.
[via createdigitalmusic.com]
August 01, 2008
Color Design as Narrative Device: 101 Dalmations
AnaimationExpressions on color design in 101 Dalmatians, in what's projected as the first of an extensive series. (Disney, I think, is where I learned most of what I know about color design.)
July 29, 2008
Tarantino's Mind
From the oddly named Hungry Man TV, the short film Tarantino's Mind. Nice.
A film buff tells a friend that he's finally broken "the code" - the mystery behind the character & story threads that bleed from one Quentin Tarantino movie or screenplay into the next. His friend is less than impressed. Starring Seu Jorge (The Life Aquatic) and Selton Mello (Tarja Preta). A short film by Brazilian directing duo 300ml.
July 22, 2008
Instruments and Playable Text
Stuart Moulthrop guest edits the Iowa Review Web's issue on Instruments and Playable Text:
Judy Malloy, "Concerto for Narrative Data
John Cayley, "riverIsland QT"
Nick Montfort, "The Purpling"
Shawn Rider, "So Random" and "PiTP"
Elizabeth Knipe, "activeReader"
Stuart Moulthrop, "Under Language"
[via Mark Bernstein]
July 20, 2008
Chris Marker Weblog
Chris Marker: Note from the Era of Imperfect Memory
Chrismarker.org is an randomly-compiled, taxonomically naive and hopefully useful archive of ruminations, bibliographic & filmographic notations, untimely meditations, mnemonic minutiae and other glosses on the cinematic, written, photographic and multimedia work of world-citizen & time-traveler Chris Marker.We welcome contributions in short article form from the global village that Marker helped to map. We also welcome Chris Marker news, links, memorabilia, aphorisms, quotations, images and stray insights. Contributions from animals are welcome too, of course, including but not limited to cats, owls, giraffes, emus and elephants (слоны).
[via Ballardian]
July 19, 2008
Surveillance
SurveillanceSaver for OS X and Windows screensaver that pulls images from 400+ networked surveillance cameras around the world. The programmers call it a "haunting live soap opera." Creative Commons licensed.
[via things magazine]
July 18, 2008
Making Faces: Typographer Documentary
YouTube (obviously) has the trailer for Making Faces, a documentary on typographer Joe Rimmer.
[via P22]
July 11, 2008
How Designers Work
Time-lapse video of Matt Willey laying out an article for Royal Academy magazine, trying out different options as he goes. This would be even better if (a) it had a voiceover explaining Willey's decision processes and (b), as Kottke says, if it were on Vimeo or some other site that had better video ("... sometimes YouTube is like watching a UHF station from 200 miles away with the rabbit ears positioned just so").
Still, cool.
[via kottke.org]
July 09, 2008
Tracking Shots
laboratory101 has a short history of the tracking shot, complete with YouTube clips. Touch of Evil, Goodfellas, Boogie Nights, The Player (the initial tracking shot of which is itself a history of tracking shots), and of course The Russian Ark (trailer above), which is one 90-minute tracking shot.
July 05, 2008
Off Beat: Piano Phase
Peter Aidu performs Steve Reich's Piano Phase. Normally played by two pianists, "Piano Phase" involves playing the same short melody simultaneously on two pianos so that, over time, one player slides out of phase with the other. Aidu's not the first person to play the piece solo, but it's the first one I've seen on video. (An mp3 of the performance is available at the Internet Archive.)
[via Super Colossal]
July 04, 2008
Imagining Behind the Scenes
Channel 4 has a 65-second tracking shot through a reconstruction of the set of The Shining.
Channel 4 Creative Services, the broadcaster's in-house creative resource, cast people who resembled Kubrick's own crew including his script lady, assistant director and director of production, John Alcott, who also worked on films including 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange with the director.
Look-a-likes were also found for Duvall, Danny Lloyd, who played Danny Torrance, and the twin girls who appear fleetingly in the film.
[via Daring Fireball]
July 02, 2008
The Street Finds Its Own Uses: Web 2.0 as Literature
Mark Merino provides links to examples of Web 2.0 tech repurposed as (experimental) literature and poetry: Jay Bushman's The Good Captain (Twitter repurposed to repurpose Melville's "Benito Cereno"), Charles Cumming's The 21 Steps (short story as Google Map), and more (including RSS feeds, Netvibes, and Weblogs). Cool.
[via jill/txt]
June 28, 2008
Doug Coupland on Being Visual
Douglas Coupland at Granta on Visual Thinking.
Here’s a personal anecdote. Someone recently asked me what the most beautiful word I know is. I thought about it and the answer came quickly: my father used to have a floatplane with those call letters on the tailfin, ZRF — Zulu Romeo Foxtrot. The way these words look on paper is gorgeous; the images they conjure are fleeting, rich, colourful and unexpected. To savour the look of Zulu Romeo Foxtrot on a page is almost the sound of one hand clapping. The letter forms mean something beyond themselves, but the meaning is not empirical — and it’s pretty hard for me to imagine discussing this at a literary festival. Doug, there’s no verb.
Here’s another question I was recently asked: when I see words in my mind, what font are they in? The answer: Helvetica. What font do you think in? It’s a strange question, but you know what I’m getting at: how do you see actual words in your head as you think? Or do you see words at all? Is it a voice in your head? Do you see subtitles?
[via Daring Fireball]
June 25, 2008
Realworld, Realtime Hacking of Pictures
p>[via Gizmodo]
June 24, 2008
Architecture and Moral Order
Name-checking JG Ballard, TC Boyle, Neal Stephenson, Octavia Butler, and Italo Calvino (in only the first four paragraphs), Joanne McNeil discusses some of the world's strangest housing communities. A community of tiny houses in Virginia, a utopian community in India, a decaying pod city (above) in Taipai, and Sao Paulo's Alphaville:
“People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriends, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbor’s wives, no time ever for friends,” Wilder Penrose says in J. G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. The “great defect is that there is no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.”
Ballardian (which links to McNeil's post) has some related links and discussion.
[via Ballardian]
June 21, 2008
Nostalgia
In the last month, several people have looked at this image and commented not on the striking colors or arty, degraded reproduction aesthetic of Holga photography, but on the price listed on the gas pumps. They have a point.
June 20, 2008
Communication
Don't confuse legibility with communication.
—David Carson in Helvetica
June 14, 2008
Design Basics
Just Creative Design has a nice, short overview of design basics: color, line, shape, scale/size, space, etc. One paragraph summaries and simple examples for each concept plus links to additional material.
[via etc.]
May 27, 2008
Sonic Camera
May 25, 2008
Bankrupt Offices
May 21, 2008
That's Not a Bug, It's a Feature
Tim Barker's "Error, the Unforseen, and the Emergent: The Error and Interactive Media Art" discusses (as you can probably guess from that title) the productive role of glitches in interactive media:
Rather than thinking of an event as the process by which preformed or preconceived possible information becomes realised, we can only think of an error as coming into being as the unformed and the unforeseen potential is actualised. This potential emerges from unique activities that occur in the process of a system. These unique activities open the system so that unforeseen information may emerge (DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy 36-37). If a system runs through its process without the potential for error it is essentially closed. It does not allow the potentiality of the emergent or the unforeseen. It is only through allowing the capacity for potential errors that we may provide the opportunity to think the unthought, to become-other, and to hence initiate further unforeseen becomings in the virtual (Rodowick 201). In a sense, when there is potential for an error to emerge in a system, the system cannot be regarded as a pre-formed linear progress; rather, it can only be thought as a divergent process that actualises elements of the virtual.
[via Remix Theory]
May 11, 2008
Bookshelves
Books at Home: A weblog about bookshelves. What's not to like?
(Above is an image from a post on Skoom & Slordig's Extended Kast shelves at Covers.)
History of the Color Wheel
COLORlovers posts a nice history of the color wheel. Above is Gautier's attempt to illustrate gaps in Newton's Optiks (w/Newton's band of color in the center).
May 09, 2008
Obtrusive Design
Roglok posts a handful of psychoactive wallpapers, animated GIF images that pretty much negate the idea of "wallpaper" as something that sits in the background. The one above is a just a static screenshot—imagine it flickering wildly. Or visit the site. (NSF, it probably goes without saying, epileptics.)
Welcome to my jazzy collection of Psychoactive Wallpapers.
My aim in this project is to generate static and animated .gif images with a low filesize that provide interesting visual effects.
I am inspired by the Structural Film movement of the 60's and 70's as well as stereographic 3d images and early webdesign..
Use these on your website and you could give even a MySpace page a run for the money in the Annoying Design Award.
[via Rhizome.org]
May 08, 2008
Flickr & Design Inspiration
Vandelay Website Design offers links by category of 99 Flickr Groups for Design Inspiration. Useful for those times (which is most of the time for many of us) when you're looking for new ideas to hack around with.
Web designers and graphic designers are always looking for new sources of design inspiration. Of course, many of us turn to CSS galleries, and there are even more sources of offline inspiration. Personally, I find the work in many Flickr groups to be another excellent source of inspiration. Aside from the billions of photos on Flickr, there are also some groups that have been established to showcase the work of designers. Here is a look at 99 of them according to category (about half of them are general graphic design groups). Below the link to each group you’ll see the number of members and the number of items (pictures, graphics, screenshots, etc.) that have been submitted to the group, plus I have included part of the group description as listed by the moderator.
May 01, 2008
Advanced CSS: Homer Simpson
Romàn Cortès uses a bunch of very elegant CSS code to draw Homer Simpson using only letters. Ned Bachelder added some additional code to animate the drawing, so that the characters are drawn on screen one character at a time. Impressive work.
I have to admit, I'd seen a link to this several times over the last few days and skipped it since I assumed it was just some ASCII art. It's not.
[via Daring Fireball]
April 25, 2008
Take That, Swan Lake
[via Boing Boing]
April 23, 2008
Fonts and Politics
The NYT has another entry in the ask-designers-about-candidates'-graphic-identity articles, this time about McCain's use of Optima Bold. This article goes a little deeper because of its focus on a single candidate and just one element: font choice. Most designers quoted offer up a standard (sometimes conflicting) description of what Optima Bold means, Matthew Carter does a little more work to set that choice in context (including the image at the top of this post):
The moment of typographic truth will come when Senator McCain picks a vice presidential running mate and two names have to be combined on banners and bumper stickers. By choosing Optima, a rather distinctive typeface, he may have seriously limited his options.
I set the possible names in a bold weight of Optima caps and certain things became clear. HUCKABEE looks awkward in Optima, and ROMNEY is afflicted with the same difficult ‘EY’ combination that has plagued the current vice presidency. Perhaps because Optima is a German typeface, the word SCHWARZENEGGER looks predictably good.
Although it’s German, Optima took its inspiration from Quattrocento inscriptional lettering in the cathedrals of Florence and Siena, which may explain why GIULIANI looks so simpatico. In the end, however, my research suggests that the optimal running mate — so long as you don’t have to typeset her first name — is RICE.
I should add here that Optima is among my favorite fonts. Often criticized for being too middle of the road—a sans serif font that has suggestions of serifs, leading to charges of not being able to make up its mind—Optima works in most places (for me, at least) as being relatively neutral but still somewhat unconventional. Although obviously now all those meanings are going to get shifted around for me, given that every time I use it I'm going to feel like I'm backing McCain. (Posting that image above made me feel a little queasy.)
April 21, 2008
DJ Spooky Lecture on Remix Culture and Sampling
Hour and a half video of DJ Spooky on sampling, remix culture, copyright, and more (from a UNC-Chapel Hill talk).
[via Remix Theory]
April 18, 2008
Sweating the Details: Storyboard for The Shining
One frame of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining along with Kubrick's detailed storyboard for the shot, which includes (among other annotations),
In order to accurately get the
central path curve, you have to
set up the shots and put stakes
in the ground so that the curve
as seen through the ground
glass corresponds to what is
drawn. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY
TO DO IT REPEAT NO OTHER
WAY exercise the greatest
care as the compositional
effect of a different path might
be BAD BAD BAD
[via Daring Fireball]
April 17, 2008
Typography and Music: The Mountain Goats
The Mountain Goats' new video for Sax Rohmer #1 is a nice run (nearly literally) through hand-drawn type, aesthetics, and camera movement.
[via metafilter.com]
April 16, 2008
FontStruct
FontStruct offers a free, web-based font construction environment (with a grid and primitives) that outputs TrueType fonts to use on either Windows or Mac. There's also a gallery for sharing fonts created on the site.
Not high end, but probably a useful space for experimenting and teaching about type. (As you can probably tell, I haven't actually used it, but it's on that long, long list of Things I'll Work On After the Semester is Over, I Mean It This Time. Also, there's the fact that the userid and password I registered on the site aren't working yet.)
April 09, 2008
The Opening Shots Project
The Opening Shots Project collects analyses of opening shots from movies. Jim Emmer's list includes some basic theory and language for analysis, then offers a slew of analyses (including visual, audio, and thematic aspects), including Slackers, Altered States, Fight Club, Star Wars, and a few dozen more. Here's a small portion of the discussion of Day for Night (above):
A bus crosses the frame from left to right and we follow a woman in red walking from right to left, who stops to get a magazine. Notice the curves and circles that establish a pattern for the shot -- the curb, the kiosk, the fountain.
[update: Bonnie discusses some additional material (w/YouTube clips) from the opening Scenes of Lolita]
[via metafilter.com]
April 06, 2008
Documentaries and Cinematic Truth
Errol Morris' weblog post at NYT has some interesting discussion about the complex role of re-enactments in documentary film:
Critics argue that the use of re-enactments suggest a callous disregard on the part of a filmmaker for what is true. I don’t agree. Some re-enactments serve the truth, others subvert it. There is no mode of expression, no technique of production that will instantly produce truth or falsehood. There is no veritas lens – no lens that provides a “truthful” picture of events. There is cinéma vérité and kino pravda but no cinematic truth.
[via artblog]
April 04, 2008
net.art.zen
Web Zen this week covers links to net.art sites, including 99Rooms.com (above).
March 26, 2008
Typewriter Fonts
Walker Art Center's weblog posts some scans from Typographica No. 6, an issue devoted to typewriter fonts (small chunk above).
Anyone who grew up using typewriters to write probably has, like me, both nostalgia and repressed horror: Typewriters developed character, like fingerprints, with each possessing its own quirks and identifiable characteristics (to the point that these characteristics showed up as plot devices in detective novels). But we don't lie to ourselves: They were a major pain in the ass.
[via kottke.org]
March 24, 2008
A Handpuppet Fish Reads Ginsberg's Howl
What more could you ask for in a title?
[via Boing Boing]
March 19, 2008
Sans Comic
As part of an upcoming Dexter Sinister show, Cory Arcangel reset the 2008 Whitney Biennial's press release in Comic Sans. There's a full-size PDF available.
[via rhizome.org]
March 15, 2008
Data, Information, and Art
Mitchell Whitelaw's "Art Against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice," in fibreculture No. 11 looks useful.
Data art involves a creative grappling with the nature of our now ubiquitous data systems. It draws data out, makes it explicit, literally provides it with an image. It also probes data's constitution, potential, and significance. In the process of working pragmatically with data — using it as a generative resource, a way of making — data art is involved in the culturally crucial figuration of data and its contemporary domain. This practice is a concrete exploration of what data is, does, and can do, but it also involves a set of assumptions, narratives and ontologies that construct data as an entity in the cultural imagination. That construction is at the core of this analysis.
The screenshot at top is from The Dumpster, "a portrait of romantic breakups collected from blogs in 2005," one of the pieces analyzed in Whitelaw's article.
Recently a cluster of works have appeared that deal with visualising networked society. Drawing on data from the new ‘social’ web, or blogosphere, they offer us a sense of the unimaginable crowd that now inhabits the network. The Dumpster (2006), by Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, is an interactive visualisation of teenage romantic breakups (Levin et al, 2006) (Figure 1). The artists harvested and classified some 20000 blog posts, analysing them to allow comparison; the work's interface follows the metaphor of the title, as hundreds of coloured circles, each representing a blogged breakup, drop from above and jostle each other. Browsing the breakups displays excerpts of the blog text, and alters the colours of the display to indicate the relative similarity of each breakup to the one currently selected. Sidebars to the interface provide more information on the selected breakup, including date, the gender and age of the author. The Dumpster is engaging and dynamic; simulated physics makes the breakup-circles jiggle and bounce; the interface is packed with detail, and the context-based display allows the user to investigate the multivariate relationships between breakups. As Manovich writes in his essay on the work, it encourages an interplay of attention between the individual and the group; ‘The particular and the general are presented simultaneously, without one being sacrificed to the other’ (Manovich, ‘Social Data Browsing).
March 11, 2008
Episode X: The TV Universe Implodes
Crossoverman follows the logical implications of the final episode of St. Elsewhere, in which it's revealed that events of the entire hospital-based series actually took place inside the mind of twelve-year-old Tommy Westphall, an autistic character featured in the series. Given the wide range of other shows that featured crossover stories, scenes, or characters from St. Elsewhere--including Homicide, a series that itself crossed over into series including Law & Order and more than 280 others.
What's odd about this isn't the plot twist at the end of St. Elsewhere--which was interesting, but it is, after all, fiction—but the sheer number of interconnections one can track across such a larger number of shows (the above graphic from Crossoverman is only about 20% or less of the full map). The site also includes textual lists, a clip of that last scene, and more.
[via kottke.org]
March 07, 2008
City as videogame, city as text
Mirror's Edge, an XBox 360 game in development by DICE, involves a parkour courier named Faith, who is pursued by by agents as she runs the city attempting to deliver a package. As Greg Smith points out at Serial Consign, as with parkour in general, the videogame ends up reading the city as text.
What immediately caught my attention about these preliminary screenshots is manner in which architecture elements are demarcated. As per her training in "the art of displacement" Faith possess an innate ability for reading the geometry of her surroundings and this translates into a playing field where the objects, surfaces and assemblies that comprise the city are colour coded according to accessibility. When considered in this manner, the city becomes a giant text and, fittingly, play revolves around spatial problem solving and wayfinding rather than trigger finger virtuosity. [see my previous post Ways of Seeing Digital Space for more thoughts on provocative representations of space in gaming]
All of which maps to the larger cultural shift towards repurposing: cross-programming in architecture, remixes in music, collage in art, etc. Perhaps more importantly, once we accept that postmodernism (or whatever you want to call it) offers the possibility to read anything as a text (an advertisement, a building, a cultural movement), it's only a short hop to seizing the ability to rewrite those texts.
March 05, 2008
Tracking Leonard Cohen
Michael Bartel tracks