Design Boom has announced the full results of their
"Doors to Paradise" contest. While this
glockenspiel door won, I happen to really like this
magnetic ball door. Their contests always seem to provide endless design porn for your personal enjoyment. So dig around, and enjoy...
"...Marshall McLuhan appeared on the Dick Cavett Show in December of 1970 along with Truman Capote and Chicago Bears running back, Gayle Sayers...." Strange talk show appearance of the man who was the intellectual voice of television. He discuses the role television plays as a public vs. private relationship.
"...TV is not a pictorial medium at all, it is a medium of audial, tactile resonance..."
Strange how despite his hopes and thoughts about television, this interview itself is proof of it's failure. This interview was aired on Network Television! In just 35 years who would have thought it would degrade so fast.
Also the full recording of "The Medium is The Massage" sound collage record.
via
MeFi
Spider camp
MON:
lecture: advanced webweaving
activity: lying in wait
TUES:
lecture: water spout safety & general rain avoidance
activity: egg sac embroidery
WED:
lecture: integrating english words into your web. pig assistance provided
activity: 12-legged race
THURS:
lecture: scuttling
activity: biting
FRI:
lecture: consumption and efficient digestion of mate
activity: post-coital lunching
SAT:
lecture: teach your million tiny babies to parasail
activity: quiet peaceful dying in a corner
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Iwant to take a post to focus on Jessica Pierce. A writer of considerabletalent, who has quite an internet following due to her "
Junkpile" days on
Everything2. She reemerged on e2 as
jessicapierceand continued the tradition. She changed the way I read hypertext. Mostof all she writes about children in a way that is both totally
realistic and carefully
sentimentalized. She is also an
award winning stuffed animator, and I really want to make her
Oreo Sludge Bars.
"SDD" seems to be an premiere link resource when it comes to all things dutch design. If you enjoy ceramics as much as myself, definitly check out their
ceramics page. Even if you often can't read the text, the sites are always simple(wink wink). The pictures are incredible. I liked it after the first link took me to
Paula Bastiaansen. Whose porclein sculptures are among the most original objects I have ever seen.
"...The Green Zone, the city within a city that houses the occupation headquarters in Saddam's former palace, was filled with Young Republicans straight out of the Heritage Foundation, all of them given responsibility they could never have dreamed of receiving at home. Jay Hallen, a twenty-four-year-old who had applied for a job at the White House, was put in charge of launching Baghdad's new stock exchange. Scott Erwin, a twenty-one-year-old former intern to Dick Cheney, reported in an email home that I am assisting Iraqis in the management of finances and budgeting for the domestic security forces. The college senior's favorite job before this one? My time as an ice-cream truck driver. In those early days, the Green Zone felt a bit like the Peace Corps, for people who think the Peace Corps is a communist plot. It was a chance to sleep on cots, wear army boots, and cry incoming, all while being guarded around the clock by real soldiers..."
from Naomi Klein's article
"Baghdad Year Zero" from Harpers.
Excellent article on the conflicts of privatization in Iraq. The ideology at hand in the ruthless reconstruction going on. Overall
"The Green Zone" is strange phenomenon, and essential to understanding what is going in Iraq.
Wooster just has some new pictures from one of my favorite street artists,
WK Interact. His work often features
fast moving masked men,
guns,
soldiers and
business suits.
John Kyrk, a scientist/artist, has made beautifully designed flash demostrations of the basic cell structures and their features.
Jeremy Stribling has developed a program that produces computer science papers. What is even more impressive is the fact that one of
his papers was accepted for
"The 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics." The whole thing echos
"The Sokal Affair." When Alan Sokal published the nonsensical
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in the academic journal "Social Text."
Both events are sources of interesting debate and cynicism. And are just plain funny...
via
MeFi
Japanese philosophical trend.
When speed and convience and unavoidable in urban settings, how can we cope with the emotional results?...
SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.
SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.
via
momus's excellent post/resource on the matter
I happen to be lucky enough to catch
Werner Herzog's new documentry "Grizzly Man." It is the story of
Timothy Treadwell. A failed actor turned eco-warrior. He choose to live with a pack of Grizzly bears on their salmon run in Alaska. For 13 years he did so without a scratch. Eventually he was mauled along with his visiting girlfriend. The movie is funny in akward ways I can't even begin to describe. Treadwell names each of the bears and is so passionate and sensitive will all the creatures, they often don't seem to share these connections. Overall, it is the most compelling movie I have seen in a long time.
“I found that beyond a wildlife film, in his material lay dormant a story of astonishing beauty and depth. I discovered a film of human ecstasies and darkest inner turmoil. As if there was a desire in him to leave the confinements of his humanness and bond with the bears. Treadwell reached out seeking a primordial encounter. But in doing so he crossed an invisible borderline.”
-Werner Herzog
Architect/Fantasy Poster artist Roger Dean has been designing and building what will become a new kind of architecture and community. The earth covered "The Home For Life" will have residential homes, a hotel, offices, and shops. His curvilinear designs require a special
spray-concrete process. It is apparently cheaper and faster than typical construction. Roger has lots to say about the project throughout the site. For a better sense of the interior architecture check out
these pictures from his personal site.
Amit Singh has programed the missing link between Apple's Powerbook tilt sensor (who knew!) and games. While he is the first to question motion sensing as a interface...
"...It is admittedly frivolous to attempt to connect everything in the Universe to a motion sensor. Sensibility ought to curb motion sensing after a limit...."
You can't deny how fun this would seem. He primary prototype game was the perfectly suited "Neverball," which is a kind of first person Marble Madness. Here is
video of the software and Neverball in action. The software is avaible to download on the above site so anyone out there with a powerbook please check this out. I would love to see the same tech on a PSP which seems ideal for motion sensing gameplay.
via
Selectpark(a "games by artists" blog)
"Grafedia is
hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content - images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere - on walls, in the streets, or on sidewalks. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones[You can use traditional email as well] by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link."
The system seems pretty simple and logical. I would be happy to see this adopted on a mass scale. I would also like the idea of an ongoing treasure hunt of sorts. The potential in the system is endless.
An essay titled "Mysteries of the Creative Class, or, I Have Seen The Enemy and They Is Us" by Gregory Sholette
"Artists and other ‘creative’ professionals are increasingly willing pawns in the State-backed gentrification games of developers and corporations. But can those that wish to challenge the underlying brutalities of ‘culture-led regeneration’ turn their creative powers against it? Gregory Sholette on New York artists’ collective
REPOhistory and their fight to re-write the story of urban renewal in Manhattan"
Here he sums up one of the conflicts.
"...REPOhistory was part of the creative class. While its objectives were different, REPOhistory, like RTmark, the Yes Men, and similar artistic agitators made use of available technologies and rhetorical forms to reach the same erudite consumer-citizens this swanky bar hoped to attract...."
The tragedy of political and artistic idealists misreading the actual results their public art. Makes you really question the short and long term results of such actions. I don't think REPOhistory or Gregory Sholette should feel as guilty as he does, by any means. Just interesting to see the way he, and others, played into the a certain aura about a place. How two conflicting visions of a place can be so different, and yet the same. Seems kind of torturous for Sholette to face what he feels to be such a personal class battle.
I'm really curious what anyone else out there thinks.
While I am not a huge fan of all of "
Arash and Kelly"'s
work. This table is so fantastic. Each of the sheets actually even has adhesive on it so you can hang your notes.
I have gotta get some of these Shockini. The coolest custom blank action figure forms. Shockini are in old school blocky transforming style. These are so beautiful. Check out the
official "Shocker" site, there are all kinds of models. In the customs link check out the Shockini with 2 leg sets, or the one with 4 arms.
It just a really inspiring toy. Think of all the possibilities!
Simon Greenwold over at that pesky
MIT Media lab ascethetics + computation division[a goldmine of wonderful projects] has devoloped a system that allows for a for a 3d object to be drawn in real space and moved about in real space. Viewed through a camera resting behind a flat screen, they give a kind of "Roger Rabbit" style illusion. They rest in place despite the movement of screen/camera.
Fantastic project, especially in light of the recent excitment about
transparent desktops. via
beyondthebeyond
Via
Treehugger"...The City of Vancouver has told Wal-Mart that their store is not environmentally friendly enough for the city, and sent the retailer back to the drawing board. Wal-Mart hired architect
Peter Busby to come up with a new plan, in order to satisfy Vancouver's requirements...."
The new design cuts energy consumption by 37 percent. The hope is that if Wal-Mart is curious enough to build this new Wal-Mart, (and it proves to be cheaper) they may be thrifty enough to adopt the model for other stores.
While critiscms of Wal-Mart are often tiring and generally hint of elitism, the short film
Bigger Boxes is the most well put attack I have seen. I happen to catch it on Maryland Public Television, and it is pretty convincing. Here is a
transcript of the program.
