a g r a p h i a

The present is really of no width whatever

2010-10-13T09:57:00.000+09:00

"One of the economic units of this society is being 'in the know' or being able to convince people that you are 'in the know' ... there is always the suggestion there that there's not actually a know and the whole thing may be kind of mutually agreed upon snake oil." -- William Gibson

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11502715

2010-09-29T09:25:00.001+09:00

2010-08-21T09:46:00.003+09:00

"Because after all a drained swimming pool can be filled." -- J.G. Ballard

“Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.” -- Georges Bataille

日本の祝いをテーマとして描いたものです。

2010-08-18T08:28:00.001+09:00

http://xxxnihilistxxx.blog9.fc2.com/

What's the Problem?

2010-08-12T12:10:00.002+09:00

Ballardian Architecture Series

2010-08-08T09:09:00.002+09:00

The Transcendent City

2010-08-03T07:32:00.001+09:00

http://vimeo.com/13296635

"The concept of a future sustainable city is developed for a society that is currently not responding effectively to environmental dangers. "Transcendence" in this case referring to a point when artificial intelligence has reached or surpassed that of the human."

THE TRANSCENDENT CITY from Richard Hardy on Vimeo.

Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard

2010-07-25T23:38:00.002+09:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/tom-mccarthy-futurists-novels-technology

"Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I'm on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static." -- Tom McCarthy

Productive Dystopia

2010-07-03T09:04:00.001+09:00

Subjective Validation

2010-06-30T08:52:00.001+09:00

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/29/subjective-validation/

"Remember, your capacity to fool yourself is greater than the abilities of any conjurer, and conjurers come in many guises.

You are a creature impelled to hope, yearning for answers. As you attempt to make sense of the world you focus on what falls into place and neglect that which doesn’t fit, and there is so much in life which does not fit.

When you see a set of horoscopes, read all of them.

When someone claims they can see into your heart, realize all our hearts are much the same."

Rich-Guy Ghetto Cults

2010-06-25T12:09:00.000+09:00

Interview with Bruce Sterling

"I'd also like to point out that large financial centers in certain cities around the planet are certainly going to kill millions of us by destroying our social safety networks in the name of their imaginary financial efficiency. You're a thousand times more likely to die because of what some urban banker did in 2008 than from what some Afghan-based terrorist did in 2001. *Financiers live in small, panicky urban cloisters, severely detached from the rest of mankind. They are living today in rich-guy ghetto cults. They are truly dangerous to our well-being, and they are getting worse and more extremist, not better and more reasonable. You're not gonna realize this havoc till you see your elderly Mom coughing in an emergency ward, but she's going there for a reason." -- Bruce Sterling

Tom Waits Interviews Himself

2010-06-21T03:16:00.002+09:00

http://russhblog.com/post/596395875

Q: What’s wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made $12 million last year… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.

La Jetee

2010-06-18T11:50:00.005+09:00

Predictably Irrational

2010-06-09T12:06:00.012+09:00

This guy, Dan Ariely, having survived third-degree burns over seventy percent of his body and a contaminated blood transfusion that left him with liver disease, endured the medication that would eventually save his life but cause him to suffer debilitating side effects by conditioning his irrational self to associate taking the medication with his favourite past-time -- watching movies. Incredible story. And his message is important: "man the rational animal" is a misnomer. We would do better to acknowledge how predictably irrational we are, and use that to our advantage.

In this CBC Quirks and Quarks interview, June 5: The Upside of Irrationality, Ariely addresses human empathy when it comes to large scale crisis and the 'identifiable victim effect'. Stalin said "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." Mother Teresa said, "If I look at the masses, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will". One child falls down a well and there is more news coverage in forty hours than Rwanda and Darfur put together. Big, statistical problems mute us. When people 'feel' sympathy for a victim they care and are willing to take action. But when people have to 'think' about a crisis they are far less willing to do so.

Climate change. How do we get people to care about a crisis that is more abstract, less immediate, and in the long-term future? Lame attempts at eliciting sympathy for polar bears or displaced Northern coastal communities? The problem is far more crucial than this. Ariely suggests "reward substitution" to get people to do things for global warming AS IF they care. Playing to the irrational ego toward a rational end. I suspect 'game design' may become important in this respect -- marketers and large corporations designing recreational or consumer driven activity that draws on cognitive surplus, immediately satisfies the irrational, selfish ego, yet somehow contributes to effecting change and benefiting society.

Responsive Cities

2010-06-09T06:20:00.012+09:00

Ben Cerveny from Stamen on how urban scale computational infrastructure could transform everyday life in the city. The city, as a social environment, is a medium of collaborative performance through which the individual writes desire with the 'handles' of mobile, ubiquitous computing. One important point he raises towards the end is the convergence of 'code' and 'law' in the provisioning of services in public space. Provisioning is scarier than surveillance. It is one thing to have a law against playing your boombox in the park after curfew -- a 'soft law' that can be broken despite the surveillance technology to dissuade one from doing so -- and 'hard code' that, for example, would give permissions to technological services to only certain individuals at certain times.

Responsive Architecture & The Dilettante

2010-06-07T12:00:00.009+09:00

Philip Beesley designs immersive environments. Vast, synthetic, crystalline structures that respond to our presence, promoting responsive sensitivity and interaction between us and our environment on a mutual level, subverting the historical stance toward landscape as a dead materiality to be hammered out and mastered.

Towards the end, an important question is raised regarding the value of being multi-disciplinary, a risky space where one can have superficial knowledge of many things and have to face the difficulty of fostering confidence in navigating generalism, synthesizing disparate areas of knowledge, and still achieving some kind of substance.

Interview with Philip Beesley @ CBC Spark

http://www.philipbeesleyarchitect.com/

Jonathan Blow 'Design Reboot' 2007

2010-06-06T13:58:00.010+09:00

http://braid-game.com/news/?p=129

"I want to see that Golden Age. I want to see us harness this power to transform society that Daniel [Radosh] also wants to see ...

I'm a designer now, because once a long time ago I was a gamer. I was a little kid who loved games. I played a lot of games. And I feel like I've grown up. I'm a smarter, wiser, more experienced person now. Games are a lot bigger but they haven't really grown. They haven't kept pace with me.

As a player, I have this desire to be transformed ... but I'm not getting it. At least, not most of the time. I get very frustrated by games ... [it] doesn't have anything fundamentally valuable to me that any other game hasn't always given me. I still love games, but it's frustrating. And I think that we can do a lot better ...

So, I'm encouraging all of us to make things that are worth while, or deep, or interesting. But what is worth while? That's a very subjective question. And surely your ideas about that are different from mine, and the games I would make left to my own devices would be very different from what you make ... But with all of our different ideas of what's worth while, we can at least hold the intention to make our games embody those ideas, to be worthwhile. And if you respect the player's potential to live a higher quality life, and not treat players as somebody from whom we're trying to siphon money or attention or fame. And if we do that, for a while, and get good at it, and are diligent, players will feel it, they'll feel the difference, we'll broaden our market, and if we get good enough at it, then someday we'll be able to see where that next step is, to build games up to their full potential." -- Jonathan Blow

The Metaphysics Videogame

2010-06-06T13:39:00.004+09:00

The Metaphysics Videogame

"(3) Videogames are the popular medium of the 21st century

This is a contentious point, but I believe it is true. If film was the medium of the 20th century, then videogames are the medium of the 21st. It is not the web, because the web is just a delivery channel, just a piece of plumbing for delivering bits. It's what those bits do that matters. And despite the massive adoption of online communications, what the web mostly does is to remediate existing media. We read text. We look at photographs. We watch videos. In the terms of McLuhan's tetrad, the web reverses into every legacy medium at its worst: top ten lists, sound bites, gossip, pornography, curiosity, schlock.

But videogames resist the trends of simplification and ease that characterize contemporary media. They are software instead of bundles of digitized books and pictures and films. They are hard to use rather than easy, and yet we praise them when they are difficult and disparage them when they are simple. They take earnest advantage of the microprocessors that are the "brains" of the machines you are using at this moment, rather than the dumb terminals that are its system of distribution.

The point is not that books or painting or film or anything else is dying; history shows that such things never die, even if they do change. The point is that the era of linear media is giving way to the era of random-access media; the era of viewed media is giving way to the era of operated media; and the era of declarative media is giving way to the era of procedural media. Anyone who doesn't want to be a part of that change, at its source, is a fool or a coward..." -- Ian Bogost

McLuhan's Brain

2010-06-06T07:53:00.005+09:00

"Marshall McLuhan’s brain was fueled by fresh blood from the heart through not one but two arteries at the base of his skull, a trait in the mammalian world found mostly in cats and rarely in human beings ... Why mention this medical information? To establish that Marshall was not merely different but very different, and it wasn’t simply in the way he thought; rather, it was because of the biological mechanisms that made and allowed him to think what he thought."

Inside McLuhan’s Head: An exclusive excerpt from Douglas Coupland’s biography of Marshall McLuhan

Arthur Lipsett

2010-06-05T15:18:00.002+09:00

2010-06-04T14:40:00.003+09:00

Slow vs Fast Media

2010-06-03T12:47:00.005+09:00

Great observation in the context of a critique on slow 'Contemplative Cinema' vs the superficiality of fast, Hollywood flicks, but applicable to New Media in general...

"It’s very consoling and self-congratulatory for old-line cinephiles (a group in which I fully include myself) to tell ourselves the story that the current cultural landscape’s insistence on rapidity and speed and instantaneous gratification is a monstrous aberration, and that we are maintaining truer values when we strive to slow everything down. But this is a lie. You cannot change a situation if you are unwilling to have anything to do with it, if you are so concerned with keeping your hands clean and avoiding complicity that you simply retreat into fantasies of the good old days. To my mind, this is what Slow Cinema is doing; and Nick James is entirely right to find it unsatisfactory, and to look instead for new, “more active forms of rebellion.” And we are likely to find these as often in exploitation cinema as in art cinema; but in any case, in movies that engage with the new media landscape, and the new socio-economic landscape, rather than fleeing them in dreams of “learn[ing] in to find the content behind the appearance of emptiness.”

-- Steven Shaviro

A New Quotidian

2010-06-01T09:39:00.003+09:00

"The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.

Please don’t mistake this for one of those “after us, the deluge” moments on my part. I’ve always found those appalling, and most particularly when uttered by aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now...

...that dawning recognition that the future, be it capital-T Tomorrow or just tomorrow, Friday, just means more stuff, however peculiar and unexpected. A new quotidian. Somebody’s future, somebody else’s past."

-- William Gibson : BOOK EXPO AMERICA LUNCHEON TALK

Skimming

2010-05-31T11:09:00.001+09:00

"Skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.

What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting."

Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains

Helping Johnny Remember

2010-05-20T16:25:00.000+09:00

Helping Johnny Remember from ashleigh nankivell on Vimeo.

Clemens Kogler

2010-05-16T03:12:00.003+09:00

http://www.clemenskogler.net/

Joost Rekveld

2010-05-14T02:07:00.005+09:00

http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld/wp/index.php

"Joost Rekveld (1970) has been making abstract films and light installations since 1991, originally starting out from the idea of a visual music for the eye. He has been making most of his animated films with optical and mechanical setups, using the computer as a controller and composition machine in order to orchestrate the precise movements of optical components. His installation making grew out of the tools he developed to make his films, often inspired by the lesser frequented by-ways in the history of science and technology. His work so far has dealt with various forms of scanning, or with concepts related to the early history of optics and perspective. His interest in the spatial aspects of light triggered a shift away from the screen, towards more architectural and theatrical forms of work. At the moment he is becoming increasingly implicated in activities that resemble cybernetics, artificial life and robotic architecture."

Chlorofilia - a new species of architecture

2010-05-12T10:27:00.005+09:00

http://www.xefirotarch.com/

Los Angeles in 2106 becomes Chlorofilia, a "self-sustaining, self-protecting natural ecology, used converted highways as aqueducts and dispersed nutrients into an adaptable organism that continuously adjusted itself to changes in demographics and housing requirements."

Grayson Perry's 'Map of Nowhere' 2008

2010-05-10T10:03:00.010+09:00

"Inspired by medieval maps and mystical diagrams, there are churches for Microsoft, Tesco and Starbucks. A shanty town on stilts is labeled 'Free Market Economy'."

Jared Tarbell : Invader Fractal

2010-05-10T08:53:00.002+09:00

http://www.complexification.net/

Launch Invader Fractal

Rishaug vs. Watz live at The Villa, Oct 2009

2010-05-09T15:40:00.002+09:00

Rishaug vs. Watz live at The Villa, Oct 2009 from watz on Vimeo.

Glib, Gnomic Generalizing

2010-05-06T14:09:00.006+09:00

Sound bites from "Hasty Habits of Mind" We should read the whole thing:

"Negative criticism can seem mean-spirited. It’s more pleasant to be post-critical. But the prices we pay are to have too many delusions—especially delusions of grandeur—and to waste too much time foraging dead ends."

"In fetishizing newness, we ensure obsolescence."

"There are common modes of 'serious' discourse that we should find troubling, and all have to do with a compulsion to move fast while frantically scooping up or tossing out tiny morsels along our paths."

"Tossed-off tweets are fast food for the mind, no chewing required. We see this in blogs, but increasingly also in academic discourse. Tweets must be short. This doesn’t force them to be shallow, but it sure nudges them in that direction."

"Information overload induces ignorance."

"We partake in a culture of glib, gnomic generalizing."

Echo Chambers

2010-05-02T12:38:00.009+09:00

Psychology, Education, Social Media

"…any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an “enclosed” space."

"Spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them ... insular and sustained by collective belief rather than by any objective reality."

Deranged Penguin

2010-05-02T12:31:00.001+09:00

"No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
-- Nietzsche

...probably just an ear infection.

Micah Lidberg

2010-05-02T11:09:00.003+09:00

http://www.micahlidberg.com

h.cosas electrones libres

2010-04-30T12:34:00.003+09:00

http://jorgecrowe.com.ar/

LOLI LA from h.cosas on Vimeo.

Paper Theater

2010-04-30T11:28:00.010+09:00

"In the 18th century dioramas became very popular as a means of entertainment. Around 1730, the Augsburg copperplate engraver and publisher Martin Engelbrecht created miniature theater[s]. [They] consist of 5-8 scenery-like sheets, which create a perspective image if arranged one behind the other. Along with religious themes, these scenes show courtly life, the seasons...These small-size dioramas are regarded as the precursors of the paper theaters that became popular in the 19th century." -- The Miniature Theaters of Martin Engelbrecht

Cosmogramma Fieldlines

2010-04-29T11:28:00.001+09:00

Cosmogramma Fieldlines [openFrameworks] from CreativeApplications.Net on Vimeo.

Books

2010-04-19T12:05:00.000+09:00

Emily Howell is Software

2010-04-18T15:42:00.004+09:00

"Things that touch me at my deepest core — pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages — might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul."

from Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

Cultivated Play

2010-04-18T10:31:00.003+09:00

Cultivated Play: Farmville

"If Farmville is laborious to play and aesthetically boring, why are so many people playing it? The answer is disarmingly simple: people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville ... The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people ...

Citizens must educate themselves in the use of sociable applications, such as Wikipedia, Skype, and Facebook, and learn how they can better use them to forward their best interests. And we must learn to differentiate sociable applications from sociopathic applications: applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners needs." -- A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz

21st century is going to be about game design

2010-04-18T03:51:00.011+09:00

Interview with Jesse Schell transcribed from CBC Spark

"The attention economy, in a world of information human attention is a scarce resource, and [game structure] is something advertisers might be interested in using.

I believe that one of the things that's really going to characterize the 21st century is this war for the attention of every single individual in humanity. We had this to some extent in the 20th century with radio, television, billboards and magazines competing for your attention. But that's going to be nothing! Now that everyone carries around a digital device that can interrupt them at anytime in their pocket, and now that the machine that you work on has things like facebook, which have the potential to send you emails ... everything is going to be trying to distract you constantly, and it's going to have much more ability to distract you, because these things are going to know what you're doing, where you are, and where you're going. The attention economy is very relevant here. And the advertisers are just now starting to wake up to the power of games.

I think for the 20th century the dominant means of building one's brand and capturing a person's imagination had to do with the graphic arts, it had to do with logo design, and designing brilliant commercials, and beautiful ads in magazines. In the 21st century, it's going to be much more about game design ... how can I incentivise you to focus on my product, pay attention to my product, tell your friends about my product, think about my product all the time. Game design is going to make that easy to do ...

Game designers are starting to feel conflicted because they realize "Wow, this is not about me trying to make a fun game, as much as it is about me trying to create situations where people feel unexpectedly compelled to pay money." So, there is a little bit of discomfort in this whole idea of putting people into a Skinner box as it were." -- Jesse Schell

The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

Fascination with the Interior

2010-04-17T07:10:00.008+09:00

*insert one of many essays I intend to write here*

Nuance

2010-04-17T01:40:00.002+09:00

"There's a riot of information racing by, and to survive, we snatch little bits and then magnify them into what we embrace as the full picture. Nuance? No time for nuance. Every interaction might be the whole thing." -- Seth Godin

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/04/when-a-stranger-reads-your-blog.html

Julleor

2010-04-16T01:01:00.002+09:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22283623@N00/

How would Ballard read the iPad?

2010-04-14T16:01:00.009+09:00

Peeking Inside the iPad

Addicted to Being Certain

2010-04-11T14:32:00.010+09:00

Neurologist Robert Burton

"Burton ... speculates that the insistence on being right might be the mental equivalent of a physical addiction. There are many people who seem to “derive more pleasure from final answers than ongoing questions, and want definitive one-stop shopping resolutions to complex social problems and unambiguous endings to movies and novels.” Perhaps such know-it-alls are people who are addicted to the pleasure of the feeling of knowing.

He further wonders whether our education system, which promotes black-and-white answers might be warping the reward systems of our students. If the fundamental thrust of education is “being correct” rather than acquiring a thoughtful awareness of ambiguities, inconsistencies, and underlying paradoxes, it is easy to see how the brain reward systems might be molded to prefer certainty over open-mindedness."
-- review

"Everyone stands on the pedestal of certainty, and it has lead us down some horrible paths ... Why are people so certain? Is this all simply personality, or is there something within our inherent biology that makes some of us more certain than others. What if there were aspects of brain function that actually created a sense of conviction, or certainty, or being right, and that if you understand that certainty arises out of involuntary brain mechanisms that are beyond your control, you have to acknowledge the fact that even though you might feel certain, that this is no different from being angry, or feeling love or resentment.

Science now points to reason as being a function of the brain, but that emotions, feelings, mood states influence how we start reasoning at the very beginning ... so if you think in terms of pure reason, as being the paradigm for proper life, you're going against what our modern day science is telling us about our brain function.

If you run up a tree and escape a charging tiger, that is the way you learn to avoid a tiger. But then you could say "Will this always work?" And then your mind sets out to think of examples of when it might not work, for example, the tree trunk is to thin and you fall down, and the tiger eats you. "Well, it will work when the tree is strong enough, but I can think of examples when maybe it wouldn't work. So, I can say it's right this time, because the tree is very strong and will hold me up, but I can't always know ... with certainty that this will always be right. Therefore, I'm always going to asking "it's true this time, but I don't know if it'll be true in the future." It's hard to learn that way. You've got to learn it's true now, and it will always be true in the future, even if that's not true. A thought, by itself, will never be finished ...

You need a second system in the brain. You need a 'feeling' about your thought ... that the thought you had is correct. Recent studies have shown these areas of the brain in which these phenomena of feelings of understanding and knowing arise have rich connections with the areas of the brain that provide reward systems ... The reward for a thought is the feeling of the thought's correctness. Every time that you feel that sense "Ah! I'm right!", you're rewarded in the same way as you would be rewarded if you took cocaine, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, won the lottery... This feeling of being 'right', for many people, is just as strong an addiction. You see these people saying "I know that I'm right!" with a big smile on their face. They're feeling pleasure.

Cognitive Dissonance, you hold on to an opinion that goes against something else you know to be true, against overwhelming contrary evidence [because the sense of conviction is pleasurable]." -- Robert Burton

CBC Ideas Podcast

Science Friction 1959

2010-04-11T14:08:00.000+09:00

Black Mass Implosions

2010-04-11T12:14:00.005+09:00

via http://dataisnature.com/

"Marco Fusinato’s sequence of drawings ‘Black Mass Implosions’ transform avant-garde musical notation into new graphical interpretations ... Aside from the allusion to the physics of space, the title might also refer to the ceremonies of witchcraft, wherein the proposed transmutations of the original music might take the form of a ceremonial rite of annihilation."

birdman

2010-04-05T14:49:00.002+09:00

Aesthetic Coherence

2010-04-03T01:42:00.003+09:00

essay by David OReilly

"A phenomenon is created truthfully in a work of art through the attempt to rebuild the entire living structure of its inner connections" – Tarkovsky

David OReilly on Aesthetic Coherence in 'Please Say Something':

"My central idea in constructing the world of the film was to prove that something totally artificial and unreal could still communicate emotion and hold cinematic truth. The film makes no effort to cover up the fact that it is a computer animation, it holds an array of artifacts which distance it from reality, which tie it closer to the software it came from. This idea is in direct opposition to all current trends in animation, which take the route of desperately trying to look real..."

"Those who aren’t fully conscious of the aesthetic fabric of their worlds will revert to default decision making, essentially to the common doctrine, or mediocrity..."

Alec Holowka on Holistic Game Design

2010-04-03T01:25:00.002+09:00

"Games right now are still a Wild West. It's a vast, largely unexplored space and it's not encompassed by any one single label ... the term 'Art Games' to me is just a ridiculous term, because all games of some artistic element to them. To me, it's like saying 'This is a blue blue'" -- Alec Holowka.

Alec Holowka: Holistic Game Design from Jeriaska on Vimeo.

Hallelujah!

2010-03-31T12:48:00.002+09:00

Gamers move from passive observers, "someone who doesn't even know the rules, to being a cheater, to being a writer, to being a programmer. Those are the stages our civilization has moved through in successive stages of media... My issue, is that at each stage, when we get a new medium, civilization seems to be one stage behind .. and an elite learns to actually use the thing ... Programming is bigger than the printing press, it's as big as text ... [It's important for people] to contend with the biases of digital media, to KNOW that there are such things as biases .. if we don't create a society that at least knows there's a thing called 'programming' then we will end up being the users, and worse, the used."

Gaming can make a better world

2010-03-30T12:41:00.003+09:00

"Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how."

Raymond Scott

2010-03-29T16:21:00.001+09:00

"Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely 'think' his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener." —Raymond Scott, 1949

Pranav Mistry

2010-03-29T04:40:00.001+09:00

http://www.pranavmistry.com/

Earth Hour

2010-03-28T13:17:00.001+09:00

"Biologically those organisms that have the greatest amount of diversity will survive. Those that resemble each other closely are doomed!" -- David Suzuki

Faile and Bast

2010-03-27T15:52:00.001+09:00

ya, well.. do this instead...

Deluxx Fluxx from Rockwell Kills on Vimeo.

Nintendo 3DS

2010-03-24T06:51:00.001+09:00

Next generation DS with Autostereoscopic Display:

Pattern Recognition

2010-03-21T16:51:00.009+09:00

Why, oh why, my obsession with glitch? Better than Rothko. I'm convinced I suffer from some kind of 'Obsessive Compulsive Pattern Recognition Disorder'. Although, I suspect, this may be the very thing that drives human consciousness.

"In the Jungle, they that recognize the tiger survive.
They that don't, die." --moi

jonasdowney.com/file_download/5/glitch_jonasdowney.pdf

Domestic Robocop + Original Footage

2010-03-21T16:27:00.003+09:00

"The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it."

domestic robocop: original footage from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Rhythmic cycle w/ abstract animation

2010-03-21T14:22:00.002+09:00

Haven't seen nice music visualization quite like this before. As far as I know, just animation, not interactive.

Sonar from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo.

Click and Glance Mentality

2010-03-21T07:43:00.001+09:00

"Driveby culture and the endless search for wow"

"We're creating a culture of clickers, stumblers and jaded spectators who decide in the space of a moment whether to watch and participate (or not) ... More and more often, we're seeing products and services coming to market designed to appeal to the momentary attention of the clickers..."

Potential

2010-03-21T07:19:00.002+09:00

Winners 2010 Skyscraper Competition

2010-03-21T07:14:00.005+09:00

http://www.evolo.us/category/2010/

Skinput

2010-03-20T15:09:00.001+09:00

Everytime you make a powerpoint ...

2010-03-18T15:19:00.002+09:00

We will be Here (Superstruct)

2010-03-18T15:09:00.004+09:00

"We will be Here" - Densitydesign
http://www.closr.it/show/Gx34DRIeVsm

Visualization based on contributions to Superstruct.

"The map, thanks to the layer of allegorical illustrations, not only wants to disseminate the ideas generated during the project ‘Superstruct’ but also provide a starting point, a common imaginary, to start discussion and analysis on the world to come." -- densitydesign.org

The Story of English

2010-03-18T14:56:00.008+09:00

Great (long) documentary on the Story of English. Plenty of low-key documentary narrative and pastoral scenery to keep you sedated and napping the rest of the week... in English.

JEREMIAH JAE

2010-03-15T19:40:00.001+09:00

Jeremiah Jae - Vertical Pupils from Jeremiah Jae on Vimeo.

Will Insley: ONECITY

2010-03-15T02:39:00.008+09:00

via BLDGBLOG http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/dark-cities.html

"26 years ago, the Guggenheim hosted an exhibition of work by Will Insley, focusing particularly on Insley's project ONECITY ... the artist described his own interests as having 'very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present' and no relation really at all to the 'utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.' ... Insley once quipped:

'what was absent from the ruin is often less marvelous than we imagine it to have been. The abstract power of suggestion (the fragment) is greater than the literal power of the initial fact. Myth elevates.’

These mythic fragments of a city that never was thus take their artistic power more from suggestion—of possible archaeologies and future extensions, impossible events this civilization of the plains might yet undergo—rather than any sense of intended realizability." -- BLDGBLOG

RandomWalk Triangles

2010-03-14T18:21:00.001+09:00

RandomWalk Triangles from Guido Corallo on Vimeo.

Pivot

2010-03-09T00:58:00.008+09:00

Making the web more like a web.

I hate it when Microsoft steals your ideas!

Love the "emotionally involved, immersed in the experience itself" 'Magic: The Gathering' part!
What are they smoking?

Very much drawn to the 'kiva loans' idea... potentially giving more of a human face to the vast database of 'borrowers'.

Any day now . . .

2010-03-07T08:44:00.001+09:00

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

The Game of Life: Jesse Schell

2010-03-03T05:20:00.008+09:00

10+ points for eating your cornflakes!

Jesse Schell on the psychology of games and social media, the hunger for authenticity, technological convergence, external reward systems, the future of games and the important role of those that will design them. Very insightful!

a monument to creative failure

2010-02-27T00:31:00.004+09:00

http://www.art-bin.co.uk/

derivative

2010-02-23T13:54:00.006+09:00

http://www.derivative.ca/

untitled - vertonung from misfitsherry on Vimeo.

wüstenarchitekten in collaboration with:
sherry kennedy - sound design
rui pimenta - painting

toronto, 2009

RjDj

2010-02-21T17:07:00.003+09:00

Generative music stimulated by sound in the surrounding environment / kinesthetic movement etc.

Retrospective 11: John Whitney

2010-02-21T15:51:00.003+09:00

Retrospective 10: Popcorn 1969

2010-02-21T15:47:00.003+09:00

"Kingsley was quoted in 2005 as saying that in 1969 he was listening to a popcorn machine and thought he could make a tune out of it. He spent the next day playing his Moog synth looking for a catchy riff. He then constructed the song in the studio entirely on the Moog, resulting in "Popcorn". Released 87 days later along with the album Music To Moog By, it sparked unprecedented success with it being heard all around the world and is still popular today."

Retrospective 1: Lillian Schwartz

2010-02-21T15:26:00.005+09:00

Lhasa De Sela (1972 – 2010)

2010-02-15T02:33:00.004+09:00

First Born

2010-02-13T06:52:00.001+09:00

(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Extraboy)
"This is the automatic sublime, the place for submissive degradation, idyllic tormenting and rhetoric voids. Machines that passively terrorize your being, where we understand that there is no nature without culture. No difference without repetition. No such thing as silence. There is only noise organized in meaningful structures. Viral ecologies where an artifact can be the interface to an aura.

Video is made with the help of a pdf screengrap glitch that overlays a video of google earth. In some ereas the satellites fail to stitch the photos correctly."

Raquel Meyers

2010-02-13T06:50:00.000+09:00

http://raquelmeyers.blip.tv/

Andy Gilmore

2010-02-09T10:43:00.002+09:00

Andy Gilmore

Life Inc.

2010-01-20T11:50:00.001+09:00

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Reed Danziger

2010-01-14T13:12:00.004+09:00

http://www.reeddanziger.com

Chad Hagen

2010-01-14T13:05:00.003+09:00

http://www.chadhagen.com

Torikago

2010-01-11T04:01:00.006+09:00

http://www.qubibi.net/torikago/index.html

Kazumasa Teshigawara

Kazumasa Teshigawara

2010-01-11T02:39:00.004+09:00

http://www.qubibi.net/newyear2010/

Enduring Without Answer

2010-01-07T03:39:00.004+09:00

"Good.
I am alone.
In the present as were I still.
It is winter.
Without journey.
Time passes.
That is all.
Make sense who may.
I switch off."

-- Samuel Beckett

photo by Agraphia

Listen II

2009-12-31T15:08:00.001+09:00

Visual Merzbow from Peng Wang on Vimeo.

Listen I

2009-12-30T11:26:00.007+09:00

http://www.nfb.ca/film/listen

Michael Shermer on 'Magical Thinking'

2009-12-28T16:52:00.006+09:00

http://www.terceracultura.net/tc/en/?p=234

"Science doesn’t come naturally, because it requires additional cognitive steps, beyond just the basic pattern-seeking, pattern-connecting, connecting the dots behavior we all do that’s known as superstitious thinking. This is what I call “patternicity” (in “How We Believe”), the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise. Now, sometimes patterns are real and sometimes they’re not. And we make two kinds of errors. A Type 1 error, which is a false positive: you think the pattern is real, and it turns out it’s not; and a Type 2: you think the pattern’s not real, and it turns out to be real. So let’s take an example. Think of our selves back in a Paleolithic environment, in a dangerous world, and there’s a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind, or is it a dangerous predator? Well, you make a Type 1 error and you think, well, it’s probably a predator, so I’ve got to move away and be cautious, and it turns out it’s just the wind. There there’s no harm. That doesn’t take a big investment of energy. But if you make a Type 2 error and you say it’s just the wind and it turns out it’s a dangerous predator and you stand there and become lunch, you’re now taken out of the gene pool.

So I’m arguing that there is a natural selection for: “Just assume all patterns are real, and operate accordingly”. And of course, that’s just magical thinking. That’s association learning, that’s just connecting A to B and assuming there’s always a connection."

-- Michael Shermer

What does simulation want?

2009-12-28T16:35:00.003+09:00

Simulation and Its Discontents
Sherry Turkle

"Over the past twenty years, the technologies of simulation and visualization have changed our ways of looking at the world. In Simulation and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle examines the now dominant medium of our working lives and finds that simulation has become its own sensibility. We hear it in Turkle's description of architecture students who no longer design with a pencil, of science and engineering students who admit that computer models seem more "real" than experiments in physical laboratories.

Echoing architect Louis Kahn's famous question, "What does a brick want?", Turkle asks, "What does simulation want?" Simulations want, even demand, immersion, and the benefits are clear. Architects create buildings unimaginable before virtual design; scientists determine the structure of molecules by manipulating them in virtual space; physicians practice anatomy on digitized humans. But immersed in simulation, we are vulnerable. There are losses as well as gains. Older scientists describe a younger generation as "drunk with code." Young scientists, engineers, and designers, full citizens of the virtual, scramble to capture their mentors' tacit knowledge of buildings and bodies. From both sides of a generational divide, there is anxiety that in simulation, something important is slipping away."

FLYING LOTUS

2009-12-28T16:33:00.000+09:00

LUIS

2009-12-18T13:06:00.001+09:00

LUIS from diluvio on Vimeo.

Syl Kougai _OpVern_

2009-12-18T12:49:00.001+09:00

Syl Kougai _OpVern_ from sarge grafX DIGITAL_ART on Vimeo.

Bruno Dicolla

2009-12-17T15:15:00.003+09:00

http://www.brn.cc/

Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man. ~William Ralph Inge

rgbxyz

2009-12-15T17:32:00.000+09:00