I found this huge paste-up hidden away in the overpass between platforms at the DeKalb stop.
Tag Archives: Art
Are all games stupid?
Hit play, and start reading.
This piece from the NY Times about stupid games really rung a bell in my head:
Stupid games, on the other hand, are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird.
Continue reading Are all games stupid?
A display is a thing you look at
The New Art
It makes me happy
Circulate
I love the art blog “But Does it Float?” – it gives you just what you want. Big beautiful images.
This one struck me. The simplicity and the beauty of it, the alien quality. I was inspired.
Just like my other art, this art is open source so you can do something with it.
Want to play with a live version?
The V-A-Lizer
That’s Janice Boan giving us face, and I was inspired by an image I saw on a blog about people who bite designs without giving attribution. Like all of my art, the source code is open and available for you to adapt and use.
Wanna play with a live version?
Continue reading The V-A-Lizer
Visible Cities
Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed.
This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.
Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Fantastic – the amazing art blog But Does It Float? has found an artist, Colleen Corradi Brannigan, who has been making Calvino’s cities visible. Here is a complete index of the invisible cities paintings, the descriptions are in Italian. I am in love with this great book, I’ve even written a city of my own.
Police bees will hunt rogue geneticists
Regine has a lovely interview with Thomas Thwaites 1 about a future where the police hunt growers of hallucinogenic plants via special bees.
How did the pollen forensics researchers react to your project?
In general the reaction was that it was almost believable… which is the reaction you want for a futures project I think. A plant geneticist, (who’s ‘Crash Course in Synthetic Biology’ I later crashed) saw the project and said he’d thought about taking genes from the Marijuana plant and putting them into a tomato plant (being a respected scientist I’m sure he wasn’t saying he’d thought about ‘doing it’, just ‘about it’).
And this gem of what’s actually happening now to translate pollen to crime:
Are the police in the UK already using pollen forensics?
Yes, and its been pretty instrumental in several very high profile cases. There’s this lady called Pat Wiltshire who is the police’s go-to person for pollen forensics. She can look at a sample of pollen from clothes or whatever, and visualise the landscape it’s from – a filed of maze, with a river next to it, and an oak tree in the middle – or something like that. The impression I got about police work when I was interviewing James, and a detective, was that it’s really arduous. Pollen forensics would be one detail in many that would lead to cracking a case, and as importantly, proving it in court.
This high weirdness is definitely part of the adjacent possible, one of those strange futures that hasn’t happened, but should.
- He’s the guy who tried to make a toaster out of raw materials, start to finish (back)
October Leaves
You are in for a treat. Hit play and fullscreen
The form and the content are married. Takes my breath away. This is the sort of thing I want to make.
How to Safely Win an Impossible Book
When I heard that Charles Yu was giving away the mysterious “Book from Nowhere” from his novel I was terribly excited. The book is a McGuffin/plot point in Yu’s novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” – the protagonist is the author who gives himself the book before shooting himself in the stomach.
It’s one of those books.
The publisher actually created a physical mockup of the all-metal book from the story and let Wired give it away in a contest – best comment wins the tome. I dashed off an entry and a few days ago I learned that I won that contest.
My winning comment was what I could get done in a little bit, but I’m so excited to have won that I cooked up a special presentation of the story I wrote. Charle’s book deals with fathers and sons and families and regret and time and loss and paralysis and so does this.
Click here to read “How to Safely Live on in a Science Fiction Universe”
I wrote this. I can’t illustrate worth a damn, so I wrote some code to do it for me. Every time you load that page, it will reach out to Flickr for Creative Commons licensed images on the subjects of mistakes, loss, time, etc. Much thanks to Tove Hermanson and Sam for their help as my editors. There are also links in there. Click them.