clean site and nice work of Rob Brearley

Dezzie Dimbitsara, an alumni from the Frank Mohr Instituut’s MFA program in Interactive Media and Environments (IME), has been creating appealing installations and generative works, that can be seen on her website (http://dezzie.net).

Her IPSE installation allows people to visualize “the invisible” links between each other. The visual depicts those links depending of the way people interact in the space. A video tracking program is used to locate each person and a projection on the ground shows those links. Distance and time are used as parameters to define the way links are moving in the space. The way links are created is inspired by rhizome patterns.

As the author explains: “My aim is to create a place, which makes us remember, the obvious equality between human beings (obvious, but it is necessary to be remembered about it). By this equality I mean, that it is important to see again in the stranger, the alter ego. I do believe that the rehabilitation of the gaze, the simple awareness of the other as an equal and not as a threat is a first step to establish better relationship in social life.”

Muonics.net

Time-based restriction, unpredictability.

This table will self-destruct. The top of the table is structured as a grid of concrete pixels. Each time a new table is produced, one pixel is removed from the design. Following these rules of self-destruction, the shape becomes more intricate as it diminishes. This project converges elements of mass production and handmade craftsmanship, resulting in a limited series of entirely unique tables that will end when the shape is no longer desirable.

Just got this catalog in the mail today, it’s sew machine bind, kinda interesting. Chris just got a new sewing machine we got him for his birthday haha. I’ll show you the print later, I took photos at night and it’s poor quality. These will have to do for now.

No greater a website
has been
or will ever be
created
by homosapien

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44368636@N00/sets/1652689/

My film professor mentioned that the cuteness of Japan arised as a result of World War II, that after the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, Japan became a child of America when American forces occupied Japan. As such, Japan has this child-parent relationship with America (which is still present today), where Japan looks to America for ‘approval’, and so a ‘kawaii’(cute) culture grew out of the Japanese people, resulting in manga, anime and toys like Hello Kitty. Professor Spigland also mentioned that there’s a whole book on this, titled something like ‘After Hiroshima’ which talks about the culture in post-war Japan. I’m curious if ‘cuteness’ was ever present in Japanese society before the war, and if it wasn’t, then his point might very well be true, because if you look at Korean or Chinese culture, that ‘cuteness aspect’ isn’t present, even when all three cultures stemmed from the same root.

“The title of T. Murakami’s symposium, held at Yale was called “Little Boy” -derived from the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The talk examined ideas from TM’s superflat theory e.g. 2-D origins of Japanese pop art coming from the aftermath of LittleBoy and high-low art having no distinctions in Japan, but it also suggests that Japanese pop art didn’t come from the West. ”

—comment left on Murakami’s Youtube video

One witness told commissioners that
she had seen sexual intercourse
taking place between two parked
cars in front of her house.

For sale: Mixing bowl designed to
please a cook with round bottom for
efficient beating.

milk drinkers are turning to powders

Iraqi head seeks arms

squad helps dog bite victim

Madonna discussed sex with David Letterman
 

’twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe
all mimsy were the boroggroves,
and the mome raths outgrabe.
(sentence with no semantics but understood only through syntax)

syntax first approach to parsing, rather than semantics.
the parsing of the sentence refers to how you group words together in phrases.

No such thing as viral anymore: really interesting tips on how to get your videos more seen. Link

Trees, artificially seperated from nature.
Via Everyone Forever

We are all aliens

Folkert Gorter aka Superfamous.com has left Amsterdam half a year ago to work on a unique multimedia project in Los Angeles “that will offer people a new way of thinking” and “that will let them take part in the evolutionary process of mankind”. The sneakpeak he offers me proves his he may just keep his promise! The thirty year old designer (formgiver in the case of Folkie - translator) has web-cred, since he started, together with Jason Kristofer, the website Newstoday.com. This elegant portal for the online designcommunity attracts roughly 11 million pageviews per month. Gorter’s new project is Spacecollective.org. Yet still hidden behind password protection, the launchdate is projected for 2007. De site will be a “non-profit, cross media information and entertainment channel for post-ideological, non-partisan, forward-thinking terrestrials”. Buzzword bingo!

In webisodes of three minutes each - non-linear minutes even, in which the focus jumps from moving image to streaming typography and short facts that will offer a psychedelic perspective in just a blink of an eye - Folkert creates, together with partners René Daalder (Bright issue 06) and Aaron Ohlman, a new version of the gold-anodized plaque that was compiled by Carl Sagan for NASA as a representation for human kind. The plaque (Bright issue 02) was shot into space aboard the Voyager, today still flying with a velocity of 1 million miles a day, looking for an exchange with extraterrestrial intelligence. From this analog plaque, named Murmurs of Earth, Spacecollective will create their own variation, this time allowing everybody to participate, without the censorship such as the brushing away of the male and female genitals at the time. Each member will get its own spacecapsule, for which the member can create messages that will be beamed to the stars monthly. This way everyone can, to quote the creators, “create its own digital immortality”.

SpaceCollective will be a trilogy. Apart from the website a reality-tv series is in the pipeline, in which groups of students, grocery-store employees or ex-astronauts will work on a capsule for a period of time; and a speculative Sci-Fi documentary about the state of the future of mankind. What is striking about the message is the notion that “the most hopeful sign of intelligent life on earth is the rise of the internet”. The creators look upon each human being as a neurone and the Net offers the synapses that will enable us to make connections. A new collective brain can bring us to the next level of human evolution, a development that is perceptibly increasing acceleration, and that will eventually, around 2060, lead us to the coming Technological Singularity. Meanwhile Gorter is all set. He thinks of himself as a testpilot who tests concepts to ultimately return them to improve the condition of mankind.

http://spacecollective.org

By Adam Eeuwens, Los Angeles
for Bright Magazine, Issue 10.

http://spacecollective.org/preview/

http://www.superfamous.com/empire/

Luxury brand executives who declare that their items can be made only in Western Europe because Western European artisans are the only people who know what true luxury is are being not only hypocritical but also xenophobic. They are not selling “dreams,” as they like to suggest; they are hawking low-cost, high-profit items wrapped in logos.

It makes no sense for me to separate research, designing, writing and other (seemingly) more random things - together these activities form a practice that is genuinely interested in the relevance and potential of cultural production (be that design, graphic, artistic, literary or other).Increasingly my focus wanders to a form of practice that voices and/or facilitates dissent, that offers alternative modes of working, living, communicating, learning, participating that are not based on commodification and capitalization, but conviviality, multiplicity and democracy. For design this means not to stand in the service of the market, but the public.

Many aspects of my work don’t take on material form, but take place (and remain) in dialogues with students, colleagues, friends and allies.Here dialogue becomes a ‘material’ to work with and utilize, a means and an end. In this sense research and practice are undertaken collaboratively and in an ongoing process within and outside of institutions, working-hours and commissions. This kind of practice/research is by default not necessarily publishable, conductive within the (temporal, economic and textual) scope of research funding bodies, conclusive or saleable, but is foremost shared and lived/living. Other aspects may take shape in more concrete forms, such as installations, texts, graphic
design…