Posts Tagged ‘art’

Spook Country Cinema

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Steve McQueen and a Mustang: This car chase scene from Bullitt has long been regarded as one of the all time classics in cinema. Someone has taken the time to “geo-broadcast” that scene using a site called Seero. Seero lets you geocode timeframes within your videos, and view the route in real time via map overlays. The result is reminiscent, though less grand, than the VR installations of celebrity death scenes imagined by William Gibson in Spook Country. (via peterme)

More for the machine-aided-geography set: Polipoly, from the industrious Sunlight Labs, is a compact Python library for associating addresses with congressional districts. I’d missed it before, Sunlight Labs also created Capitol Words, a dead simple website that tracks the most popular word from the Congressional record each day. They have released an API as well.


Soak in the geometric color abstractions from both Owen Gildersleeve and Andy Gilmore. Gildersleeve created a set of unique posters in collaboration with artist Thomas Forsyth. Forsyth’s spinning top auto-drawing contraption creates ghost scribbles atop the circular fields designed by Gildersleeve. Courtesy of Matthew Buchanan, the color abstracts by Andy Gilmore remind me of this poster by Otl Aicher, from his collection for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Four years earlier: a graphic uprising in 1968.


Michael Agger explores how we read online, while fewer and fewer people read books offline. RIP Cody’s. Who needs books when you can purchase an abstraction artifact of your favorite product at Daniel Becker’s Barcode Plantage?

Visuals: Lovely portfolio of Wayne Daly (via It’s Nice That). The artwork of Sandra Kassenaar. The photography of Christian Wander. A gallery of sawn in half cameras (via DF). YouWorkForThem presents ZINETWO, a PDF magazine/design flyer. Raymond Biesinger drew the icons above this paragraph, and he has a striking portfolio of vintage-styled illustration that look plucked from a Boys Life issue from the 1950’s. Pin-Up a magazine for architectural entertainment (via EG).


Featured up top, Raymond Pettibon cover art for the Dim Stars 1992 EP. Not so grim as this caped crusader poster, but a bit more subversive.

Ampersands & Phantoms

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

Island of Capri, from the back cover

“If you want to read it as a mystery, a clue is: the bald spot.”

So reads the inner flap to Ellen Raskin’s 1974 young adult novel Figgs & Phantoms. Raskin’s second novel (and twelfth book) wraps playful meditations on life, death, identity, family, and dreams in a mysterious romance (or a romantic mystery). Raskin created the cover, supplied several illustrations, and designed the intricate playbill and posters that add to the story.

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Death of an Electric

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Above: Robert Edgar Broughton of the Edgar Broughton Band. Wasted blues from 1968 till the present, after starting as a more straight head blues band in the late 60’s, and what British rock group didn’t start that way, the Broughton Band let things get a bit looser and ended up twisting Howlin’ Wolf and the MC5 into some sort of anarchist free blues heaviness. Charting in the UK, their most popular single foreshadowed mashups of today, nonsensically mixing a cover of The Shadows’ hit “Apache” with a raw take on Captain Beefheart’s “Apache Dropout”. Here’s an ealier live performance, minus the “Apache” sections.

Speaking of 1968, the new issue of Aperture Magazine showcases famous and striking photographs from 1968.


Drawing: The Nonist digs up drawings by people suffering from various psychological afflictions. The lettering sketchbooks of Linzie Hunter. Aza Raskin’s Algorithmic Ink paints organic patterns within your browser using the Javascript port of Processing.

Some sort of disorder, or perhaps a bit too far left of wasted: hypnotizing footage of the infamous Royal Trux stumbling mightily through radio IDs. Five Dials, a magazine. Abandon NASA Photography by Richard Harrington, snapshots of decaying futures (via MB). Even more ghostly, Vincent Fournier’s Space Project channels Solaris, Sputnik, and the modern world’s vanished dreams of not so long ago.

Nina Katchadourian stacks books to creates meaning (via Coudal). A full album of outtakes for download from drone conjurer Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s out of print Shining Skull Breath.


Easier and cheaper than a whiteboard plus a projector: transparent Post-Its (via Torrez). Guidelines for Online Success by Rob Ford, published by Taschen. Ford attempts an all encompassing analysis of completed successful online projects, I look forward to viewing a hardcopy. Sometimes it can be inspiring to see a site’s humble genesis, ink and all (via TMN).

URIs Beyond Death

Monday, June 9th, 2008

In Japan, QR codes are being embedded on gravestones, creating a URI for accessing photographs and videos of the deceased via cellphones. Those who have strolled through cemeteries, wandering through aisles of strangers will wonder no longer. Mobile technology before death: cellphones now allow scientists the ability to track human movement much more precisely. The studies have revealed that the patterns closely follow power laws.

Two interesting news visualizations: TimesMachine allows you to flip through New York Times front pages back to 1851. Big Picture, a news blog exploring the power of a single image. It consists of a large format AP photograph selected from breaking news stories.

Photos of the Titanic from the Library of Congress. The artwork of Yellena James. The photography of Cecile Bortoletti and those represented by AR Photographic Agency. Wild Light: a wildlife photography blog.

Until the Kingdom Comes: artwork by Simen Johan. The Sea Inside: psychedelic ink drawings by Maia Valenzuela. The art of David Haines, who tarnishes delicate pencil drawings with gum, mosquitoes, and blood.

An interview with John Gall on book cover design, including some of his favorites.

Cloud Shovelers, Hither

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

Score for the \"The Appointed Cloud\"

Above, a picture of the score for composer Yoshi Wada’s November, 8th 1987 performance of The Appointed Cloud, newly reissued by Omega Point and the ever-eclectic EM Records. In this performance, eighty of Wada’s homemade pipe horns and organs were controlled via a single computer, and paired with a small ensemble playing instruments and prepared metal objects. In addition to directing the was flow of air powering the pipes, the program also had control over the mallet which struck the hanging steam pipe gong.

The Appointed Cloud was not only a performance, but also exhibited as an interactive installation which began anew every hour. Visitors could create variations on the theme via an external keypad, which was fed into the computer orchestrating the pipes.

A special artist’s edition of the release comes in a roughly legal-sized folio containing a reproduction of the colorful score pictured above. This is the second Wada reissue/release by EM, and let’s hope that it isn’t the last. Perhaps Audibility will be next.

Sarah Oppenheimer’s 610-3356 (via Life Without Buildings) eradicates the boundaries between the viewer and the museum, and viewer and the floor below. Remnants of Rauschenberg. The Vanishing Design erodes the style from a webpage while you watch.

China’s moment of mourning captured in analytics. The ghost town of Yubari, a former Japanese coal city.

Explorations in tracing time: Analogy, a typographic clock. A polaroid calendar.

Visual: Bruno Munari’s Original Xeropgraphies. The gallery of disciples. The book covers of Henry Sene Yee. The photography of Sarah Cass. A gallery of book trade labels. The seductive art of Robert McGinnis.

Piet is a fascinating visual programming language paying tribute to Mondrian. The language operates on the change in color from one block to the next. The shift and hue change dictates the instruction. An IDE is available online.

Ampersand, a blog. Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Distortion, a double compact disc. Make your own film, a photoset. Cubescape, an isometric pixel editor.

An interview with Honey Owens, who performs under the name Valet. Her newest album Naked Acid smears vocals upon whispers upon a subtle pounding. She speaks of the electric current running through her body that sabotages computers, and truth or not, the sounds are bewitching. Serious orange feathered sunset music here folks.

Finally, via the new nonist annex, Semantic Field Relationships. You really won’t find a more perplexing diagram today.