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.


