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[Image: It's back – and it's a real photo. "From space," we read, "Kansas farms look more like a geometric puzzle than sources of corn, wheat and other crops." From Earth, Kansas farms look more like (censored)].

Originally from BLDGBLOG on February 17, 2006, 10:01pm

a hydraulic, physical representation designed by Bill Phillips in the 1920s that simulates the macroeconomic flow of money in a national economy (moniac = Monetary National Income Automatic Computer). water is pumped into the top of the machine & then filtered down though a central column & then through pipes & chambers. the amount of money is represented by how much water is in a tank. the net flow of the system gathers at the bottom & is pumped back to the top to restart the cycle. different variables can be changed by tuning valves & other piping. [nzier.org.nz & inc.com|via kirchersociety.org]

Originally from information aesthetics on February 16, 2006, 11:34pm

[Image: 32 Beijing/New York, Issue 7: Floating Populations, Edited by Steven Holl]

I haven’t gotten my hands on this yet, but Issue 7 of 32: Beijing/New York is devoted to Floating Populations and the spaces cropping up as the result of global urban migration. I’m very curious to see what types of connections are made between African nomadic settlements and, say, American commuter transit villages, and other migration spaces reflected between the first and third worlds.
What I am most interested in, though, are those places which evidence an urbanism of forced migration: I’m talking refugee camps, prisons, homeless shelters, immigration stalls, detention facilities, national emergency centers, squatter cities, tent cities, border fences, subterranean worlds, slave trade enclaves, mobile homes, convalescent homes, security checkpoints, the baseworld archipelago, and so on, etc.. Altogether, they constitute this massive informal infrastructure of nomadic space expanding around the world, fragmented in different forms of socio-political captivity.

[Image: Dakhla camp for Sahrawi refugees in the Tindouf region of Algeria in 1998, UNHCR/A. Hollmann]

It is the architectural space of urban dislocation. Expelled space. A scattered no man’s land buffering the first world from the rest of the world. Swollen fractions, a violent terrestrial palette, criss-crossing boundaries, impregnated landscapes and disease. It is a haunted edge space that laps at the periphery of earth’s gated Eden.

[Of course, I really don't know what I am talking about, or exactly what it is even I am trying to say, but...]

These contexts of posturban mobility, sort of, stratify a geospatial complicity for a whole spectrum of forced migrations and evictions. In the examples given above, familiar notions of eviction and immigration are challenged and redefined. Homeless people can no longer be seen as waifs who simply refuse to work. Day laborers are no longer just some group of hard workers from across the border eager to make an extra buck. The riots that recently rocked Paris can’t be reduced to mere temper flare, or senseless acts of violence. And the African immigrants dragging their feeble bodies over barbed wire fences in Spain aren’t risking their lives just because the grass is greener on the other side. Disintegrated economic development, exclusionary housing policy, inacessible real estate markets, insufficient job creation, and a pervasive lack of economic development collaboration between the two worlds is now regarded as much a force of eviction as the worst environmental disasters, or brutal tribal wars.

[Image: WORLDPROCESSOR, Ingo Gunther]

In terms of a global immigration movement, I’m trying to understand how ambiguity in architecture plays out in these contexts, as both a strategy for maintaining strict economic control over certain demographics, while, also, offering a much needed place for protecting communities that have been uprooted by civil war, scattered by genocide, banished from their homeland, etc.. Such are the semantics of the ‘refugee camp’, f.e., which usually turns out to be as much a permanent prison in humanitarian disguise as a temporary transitional facility, (the detention center as stepping stone to asylum? I don’t think so.). In all the ingenuity that goes into accomodating a culture of forced migration these constructs only reinforce it, and ultimately refugee camps just end up incapacitating communities more than helping them to rebuild. I guess I can’t ignore the implications of such places essentially herding people around the globe like cattle.
The antithesis of global urbanism, “refugee urbanism” is a dispersed carceral landscape defined by an urbanism deprivation, a nomadic vertigo, and the uncertainty of judicial status in constant flux.
Until the richer nations truly invest in solving the root causes of the common refugee camp (because they’re not going anywhere soon), or continues to find new ways of helping refugee communities turn them into catalysts for broader social change and infrastructural improvement, what will keep the regimes of indiscriminate eviction at bay?

[Image: WORLDPROCESSOR, Ingo Gunther]

These semi-porous detention centers are partly the mechanisms that manage the global flows of exploited labor, they are the product of the ‘global factory boss’ in cahoots with the ‘global slumlord’, coming together to flex their power along the fringes of a decentralized and disaster-plagued third world landscape, hovering in nomadic perpetuity.
For millions of people, it’s a life of torture and neglect, starved wandering, the zombification of urban migration.
I can’t help viewing all these places as some sort of autonomous transnational platform of networked walls and flexible urbanisms, secretly working together in frightening choreography of architecural unison. (almost like an animated gif of moving building parts: folding gates, collapsible walls, roving compounds, mobile bunkers, inflatable watchtowers, coils of barbed wire unraveling themselves, urban street armor ratcheting into place, solar fences sparking with electricity, the whole freakish thing flickering somewhere in between a power-drunken march, a mechanical ballet, or a stilted slow motion slither.). It is the empire’s modular self-expanding fortress — the nomadic fortress — designed to round up and quarantine global poverty. An act of simultaneous landscape fortressization zipping up the modern world, making it impermeable to everywhere else. Altogether, this refugee urbanism is an epic architectural conceit that translates distant lines in the sand into a subtle systematic ghettoization of the world’s floating populations.

[Image: Exodus by Sebastiao Salgado]

While China’s migrant patterns over decades of hyperurbanization has led to the floating populations of instant labor armies and millions of people evicted from rural areas, the term “floating populations” can now be expanded to include an entire strata of globally dispossessed people, taxonomies of exodus movements, new classes of global non-citizens suspended in political limbomania, culturally uprooted, dying for juridical recognition. These floating populations are the strewn objects of dislocated space, pawns in a much larger geopolitical strategy of forced migration and tactical real estate wars. Soon, we may all be the subjects of one type of eminent domain or another.

Originally from Subtopia on February 16, 2006, 2:00am

Have started going through a long backlog of tips that haven’t yet seen the light of day. And noticed this one. Dutchman Philippe Holthuizen (who sent the information) and Spaniard Rodrigo Clavel were Masters students studying transport design at the Elisava Design School in Barcelona. (We noted Elisava in a post of ecodesign university courses). The guys were selected to design a bike for Cannondale that would appeal to urbanites within the 20-35 years bracket. The Jackknife resulted. “For clean aesthetics and low maintenance the drive system is hydraulic, and for storage and easy handling in elevators and on public transport the bike is also foldable. The folding mechanism shows a unique and highly innovative approach, with the central tube twisting through 180°.” (The hydraulic drive sounds more radical than the folding aspect, but seems glossed over a bit.) The bike has integrated lighting and other details were in keeping with signature Cannondale aesthetics. The two wheeler has been doing the rounds of transport trade shows as a ‘concept’ bike, with the students sponsor indicating it may not be produced, but its ideas incorporated into future designs. Philippe initially sent us a link to the German site ::Radsport, but we see that in the intervening time the story was picked up by Bicycle Design and Car Design News.

Originally by warren from Treehugger on February 19, 2006, 1:16am

The Memory of The Netherlands is an extensive digital collection of illustrations, photographs, texts, film and audio fragments from a large variety of Dutch cultural institutions. There are about 50 collections (in english).

Originally by peacay from MetaFilter on February 19, 2006, 12:40pm

Attention all producers, DJs, and remixers: the Copyright Criminals Remix Contest over at ccMixter has been extended by two weeks, to March 14

Originally by del.icio.us/tag/unmediated::exiledsurfer from unmediated on February 17, 2006, 7:39am

While editing a recent post about the Mars rover, I got to thinking – as you would – about how to make an animated, feature-length children’s film, starring another such rover, set in the immediate future…

In the film, the rover would go tootling around in its cute little animated way, wheeling across unbelievable landscapes, snapping Ansel Adams-like photographs of alien tectonics, volcanoes and basins, systems of canyons that redefine the sublime.

Hills, arches, gorges; mountains surrounded by clouds of methane. Erosion; windstorms; evidence of ancient floods.
Plus, it’s a cute little rover. Kids love the thing. They pressure their parents to name family pets after it. Burger King sells a small plastic version of it with their happy meals, or whatever they make there. T-shirts. Pajamas.

In any case, our erstwhile hero, the little rover, is Artificially Intelligent – and he’s funny. Maybe his voice is by Paul Giamatti. And he gradually sort of wakes up, comes to consciousness, and falls head over heels – monitor over wheels – in love with the world, in love with landscapes, with everything – with emotion and memory – in love with love, and hope, and fear – and he starts to wax poetic over a radio-link back to mission control, his friends and creators, they’re cheering, and to television viewers sitting on sofas at home, going on about how wonderful everything is.
How beautiful that world, in which he travels alone, can really be. It’s not lonely, see. He’s on fire inside. His own little robot mind is as deep as the canyons he explores.
He smiles.

Kids in the cinema aren’t blinking at this point; it’s too amazing. Everyone’s in love with this little rover. It’s like bloody Dead Poets Society out there; everyone’s feeling it. Everyone’s alive. Cynics are vomiting into popcorn boxes.
But then the Martian seasons change, and the rover has to shut down – to be shut down, by mission control. The kids in the cinema start to worry. Frowns appear. Dads grow nervous, re-crossing their legs, only vaguely reassured that the film is rated PG.
You see people on-screen, back at mission control, wringing their hands, preparing to remotely shut off the rover – but the rover loves life, damn it, he loves what he’s seeing, he wants to see more! He wants to live – and he’s funny – and he’s got a friend back at mission control who has to push the button, but she can’t because she loves him – what do you mean shut him down?! – she loves his silly robot eyes, and his enthusiasm, and his stupid voice, and these amazing things he’s been showing to everyone back on earth, and she can’t do it.
She can’t kill the little guy.

Some kids are crying now; she’s crying. Not the little guy! With his tiny wheels pushing further into life and alien landscapes.
Not him!
Enter some sinister, technocratic boss figure – with a voice by Robert Duvall – and he forces her: the button is pushed, mission control sends the command, and our friendly, naive robot hero of off-planet landscape exploration, in the midst of a sad why are you doing this to me? weepy monologue, his AI-eyes wide and worried and scared of that darkness into which his circuits will go – overlooking the most beautiful canyon he’s discovered so far – suddenly he is no more.

The rover’s little eye-lights fade. Martian winds erase his tracks. Grown men wipe away tears before their wives can see them.
The credits roll.
Kids leave the cinema howling. Moms give out hugs left and right. Oscar nominations roll in. I retire to Arizona on the proceeds and begin carving strange topological forms into the desert floor.
Movie producers: you know where to find me.

Originally from BLDGBLOG on February 19, 2006, 2:00pm

WHAT IF THE CATCHPHRASE “the legacy of Duchamp” did not evoke Brillo boxes, factory fabrication, Conceptualism, or any variant of the word critique? What if “Duchampian” were instead to signify that which is hand-replicated, erotic, and (to use Eva Hesse’s favorite word) absurd? What if the wellspring of art since World War II were to be found not in the mass-made objects Duchamp bought and recontextualized in the teens, but in the crafty way he remade and repackaged them decades later?

rio posited by “Part Object Part Sculpture.” In a tour de force of selection and juxtaposition, curator Helen Molesworth uses the work of twenty artists to put forward a tightly focused alternative to received histories of sculpture since the midcentury.

more from Artforum here.

Originally by Morgan Meis from 3quarksdaily on February 18, 2006, 12:00pm

Here’s an interesting site, the Turing Archive for the History of Computing:

The documents that form the historical record of the development of computing are scattered throughout various archives, libraries and museums around the world. Until now, to study these documents required a knowledge of where to look, and a fistful of air tickets. This Virtual Archive contains digital facsimiles of the documents. The Archive places the history of computing, as told by the original documents, onto your own computer screen.

ntains a section on codebreaking and a series of reference articles concerning Turing and his work.

Originally by Robin Varghese from 3quarksdaily on February 19, 2006, 3:02pm

(Thanks, Paul!)

David Bollier and Laurie Racine write, in Christian Science Monitor, on the differences between the music, fashion, and film industries when it comes to controlling creativity:

Is it possible that the fashion industry, long patronized as a realm of the ephemeral and insubstantial, is the real bellwether for future ideas of “ownership” of creative content?

Through fashion we have a ringside seat on the ecology of creativity in a world of networked communication. Ideas arise, evolve through collaboration, gain currency through exposure, mutate in new directions, and diffuse through imitation. The constant borrowing, repurposing, and transformation of prior work are as integral to creativity in music and film as they are to fashion.

Although the music and film industries acknowledge the cultural commons as a source of inspiration, they then turn around and try to claim exclusive ownership of the results. The Disney Company, for example, has “taken private” dozens of folk stories and literary classics while contributing nothing to the public domain. Such one-way privatization of our culture makes it difficult for new creators to build from works that were themselves derivative at an earlier point.

Creativity can endure only so much private control before it careens into a downward spiral of sterile involution. If it is to be fresh, passionate, and transformative, creativity must have the room to breathe and grow, “unfettered and alive.”

The legendary designer Coco Chanel understood this reality. She once said, “Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only; fashion is something in the air. It’s the wind that blows in the new fashion; you feel it coming, you smell it … in the sky, in the street; fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.”

The fashion world recognizes that creativity cannot be bridled and controlled and that obsessive quests to do so will only diminish its vitality. Other content industries would do well to heed this wisdom.

Originally by Smart Mobs from unmediated on February 19, 2006, 4:35pm

User-generated content can thrive when only a small portion of the audience contributes.

“There are a couple of interesting points worth noting. The first is that we don’t need to convert 100% of the audience into “active” participants to have a thriving product that benefits tens of millions of users. In fact, there are many reasons why you wouldn’t want to do this. The hurdles that users cross as they transition from lurkers to synthesizers to creators are also filters that can eliminate noise from signal. Another point is that the levels of the pyramid are containing - the creators are also consumers.”

Originally by del.icio.us/tag/unmediated::revgeorge from unmediated on February 19, 2006, 4:40pm

On Saturday, the planet’s population will hit the landmark 6.5 billion mark. The bad news: That’s more than some say the planet can support. The good news: Um, er… population growth is slowing? By Joanna Glasner.

Originally from Wired News: Technology on February 21, 2006, 1:00am

Cory Doctorow:
This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music — a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison’s 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

Link

(Thanks, Chris!)

Update: Hirmes sends us a link to a mirror.

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on February 21, 2006, 10:41am

Cory Doctorow:
The head of the US Copyright Office says that a controversial treaty that would bring harm to webcasters — especially podcasters — has been rejected by the rest of the world, leaving only the US to champion it. This is the opposite of the US negotiator’s position, which is a lot like the old Internet saw, “The lurkers support me in email” — that is, that lots of countries have privately supported the restrictions on webcasters, but haven’t found the right time to express that support at the United Nations.

At stake is the “webcasting provision” of the “Broadcasters’ Treaty” underway at WIPO, the UN agency that handles copyrights, patents and the like. The Webcasting provision would make it illegal to retransmit Creative Commons licensed works (as well as public domain works, uncopyrightable works like those made by the US government, etc) without permission of the person who hosts them. In other words, it will no longer be enough to know that the author of the work wants you to share it — you’ll also need permission from the company that hosts and distributes the files.

The treaty wil eliminate fair use for all Internet audio/video casts, by creating a different set of rules for what’s fair and what isn’t when it comes to casters than when it comes to copyright holders. You’ll have to negotiate two separate, contradictory “fair use” systems whenever it comes time to making a podcast.

At the UN, the US consistently argues that this is a popular idea. They’ve been put up to advancing it by an org called DIMA that’s a front for Microsoft and Yahoo, who like the idea of being Internet audio/video gatekeepers.

I’ve delivered a letter to the UN signed by 20 tech companies that oppose the inclusion of webcasting in the Broadcast Treaty. The copies of the letter were stolen from the literature table and put in the trashcans in the toilets. Repeatedly.

I questioned Mary-Beth Peters, the US Register of Copyrights, about the Webcasting treaty during the Q&A after her panel at a conference at UNC last November. To everyone’s surprise, she admitted that the US’s position that this is a fundamentally popular idea was a lie:

[7:20]…I think the most controversial piece is the scope of the right that’s being created. The position that the US took is well, if you’re going to give that type of a right to a broadcaster — theft of a signal — then you should look at all people who are similarily situated, including webcasters. Now, that has been totally rejected by the rest of the world.”

MP4 Link,

AVI Link,

MPG Link

Credit: The University of North Carolina and UNC-TV for the video capture and TJ Ward for digizing it.

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on February 21, 2006, 12:03pm

LabelThis asks: “While I’m not a huge fan of immersing children in technology, there is a certain point at which you must expose them to the tools that will help them be successful in the world. Looking back, I distinctly remember my parents making every effort to provide a computer for me and my sibling, early on (they bought an Atari 400 for us when I was 5). Either by accident or on purpose, that single decision (and the continued follow up of purchasing newer computers as needed) shaped my future and the future of my siblings. I now have a daughter, and my wife and I have a number of years to before we worry about equipping her with technology (right now spending time with her and helping her be a happy well adjusted toddler are our primary concerns). In the spirit of my parents choice, what type of tools should parents be equipping their children with, today?”

Originally by Cliff from Slashdot on February 21, 2006, 9:44pm

Originally from BLDGBLOG on February 21, 2006, 10:25pm

A few months ago, BLDGBLOG explored suggestions by physicist Paul Davies that alien life may exist on Earth – though it would be unrecognizable to microbiologists, and thus ignored or wrongly identified.

Paul Davies now reviews a book by Peter Ward in New Scientist – and Davies writes some extraordinary things.
The planets in our solar system, for instance, “are not completely quarantined from each other. Debris splattered into space by comet and asteroid impacts gets distributed around the solar system. Mars and Earth in particular have been trading rocks throughout their history, and it is clear that microbes could hitch a ride and be transported in relative safety from one planet to the other.” Which could make for an award-winning Pixar film… Finding E. Coli.
“Martian organisms might not be alien at all,” Davies concludes, “but merely members of another branch on the terrestrial tree of life.”

Even better is “the intriguing idea” – mentioned above – “that alien organisms may lurk all around us, unrecognised for what they are because they fail to respond to standard biochemical analysis” – or they’re very bad at conversation. “For example, there could be microbes that use RNA instead of DNA, or employ a different genetic code.”
There is even a chance “that some viruses could be relics of ancient alternative forms of life.” Which blows me away it’s so interesting! In other words, what we call an infection is actually an encounter with ancient life.
Living fossils inside wounds.
But my enthusiasm here is ultimately more inspired by the possibilities for landscape design, say, using gardens as a form of astrobiological research. It’s not a garden, it’s a laboratory; it’s not your backyard, it’s a kind of skin graft from an alien planet. Patches from elsewhere. J.G. Ballard’s “nightmare world of competing organic forms,” an “insane Eden.”
One could even imagine a series of classified landscapes, grown by infrared in a cave beneath Los Alamos National Laboratory, incomprehensible genetic lines cultivated into a kind of aterrestrial Versailles. Fountains of amino acids washing slowly over alien flowers.
Weird topiary mazes made of symmetrical creeper vines from space.

(For more of this, see BLDGBLOG’s Alien Rain on India).

Originally from BLDGBLOG on February 21, 2006, 5:55pm

May not a Pollock forgery that passes for authentic be the best Pollock of all?

- asks Don Foster in a recent article in N.Y.Times.
Here is a more of the article, which will soon be unavailable for free reading:

LAST year, 24 paintings were unveiled as previously unknown works by Jackson Pollock. (…)

But Richard Taylor, a physics professor retained by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation to subject six of the paintings to computer-assisted analysis, discovered that the paintings may well be fakes — at least, the drips lack Pollock’s characteristic geometric pattern. The collection’s owner disputes that this finding is conclusive.

At the heart of the controversy lie critical questions about artistic meaning and value that have vexed literary scholars no less than art historians. Would the exposure of a hitherto successful forgery diminish Jackson Pollock’s reputation as a unique creative genius, by demonstrating that his work is replicable? If Shakespeare were credited with a mediocre poem hitherto presumed to be written by a lesser light, would that change our opinion of Shakespeare?

“What matter who’s speaking?” asked Michel Foucault, quoting Samuel Beckett.

What matter whose painting? The implied answer — no matter at all — takes for granted that cultural artifacts are symptomatic of the society that produced them. The critic’s job, then, is to assess the product on its own merits, quite apart from the artist’s name or reputation. If “Hamlet” had been written by Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere, not by William Shakespeare, would the text therefore be less great? Perhaps not, but we would think of it in a different way.

If a previously authenticated Pollock painting was actually done by a disciple, or by Norman Rockwell, or by a monkey with a paintball gun, yet looks to be authentic Pollock, so what? The look-alike might be worth less at Sotheby’s, but would it be worth less as art?

At stake in such attributional debates is a question of methodology: how can experts tell the difference between the real thing and an imitation? If the qualitative judgment of Pollock or Shakespeare scholars differs from quantitative analysis of a computer-assisted study, whose verdict will carry the day? That Richard Taylor’s analysis can inform us of patterns generated by Pollock much of the time provides no guarantee that Pollock reproduced those patterns all of the time. But if the Pollock canon includes a forgery, it may be that Taylor’s analysis provides a more objective mode of analysis than aesthetic appreciation.

(…)
In the art world, the problem of attribution is complicated by market value.(…) if you have paid, say, a half-million for a Pollock painting and some physicist and his computer say that you were hoodwinked, the question of the work’s value is not wholly aesthetic.

Literary and art attribution is not just a game of pin the name on the donkey. A community of interested scholars must consider all available evidence, and come to a consensus. In the case of the Pollock canon, the jury is still out. It would be a mistake, in my opinion, to sell the disputed Pollock canvases at a discount without more evidence than computer-assisted analysis of drip patterns.

Meanwhile, Jackson Pollock may be chuckling in his grave: if the object of Abstract Expressionist work is to embody the rebellious, the anarchic, the highly idiosyncratic — if we embrace Pollock’s work for its anti-figurative aesthetic — may faux-Pollock not be quintessential Pollock? May not a Pollock forgery that passes for authentic be the best Pollock of all?

Well, may it not? This question joins the recent Duchamp controversy and many, many other cases where an artist’s desire for artistic freedom seems to be forgotten when his works are judged by computer programs or valued for their size, or put on a pedestal and turned untouchable.
There is one factor, however, that tends to be forgotten in all our excitement about the real meaning of art and its heroes. I mean psychology of art. Namely, two points about it:
1) As art viewers, we feel the need for coherence. The work has an artist, the artist has an identity, the identity is not just some drips of paint scattered across the canvas of the soul, but it is a whole, it makes sense. In this case, it means a) Pollock was a painter; b) Pollock was a good painter; c) Pollock’s paintings are related to a) and b); finally, d) we can expect that Pollock’s work can only be his (there are recognizeable patterns, then).
This final point is the most questionable, and obviously we often fail at it, misjudging a work, attributing it to the wrong painter, etc. But our failures are only more proof of the possibility of success. And if we wish to name some of the 20th-century works of art that are based on “anonimity”, such as Yves Klein’s exhibition of air, we must notice that they were conceptual works of art, and we are ready to pay either for the event (as a performance of burning money), or for the signs of the concept (as the partiture of Cage’s 4′33). The silence, the air, we somehow don’t actually assign to the artist. Earth, after all, is not Manzoni’s.
2) Reality check: artists aren’t always right. Not even about their own work. Pollock might have dreamed of ” the rebellious, the anarchic, the highly idiosyncratic”, but he never moved beyond the canvas (he never even made the tiniest hole in it, as Fontana ever-so-modestly mentioned). Artists say a lot of things. And dream of even more. That’s our job. If we don’t dream, something is wrong. As Jules Verne put it, there are no great achievements without exaggerated expectations. But if this is true, we simply cannot take the artist’s word for it. Or at least, we don’t need to. Not even when they’re dead and famous (what a scary combination!). That’s why we might just pay more attention to our way of seeing The Fountain, or a drip painting, than to that of the artist. After all, if we listened to the wonderful, charming futurists, we wouldn’t even know them.
I suppose if we join the dots 1) and 2), we see that the artists need a story and we need one. Trying to make us forget any story and see the “pure drip value” of a Pollock seems absurd. On the other hand, promoting the avant-garde tendency towards anarchy as a way of promoting the very artists that lived this tendency is, well, silly. Damn it. We actually need the library, and we need the museum. And some of us, yes, would like to know if the drip-dropped canvas they own was made by a genius or not. Does it change the value of the canvas? Of course. Why? Because we need the story.

Originally from New Art on February 21, 2006, 5:00am

Photos of the First Few Microseconds of an Atomic Blast: Quote: “Ever ondered what an atomic blast looks like before it obliterates everything around it? Before the smoke, the mushroom cloud, the devastation, it’s really quite amazing to see the first few fractions of an atomic bomb upon detonation. Edgerton built a special lens 10 feet long for his camera which was set up in a bunker 7 miles from the source of the blast which was triggered Nevada - the bomb placed atop a steel gantry anchored to the desert floor by guide wires. The exposures are at 1/100,000,000ths of a second. Due to the extremely high shutter speeds, the image quality and color depth is limited in these photos.”

(via Carlos Katastrofsky)
Link

Originally from monochrom, ReBlogged by huong on Feb 20, 2006 at 09:55 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on February 20, 2006, 8:55am

Have you heard of the LED throwies? It looks like very good “art material”, doesn’t it?

via

Originally from New Art on February 20, 2006, 4:19am