today's Photo Friday topic is "furry" which reminded me of this amazing seed pod I saw while hiking around pinnacles.
Taken with my pentax optio, which has a startlingly excellent macro.
John Baldessari is speaking this monday and so i did a search for him, and found this site that opens up in such a lovely way. i recomend you try it. it's actually pleasurable to navigate as a pure act of navigation. odd.
sad the site hasn't got any images of his work, tho.
So Zap sends me this wonderful Rich Gold talk The Coast Guard and its Borders and tells me to read it. And I do. And I find this gem (as well as many others)
"I had gone to a college with both an art school and a design school. And the artists and designers always sat at separate tables and didn't like each other much. These guys had sold out according to these guys and these guys were kind of flaky and didn't really want to make a living according to those guys.
And the way I think about it, the difference between the art and the design is that an artist paints a painting, and he goes, "Oh, it's beautiful. It's me. It expresses myself. There I am. There's my vision." A designer paints a painting and in the end, turns it around and asks: "Do you like it? No? I'll change it." "
Zap actually sent me the second part of the quote, but I wanted to include the first part, but there exists this art/design cultural uneasiness in schools, and later we pay for it no matter what side were on. As artists we are taught arrogance and starvation mentality, as designers we are taught to be pliant to the power of the buck. And we constantly suspect the other side might be having a better time of it, but we don't dare cross because we are holding on to our dream/sense what-have-you.
As designers we ought to be strong but not arrogant, and be willing to do the right thing isince we are here to help our clients, and "help" and "obey" are not synonyms; and as artists we need to stop being bellybutton gazing sycophants and say something some one can hear.
For Photo Friday: a bit of pool playing. Andi is a thing of beauty in motion when taking money from strange men...
The oddest thing googlealert has brought me is "literature reinvented by three frenetic red white and blue stay-at-home moms ".
to which I mostly say "huh?" and "why me?" but considering previous forays into poetry perhaps I shouldn't ask.
Derek uploaded a sound file with John Cage telling the story of translating a haiku from japenese into english and it's an extraordinary small moment.
Not only do the translations make for several lovely small poems all very unique and human, but the sound file reveals the perils in attempting translation. After listening to it I felt both happy and lonely. We are all so seperated from each other, but not only distance, but time, language, culture and the variations that come from being a complex being.
Anyhow, do listen.
My first exquisite corpse was published today. Nice ending to a day of mishap.
le cadavre/exquise/boira/le vin/nouveau
'Consequences of Thought' continues our "it's friday" series.
Huge Magazine's Thriftstore Art Gallery
le cadavre/exquise/boira/le vin/nouveau because daily doses of art is good for us. feed yr soul (with a nutella&cheese alternative).
Completely unusable, and I don't care. ORTHOGRAPHIE is art. Go when you have time to not multitask, but wander through a strange vector gallery. My fave: on/off.
ALL LOOK SAME is an amazing site where you are asked to guess is an individual is chinese, japanese or korean simply from a head shot. While this is a great site from the point of view of art (forcing one to look at one's preconcieved notions of race) it also could be a powerful data collector for understanding race&place-based views toward asians. It leads me to wonder what how academic research could be made more engaging... and what would be the repercusions?
From: Gleanings
To: glean-team
Subject: Gleanings:less real but more fun
APROPOS OF NOTHING
I am in love with this site. With its well thought out icons, strange
photodisk testimonials and clever personalization and stickiness ploys it is more successful as a fake site than many real e.coms.
Goodwill. Globally.
more on fake websites
NY Times: Wacky, Fake Web Sites Grab Attention.
The trend is meant to capitalize on the growing use of and fascination with
the Internet as well as to take advantage of the capabilities of the Web to
produce content at a low cost that appears to be genuine. In other words, on
the World Wide Web, it can always be April Fool's Day.
this has to be seen to be believed.
super postal worker.
EYECANDY
(flashcandy)
http://www.graffiti.org/figm/index2.htm
http://www.lorenhaynes.com/
I quite like the design and navigation of this webshop.
http://www.entercomm.com/
NEWS
domain squatters are starting to lose...
Yahoo! Wins 40 Domain Names (AP)
http://www.msnbc.com/news/446029.asp
from Tomalak
Salon: Don't call us.
In five years writing about the Net, I've seen a lot of ridiculous endeavors -- like publicists who fax over press releases and then request that, if you don't plan to write about "Making Merry with Shari's Berries!" you fax back an explanation of why you passed on that hot story tip.
from webmonkey
Friday, 18 August 2000
Levi's and Phillips have banded together to create the first commercially available line of e-clothing! They're starting out with jackets that come with built-in MP3 players and cellphones, and cost between $600 and $900 (so reasonable!). Some people are concerned about the possible health risks of having so much technology constantly radiating your body, but I just want to know what the coats look like. I mean, unless they're really cute, you probably won't wear them enough to worry about anything but the wrath of the fashion police, right?
Read all about it at Wired News
and more
Industry Standard: Hello, And Welcome to Our Redesign!
Q&A with Alex Weil, designer at Charlex. What I tried to do was raise the
quality of the Web site to match the brand and culture it created through
the phone. The first thing we did was add its well-known slogan to the top of
the Web site. "Hello, and welcome to Moviefone!" can also be downloaded as an
audio file.
Adweek: From July 3, 2000; Sneak Previews
From: Gleanings
To: they might be gleanings
Subject: Gleanings: now with less content!
EYECANDY
limn.com has been a nightmare for users.. this is half apology, but mostly
something very different.
turn on your speakers: their background music is by they might be giants.
APROPOS OF NOTHING
NEWS
Cellphone are for people communicating with people, not Proctor and gamble or the NBA...
from tomaak:
SJ Mercury: Forget the hype, e-books still hard on the eyes.
E-book technology is just not ready. It's too hard to read on the screen.
Think of this as the opposite of what's going on with the music industry and
Napster: With Napster, the public is clamoring for file-sharing technology but
the big companies are trying to ignore it.
In their dreams
Sony claims to be an Internet company. It isn’t yet
