GmbH Shop is opening next friday, (vis com night out?), primarily an outlet for magazines and periodicals, and a great initiative. A great addition for Glasgow, alongside the lovely Aye Aye Books.
Monthly Archive for September, 2010
If you’re currently troubled by the above question, there’s a conference on that very topic, taking place on the 1st october and streamed live here, as part of the GE & Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum exhibition of the same name, currently running.
Just bringing attention to Studio Roosegaarde who have some great projects on their website (which I love). The studio is a mix of engineers designers and artists headed by Daan Roosegaarde (plenty of vowels there). Soo feeaast yoouur eeyees oon thaat.
I have been researching measuring instruments recently for a self promotion piece. On my Grand Tour of Glasgow, I discovered this Metal Erasing Shield in Miller’s for £0.99 and thought it was rather beautiful. The metal plate is delicate to the touch with the shapes carefully considered and arranged. It smiled and winked at me in the shop, so I bought it. I may never need to edit or correct the intersection of two bisecting lines again, so I am now in possession of an objet d’art. But then again, so might thousands of other precisionists.
Meant to post about this ages ago, but yahoo Pipes are very worth looking into, as a way of using and manipulating various forms of data and content that exist online.
This leaked pdf, courtesy of the BBC, lists extra-governmental bodies in line for sweeping reform or abolition. The fate of the Design Council, as you’ll see, is still undecided.
The idea of leaks and leaking have taken an interesting turn, now that digital artefacts (memos, spreadsheets, pdfs) can be transmitted instantly and electronically through expansive and open(ish) networks, and don’t need to be left in a brown envelopes at victoria station and translated via the pages of the broadsheets or a few tv channels. For more on this in a social media context, see wikileaks.
(Am wondering if the student loans company gets abolished, that means my loan is written off. Suspect not).
Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
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You could easily ask the ‘why?’ question about this project, but knowing the work of BERG, there’s something quite pleasing in the playful visual experimentation that works as a sketch of future ideas to come. More here.
We’re just finalising plans for GSA Pecha Kucha II, taking place this coming Wednesday, 22nd September. Click through for credit-crunch busting, double-dip destroying FREE tickets.
You are cordially invited to the first talk of year 10/11:
Fri 1st Oct, 4pm, 2nd Yr Studio:
featuring:
Paul Ryding; illustrator and man from the AOI.
Martin Clark; Photographer, Filmmaker and Bon Vivant
(i can confirm that the M77 will not be closed for these talks)
image: Paul Ryding.
Substitute ‘design industry’ for ‘Catholic Church’ and this article from the Guardian’s Indie Professor seems to sum up the (reasonably) current art vs design argument quite nicely. The fact that the argument may be a totally spurious one, made largely by industry bigwigs who just don’t get it is a whole different matter.
Simultaneously (un)related but connected things: The Form Of The Book Exhibition, coming soon at SWG3 Glasgow, and The Form of The Book Book, (from The Form of the Book)
I, like the rest of the population of the world it seems, love Stephen Fry. But there’s something slightly annoying about the way he appears (and this isn’t his fault) to have become the sole conduit between ‘new’ technology and the ‘general public’, in the minds of the mass-media. Twitter was one example, and MyFry is another case in point. The non-linear display of text-based information has been kicking about as an idea for almost (and probably over) 500 years, and even in terms of ‘new media’ it has been on the table pretty much since the web enabled hyperlinking of texts and emergence of online network cultures, but this book-as-an-app may still be hailed as a radical departure by the mainstream press. Anyway, on a lighter, but still ‘language-transmission’ related note:
Following up the previous post: Amusing Ourselves to Death, reinterpreted by Stuart McMillen
I thought i’d maybe written about The Shallows before, perhaps not, but the book gets a review alongside a useful comparison here.
The debates, as they have a tendency to do, polarise the views, but I think the basic premise is questionable. Its interesting thinking about this from a creative point of view, where a ‘butterfly mind’ (something you might be criticised for in more mainstream education) can be an asset, and the ability to drawn together disparate and varied sources to create something new, thinking in the ‘extended abstract‘, is part of normal working practice. As with all these net criticisms, and I’m not saying there’s not an element of accuracy in them, it seems a little like pissing in the wind, as even if they were valid the net isn’t going to ‘go away’. The issues become more ones of literacy, making the most of changing learning and knowledge aquisition styles, and seeing what benefits these changes might bring.
Parallel arguments, but relating to TV rather than the web, might be found in the entertaining and insightful Amusing Ourselves to Death, by one of my favourite other Neil’s, Neil Postman.
This all links to some previous posts on this blog, including this, this and this.
N.B. (To correctly attribute the post title, like Waynes World, but FOR REAL.)
Himptology: The Second Coming is currently running at the Arches, involving a series of Sunday Services, “a non-denominational alternative to Sunday School for creative types”.
Apple today changed their terms and conditions for developers of apps for the iphone and iPad. It now allows developers to take advantage of the publish iPhone app in Flash CS5.
This was the killer feature when Flash CS5 was released last year but was shortly afterwards crushed by Apple changing their terms and conditions for the App Store to exclude apps developed in third party software such as Flash. This new change has sent Adobe share price soaring and perhaps indicates a cooling off on the Apple / Adobe battles over Flash on the iPhone. Motorola and other smart phone manufacturers using Google’s Android OS which supports flash have been mocking Apples lack of support for Flash in press ads. Meanwhile Adobe have tightened up security flaws in the Flash Player which Apple criticised. This perhaps shows a softening by Apple and possible inclusion of flash player in iPhone / iPad OS 4.2 due out in November.
Apple had pinned it’s hope on HTML 5 being able to deliver rich content but this seems slow in being adopted by browsers and html 5 has come under a lot of criticism for not being robust enough in it’s current form. Many television channels such as BBC iPlayer, Sky on Demand and Channel 4 On Demand use the flash player to deliver video content and if as predicted Apple release a new iPad with 7 and 10 inch screens and webcam to take advantage of facetime calls it would make sense to include the ability to watch flash content, especially television on demand channels. That would bring an added dimension to the iPad as a home device and keep the competition at bay. Come on Apple smell the coffee.
Awesome Tapes from Africa does exactly what it says in the URL. A lucky find, thanks to Sarah Usher. The covers require no comment (other than awesome).
“The Wilderness Downtown” is not a phrase that you’d readily use to describe Kenton Lane in Newcastle, the street where I grew up – the most exciting thing that happened there being an occasional crash at the traffic lights. However it is given a different slant in this video for the latest Arcade Fire release which brings to the mainstream a lot of experiments using interactive media, geo-locative data and re-interpretations of the pop-video format. As an aside, we are told that this is the year of ‘geo-location‘ and the death of the ‘web‘ (as distinct from the internet). Beware false prophets*? Endism anyone**?
*or possibly opportunists using the well trodden “x is dead” tactic.
** “At the center of their argument is the observation that popular thinking about technology today is ruled by a kind of relentless “endism,” which forecasts the death of everything from mass media to the nation-state, government to politics, universities to regions, even distance itself.”
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