Out of Retirement

What does it take to get this cyberslacker out of retirement? Why extraordinary wedding cakes of course.

Must have some Lego!

And some Scrabble.

A nicely geeky one too.

More can be found here.

Civic Pride

After having been dubbed one of America’s 10 “dying cities”, the good citizens of Grand Rapids, Missouri put together a wonderful video made by a collection of Grand Rapidians lip syncing to Don Mclean’s American Pie. It was paid for by local sponsors and produced by local volunteers.

I admire it both as a demonstration of civic pride and as a fabulous piece of filming logistics.

 

see also http://www.indiewire.com/article/michigan_lip_dub/#

Who Owns An Image?

This blog is very dependent on the reproduction of other peoples work and I try to credit them when I know who is responsible. Often I copy photos and artwork from website where the creator is not named even though sometimes the identity of the originator is only a few clicks away. Nonetheless, I am aware of the possible risks associated with using people’s work without permission and the potential for accusations of hypocrisy in doing so.

Part of my justification is that I use these pictures, either to draw attention to the artist’s work or to comment on it in some way, and certainly there is no material gain for me in this.

An interesting angle on this is found via Fstoppers – a website for professional photographers.  In a video entitled The Stolen Scream,  photographer Noam Galai tells the story of how a single photograph of himself posted on Flickr has become a universal image.

 

Noam generously sees this circulation of his work as publishing rather than theft, though he draws the line at people making money out of his work (let alone his likeness). It does raise the question though of who owns an image and does the act of posting it online negate any claims. Noam himself gives the example of an artist not receiving any ongoing gain from a work hanging on the wall of a gallery.

I suspect that it is a forlorn hope to want to share in the profits from the use of work posted online.

Clever

In the quest for clever and creative artistic endeavours I have now found the work of Belgian artist Ben Heine (he calls himself a "’visual creator’, though his rather cluttered website might belie this). His work encompasses a number of styles, but I specially like his photo-drawing hybrid pictures. He calls them ‘pencil vs camera’.

 

Clicking on the pictures will take you to Ben’s blog with information about the photos etc.

Ben’s photostream or his blog have the full range of his work.

Love at first sight

How else can I describe my discovery of Google Patents? This has got to be like nirvana to a dedicated cyberslacker. Access to over 7 million patents. Why, I may never leave my desk once I get into reading all of them.

OK so here are a few fun ones to be getting on with.

Hat simulating a fried egg.

Toy gun convertible into robotic-humanoid form.

 

Space Vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state

Combined scarecrow and advertising device

Method for concealing partial baldness

 

Device for cooling infant’s brain

 

Hmm. I wonder if it also protects against alien abductions

Mixed media

Sometime back in the last century (1972 actually), a friend and I made a computer generated film where the image was created by the soundtrack.

For the technical minded, that is a EMS Synthi A synthesiser running via an analog-to-digital converter to a PDP8. A 16mm film camera with servo controlled coloured filters recorded the output on the large circular cathode ray tube.

Unfortunately, I don’t know where the film is now but my memory is that it somewhat resembled the coloured patterns that media players show when playing music files. Unremarkable now, but at the time it was novel. I think the doing of it was worthier than the result.

I was prompted to recall this by seeing this music machine shown at the design academy Eindhoven’s exhibition at Milan design week 2011.

It consists of a scale model of the city of Eindhoven wrapped around a cylinder which when rotated plays a piano keyboard.

How successful this mixed-media work is is open to question as the accompanying video is so poor that you can’t really hear the sound.

Still, like my 1972 film, I applaud the effort.

Slow posting

Yes it is true. I have not posted anything for a very long time.

It is possible that I have taken the ‘slack’ part of Cyberslacker too literally, but I think not. What is more likely is that the online world of sharing ideas has changed. There once was a time when I used newsgroups to share thoughts, and before that I posted things on bulletin boards. Blogging is so much easier and so much more accessible, especially for someone who wants to share images publicly, so I have been doing that for a few years. Though sometime it does feel a bit like throwing ideas and images out there and hoping someone is listening. Writing a blog doesn’t automatically make one feel like part of a community. I wrote in my first blog “yes I do like the sound of my own voice”.  A bit indulgent you might think. And with good reason.  Maybe blogging has to give way to the next technology, whatever that might turn out to be, that connects more. Although I do post videos on Facebook, I don’t think that it a long-term replacement for a blog. Perhaps I’ll stick to this for the moment. 

In the meantime … more of the same from a collection of wonderfully whimsical oddities at meme-meme.org.

and via meme-meme there is Like Cool who describe themselves as a gadget magazine.

The music player bed

The digital measuring tool (though its range is limited!)

 

or the folding keyboard

Art and Politics

 

This series of photographs called ‘Stop the Violence’ by Francois Robert is another example of how powerful simple images can be in conveying anti-war messages.

Recently I was in the National Portrait Gallery in London and one piece stood out Official war artist Steve McQueen’s Queen and Country is a display case that features a full page of stamps for each of the UK servicemen and women killed in the war in Iraq.

Pulling open a drawer at random (they are not labelled) and looking into the repeated face of a dead soldier is as chilling an anti-war message as any. No need for visceral images or direct statements. And the fact that some of the drawers are, as yet, empty adds to the power.

Where would we be without maps

I don’t make any apology, I love maps. I don’t know why. I just do. It is why I have a collection of atlases and maps and why I am such a fan of the website Strange Maps. Recently, I have had two separate delightful map based pleasures.

The first pleasure came from a gift from my mother-in-law of an atlas that had belonged to her late husband’s grandfather. The Chambers’s Atlas For The People was published in 1846. It shows in both the maps and the text a very different world. Pre-Civil War United States consists of 26 states, some so-called ‘organised territories’ in the middle of the country and a huge area of ‘unorganised territories’ to the west.

With the creation of the country still 20 years away, Canada was known as British North America with a large area to the north entitled ‘Territory of the Hudson Bay Company’.  There is also reference to Russian America (Alaska) which is described as “a dreary country, inhabited by a few savages”. Yep, it was a very different world.

Of course being before the American Civil War and therefore before the abolition of slavery, the map of Africa is also interesting.

The whole centre of the continent is marked as ‘unexplored countries’ – this being 10 years before David Livingston started his explorations – and the coast of Nigeria appears on the map as ‘Slave Coast’.

The text states that “Civilisation is only to be met with in the settlements of the Europeans” No surprises in that attitude.

In 1846  convicts were still being sent to New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land was identified as a separate colony and South Australia had only recently been founded as a free colony. Although the continent was known as Australia (as well as New Holland), it wasn’t to become a country for another 45 years.

The text is even less complementary about the Australian Aborigines than it is about the Africans.

The second pleasure came when I was in London recently and visited the wonderful Magnificent Maps exhibition at the British Library.

The exhibition is subtitled “Power, Propaganda and Art” and features 80 fabulous maps, many of which were produced for rich and powerful people to display their realms. Most impressive is the Klenke Atlas which is the largest atlas in the world and displayed with the pages open for the first time in 350 years.

Other maps show the boundaries of territories, the progress of development and the fruits of wars. There are also maps which chart subtler conquests.

As with the 1846 atlas, this exhibition provides a wonderful history lesson and reminds one of how much seemingly mundane objects can tell such fascinatingly powerful stories. 

 

Tee Shirt Design

 

The rather odd website TeeRater seems to exist only to reproduce designs for tee-shirts and links to tee-shirt manufacturers.

The designs are listed on the site in categories such as  -

Starwars

Halloween

Superheros

Although they don’t deserve a category of their own, designs featuring toilets seem to be popular.

The site links to the wonderful New Zealand based  GlennzTees pages which feature their designs on tee-shirts, mousepads and laptop skins.

Here are a couple of favourites.

  

I’m not sure I will be rushing to wear any of them, but I have had a great deal of pleasure laughing at the images.