1985

This is all the things that I coveted as a kid in one awkward promotional event. To be an art star like Andy Warhol, to have an AMIGA with those sweet graphics, and to be sitting next to Debbie Harry so I could stare longingly at her.

via boingboing

Cheering for Cynicism . . . The Critics

Organized by Daniel Birnbaum, this 53rd version of the venerable Biennale is tidy, disciplined, cautious and unremarkable. If any show can be said to reflect a larger state of affairs in art now, this one suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus. It has prompted the predictable cooing from wishful insiders, burbling vaguely about newfound introspection and gravity . . .

. . . But the Biennale is meant to be a survey of new art, and while conscientious young artists now dutifully seem to raise all the right questions about urbanism, polyglot society and political activism, their answers look domesticated and already familiar. They look like other art-school-trained art, you might say, which is exactly what Pape and Matta-Clark and the Gutai group didn’t want their work to look like, never mind that the art market ultimately found a way to make a buck off what they did, as it does nearly everything, eventually.

For some reason, I continue to be fascinated by a current of extreme cynicism in the writing by art critics since the financial bubble that was forming around art collecting in New York and London nominally popped.

There is a companion article about Art Basel from that week, it follows the same tone but is much more absurd in details. I will have to find the hyperlink so that you can read the quote about all that high falutin arch-consumerist art from those long past "Bush Years."

1/Quarterly Scavenger Hunt Results

Howdy from Chicago!

If there's anyone out there nostalgic for chicago, I shot a bunch of photos around town of old and new sites. oh yeah and since I love games I had to dominate the runnings for this scavenger hunt brought to you by a deceased gallery anyone remember 1/Quarterly Gallery?

A rendering

This is two solid weekends of work and was done for a historical architecture award submission that was due today. It was done entirely in Blender. I plan on completing it and taking it to Luxrender.

Cross posted on Blender Artists.

Alan Kay on User Interface

I've been starting lots of projects and finishing none of them. A newer pursuit of mine is computer programming. My language of choice is Python. Firstly, because it is very simple and consistent. And secondly, because it is applicable to most situations I would want to write a program for: shell scripting, web development, CAD automation, and most interestingly, the umpteen different ways to use Python in Blender (logic in the game engine, PyDrivers, PyNodes...).

I found a course in UC Berkley's webcasts series that can start to fill in the giant holes in my knowledge about writing programs. Anyway, the lecture that I am linking to in this post is not very technical at all. It is a talk by Alan Kay about human-computer-interaction. Alan Kay was a major player at Xerox PARC, which is considered the birthplace of the graphical-user-interface. (bio.) He shows a a demo of what must have been one of the first CAD systems, Sketchpad. It could do things that AutoCAD cannot do now without extensive scripting. The ideas that formed his thinking about user interface were visual thinking, multi-modal learning, and giving people access to the building blocks inside the computer.

The talk is in two parts. I don't think I can link to them directly. They are the September 12th and 15th classes labeled "User Interface (Alan Kay)" on the class' website. (link.)

reactable

interesting interface for a musical device.

demo #2

live in berlin

HIGH on FIRE

BEST METAL!

My Shameful Starcraft Confession...

I... I watch professional Korean Starcraft matches on YouTube :-( (Viewing in HQ is recommend so you can really follow what's going on).

For a taste of the BlipVert speed competitors function at during play, see this.

Next stop: Insanity!

Battlefield HEROES

its like team fortress, but the maps are bigger. and there's vehicles. well, you'll see. and its FREE!

since we're in the mode of reviewing favorite things...

"Go Go smear the poison Ivy" by Múm, was one of the best albums last year. if you are feeling good and you like music that makes you feel good about the fact your feeling good to the point where you are so happy that your feeling good you want to listen to music, then this is a good band to listen to.

i can't recommend a particular song, but "marmalade fires" is excellent, and also "moon pulls" breaks my heart. but maybe just cause i'm an old sentimental sap.