Saturday, January 02, 2010

The Dalai Lama on "All in the Mind"


Australian radio recently aired a fascinating three-part discussion with the Dalai Lama. The panel discusses neuro-plasticity, behaviorism, morality, and positive psychology. (Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3)

Duchamp on French TV

This is my favorite video I've seen on UbuWeb, so far. It is an hour long interview with Marcel Duchamp that aired on French TV in the early '60s. I visited the most important Duchamp collection last Tuesday, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The main Duchamp room was full Boy Scouts. They looked upset and confused. Later on I passed them and they were joking about how they would be doing the public a favor if they were to smash the art. (Link.)

Monday, December 21, 2009

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Old notes

I attended the Siggraph conference in New Orleans in August. Siggraph is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques. The conference has been at the heart of the computer graphics industry since 1967, so I figured it was a good place to go to figure out if I should be a computer graphics professional. (I shouldn't.) The long-and-short of it is that the art galleries presented by MIT's Leonardo society jazzed me much more than any of the technical demos. The galleries set-up by the Leonardo society were entitled, "BioLogic : A natural history of digital life". The title suggests cellular automata, such as Conway's Game of Life. The pieces in the exhibit did not deal with this directly, but rather dealt with bio-mimicry stylistically. There were several stand-out pieces:
  • A piece entitled "One" by Yoon Chung Han imagines a drop of ink as a microcosm/planetoid. Here's a video:

One (2009) from Yoon Chung Han on Vimeo.


  • Philip Beesley's "Hylozoic Soil" depicts an environment of micro-machines much like a coral reef:


  • The best piece in a gallery of generative art was a lantern by this guy:


  • Here's a conference Uncle Bruce did on generative art. (Link.)


I didn't see the coolest technical demo until I was home from the conference. I spotted this on a Blender news site. (Link.)

Monday, November 09, 2009