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Emotionless, motionless characters adrift in a bleak world seek sex tourism rapture. And find it only temporarily before disaster strikes and ennui wins. Cf Ellis Glamorama. Perhaps this is what Duchamp was getting at with "timid power".
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"like the man you meet at a crossroads of great contradictory currents who hasn't made up his mind which path to take and who, moreover, is not going to make up his mind. He enjoys the intersection."
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"Really successful art consists of producing new clichés, so if what I do is really successful, it should be considered as a source of future kitsch. Yes, that would be real success. A new and depressive type of kitsch perhaps. I have high hopes."
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15 stone carvings on the Diageo building trace the (pre)history of architecture, from cave to Canada square.
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"At some point this year, our species will prove Darwin wrong [...] the human being is about to become a predominantly urban creature: humans have not evolved to fit our habitat, we have changed our habitat to suit ourselves."
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Interactive underground map on top of Google maps. Very nice, but tube only.
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Self made and reflexive objets d'esign
rodcorp
books, stories, art, architecture, maps and occasionally how teams and systems work. @rod
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March 28, 2006
links for 2006-03-28
Posted at 01:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
March 25, 2006
links for 2006-03-25
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The correspondence with Elkins on drawing as a ghost subject is good. Much of it is fragmentary (it's a collection of writings) and approximal, like a tentative sketch in which the hand and paper gradually receive the subject...
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Archinect interview with Maisel. You can see the influence of teacher Emmet Gowin. Burtynsky influence too?
Posted at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 24, 2006
Checkerboarded notebooks, c 1981-2
Among a dozen or so of us at school there was briefly a craze of taking squared school notebooks and pencilling in alternate squares like a chess board. One or two filled a whole book, page after page of grey and white squares - something that took a commitment of many days - but most achieved a handful of pages only.
Progress was a slow and laborious, and its essential pointlessness somehow excited us and drove us on. After we'd done a page or two the pencil would have worn nicely to a flat diagonal, optimal for quickly covering a square. We'd keep these pencils carefully in our pencil cases, reserving them for the notebook.
But soon the teachers confiscated the books because they represented a waste of our time, particularly in the classroom, and of school material. The practice immediately went underground, but it was hard to keep up, and the checkerboard craze soon fizzled out.
The image is a replica from last week, the original notebooks are sadly long-lost.
See also: pixel portraits and Things Mag's 1160 found dots.
(More personal history of drawing to follow!)
Posted at 05:52 PM in Rodcorp's Art | Permalink | Comments (2)
links for 2006-03-24
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The Iliad as if written in the disillusioned voice of a blogging US officer in Baghdad.
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(tags: howwework)
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How we work for Bram BitTorrent Cohen (thanks TomC.)
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Photographs of corroded containers (with human remains inside?) Reminiscent of magician Ricky Jay's photos of decaying celluloid gambling dice http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/2004/06/mottled_warped_.html
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featuring Colva's triumphant radio debut.
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i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = -1, the equation for Quaternions came to Hamilton as he walked along Dublin's Royal canal with his wife on 16 Oct 1843. He immediately carved it into the side of the Broome bridge. (via Colva on R4's In Our Time)
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i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = -1, the equation for Quaternions came to Hamilton as he walked along Dublin's Royal canal with his wife on 16 Oct 1843. He immediately carved it into the side of the Broome bridge. (via Colva on R4's In Our Time)
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the average/"favourite" colour of flickr photos tagged favcol. See also the work of artist-market researchers Komar and Melamid
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Market research as art(tags: komarmelamid art)
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Market research as art(tags: komarmelamid art)
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"in 1999 anthropologists discovered the oldest known artwork, and this work is more than 70,000 years old. It consists of triangular tiles inscribed in hand sized pieces of red ochre [...] As I like to say, generative art is as old as art."(tags: art generative)
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(tags: art generative)
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(tags: art generative)
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"Art from code"(tags: art generative)
Posted at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 23, 2006
links for 2006-03-23
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the cross has been described as the sign of signs
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the skull of human head, death's head
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I may be wrong but I believe you can not have a rise in new infrastructure technology without having a rise in old infrastructure. To a degree that is invisible to us, new tech sits on a foundation of old tech.
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The Armstrongs is like David Brent turned up to eleven. Still extraordinary several episodes in.
Posted at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 21, 2006
links for 2006-03-21
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Business/exec coach Fiona Clark is blogging coaching lessons from series 2 of The Apprentice.
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If you Google search from your mobile, and then click through to that site, G very helpfully repurposes the site (incl stripping out ads), so that it’s mobile-friendly. (But will Google allow publishers to serve their own mobile version if they have one
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Obstacles: Lack of Web services or SOA; Governance Constraints; Tools and Practices Are Little Known; Disconnects between heavyweight SOA and lightweight services. Or, distilled further: legacy technology and politics makes it hard.
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Useful comment by Shawn Smith on why some customers/projects need functional specs. (37 Signals says http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives/001050.php that functional specs are useless because they're politically fungible.)
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Ouch. "RIM will be trying to sell features to users who don't want them, through a set of decision-makers who don't care and through a channel that has no vested interest in helping RIM build a software monopoly."(tags: blackberry business)
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SAP: apps; Oracle: db; IBM: middleware; MS: desktop, smes. All will try commoditise the others' strengths. Eg SAP promotes MySQL, Oracle o/s middleware, and o on. See also Nick Carr's Stack War: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/03/stack_war.php
Posted at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 20, 2006
BlackBerry futures
On the Mobbu blog, BlackBerry futures ponders the future of mobile email - and mobile apps more generally - in the wake of RIM's settlement with NTP. If the strongest current market trend is towards loosely integrated apps that run on any device, does BlackBerry's opposite approach - specialised product design and highly integrated stack - still provide a USP, or marginalise it? Time will tell.
And whilst Good Technology’s CEO admits that RIM offers “a completely integrated stack of stuff. If all you want to do is run e-mail on an appliance, then BlackBerry is your choice”, he is betting that developers will be more inclined to write software for Win Mobile, Palm and Symbian. RIM would argue this, but in truth their stack probably is a little harder to develop for. What RIM won’t argue though, is that future growth will come from outside the C-level offices (where the Blackberry’s simple, business-email-only approach historically scored them points), which suggests that devices need to do more for end-users, and get easier for third-parties to develop mobile apps and data services for. To achieve that, RIM needs to speed up its hardware innovation, and open up their software stack a little.
Posted at 12:39 PM in Mobile, Work, teams, projects, systems | Permalink | Comments (0)
Coaching lessons from The Apprentice
Fiona Clark (the brilliant and delightful rodcorporate sister) is a business/executive/personal coach, and your company - or yourself - could no doubt usefully hire her. She's blogging about The BBC's second series of The Apprentice.
Are you involving your team in decisions?:
Despite winning, all was not well in the Velocity camp… highlighted by Sharon’s outburst to Mani regarding his management style. His only attempt to involve his team members in decisions appeared to be the first brainstorming session and it went rapidly downhill from there. In his defence, he did at least make decisions – a skill lacking in the other Project Manager, Alexa, which ultimately led to her downfall. However, he didn’t appear to know how to involve his team so that they felt some ownership and felt motivation to achieve their end goal. As a consequence, the team split down the middle – with Mani as the manager and the girls as the workers – “we’ll just do want we’re told and no more”. Mani missed a fundamental management principle – optimal team performance will only be achieved if the potential of all the individuals in that team is being utilised.
The week before: Leadership and Motivation - The Apprentice:
From the outset there were basic leadership errors. The planning meeting overran and was poorly organized, and she did not stamp her authority on the team to gain their respect from the outset.
Posted at 11:11 AM in Work, teams, projects, systems | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 16, 2006
Art Shock on Channel 4
Brief notes on the first two shows in Channel 4's Art Shock season.
Is bad art for bad people?, 13 March 2006
Jake Chapman's documentary starts with the Mutt urinal (where else? How about Olympia?), then Marcus Harvey's Myra Hindley, and moves onwards to "impoverished representations of human bodies and actions" and "joyful destruction". Is shocking bad?
Brock Enright: video/performance artist who offers kidnap experiences (think of it like an S&M version of CRS in The Game. BBC: "Enright admits to concerns that the service is beginning [to] get out of hand and is becoming too violent. 'Right now I am worrying. I'm thinking about it a lot.'" Times journo: "I found myself oddly reluctant to talk about what had happened".)
Is beautiful better than poor taste? Is the appetite for aesthetic imagery merely a longing to be reassured that the positive, beautiful things in the world are permanent? Goya. More YBAs, but not this image of Hirst and head.
Then, from shock to banality (Jeff Koons, enigmatic), nihilism, pointlessness, laughter ("originality has no value whatsoever"; copying and damaging is pointless too: the damage to an object or image is "always recuperated immediately" - Chapman Bros). This obsessive-indifferent appetite for intensity/pointlessness was an in-crowd symptom at art school.
The doc asks us to think about our preferences, but is more an immersion in (rather than an argument on) the value of shocking/bad/nihilistic/banal art images. Entertaining, and that the adverts during the broadcast seemed to be more ironic and to need more consideration, suggests it succeeded somewhat.
The Hills Have Eyes film
Levis moonbathing
Nivea for men
More Than car insurance
Nokia slide handsets
The Brothers Grimm dvd
Pepsi Max Cino
D and A opticians (cartoon men being squeezed into sausage cases, a metaphor for impersonal customer service; resonated with the next night's documentary)
The Pink Panther film
Guinness
Lloyds home insurance
Think! wear a car seatbelt
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire dvd
Saab
Airwaves chewing gum
Hostel film
Ghost Recon game
28 Days Later tv
Lynx clicker
Benefit cheats
Listerine anti-plaque
No Angels tv
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Human canvas, 14 March 2006
Professor Victoria Pitts: "Body art, despite its interest in intervening with the physical flesh and creating blood and scars and so on, actually is not a violent practice. They’re really taking a kind of libertarian or civil libertarian attitude towards their bodies. It's my body I should be able to do what I want with it." [But watch me.]
But we react strongly because watching flesh piercing triggers the same neuro-chemical results as actually experiencing the piercing (might partly answer one or two of Chapman's questions from the night before)
Flesh hangers (hooks, suspension):
Samppa von Cyborg, Alison Newstead. Pain: intensity of experience ( a shortcut to unconscious? rapture?). Pain/pleasure neurochemically. History in adulthood ritual.
Body modders:
Appropriates (and ritualises/fetishises) medical tools and practices. Doctors don't like this, though note irony re support for plastic surgery. Difference?: cosmetic surgery normalises, but body-modding/scarification etc denorms.
Performers/blood:
Ron Athey, Franko B, Kira O'Reilly. Orlan: meditation on the purposes of medecine, and the control doctors wield? (Memory: at a Warwick conference in the early 1990s, no-one could concentrate on her words because of the video behind her.)
No mention of Chris Burden curiously.
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The visual (or visceral) shock factor itself seems to be a barrier to understanding the "consider what you are, what you do to yourself, what you like to look at, why you think this is good/bad" message. And banality seems self-defeating. What other strategies?
More reading: Anthony Julius' Transgressions: the Offences of Art (shock is depleted, and has collapsed from avant-garde to establishment). JG Ballard's review: "The problem facing any avant-garde out to shock us is that we have seen the concentration camp newsreels and the photographs of child victims of psychopathic killers."
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15 March: What price art? with Tracey Emin.
16 March: The Pervert's Guide to Cinema with Slavoj Zizek.
Posted at 12:51 AM in Art, architecture, books | Permalink | Comments (7)
links for 2006-03-16
Posted at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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