cityofsound

Fragment 4

Art

More fabulous recent blog-art:

Rodcorp: Really beautiful work across this site, not least the recent Fully Articulated drawings, 2002-3 and the Drill tests: blue and blue/red

Playbody Decades: "The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture." [via Abe's lovely wrmx of same]

Jones's Jet trail - see ya buddy!

Ciudad Abierta: Photographs by Anthony Hamboussi of Ciudad Abierta (Open City) - what looks like a continually evolving testbed for architecture, built by students and faculty of the School of Architecture of the Universidad Católica de Valparaiso in the early 1970's. [via Purse Lip Square Jaw]

Fragment 2

Fragment 10

Fragile soul music

Just discovered this nice paragraph in Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun, on playing records, the user experience of vinyl, etc.

"Shimamoto was in charge of the records. She'd take one from its sleeve, place it carefully on the turntable, without touching the grooves with her fingers, and, after making sure to clean the cartridge of any dust with a tiny brush, lower the needle ever so gently on to the record. When the record was finished, she'd spray it and wipe it with a felt cloth. Finally she'd return the record to its sleeve and its proper place on the shelf. Her father had taught her the procedure, and she followed his instructions with a terribly serious look on her face, her eyes narrowed, her breath held in check. Meanwhile, I sat on the sofa, watching her every move. Only when the record was safely back on the shelf did she turn to me and give a little smile. And every time, this thought hit me: it wasn't a record she was handling, it was a fragile soul inside a glass bottle."

Fragment 8

Fragment 7

Hacking and adaptation

Fabulous link-packed post from Anne Galloway, around various adaptive design ideas: enabling users to build out of recombinable modules and abstract blocks with basic properties; leaving systems open to creative misuse/serendipity etc. Lots of echoes of Tom Moran's adaptive design presentation at DIS2002, and some of my follow up thoughts.

Moran noted Alan McClean's work - "Buttons" (citations here) which sounds like the thing closest to what Anne is looking for. I'm still looking for more on McClean's work. Anne's pointer to the Programmable Bricks project looks to be the closest to these ideas.

In my presentation around Adaptive Design I pulled a few more ideas together - including Anne's notion that game mod communities get this stuff. Afterwards I also pointed to both Tom Coates's Universal Adaptive Machines and Andy Otwell's notion of modular code in this post - both of which contribute useful thoughts in this area.

Annes writes:

"The more technically-inclined call this end-user configuration.  Other people say we can get there by designing with ambiguity in mind.  The more poetic simply don't want to lose chances for serendipitous use."

That latter phrase is a tangential link to Adam Greenfield's fabulous article on serendipity and the city - it doesn't really apply here, but it was nice to read that again. Very interesting in the context of recent discussions around tunA.) 

Anne continues:

I imagine something like themed boxes containing open-source materials and code.  For example, the SUBVERSION box might contain a selection of tactical media tools that people can put to use in whatever ways they wish. What I want is to make it easier to afford new technologies and learn how to use them.  I want to encourage counter-applications, personal and collective engagement.  I want people to gain a sense of ownership and authorship over new technologies.  And I want non-designers to teach designers something about creativity, design and use.

Really really interesting, yet I can't help myself reacting a bit to that last sentence, tho. There are many designers who are aware of this stuff - and in fact leading these ideas. We're not all closed system or control freaks! But most designers do need more exposure to this way of thinking, for sure.

Purse lip square jaw: Design for hackability

Fragment 9

Blaze is on fire

William Abraham Blaze, of Abstractdynamics.org is absolutely on fire at the moment. His wrmx series is wondrous stuff (latest here). A truly original aesthetic, entirely web i.e. making a virtue of giffy dithering and lossy jpg artefacts, folding and recombining elements back in on itself, layering and layer-blending, making the process implicit within the art. It's raw and intelligent.

This isn't about pixellated infantilism, neo-baroque, undesign, illustration, or any of the other graphic design memes du jour - but something entirely fresh, and true to its medium. As he says:

"Its all in the photoshop, and getting it to do things its not supposed to. Lots of exporting, reimporting and layering."

(I'm very fond of this approach myself having built lots in that way in the past - also using mistakes and bugs as part of the process. Introducing aleoteric technique. Rarely as well as Abe tho') Next to that comment, from this post, is a link ... and so I stepped into the middle of this - an incredible graphic narrative flow. Click thru it.

He's inspired me - along with Chris Miller's current Illustrated Ulysses project (latest here) - to start posting up a bit more 'art' (in the loosest possible definition of that word!) including some old stuff lost in the uncharted waters of this hard disk. There be dragons. Check Blaze's stuff out though. Smokin' (that's enough fire gags. Ed.)