Next time you check into a motel, look under the drawers and tables. Online photo-comic artist Chris Yates has been waging war on uniformity and alienation in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Nebraska, Nevada, and Utah. And those are just the ones we know about.
[Utah, It May Be Good for You]
Tag Archives: art
Visible Magnetic Fields
Magnetic fields are weird, something that’s invisible in and of itself, but nevertheless acts on the other objects. By way of visualising magnetic fields, some boffins from Semiconductor working at NASA Space Laboratory as “artists in residence” – Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt – have created this incredible movie depicting magnetic fields:
There isn’t much explanation as to what this is – how abstract is the representation? From Semiconductor Films:
In Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have taken the magnificent scientific visualisations of the sun and solar winds conducted at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Semiconducted them. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor were artists-in-residence at SSL. Combining their in-house lab culture experience with formidable artistic instincts in sound, animation and programming, they have created a magnetic magnum opus in nuce, a tour de force of a massive invisible force brought down to human scale, and a “very most beautiful thing.”
Well it sure is pretty, but it would be nice if there were some details as to how the effect was created. It reminds me of the “fields” of the drones from Iain M Bank’s billiant Culture series, which use coloured “fields” to convey emotion and also as manipulators.
[story via technovelgy]
Crime stats as sculpture – Mount Fear
Another little gem spotted by the grinders: what would you get if you took the crime incident statistics for London and represented them as a 3D physical map?
Mount Fear is what you’d get. In the words of its creator, Abigail Reynolds:
The terrain of Mount Fear is generated by data sets relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Precise statistics are provided by the police. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain … The imaginative fantasy space seemingly proposed by the sculpture is subverted by the hard facts and logic of the criteria that shape it.
While it makes for an intriguing art project, Mount Fear surely presages a short-range extrapolation of geolocative mash-ups.
In other words, being able to call up the data used for Mount Fear and overlay it on Google Maps running on your mobile device would make your next flat- or apartment-hunting experience that little bit more reassuring.
Or should that be less reassuring?
In the Future, All Art Will Be Grown in Vats
It’s commonly said that “life imitates art,” but in this case life is art, to a disturbing degree: a curator was forced to “kill” an art exhibit, a living jacket on life support which threatened to grow beyond its boundaries. [m. christian]
May Day giveaways – welcome to the new artist’s business model
Another pair of sturdy nails were hammered into the coffin of old media business models yesterday.
First of all, Cory Doctorow released his new YA novel Little Brother …
“… as a free, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licensed download (in many formats).
It’s my first young adult novel, a book about hacker kids who use technology to claw the Bill of Rights back from the DHS. Neil Gaiman said of it, “I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.”
There’s a bunch of cool stuff to accompany the downloads, including a remix gallery and a simple system for donating copies to libraries and schools.”
And on the same day, almost as if they’d conspired together*, Trent Reznor dropped The Slip – an entirely new Nine Inch Nails album – on an unsuspecting world.
No build-up, no fanfare; just every flavour of audio format you could ask for (well, OK – no OGG), and a Creative Commons licence just like Doctorow’s book:
“… we encourage you to remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc.”
So that strange noise you may have heard yesterday was the sound of a thousand overpaid record executives wailing in horror; the sound of old business models crumbling under the weight of change.
This is the point where someone asks how it’s possible to make a living for the average artist without Doctorow or Reznor’s niche-superstar status. And I’ll be totally honest – I don’t know yet, though I have some ideas.
But I’ll tell you what I am sure of; I’m going to learn a lot more by watching what Doctorow and Reznor are doing than I’d learn by listening to the old guard complain that they’re not playing fair. I suspect you will, too, whatever you may think of their art.
[ * Doctorow protests innocence on this one; Reznor was unavailable for comment. 😉 ]