Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Developer Riley Walz made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos. Amazing.
I’m literally mesmerized by Karl Sims‘ digital creatures.
Harold Cohen, Becky Cohen, Penny Nii, The First Artificial Intelligence Coloring Book, 1984. Read the foreword here.
In the 1990s, a group of radical artists called the GALA Committee smuggled political messages into Melrose Place. This story is WILD.
“Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl.”
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I just discovered my new (old) favourite documentary series. It is titled Connections and it was aired by the BBC in 1978 an 1979. The series was written, and presented by British science historian James Burke. “It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention, and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology.”
And to my immense surprise and delight, I also read that the series is coming back, 45 years later, with a brand new season.
Neal Agarwal is back with a new entry for his collection of entertaining tiny websites. Internet Artifacts is a virtual museum of artifacts from early Internet history. Funny, educational and immensly nostalgic.
A lovely PSA commercial for kids about the dangers of pills. Produced in the 1980’s by the Poison Control Center.
The song is titled “We’re Not Candy!”
We could make you delirious (delirious).
You should have a healthy fear of us (fear of us).
Too much of us is dangerous (no no no no).
Doctors tell the pharmacies (pharmacies)
Types of pills that you will need (you will need).
And they know the harm that we can be (we can be)
If we’re not taken carefully (no no no no).
We’re not candy (believe us!)
Even though we look so fine and dandy.
When you’re sick we come in handy, but
We’re not candy… ohhh, no.
Ormer Locklear was a stunt pilot who made movies for Hollywood. This pic is from his second movie (The Skywayman, 1920) which he was the star of and did his own stunts for. He pulled this stunt off successfully, but he died doing a different stunt on the last day of filming. They used the footage of his crash in the movie. The movie is currently lost.
Amy Goodchild published this cool article on early computer art (50s and 60s). I always show these artworks and experiments to my students because, after all these years, they still feel amazingly fresh and interesting.
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Since people talk so much about “machine learning” nowadays, I think we should go back to the basics and listen to the people who first began to investigate the idea. Here is the amazing Gordon Pask, English cybernetician and psychologist, interviewed by the BBC in 1974. Here you can find one of his best writings, here is a good article about his concept of “maverick machines”, and here is a video lesson about him by Paul Pangaro.
“Kate Bellingham reports that an exciting new interconnected world – a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and ever film ever shot will be at our fingertips – is tantalisingly close. The information superhighway will be a high-capacity digital communication network, which in time could revolutionise the way we shop, socialise and work”.
“A 13-part television series covering aspects of the Internet in 1996 to introduce to a general audience. Called “Life on the Internet”, the series was hosted by Scott Simon, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, and covers the state of online life at the time”.
I’ve been studying early Computer Art quite a lot in the past ten years, but I just discovered a new artist I never came across before. Click here for the story of Joan Shogren, a secretary who, back in 1963 (so before Micheal A. Noll and Frieder Nake, but also before Sol Lewitt’s conceptual wall drawings based on instructions), “suggested that computers should be able to ‘design a picture’“.
Joan’s artworks were exhibited two years before the famous “Generative Computergrafik” exhibition at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart in 1965, which is generally considered to be the very first computer art public show.
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The Whole Earth – California as Dialectic Image. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Keynote by Fred Turner (21.6.2013) – www.hkw.de
This is the best McLuhan conversation I found so far:
Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer, 1968
[Mailer]Look Marshall, we’re both agreed that man is accelerating at an extraordinary rate into a super-technological world, if you will. And that the modes and methods by which men instruct themselves and are instructed are shifting in extraordinary –
[McLuhan]We’ve gone into orbit.
[Mailer]Well, at the same time I would say there’s something profoundly autoerotic about this process, and it’s sinister for that reason.
[McLuhan]It’s psychedelic. When you step up the environment to those speeds, you create the psychedelic thrill. The whole world becomes kaleidoscopic, and you go inward, by the way. It’s an inner trip, not an outer trip.
“Tech Art” was new in the Sixties, in the Eighties, in the Nineties… and it’s still new now!
Why One of the Internet’s Oldest Images Lives Out Without its Subject’s Consent.
“25 years ago, the entire World Wide Web was only 2.5 terabytes in size. Most connections were dial-up, important records were stored on tape, and a young engineer named Brewster Kahle was working on a revolutionary project—a way to archive the growing Internet.
Filmed by Marc Weber for the Web History Project, this video showcases the Internet Archive’s very first web crawl in 1996. In 2001, the project was made accessible to the public through the Wayback Machine. Today, the Internet Archive is home to more than 588 billion web pages, as well as 28 million books and texts, 14 million audio items, and 580,000 software titles, making us one of the world’s largest digital libraries.”
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Two years ago, a scandalous “art heist” at the Neues Museum in Berlin—involving illegally made 3D scans of the bust of Nefertiti—turned out to be a different kind of crime. The two Egyptian artists who released the scans claimed they had made the images with a hidden “hacked Kinect Sensor,” reports Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica. But digital artist and designer Cosmo Wenman discovered these were scans made by the Neues Museum itself, which had been stolen by the artists or perhaps a museum employee.
