Occasional updates

A really cool website full of old Casio wrist camera photos taken more than 20 years ago:

It’s an amazing thing that looks just like a normal watch, but has a nifty little built-in digital camera that lets you take lots of photos on the quiet – and then beam them to your computer! Expect occasional updates documenting my travels and drunken nights…

Sensing, more than reading

Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content: great new article by Caroline Busta.

“But what if, for better or worse, this non-reading mode is a form of adaptation: an evolutionary step in which we’ve learned to scan, like machines, for keywords and other attributes that allow for data-chunking, quickly aligning a piece of content with this or that larger theme or political persuasion? What if, in a time of infinity-content, a meta reading of the shape and feel of content has become a survival skill? The ability to intuit a viable meaning via surface-level qualities—ones that are neither text nor image but a secret third thing—is now essential for negotiating our sprawling information space. Perhaps we’re tapping into a more primal human intelligence.”

Oh, Ballard

One of the dozens incredible predictions by J.G. Ballard. This comes from the 1977 essay “Future of the Future”, published on Vogue.

[via]

Karaoke Torii

Karaoke Torii (2017), by Benoit Maubrey

300 recycled loudspeakers, Bluetooth receivers, microphone, line in, 1 amplifier. A 4-channel speaker system allows the public to express themselves directly via a microphone, a line in or their smart phones and wireless technology.

Commissioned by Kamiyama Artist Residency Program (KAIR) , Japan
12′ x 15′ x 2′ – Also commissioned by the Kobe Biennale 2015

4004

“2021 marks the 50th year since the invention of the 4004 – the world’s first Monolithic CPU and microprocessor. This incredible invention is barely known outside of CPU collector circles, but there’s no reason it should be any less famous than the lightbulb, or the atomic bomb. It was an extraordinary feat of miniaturization which revolutionized computer design and made personal computing a reality. It paved the way for everything in our digital world.”

David OReilly, “4004,” 2021

The Beauty of Degraded Art

“The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to it” – Brian Eno

[via]

Live Fashion Meme

Chanel-catwalk

This is the last Chanel runway at the Grand Palais in Paris. Models are dressed like stormtroopers and walk through the corridors of a data centre. Cultural remix is reaching vertiginous heights. This is a new genre: this is a live fashion meme.

Annals of Time Lost

rafman

“The conversation surrounding the presentation and archival of new media art has often revolved around the issues facing curators and historians as they struggle to bring older works to newer formats; in Annals of Time Lost, Jon Rafman reframes this responsibility into an opportunity: A COPEX LD75D microfiche reader displays Rafman’s New Age Demanded, a series of busts rendered from 3D models; while a nearby plinth houses a 3D print of a bust from the same series. The conditions of archival anxiety—which has been, on some level, wrongly understood as a passing phase to a future in which Google Glass sees all—become palpable as Rafman reexamines the scale and physicality of archives.”

Jon Rafman
Annals of Time Lost
Future Gallery
Berlin, Germany

[via dismagazine]

DataBot Mouse

Databot

DataBot Mouse is very interesting experiment by Jan Barth and Roman Grasy:

The mouse is able to communicate three different properties of data. It can show you the weight of files and folders, by braking with different force, according to the file-size. Or you can set a custom weight for files, just like the color marking function in MacOSX. So you can find important files more easily.
The third property, the mouse can show you, is the activity of files and folders. By ‘breathing’ with different intervals, it shows how much a file was opened or how busy a folder has been recently.

(via today and tomorrow)