Smashing Telly brings us yet another landmark series which I’ve heard mentioned many times, but had not had a chance to see until now - John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. The series led to book of the same name, which is still available, but to the best of my knowledge the series has not.
Some zany hipsters in Pittsburgh found out when the Google Street view car was going to come along a certain street, and staged a big party with a marching band, costumes, and confetti dropping from the balconies above.
Visit Street with a View for more.
On his ambient music, like Music for Airports:
It’s closer to sitting by a river than watching an orchestra. . . Some of that music came out of trying to find something I could listen to while trying to work. . .
[the other music was] too attention-grabbing, it was designed to grab your attention. . .
One is always inclined as a composer to put in more than you need as a listener. So one of the very good things about working on this, is that there’s a speed control. I work on them much faster than I end up releasing them, generally. In the days of analogue tape a lot of the music I released was released at half the speed I recorded it at. . .
This is the opposite of what people are doing on television, where they accelerate everything. . .
I find with music — if you’re making it — you always tend to fill the gaps. You want to paint the whole picture. But if you’re listening, you actually want a lot less than that. So I do that the simplest way by slowing it all down.
From a session with game designer Will Wright done by the Long Now (view the summary or download the audio). I’ve cut out Wright’s comments only to get to the heart of what Eno was trying to say.
Reuben Miller has posted a pretty great collection of creative “typefaces”, made from everything from stones, meat, paperclips, and beards.
Looks like notorious street artist Banksy has traded in his spray cans and stencils for animatronic hot dogs and chicken mcnuggets. Extremely surreal.
Here’s a cute little video of 100 aged 1 to 100 banging a drum, in order of age.
Here is my entry for the just-completed M60, the Montréal 60-Second Film Festival. The festival, in its inaugural year, was a big hit, with tons of great films and far too many people being turned-away at the door.
My entry is really more of a tech demo than a film. It was done entirely with a flatbed scanner, an idea that quickly lost its luster as my cheap $100 scanner slowly imploded under the strain of about 400 scans in the space of a few days, getting ever slower and showing ever more lines and other artifacts of wear.
I think I need to come out and say that first of all, I don’t own a car. I use them from time to time, but I find something slightly off-putting about automotive culture in general, and something fundamentally wrong with the fabric of cities that come out of our exaggerated car-centric society. Still, I need to interact with cars every day, and couldn’t avoid them if I tried.
This concept was inspired by a situation I’m sure many of you have been in. I was in a rental car, stopped at a light on a dark night. I saw a friend on foot crossing the street right a little ways in front of me. I tried gently tapping the horn, in hopes of making a friendly little beep. Instead, the car spewed out an angry-sounding honk, and the friend of mine, not knowing who I was, promptly gave me the finger.
Drivers, for the most part, are largely anonymous to the other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists they interact with. On foot, if you cut someone off or act rudely, you risk being in a direct confrontation. In a car, you’re not only usually shrouded from view, your only methods of communication are essentially your horn, flashing your lights, or revving your engine. All are ambiguous at best, aggressive at worst. I’m sure I’m not alone in asserting that driving does not bring out the best in people.
There are a lot of things you often can’t express while driving. You can’t say sorry for a mistake, you can’t say hello, and yes, sometimes you can’t express the anger you wish you could.
This concept takes the idea of the horn but multiplies it. In this case there are three horns which each make a different sound. The goal being to provide the driver with multiple ways of expressing themselves through series of short, musical tones.
Happy: Plays happy notes, useful for saying hello or “after you”.
Sad: Apologetic notes, useful for saying sorry.
Angry: Says what sometimes needs to be said.
As an alternate idea, I would try making the angry button much smaller than the other two, in hopes that people would only use it when they really had to.
The driver will likely never be able to express themselves as clearly as they would while walking or biking, but the goal is to provide them with better communication tools than they have.
In the end, this is more of an art piece than a true design concept. I have not looked into the legal or technical limitations, nor do I know if it would have any real impact if put in the real world.
Driving has come to be an awkward hybrid of a public and a private space. In many ways, it borrows some of the worst qualities from each one - you interact with many people, but in a way that’s anonymous and unpleasant. This is no magic bullet, but hopefully gets people thinking about the way that drivers interact with the world around them.
Chicago used to use an extensive series of small underground trains for transport between large downtown buildings.
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Here’s a road which had been cut with grooves in order to create musical notes. It’s reminiscent of a very late-night (possibly slightly drunken) conversation I had several years ago with a musician friend about outlandish possible ways of distributing his music. They’ve actually done it.
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Paradoxes of Creative People
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Flow fame writes a piece on creative types and their many paradoxes.
Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements
Shepard Fairy Style Dion Poster
Jack Dylan has his own version of the famous poster. I don’t agree with this sentiment, but it seems a whole lot of people aren’t Dion fans.
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Creator of The Wire, David Simon, gives a lengthy lecture on some of his beliefs that influenced the best show on television in a long time.
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A peek into how the movie industry has changed via its credits.