Vivian Maier was a street photographer. She took incredible photos from 1950 - 1990. Over 100,000 of her prints, negatives and undeveloped rolls were discovered at an auction in Chicago. Much of her work is now online:
Merry X-Mas. This is what I got you:
The new mix tape. Long awaited, seldom hated. Features a guest appearance by Plastic Little’s Kurt Hunt (current Mayor of Philadelphia). Consider it a free class in freestyle drunk knowledge 101. Also listen to recent techno hotness from Montreal’s Prince of Darkness, Jordan Dare. I gave his cut Shadow Town a tune-up (read: ruined it), with help from Ose. Hear it the way it was not meant to be heard. If you only download one mix tape in the next 15 minutes, make it this one.
CTRL + CLICK to DL:
DOPEWEREWOLF - BACK SEAT OF MY BLEEP
and Mirrored:
For awhile now, I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of encoding sound, specifically music, into a visual medium. Before MP3s music was hoarded, loaned, shared, kept in pristine collections, or kicked around on the floors of cars. And even when it was beaten, battered and used to the point of destruction, the artifact was never a disposable commodity. The idea of having a physical medium that has a life outside the songs themselves appeals to me. When everything can be downloaded for free, it’s hard to give anything personal value. If I tell you something is great, it’s just never the same as putting it in your hands. My initial idea was to encode a digital music file as a high density bar code. Not the ugly black and white ones, but something like those crazy colored Microsoft tags with all the magical geometry. I quickly realized however, that even a low bit rate MP3 contains enough ones and zeros that the bar code would have to be big, really big. Too big to be slapped in your friend’s hand like mixtape. What’s worse, translating a ginormous bar code back into music would be a chore. So being the great design thinker that I am, I gave up. It never occurred to me to make the project into a book, which is what Irene Themann did. For her Colour Rhapsody project, she created a book of audio and optical experiments. Themann used Ascii encoding instead of bar codes, which resulted in some very cool minimalist artwork.
Joe Saavedra is an awesome dude. He’s helped me with a few of my projects. Now one of his has been covered by Gizmodo, which is way rad. But they had to go and eff it up with this comment at the end of their article.
“anybody can collect, view and collaborate on data from the world around us. Though, given how polluted NY is—in every way imaginable—maybe I don’t wanna know.”
Really Gizmodo? Exactly how polluted is NY? Did you even check? Try not even in the top 10, so shut the hell up.
Check it:
The article in full about Joe’s modular neuroid project:
Here
Maybe someone at Gizmodo should build one and do a little fact checking.
Maybe I should be embarrassed about how much I love this incredible spinning thing with the pretty lights, but I’m not. If I had to pack for time travel, I’d squeeze five of these things into my luggage. Not sure how I’d power them, but if I figured it out, I could go back and start my own religion.
The details on the build are here:
http://laserpointerforums.com/f57/led-orb-2-0-a-50012.html
Aestheticode is a human readable and machine readable code, similar to bar codes but more aesthetically pleasing. Pretty interesting stuff if you like codes, urban art, computer vision or just playing with blocks.
