Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Db We Used to Say Pirating I Mean the Term
DB: We used to say “pirating.” I mean, the term pirating was used for my early work.
CA: Was it really?
DB: Yeah. For example, when I started, there were no home-recording units. There was no TiVo. There was nothing like that.
CA: I must have been very difficult for you to get that footage.
DB: It was. There was no way to get the footage I needed directly. I had to find people inside the industry who believed in my artwork and were willing to get images out to me. So they called me a “pirateer” of imagery. That had a very romantic sound to it: “Oh, she’s the one who pirated imagery from television.”
Maybe this is the real difference between our generations. In pirating, originally, there was no way to talk back to the media. That’s why I did it. The stuff was coming one way at you, and there was no way to arrest it, stop the action, divert it, alter the vocabulary, or change the syntax.
From Do It 2, a conversation between Dara Birnbaum and Cory Arcangel. Artforum International XLVII, No. 7, p198 -
Certainly Knowledge Comes from Traditional
Certainly, knowledge comes from traditional sources, such as school and books, but it also comes from non-traditional sources like experiences and conversations. Personally, I’m fond of the immersion technique when it comes to learning.
[…]
I think one of the most important things that my career path has taught me is that it is it very important to respect all kinds of art, whether I like it or not. It is not the difference between good or bad art, it is that art comes in different forms and qualities. I like to think of art as a document or reflection of our time. The more able an artist is to make a clear statement, the more lasting it will become. Artists often project ideas on a piece of work, but I think a work’s impact is stronger when a artist can project a broader conceptual belief.
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It takes a second act to understand the first. My interest in art, architecture and music are all constantly informing my work. It is about submerging yourself in something you believe in. I guess the main function of a first act is to flush out ideas – to experiment and refine wheat I think my work should be. A second act allows for self-imposed rules and regulations. It gives me the ability to say no to ideas that are not genuine and complete. I often think of the legendary story of Johnny Cash walking into Sun Studio to record gospel songs. Sam Phillips told him to “go out and sin a little and then come back.” He came back “experienced” and became a legend.
Scott Ingram, Work Ethic. ART LIES no. 61, p65. -
AR Record Scratching
Todd Vanderlin’s working on a project using OpenFrameworks and ARTag markers to simulate scratching a real record but using a camera as a the virtual needle. Nifty.
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Tom Lehrer: Pollution
One for Earth Day: Tom Lehrer’s Pollution (performed in 1967)
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UltraEdit UI Horrorshow
UltraEdit, the Windows text editor I’ve been using for years, has a “bold new interface”, cited in the promo email as “a thing of beauty”. Sigh.
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An Appreciation of Ted Cassidy
(video no longer available)
Follow me. Ted Cassidy is one of my favorite sitcom actors. Few people seem to know that he also played “Thing” on the Addams Family tv show! (why the show’s producers got the 6’9″ guy to cram himself under whatever table / Victrola / box that Thing pops out of instead of just hiring a second actor, I don’t know)
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Bohemian Rhapsody performed by old PC equipment
A thing of beauty.
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The DONE Manifesto
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
- Once you’re done you can throw it away.
- Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- Destruction is a variant of done.
- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
- Done is the engine of more.
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There Are Only Two Reasons to Show an Error
There are only two reasons to show an error message:
1. The customer has entered something that the system can’t accept, so the customer can’t continue (for example, a mismatching username and password). This kind of message should clearly and succinctly tell the customer what happened, how to fix it, and then move on.
2. Something very, very bad has happened to the system, so the customer can’t continue (e.g., an essential server just got smote by lightning). This kind of message should be very apologetic and should give the customer some alternate way of contacting you.
There are no other reasons to show an error message. If you show something that looks like an error message in order to market something to the customer, you are a bad person.
James Reffell, quoted in Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski, p195. -
Étienne-Jules Marey
Pioneer of medical instruments, photography, and cinema. Took some very interesting early photographs in his research of animal locomotion and physionomy, which led to his successor Muybridge’s famous collections of plates.