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June 3rd, 2009
07:17 am - Up ::..
Carol + Maceo + i went + saw Up last weekend + i have to say it is one of the best 3D animated movies Pixar put out ... + just an fyi here, as much as Carol + i follow animation, + specifically 3D animation, we tend to NOT love a movie just for using the latest + greatest technology ... the Pixar difference, from film to film to film, is their emphasis on developing a good, solid story ... + Up focuses nicely on the story of a unique relationship between this little Forest Wilderness boy + the little old manfor me, on a more interesting level ... the wonderful visual symbolism of this house, flying through the sky under a colorful mass of balloons, the image of the balloons + the house floating through the sky quite literally painted a fantastic picture + came to represent a liberation from the mundane, a sort of wake up call to get out into the world + fulfill your dreams ... a big, beautiful blue sky w/ fluffy white clouds ... a cute little house, the point at the bottom of an exclamation point ... zipping through a dreamscape ... an impossibility ... a voyage of love, journey into the heavens, to finally make the dreams of this man's wife finally come true Paradise Falls ... the ultimate destination ... the unreachable dream
Current Location: home
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/punquinheads/blue/happy.gif) impressed
Current Music: morning preparations
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May 29th, 2009
12:47 am - Slagsmålsklubben ::.. ..:: cool vimeo clip ::..
check out this cool video clip my good friend RJ Foley shared w/ me ... take it ...
Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/punquinheads/blue/cheerful.gif) cheerful
Current Music: none
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May 26th, 2009
11:24 pm - girl eating a giant scorpion gladly
every once in a while you bump across something online that makes you think 'i am SO happy we have the internet' ... and this image, this entire image set, brings a smile to my face + makes me realize that without the web, without Flickr, i might not bump across the genius of Mark Weaver ( among others 'out there' ) ... thank you for this fantastically surreal collagework ...
Current Location: home
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: television backdrop audio wallpaper
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May 24th, 2009
07:07 pm - iTunes Genius Sidebar ::..
aight, not sure about you ... but i JUST turned on the iTunes Genius feature, right? and, uhm, i am so completely disappointed ... i mean, i really thought something magical was going to happen over there ... maybe the Genius feature would look at what i listen to in iTunes, on Last.fm, Pandora, Blip.fm and check out any audio-like file on my MacBook Pro and make some interesting suggestions ... might make sense + be a really cool feature, right? but instead it basically echoes the artist of the track that you click on in iTunes?
C'MON!
just ridiculous ...
Current Location: home
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/punquinheads/blue/angry.gif) annoyed
Current Music: The Monkees 'What Am I Doin' Hangin' Round?'
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April 21st, 2009
11:51 pm - fun w/ fruit ::..
 something posted just for fuN : found on twitpic ... enjoy! ;] ::..
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: reality show backdrop
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April 17th, 2009
10:14 pm - ..:: WHAT is DESIGN? ::.. ..:: Designers' Talk Discussions on LinkedIn ::..
Fred Showker, Editor and Publisher of DTG, recently posted the following question in the Designers' Talk Discussions section of LinkedIn:
My question: WHAT is DESIGN?
So many readers often write to ask about becoming a design professional. Many ask "What is Design" or "What is Graphic Design?"
Among the established definitions you'll find that just about anyone you ask -- you'll get a different answer. So, in the May issue of DTG we'll be asking ...
WHAT IS DESIGN?
My studies at The Dynamic Media Institute at MassArt bring up many questions about design, media, communication and creativity. The question What is design? seemed to perfectly resonate with recent thoughts and discourse with the fantastic community engaged in these discussions at DMI.
Here is my response:
WHAT is DESIGN? What an excellent question. And what an important question to ask ourselves on a daily basis.
Here is my quick interpretation of design ...
First of all, I think of the word design as more of a verb than a noun. An active process. A process that can contain elements of expression, research, planning, thinking, doing, conversing ... but design is best when there is a lot of active exploration, research and process behind the end result.
As a second notion to consider ... here is a layman's linguistic deconstruction of the word as interpreted by someone personally and professionally involved with design for a decade or more. So here is my breakdown by syllable ...
The 'de' part of DESIGN ... 'de' reminds me of the word 'di' in Italian, both in phonetic | aural similarity and in direct translation of meaning ... 'de' = 'of' in English.
The 'sign' part of DESIGN ... 'sign' is the root of the word 'significance'.
Literally translated DESIGN means 'of significance'. More importantly, the interpretation I come away with is something more like the infinitive 'to bring significance'. I think of it as a process where the designer brings meaning ... actually brings something significant to the world. Or at the very least to a certain targeted audience.
So ... in the end, we not only need to ask from day to day the all-important question 'WHAT is DESIGN?', but we also need to continually update and define 'WHAT is the role of a DESIGNER?' ... the answers to both of these questions are shifting and changing more and more often in these times, due in part to the speedy development of new technologies and also immensely influenced by a confluence of so many eclectic fields coming together to define and design new significance, new meaning, new thought, and new methods of communication.
View the original LinkedIn Answers question and responses here: http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=92232&discussionID=2742196&commentID=3023128&goback=.hom.anh_92232#commentID_3023128
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Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/punquinheads/blue/working.gif) accomplished
Current Music: crimeshow television audio backdrop
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April 16th, 2009
01:42 am - datamummification + madness ::..
Judith Donath stopped in at Media Tech Tonic sponsored at MassArt's The Dynamic Media Insitute to discuss The Sociable Media Group's latest exhibit 'Connections' at The MIT Museum. A lot of amazing work ... I checked out some of the people involved in the project work earlier in the day ... specifically looking deeper into some of the previous work in visualization and interface design. I particularly enjoyed Alex Dragulescu's 'Spam Architecture' as I had previously attempted to approach the topic of troublesome eMeddlings in my own 'Operation Enduring Email' ...
but seriously folks ... the jist of the discourse tonight centered around a new 'new media' twist on the concept of portraiture ... excellent lecture, fantastic work all around ... i especially loved the participatory installation 'metropath(ologies)' ... such a dream project for me ... the overflow of information projected on a cityscape model, a veritable maze of data + architecture to get lost in ... amazing work + the best of the collection shown at the talk ... i gotta get down there + check it out
i've digressed once again ... so, back to portraiture ... a quick whirlwind history of the portrait as an artform ... a golden bust of royalty from greco-roman times, renaissance-painted realism complete with symbolic items and less idealized facial features, 20th century cubistic renditions capturing a more abstract essence of Picasso's art dealer, and for the 21st century ...
the portrait of the micromoment involved feeds from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Seesmic and other multivariate social networking sites the your modernday eCitizen gladly pours information into with feverish up-to-the-minute details about the minutae of our daily lives ... 'Data Portraits' took the unsuspecting tweets of the twitterverse to create a portrait visualization of each user ... words { the smallest common denominator allowing some balance between private and public exposure } from the user | participant's tweetstream make up the outline of head, neck and shoulders ... words on the left are from recent tweets, words along the right of the datahead silhouette are the most-used throughout your tweetstream history ... the words of each portrait pop forth from the black backdrop muchlike a smooth data-persona tagcloud, quite literally outlining your wordstream of the moment for you
what strikes me the most about these linear-textual gestural snapshots is the cocoonlike and ghostly bodily presence of each figure ... there's also a wonderful sense of swirling ... the words seem to envelope or mummify a preset human form ... besides certain key words that pop out { i am guessing the word size follows the same sort of rules of frequent use that most tagcloud methodologies implement }, there is little differentiation from portrait to portrait ... the shape of the head, neck and shoulders remains the same ... and the words simply outline or 'contain' the previously human form
at first i thought that the datamummification might be a purposeful artisitic and aesthetic choice ... i don't think i get the sense that my portrait would look that much different than anyone else as far as physical attributes are concerned ... same height, same weight, same shape, same lack of eyes, mouth, ears and hair ... you are your words in these portraits ... you are the ghostly echo-trace of your micro-bloggings ... a bit sobering ... a little scary ... and unless you are lucky enough to have micro-entered some emotionally-laden and unique words over the last year or so, you are just as unique as everyone else on Twitter ...
part of me wants to think these implications are an intentional affect of the visualization as portraiture ... and if nothing else, perhaps we can see this as a subconscious expression of the artists involved ... maybe there is no true participatory auto-magical means to create this sort of portrait ... or perhaps the effect is completely intentional ... a statement about machine-produced { app-influenced } human behavioral modification ... the media we use shapes our behavior, and now we quite literally all itch to tell it all right now ... a sort of electronic OCD ...
another memorable concept that came up tonight was the notion of 'pure knowledge' ... an amazing question from the crowd mentioned Elie Weisel's Zalmen, Or the Madness of God ... in the book a person comes to know God, but not as the bearded, old white guy in the clouds oft-depicted by Michelangelo ... but instead as the concept of 'pure knowledge' ... the question specifically asked tonight had to do with the current proliferation of information 'out there' for all of us to access and whether or not we, as humanity, are reaching a moment of 'pure knowledge' ... my own answer to this concept delves into questioning 'knowledge' ... information is not knowledge ... accumulation of datapoints provides no higher wisdom to the individual or to society at large ... consuming data alone, collecting data does not translate into knowledge or a deeper understanding ... in fact, my personal belief is that knowledge and wisdom are not even closely related ... and neither can ever be thought of as 'pure' ...
read more at the DMI Seminar 2 blog here ... http://dmistudio.org/seminar/
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Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/punquinheads/blue/excited.gif) excited
Current Music: television audio wallpaper
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April 8th, 2009
11:06 pm - comment posted to the Dubberly Design Office ::..
recent comment posted as a follow-up + thank you to Hugh Dubberly for bringing the topic 'Design in The Age of Biology: Shifting from mechanical to organic, from object to system' as part of The Dynamic Media Institute's Annual Lecture Series ...
Fantastic lecture tonight at The Pozen Center for Interrelated Media as part of The Dynamic Media Institute's Annual Lecture Series.
Hugh, thank you for bringing this conversation to MassArt and for meeting up at DMI Headquarters to deepen the discussion and engage us all in the extended conversation. I especially appreciate the references you gave pertaining to 'total design'. My own thesis topic for graduate studies at The Dynamic Media Institute pertains to 'media translation' ... which for me includes discussion of translation versus interpretation, the occasional poetic impossibility to fully bring exact meaning from one mediaform to another, as well as Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ... and how the role of the designer becomes less and less about a particular medium or format and more that of a strategic visionmaker of environment, experience, culture, systems ... basically a re-inventor of new language.
Is there a new media equivalent to Esperanto? Or will we need to weed through babble to distill meaning from a multi-lingual onslaught of expression in this dawn of participatory dialectics?
more details about the lecture here: http://www.dubberly.com/articles/design-in-the-age-of-biology.html/comment-page-1#comment-6972
Current Location: home
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/punquinheads/blue/curious.gif) curious
Current Music: television audio wallpaper
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March 28th, 2009
12:56 am - tools + language + resistance, oh my! | part 1 ::..
media tech tonic #8 ... scott kirsner brought the topic + conversation ‘what innovators can learn from hollywood’ to the dmi design seminar 2 table ... walking + talking us through the history of technological innovations in the american film industry + the amazing, relentless resistance each innovation met with along the trajectory of celluloid to digital moviemaking ...
par for the course comes the inevitable discussion of :
the innovators ... creators of tools ... artists in the guise of engineers, working to create the bionic mouth + vocal chords of the new poet, or maybe its the electronic quill, a special digitalneural tweak if there can be innovation in poetry ...
the tools reach a point of release ... innovators put them out on the candyshelf to await purchase + use by artists ... creators of a new language ... language unique + appropriate to the tools now in hand ... the new language becomes uncharted territory, strangely familiar to the artists in some ways as the undiscovered new landscape they traverse is cosmologically linked to the invisible, universal core of all creativity ... the action of creation, of losing oneself in the process of complete exploration + work in the medium, is one that elevates + transports the conscious to a different place ... in the case of tools from digiteria, the self-translation from a previous, perhaps more traditional creative process carries forward into the new with a certain muscle memory ...
the process might remain the same ... the tools, the materials, these present fresh challenges + many new decisions ... the new tools + new materials at first might lead to new media echo ... tintype cetaceous blips into the underwater journies of an artist in suspended animation ... sculpting through a range of possibilities never before presented to her | him ... finding limitations + loss as previous opportunities fall away, but simultaneously setting foot on fertile, virgin moonscapes of otherness ... what new things can be said now that we can do x? + now that we can finally incorporate what was once only a fantasctic notion into the crux of our new art ... what will we make with it? what will we say with it? where will we choose to let us take it?
what happens when these new tools + the new language react + percolate at a pace beyond human capacity? in a time that no longer believes in time?
Current Location: home
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/punquinheads/blue/tired.gif) exhausted
Current Music: blip.fm
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March 27th, 2009
01:10 am - up late ... workin' on Monster + blippin' out ::..
aight ... i'm up late working on some re-design work for Monster ... got some good momentum going lately ... playing Windy by The Association over + over + over + over + over again really helps though, too ... right? fo sho ;] ::..
part of it too is that fr!kken crazy fife solo at the end ... just makes the whole '60s composition 'revolutionary' ... such a timetrip into the sock drawer of happy elevator music that haunts me ::..
Current Location: home
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/punquinheads/blue/hyper.gif) bouncy
Current Music: Windy by The Association
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