Friday, October 29, 2004

Google officially becomes God

do you think sergey and brin are laughing at us right now? with the acquisition of satellite map company Keyhole Corp, their plan for total world domination is almost complete.

google_globe

beautiful

wow. luke chueh is amazing.

my happiness is riding on your misery
My-Happiness-Is-Riding-On-Y

hare cut
Hare-Cut

the queen is dead
The-Queen-Is-Dead

show em your mob, perth!

i have it from an excellent source that there's going to be a flash mob in lil ol perth. today. at 1pm!

banner ad ten today

according to adland, the banner ad turns ten today.

Banner ads turn ten years old. They've evolved, become flashy, carry sound, blink worse than the blink tag ever did and given birth to far more discreet things called TextAds.

So what did the first banner look like? Appropriately enough it was a future-predicting ad from AT&T in their "you will" campaign from 1994, according to the website that collects old banners and celebrates the tenth anniversary


atat

Virtual Pumpkins

I don't buy into the whole halloween thing, but this is quite cool.
[via greedy girl]

reminds me of make-a-flake.

halloween

socks

a friend of mine carries his cash around in a sock - he reckons that way, if he drops it or misplaces it, no one will want to pick it up.

well, it looks as if other people are going to start following suit, what with the release of the ipod and mobile phone socks. these are a lot flashier, without a darn in site, and can be custom-designed with your logo, size, colour etc.

so if the sock is the new wallet, what's my buddy gunna do?

via textuality.org

Thursday, October 28, 2004

datamining our datamining trends

on average, men use 2 words to search for something. of the millions of search results that turn up, they'll visit 2 sites, spending approx 1.5 minutes on each before moving to the next search. on the other hand, women use about 3 words to search for something and visit between 6 and 7 links before they're ready to move on. as a result, men "hunt" a greater amount of search queries per week (42 searches at 3 mins a search), while women "gather" a more diverse array of resources (30 searches a week at 5 mins a search).

i guess us girls really like to penetrate those deep links.

via vnunet

what a dick

i'm sure michael moore would've loved to get his hands on this.
via boingboing

and imagine what he could've done with this.
via rhizome

bushfinger

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

random panda strikes! (on stickers)

long before i knew anything about street stickers or the implementation craze, my very good buddies and i decided to saturate the urban landscape with a Random Panda Strikes with Love sticker campaign. of the three among us, one is a very talented artist, the other a muse. i'm just along for the ride.

altho it's taken us too long to get started, i offer u the first of our efforts.

but watch the streets in the next few months, cause you never know when you're gunna be powed! by the panda.

panda_happy

random_panda



Monday, October 25, 2004

first ferrets, now hamsters

there's political gaming and there's political gaming. this one's definitely aimed at the kids.

hamster

ipod = trapper-keeper

according to wired, Steve Jobs' just released iPod photo, an ipod capable of storing 25,000 digital images. it comes complete with a coloured screen for display purposes and also has room for thousands of music tracks. i don't think it'll be too long till it can take photos too.

bono_ipod

while most people are happy with the ipod-trapper-keeper, the Neistat Brother's video reminds us that everything is not perfect in the land of the pod. thanks for the link andy pandy ;)

scott's black cat

this is scott's black cat. i think he looks a bit sad.

cat_black

TransBody

if you've ever imagined your torso on anothers (or the other way round), send in a pic of your body to transBody. the organisers are collating as many pics of bottom and top halves as possible for an upcoming exhibition.

give it a go - your bottom bits might become famous.

transbody

the bar bot

haha - some sillys have developed a robot that's capable of spending an eternity in the pub.

bar_bot

pixel moon

collision detection made mention of Pixel Moon the other day, not only for its unique concept, but because of the way it's presented.

Pixel Moon is brilliant: It's a web site that displays a moonscape where you can design your own moon base and add it to the landscape. So far, 78 people have created bases, many of which are quite hilarious -- including a Vodafone kiosk and a shot of four Star Trek characters staring at something lying on the ground.
But to me, what's really interesting is how big the page is. To see all of Pixel Moon's surface, you have to scroll four screenfuls sideways, and several screenfuls down. I've always wondered why more web artists don't take advantage of the almost-limitless size of a web page by creating digital art that spreads out to the left and right (and up) as well as down. Indeed, someone could create a web page that was, say, 14 feet wide and 15 feet tall, and then anchor the "opening" part of the page at dead center. When you first loaded the page, you'd start in the center of that massive terrain, and wander around like a voyager. That's much the way many online "immersive world" video-games work: You arrive somewhere in the world, but can wander off in any direction for quite some distance. It gives a fun sense of scope and immensity to the virtual space.


pixel_moon

make your own mosaics

jill's found an excellent way to produce your own mosaics. it's as easy as choosing an image and telling the programme which search terms you'd like to use from google for 'tiles'. you get to watch the image compile itself throughout the whole process, which is probably the best part for me.

this image was made using the search terms happy, love, god, sad, beauty, death, boy, girl, face and hair.

download engadget for pc and mac here.

jo_mosaic

jojoterrific

Friday, October 22, 2004

tv b gone

from collision detection:

Some wit has designed TV-B-Gone, a TV remote that has only one function: To turn TVs off. He got so annoyed at the omnipresence of TVs in public venues that he collected the "power off" commands for dozens of units and put them in a single keyfob device. Point it at the TV in your local bar during the Red Sox/Yankees game, hit the button, and presto: The TV will go dead. And so will you, since when people discover you're turning their TV off in the middle of game they'll beat you into a bloody pulp.


tv_noise

sitestepper

in a similar vain to apartment, sitestepper relational architecture 10 makes use of data visualization to map one representation (a 2d image) into a 3d surface. the result's less interesting than one would hope, but worth a look nonetheless.

This project is inspired by the perverse commercial tendency to add a 'theme' to everything, from restaurants to amusement parks to government agendas. The idea is to establish uncanny branded environments that reorganize information and boring web aesthetics into quotidian spaces of presumed neutrality.


sidestepper

the Dartmouth Algorithm

a couple of uber nerds at Dartmouth college have been working on a way to detect whether an image has been tampered with in photoshop or the like. from Dartmouth News:

Farid [Hany] and Dartmouth graduate student Alin Popescu have developed a mathematical technique to tell the difference between a "real" image and one that's been fiddled with. Consider a photo of two competing CEOs talking over a document labeled "confidential - merger," or a photo of Saddam Hussein shaking hands with Osama bin Laden. The Dartmouth algorithm, presented recently at the 6th International Workshop on Information Hiding, in Toronto, Canada, can determine if someone has manipulated the photos, like blending two photos into one, or adding or taking away objects or people in an image.

I understand why a tool like this would be useful, but quite frankly, i think it takes the fun out of guessing.

on the other hand, it'd be really cool if the algorithm went a step further and stripped the layers of digital manipulation from the image, one by one.


all in an inkblot

psychs have been banging on for years about the unplugged potential of the subconsious mind, and amongst other things, have used inkblots to help map this mysterious terrain. we've all had a go at a couple, and each of us has pretended to see something deep and meaningful in the pictures (depite our first impression of two people fucking, or a splattered butterfly etc etc).

well thanks to The Rorschach Prophecy Machine, you can now make your own ink blots, and the "machine" will give you a friendly readout of the symbolism behind your drawings. give it a go - despite several earnest attempts, i couldn't create a single splattered butterfly.

inkblot


Thursday, October 21, 2004

miss them already

i'm feeling a bit sad today. i've grown to love my ComStudies kids so much - i don't want to leave them at the end of the year. they're just such a pleasure to teach - as soon as you show them how to animate something, or import sound, create an image etc etc their faces light up. and the work they're doing is really creative and unique. the UWA ComStudies website should be up pretty soon, so i'll link to their work then.

i found out yesterday that some of them nominated me for an excellence in teaching award this year. shucks.

smile


timmy's t-shirt

it's my husband's birthday today, and seeing as we're both broke, i decided to make him something. he's a mad football fan, so i thought this image printed on a t-shirt would be most appropriate. gotta love photoshop.

timmys_tshirt

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

wordcount

This is a bit old now, but i'm worried i'll forget about it if i don't put it somewhere, and as blogging seems to be as much about archiving references as sharing material....check this out.

wordcount:

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.


wordcount

Monday, October 18, 2004

Satirical Ferrets

politically motivated flash animations are an act of protest - there's no doubt about that. but do they have to include ferrets? here's a few more to add to your list:

leave it to bush
dishoom
jibjab boys

leave_it_to_bush

jill's distributed meme

in a recent blog post, jill mentioned that a descriptive phrase she'd formulated a few months back - distributed narrative - is now returning a thousand or so search results from google:

There’s something rather fascinating about how a term can grow. I bet I had something to do with it, but quite possibly I simply happened to use a combination of words that was sort of ready to emerge from the primordial soup of our brains. Perhaps I’d even heard the term somewhere - I couldn’t find it on Google, but it might have slipped into my mind from somewhere.

it works perfectly and yes, there is something natural about the term. but as we've been using "distributed media" to describe the instruments of narrative construction and distribution for a while now, "distributed narrative" doesn't seem like a huge jump to make.

but trust jill to locate the precise moment this cultural shift occured - she really is the queen bee of blogging.

Friday, October 15, 2004

writing in waveforms

tone row poetry is a beautiful new media piece on the turbulence site. its premise is a simple one - that language is all about translation.

Communication requires mimesis; right now, I'm stringing a daisy chain of tokens together, each of which you can apprehend and appreciate, because we're speaking the same language. This is convention; as Saussure pointed out, it's arbitrary. I am trying to convey something to you, something about this piece Tone Row Poetry that I've been working on, so I'm tracing with a crayon some jagged lines that by convention mimic what I need to tell you about it.

tone row poetry replaces words for sounds, so that a sentence becomes a soundscape - its message conveyed through emotive scratches and blips instead of marks on the page or screen. it’s a pretty clean example of transcoding, or as the author puts it, "crayoning waveforms".

subservient president

what do you get when you cross a subservient president with a subservient chicken?

why don't you ask him yourself?

subservientpresident/chicken

cambiemos


cambiemos
Originally uploaded by jojoterrific.

nick from grand text auto has brought our attention to a new political game from casa de cambio - "cambiemos".

Cambiemos is a short, positive game that is both fun and seems to be good at expressing political principles: rebuilding is important, rebuilding takes work and cooperation, you have to be perceptive as you work... even "you can fix your mistakes if you have time" I think. It's not a Boalian system for working out people's political approaches through play - and unless Boal runs for office again, I don't think any political campaign would pay for Gonzalo to whip up one of those - but it is something else that's pretty interesting. I have to admit that like it better than the Dean game, which was more of a campaign volunteer's manual than an interestingly-presented political statement. "Cambiemos" is easy to play, not being fast-paced at all. It also has good gameplay, and is aesthetically pleasing, making good use of black-and-white and color images.

Thursday, October 14, 2004

meet jojoterrific


jojo
Originally uploaded by jojoterrific.

isn't she terrific?

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

flash dreaming

i was sent this by a friend (thanks jimmy via panda), who told me that he dreams like this animation. it's pretty trippy, especially the backwards motion. i love that it's a collaborative effort, too.

zoomquilt

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

remixed republicanisms

check out this remix of republicanisms. it would be funny it it wasn't so depressing.

what a brain sounds like

turbulence has a great site up at the moment. it's a product of the Institute for the Study of Perpetual Emotion, and is dedicated to the "scientific study of emotion as relays, networks and vibrations." probably the most interesting part for me is the echographs of neurological activity. go to neurological maps, then choose any of the seven emotions - happy's the best!

emotional_slump

flash for breakfast

what will it be, donuts or muffins?

donuts


rhizome's iconography

Roman Minaev (of trashconnection fame) has put together a portrait of rhizome users - just their icons mind. it looks pretty, and if you stare for long enough, you'll see a pattern emerge.

rhizome

jpeg of death

interesting (and short) article in the New Scientist about image files capable of spreading computer viruses. there's been a great deal of talk about this since the early 90s - reminds me of the hype surrounding digital steganography succeeding the september 11 attacks.

Monday, October 04, 2004

motion graphics

i've been trying to source some good examples of narrative-based motion graphics for my flash kids. apart from the real arty stuff (which is fantastic, but a little too complicated for the purposes of this demo) i've discovered a few that are quite cool. if you've got time, check em out:
VidLit
Creative commons
Pentagon Strike
i'm not really looking for interactivity because this requires ActionScript (which I don't think they're ready for). if you know of any others that are similar to these, send em in!

Friday, October 01, 2004

french, german and danish fraggles

like most kids who did their growing up in the 80s, i was a big fan of fraggle rock. there was something instantly attractive about the fraggle's existence - here were some crazy creatures who didn't give a crap about anything except partying. If you feel like a trip down memory lane, check out some of their more recognisable tracks at the unofficial website I did, and it made me feel at least ten years younger.

red6