Archive for October, 2009

IMAGES OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Just a few interesting images I’ve accrued on my desktop over the last couple of months.  While I’d love to give credit where credit is deserved for these, I unfortunately tend to drag cool images from the net without even thinking about writing down where they’re from.  Actually, I do know that the first one was an image submitted with one of the proposals for the National Museum of Oslo (more info on the other finalists here).  If anyone can place the other images, let me know in the comments.

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THEBACKMIX, EDITION 6

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

theBackmix, Edition 6:  October music.  Enjoy!

Tracklist:

  1. The Guard Attacks by Chavez
  2. Made To Disappear by The Twilight Sad
  3. Plan B by New Year
  4. Made-Up Dreams by Built To Spill
  5. Fooled With The Wrong Guy by Beulah
  6. I Came As A Rat by Modest Mouse
  7. Wolf Like Me by TV On The Radio
  8. Bloods On Fire by Pinback
  9. Panda by Dungen
  10. Railroad Lullaby by The Twilight Singers
  11. Here (Peel Session 1) by Pavement

It takes a lot to make me crazy… and a lot is always going on…” — Made-Up Dreams by Built To Spill

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WORK: BRETT BEYER

Thursday, October 8th, 2009



Images from Brett Beyer’s New Amsterdam project. Each image is shot in lower Manhattan with a Holga or a Zeiss Nettar camera, which are used specifically for their flaws, light leaks, and all-around non-digital awesomeness. Beyer overlaps the exposures within each camera by manually advancing the film.  No Photoshop used here:

“These errors,” he says, “allow chance into the process and give me results I never would have intentionally gotten.”

I really need to get my hands on an Holga — you just can’t recreate something like this digitally. Anyone own one?  Do you recommend?  Feel free to share your images in the comments.  More quotes and info at Wired.

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THINGS TO CLICK IS AN OPTICAL ILLUSION

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

A and B are the same color. No joke.  Pull that image into Photoshop — both squares are 100% #787878.  How wild is that?  The image above is actually from the “astronomy picture of the day” and is being used to illustrate an example of the color illusions that scientists run into when observing the sky.  While space is cool and all, it’s also an interesting thing to consider when working with color in a design.  Sometimes that whole relativity thing is crazy.

Camelot, ’tis a silly place. Normally color illusions like this are really lame, but this little experiment does a great job of hinting at the possibilities of such an illusion — as a designer, how much information is needed to tell the story?  How much can be filled in by the user?  Who’s the artist in this case?  There has to be someone who can explain this better…

…a bit better. OK so the lecture itself is a bit rambling at times but that first part that builds on the simple color illusion in the castle experiment above is quite interesting.  Olafur Eliasson @ 1:30:

“What the potential is is to kind of move the border of who’s the author and who’s the receiver?  Who’s the consumer and who has the responsibility for what one sees?  I think there is a socializing dimension in moving that border.  Who decides what reality is?”

The rest of the lecture is definitely worth a listen or two or three…  He rambles a bit, but his thoughts on art are quite germane.

Etc. If you just can’t get enough of illusions, more here and here.  You should probably also pull out your old Magic Eyes and relive third grade (an explanation of how those actually work here).

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