frequencies (a) by Nicolas Bernier is a sound performance combining the sound of mechanically triggered tuning forks with pure digital soundwaves. Nicolas is triggering sequences from the computer, activating solenoids that hit the tuning forks with high precision. Streams of light burst in synchronicity with the forks, creating a not-quite-minimal sound and light composition.
“A young girl can be seen standing alone on the train station platform. Who’s she with? Is she travelling alone? Engrossed in her own world, she is still and focuses on the phone she carries. As a concerned member of the public approaches, her form appears to digitize and fragment into cubes.”
Voxelate is three-dimensional pixelated portrait that can be read from a distance - but as the viewer gets closer the object appears to fragment into cubes.
Commissioned by the Watershed it is being created for installation at the Bristol Temple Quarter.
(via Tom)
“For all the hesitations anybody may have, and for all the vulnerabilities even casual observers can readily diagnose in the chain of technical articulations that produces an augmentive overlay, it is hard to argue against a technology that glimmers with the promise of transcendence. Over anything beyond the immediate near term, some form of wearable augmentive device does seem bound to take a prominent role in returning networked information to the purview of a mobile user at will, and thereby in mediating the urban experience.”
“There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.”
— ACM Web Science talk, as written | Quinn Said (via new-aesthetic)
“And then there’s this empty pretense that these innovations make the world better. This is a dangerous word, like, ‘If we’re not making the world better, then why are we doing this at all?’. Now, I don’t want to claim that this attitude is hypocritical, because when you say a thing like that at South By – ‘Oh, we’re here to make the world better’ – you haven’t even reached the level of hypocrisy. You’re stuck at the level of childish naivety.”
“Legibility is a baseline requirement for typesetting anything. It’s like edible food. It shouldn’t really be a measure of what is good or not. Just like audibility and comprehension are baseline requirements for speech. There is more flavour in words; spoken or printed. There is more flavour in type, that if applied well, transcends content from being merely legible, to that of being pleasurable.”
“Part of what tips the algorithmic rape joke t-shirts over from very offensive to shockingly offensive is that they are ostensibly physical products. Intuitions are not yet tuned for spambot clothes sellers.
Better tune those intuitions fast. Spambot everything sellers are well on their way.”
“I can see the argument that dicking around with our phones in public is not cool, that we should pay more attention to our companions and surroundings, and less to our computer displays. Strapping a computer display to your face is not the answer.”
