September 2008

Viva Failed Web Illustration

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Have been reading the Timothy Alan Liu book Rob Myers recommended, The Laws of Cool. Especially liked the discussion of the history of typefaces and design as they made the jump from print to the web. The book features a good, if matter-of-fact, discussion of JODI, as well.

This blog confesses it has a hard time finding its place in Liu's scheme for some of the reasons Rob mentioned in his post on the artwork here (thanks--much appreciated): "...it would fail as simple web illustration. It is too interesting and has too much internal complexity. It makes a context for itself. History, problem solving and interiority are anathema to the easy post-historical consumerist cool of Web 2.0."

Alan Liu assumes everything is about "cool" and eventually even the "uncool" gets absorbed into the "cool." That is, the computerized workplace and playplace is an all-encompassing seductive experience measured in "cool," whether it's the Ars Electronica avant garde or designers creating Facebook apps.

I'm interested in seeing software and web tools made problematic through the investment of time and labor all out of proportion to their intended function. Examples would be hand-shading a gradient instead of just writing parameters for it, or hand-rendering animation frames without any use of onion-skinning or digitally generated transition frames. This is an artist stance of "doing the difficult thing" which does not make an easy jump to the web.

The labor and use of "historical" art techniques is not always conspicuous in the finished product (that is, my artwork), so Rob's vouching for it is appreciated.

A post on Rob a few years ago and some examples of his online artwork are here. We have an ongoing disagreement over whether the surf clubs "add anything" to the images they recycle.

Update: Don't know where that "Timothy" came from. Most uncool.

found ad image

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piggybank

the typography was removed but this has it all: loretta lux-like child, baby blue vortex, jar of money. spirit surfers might give this a religious spin but this blog prefers the secular: the impossible ideal of savings in a world of $700 billion bailouts.

"Riff Valley"

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"Riff Valley" [mp3 removed]

3/4 time; 160 bpm. Mostly made with the Linplug Alpha and RMIV softsynths. There is an e-piano midsection that is fairly unapologetically MIDIish. Apropos of nothing, am haunted by a Wire review of Thomas Brinkmann that complimented him on building up clicks-and-cuts atmosphere but then said he ruined it with "major 7th Latinate foolishness."

SEC Doesn't Regulate Credit Swaps, Duh

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It's hard to know if John McCain is stupid, a liar, or both. Regarding his call for firing the Chairman of the SEC, TAPPED says it well:

MCCAIN PROPOSES FIRING CHRIS COX.
In his latest attempt at a total makeover, John McCain said today that if he were president, he'd fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the SEC, for keeping in place "trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino." But whatever its flaws, and they are abundant, the SEC still is constrained by federal laws -- and a number of the laws that prohibit SEC regulation of casino behavior were written by McCain's chief economic guru, former Sen. Phil Gramm, who exempted the very credit default swaps that dragged AIG down from any federal oversight.

So who does McCain want to replace Cox with? Gramm?

That's change you can grow queasy about if you think it over.

--Harold Meyerson

And as ABC notes, "while the president nominates and the Senate confirms the SEC chair, a commissioner of an independent regulatory commission cannot be removed by the president."

And as for Cox being lax, as Salon's Andrew Leonard points out (prob. subscription only):

[I]t might be worth remembering that this former Reagan administration lawyer and congressional House representative from Orange County, Calif., has been doing exactly what his party has always wanted him to do. George Bush did not appoint him commissioner in 2005 to crack down on Wall Street. The prevailing ideology of the Republican Party -- and this is one area where the historical evidence, by his own admission, does not justify calling John McCain a "maverick" -- has been to loosen control of Wall Street, not to tighten it. If our markets were turned into casinos, the majority of the blame has to go to the Republican Party, with some assistance from the Clinton administration.