Michael Bell-Smith has moved his online vitae-slash-archive to michaelbellsmith.com from its former location. Worth a look--am especially happy to see some of the work linked to on my old blog back up, such as Video Created to Fix Stuck Pixels in Computer Monitors Recast (with Soundtrack and Sunset) as Video to Fix Your Stuck Mind. Also good to see some of the newer work such as Faceted Sphere on an Escalator, a sophisticated variant of the venerable chrome sphere on checkerboard motif.
April 2009
rotating smile
semi-failed attempts to reconstruct one Travis Hallenbeck posted that is now tastefully blurred out thanks to the geniuses who developed Firefox 3 and included a mandatory "zoom" feature that resamples or anti-aliases all html-enlarged content. Internet Explorer is now the go-to way to view such GIFs accurately.
the ones above were screen-captured, making the rotation rate erratic; in the bottom one the "pixels" are divided.
All art made for the Internet is doomed.
rotating smile 2
datamosh version - the "keyframe" is removed and the export function forgot to make it yellow
Consumption of Metals Chart
Clear, detailed, sobering chart from New Scientist shows how many years' supply is left of various minerals (zinc, copper, germanium, etc) if:
--the world consumes these materials at the current rate and
--if the world consumes them at half the current US consumption rate.
Also considered is how much each metal is currently recycled.
It's fair to say several will be mined out in our lifetimes. Any science fiction writer worth his or her sodium chloride can imagine that our future economy will be based on the barter value of various used-up metals, and the rise of feudal systems based not on land but hoarded recyclables in the hands of technologically endowed elites.
"Iceworld Two"
"Iceworld Two" [mp3 removed]
The deep bass throb on this will likely be lost on computer speakers. The bass is a drum loop run through the Mutator analog filter.
The synths are FM4 (the strumming strings-like part, recorded separately and pasted in with a short prayer), Absynth for the "keyboard," and the wispy drumming at the end is an 808 loop with some delay.