hat tip maxlabor
September 2012
9-11 again
It's always good to think back on that amazing moment when George W. Bush resigned from office. After a series of dramatic, utterly preventable disasters happened on his watch, he was candid and courageous enough to say "Sorry, I'm in over my head, folks. It's back to Texas and booze for me." Without this handsome and congenial-seeming front man, the public soon had its fill of the condescending, backroom-dealing Dick Cheney as a figurehead, and by 2004 the Republican party was history.
It's also a credit to this great nation that the people had the patience to wait for the US to bring the attackers' co-conspirators to justice, through a combination of detective work and building bridges to international law enforcement agencies.
I would have expected Americans to act like a bunch of enraged apes, screeching "REVENGE, REVENGE" at the tops of their lungs, and that's not what happened. Fighting an invisible enemy by waging wars against scapegoat nations would have been the height of wasteful folly.
my drawings in chris shier's "line 02"
Chris Shier designed the interactive drawing HTML element one uses to make these.
You move your mouse or stylus around until you get a design you like and then screenshot the result.
Essentially it's a drip painting process that yields fluid, Naum Gabo-like structures melding the organic and the geometric. These also resemble photograms and William Wood paintings.
The geometry part is more apparent if you use the full-screen version on Shier's site - you can see the "wireframe" patterns comprising the swirls. I made these using a smaller window Shier posted on dump.fm and found I had more control with it.
What's good about this "virtual instrument" is also what's bad: it's almost impossible to make a poor design. Stubborn artist types want to do more than play, they want to break the boundaries of things and feel like they're doing at least some of the work.
In electronic music there's a better-understood distinction between "performer" and "instrument maker" (thanks to Paul B. Davis for pointed this out to me) than in so-called "generative" visual art -- or at least an acceptance of the blurring and overlapping of these roles. Hybrid drawings such as the above "challenge notions of authorship" or "raise interesting questions about artistic autonomy," depending on how tendentiously you want to phrase it.
tweet filler
dear fellini's ghost, endless starkly-lit closeups of strange-looking people is not surrealist
dear fellini's ghost, La Dolce Vita is a great movie but 8 1/2 is a self-indulgent rehash, with a pointlessly maudlin ending
Dark Shadows and Total Recall failed at the box office - *whistles happy tune*
the wachowskis were notoriously publicity-shy...until this week's 5000 word fluffy-puffed marshmallow in the New Yorker
just learned (from the NYT) that Conde Nast's parent co. Advance Publications owns Reddit
we're supposed to believe that Conde not micromanaging Reddit is by design rather than just neglect or incomprehension