November 2017

accidental art from [eric schmidt's company]

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Clement Valla published an article on Rhizome.org in 2012 that I missed about weird Google Earth "mistakes" (hat tip E.D.). Didn't realize (and kind of don't care) that Google uses a tabletop 3D model as an intermediary image between "satellite" and "street" views and imperfect translation "through" the CAD rendering creates deformed landcape incidents such as bridges that appear to hug the earth like snakes, rather than soaring in the sky.

As I wrote to E.D. in an email:

I missed that Rhizome [Valla] article. (It's funny that his commenters found the same effect on iOS.)

Some of the images are notably bizarre. Google should not be proud -- this is like their dirty linen. [As for their] 3D effect where the user switches from satellite view to street view and is taken on a bird's-eye thrill ride through time and space onto the tabletop of street reality: experiencing all that theatrical overkill in the course of something as mundane as looking up a local sandwich shop drives me a bit crazy.

Valla says they aren't glitches but they are! The mistake is using fake 3d reality as a conduit between photo views of sky and street. Why do that?

Weirdly squashed bridges I view as symptomatic of our not-ready-for-prime-time culture, which treats all innovation as a success regardless of whether it works.

Kind of like self-driving cars (speaking of squashed).

After sending the emails was doing an ordinary search and used it as an occasion to "freeze" some of those imperfect (but artistically tasty) "transitional" images.

Alex Katz and Wayne Thiebaud saw the future!

weirdgooglelandscape4_650

larger view

weirdgooglelandscape3

weirdgooglelandscape650w

larger view

weirdgooglelandscape2_650

(detail of above)

related: Weird Stretched Zombie

tags: uncanny valley, don't be evil, accidental art, modernist painting

now with longer tweets

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tommoody‏ @tommoody
4m4 minutes ago
was laughing retroactively at the Scott Kildall/Nathaniel Stern PDF about their project "Wikipedia Art" where they used the word "Brooklynite" as my identifying credentials, as in, those damn Brooklynites saying what is and isn't art

tommoody‏ @tommoody
17m17 minutes ago
i have a show opening Dec 15 at Honey Ramka gallery called "Pre-Post-Internet" -- might as well get out front and claim this turf

tommoody‏ @tommoody
20m20 minutes ago
if @furtherfield must break links in the name of website redesign "progress," could they please add, on the "Sorry!" landing page, the sentence "Any old links can be accessed on our archive by adding 'archive.' to the beginning of the URL"

tax code ideological warfare

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Benjamin Studebaker, The Republicans are Trying to Use the Tax System to Attack Their Political Enemies:

We’re seeing lots of good pieces which point out that many of the claims the Republicans are making about their tax plan are not true, that the plan favors the rich at the expense of the middle. But today I want to make another point about the plan, one that doesn’t seem to be getting the attention it merits. You see, it’s not just that the Republican plan helps the rich and hurts the middle. Those distributive consequences are real, and they matter, but this goes deeper than that. The Republican plan specifically targets liberal and left-leaning groups in the country for tax increases. It is an assault on the political neutrality of the tax system.

The tax system is anything but politically neutral (get married, own a home) but Studebaker points out two targets of the current plan: grad students (taxing doctorate candidate stipends) and blue states:

The Republican plan also intends to prevent Americans from deducting their state and local income and sales taxes from their federal taxes. This means that if you live in a blue state with higher taxes and more generous public services, the federal government will double tax you. The goal of this is obvious–to drive business and investment out of high-tax blue states. In the short-run, this enriches low-tax, cheap-service red states. In the long-run, this forces blue states to lower their income and sales taxes to remain competitive, turning them into red states. Lower taxes at the state level means gutting public services and dishonoring pensions. Gutting public services takes money from the public schools and from the state universities. It helps privatization campaigns convince ordinary people that government programs aren’t worth maintaining, which leads state governments to divert even more resources away from the public system to voucher-based private alternatives. Those funding diversions further run down the public services, leading to a spiral of state abandonment.

Lest we lay all this on "Republicans," let's note that the Clintonites also favor "austerity," just perhaps not this blatantly.

"Scheduled Appointment Part 2"

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[embedded player removed]

...another track (previously unposted) from my latest Bandcamp release, Full Metal Algo

Made with modular synth riffs edited into a song using Tracktion's Waveform DAW.

The main modules used here are Doepfer's A-154/155 sequencer, A-190-8 MIDI sync, A-112 sampler/wavetable, and A-166 logic modules; Manhattan Analog's Discrete SVVCF filter; and ADDAC's "Ultra WAV" player. Portions are recorded from the Elektron Octatrack. "Found" 808 drum hits (playing in Waveform's sampler rack plugin) provide the main rhythm. The last four bars use Waveform's Collective sampler/synth.