-
Informative and fun new work from Stamen (along with a shout-out to How Big Really).
-
"It costs us something to be the beginner. Our minds opt for intellectual ejector seats, taking us away from new ideas. But “I hadn’t thought of that before” is actually the experience of joy trying to reach us." Sara Hendren on expressing discovery as pleasure rather than threat.
-
"This isn’t because I want to optimise an audience; this isn’t because I want to sell ads. This is because it’s nice to know that 17 people read the website and 21 people opened the newsletter, and 36 people read the same story on Facebook, and 6 in an RSS reader — and gosh that’s like the whole top level of a double decker bus, all those people read my story! When companies deal with millions and billions, I think perhaps they forget how the intimate feels. How sometimes it’s not about a thousand retweets but instead about an audience of readers who come back. With whom you have a relationship. Who appreciate you, and you appreciate them. Yes it’s a pleasure to write, and yes I will do it without needing to get 1,000 likes on each and every story, but also let’s not forget that it’s more pleasant with company." This is all good by Matt – on the way the small-bit-intimate web has been sidelined for the all-or-nothing approach. (I'm glad I still run my own site. I'm glad RSS still works. Small software is important. Maybe web-scale doesn't automatically mean 'big')
-
"Instead of asking “will it scale”, ask a better question: “Does it gracefully handle massive diversity?”… This is not to say that scale doesn’t matter. Rather, understanding diversity is the better starting point. The diversity question accommodates scaling; the scaling question tramples all over diversity." A good post from Matt Edgar, but this point is particularly good.
-
Lovely – an encoding designed for people, not machines.
-
"…your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a chip is remembering a fact from your own brain. Your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a disk is fetching that fact from Pluto. Computers live in a world of commonplace interactions not the size of a house, like us, but the Solar System. On their own terms, they are long, long lived, and vast."
Bigger Trees
26 April 2010
Several weekends ago now, I went to the Tate Britain to see the Chris Ofili and Henry Moore exhibitions. Both were good. I find sculpture difficult to “read”, as it were, although I found Moore’s stringed work very beautiful; the real highlight of his exhibition for me, though, was the central room of his sketches from the Blitz and from coalmines. The Ofili, similarly, wasn’t initially to my taste, but grew into a rather nice body of work, and the room of his blue paintings was wonderful; I enjoyed the catalogue of the Blue works I read later, although was disappointed to see how many of the Blue paintings hadn’t been selected for display.
But the best thing I saw in the gallery that weekend was a total surprise.
That surprise was David Hockney’s Bigger Trees Near Warter.
I glimpsed the painting through a doorway, not in its entirety, just part of it, already filling the doorframe and enticing me in. What greeted me on the other side was, in every sense, stunning.
Bigger Trees Near Warter is a huge painting, made of 50 canvases – 10 wide by 5 high – and, in this showing, duplicated on two adjacent walls of the gallery in scale replicas constructed out of fifty photographic prints. It dominates the room, filling your peripheral vision as well as your forward gaze.
(I enjoyed Hockney’s rational for making the painting so big – he didn’t want the Royal Academy to try to hang anything next to it, and so he ensured it would fill the wall it was intended for)
And, as the explanatory documentary running on a small television on the fourth wall explains, the artwork was only really possible because of modern technology.
Hockney’s a very technically savvy artist – something that often surprises people – and it was fascinating to watch him at work. The computer’s role in Bigger Trees was very specific – it enabled pre-visualisation of the larger work, showing how the initial sketches would be divide across fifty paintings, and by stitching together photographs of work in progress, hinting at how the artwork was developing. After all, there wasn’t nearly enough room in Hockney’s UK studio to hang all the canvasses.
But that was it: each canvas was still very much painted in the field, and the stitched image helped plan which canvasses to take out each day. It’s still very much a landscape painting made on location. I admired both the necessity of technology to the painting, and yet a lack of complete reliance on it.
Enough of the method, though, because even if you didn’t know that, it’s still a phenomenal work: subtle use of colour that’s unmistakably English countryside, detail in the tree branches that’s visible at a distance, but recedes as you get closer; a painting on such a large scale it never escapes your eye. It dominates you, keeps you in place, and then the shapes form into detail and draw your eye in.
I looked at this one image for a good while – longer than I’ve looked at any single painting for a long while. My eyes occasionally darted right and left to check that the facsimiles really were identical, and not variants; quiet and still in one of the gallery’s larger single rooms, awed, and glad to have followed my nose – or rather, my eyes – through that doorway. I’ve been a fan of Hockney for a while, but this was just magnificent; if you’re passing Tate Britain in the near future, it’s worth the detour to find. Words and photographs can hardly do it justice.
-
Lovely little Unity game all about scale. You navigate the level as usual in a platformer, with one twist: the up and down arrow increase or decrease your size. And time goes faster when you're big, and slower when you're small. And from there, some fun begins. A short game – about twenty minutes, I reckon, to finish – but ingenious throughout. Worth your time.
-
"And that is why, in 2009, when developing in Microsoft .NET 3.5 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 on a Windows 7 system, you cannot include /com\d(\..*)?, /lpt\d(\..*)?, /con(\..*)?, /aux(\..*)?, /prn(\..*)?, or /nul(\..*)? in any of your routes." Madness.
-
Blimey. I have many, many fond memories of the first Operation Flashpoint, but it looks like Bohemia have really dropped the bomb here.
-
Mike Darga's blog is a smart, insightful, data-driven look at game design, especially for MMOs. It's very good, and goes straight into my subscriptions.
-
"Clipstart complements your photo application to give you a place that is designed for home movies. Import your movies, tag, search, and upload with one click to Flickr and Vimeo. You can even quickly upload a trimmed portion of a movie without needing to save a new copy." Looks like an interesting alternative to iMovie for most of the uses I make of video.
-
Scans from a German magazine: messy, full of records, sometimes computers.
-
"Size has been one of the most popular themes in monster movies, especially those from my favorite era, the 1950s. The premise is invariably to take something out of its usual context–make people small or something else (gorillas, grasshoppers, amoebae, etc.) large–and then play with the consequences. However, Hollywood's approach to the concept has been, from a biologist's perspective, hopelessly naïve." Fantastic: transcripts of a series of lectures about the biology of B-Movie monsters; funny, accurate, informative.
-
Map of Shanghai, as Sim-City style rendered projection; is this useful? Or is this just a style of imagery computer users are used to?
-
"I find the watchclock fascinating not simply because it’s a kind of steampunk GPS, a wind-up mechanical location-awareness technology. I’m further fascinated at how this holistic system of watchclocks, keys, guards, and supervisors succeeded so completely in creating a method of behavioral control such that a human being’s movements can be precisely planned and executed, hour after hour and night after night, with such a high degree of reliability that almost a century goes by before anyone thinks of ways of improving the system as originally conceived." Fantastic.
-
"Sweet Sue's Canned Whole Chicken (without giblets) is an entire cooked chicken in a can (a big one)." For reference: I am not whole chicken-in-a-can hungry.
-
"If I had but one backdrop to use for portraiture I would choose a simple roll of white seamless paper. With one roll of paper you can create many options. For the rest of the week I’m going to break it down for you. We are going to look at getting it to pop to pure white, making it various shades of grey, getting it to go black, gelling it to any color in the rainbow, and doing very easy and quick changes in post production to further the visual options available to us when using such a simple background." Fantastic tutorial.
-
"Moon Stories, a collection of my latest three experiments, got selected to be presented at the Tokyo Game Show during the Sense of Wonder Night, the japanese version of the Experimental Gameplay Sessions." Beautiful, notably "I wish I were the Moon"
-
"In a strange way then, the designer of a video game is himself present as an entity within the work: as the "computer"– the sum of the mechanics with which the player interacts." Fantastic piece from Steve Gaynor, which touches on some notions of the death of the designer – namely, that the designer *is* inherently present in games; they embody themselves in mechanics, and games that downplay logical mechanics that players can reverse-engineer do themselves a disservice.
-
I don't normally link to XKCD, simply because it would become repetitive… but "Height" is really lovely.