Tree, Line: Wrapped trees in landscapes manufactured for the camera and photographed by Zander Olsen
Made by Joel’s print, cut & fold Paris city play set is the visual equivalent to the olfactory nostalgia you get when you open a box of crayons.
What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed.
THIS IS WHY I HATE BUYING CLOTHES AT FOREVER 21. I MEAN, YEAH, THEY’RE SUPER CHEAP BUT YOU WASH THEM ONCE AND YOU BASICALLY HAVE TO THROW THEM AWAY.
Yayoi Kusama - The obliteration room (2011)
The obliteration room 2011 revisits the popular interactive children’s project developed by Yayoi Kusama for the Queensland Art Gallery’s ‘APT 2002: Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’. In this reworked and enlarged installation, an Australian domestic environment is recreated in the gallery space, complete with locally sourced furniture and ornamentation, all of which has been painted completely white. While this may suggest an everyday topography drained of all colour and specificity, it also functions as a blank canvas to be invigorated — or, in Kusama’s vocabulary, ‘obliterated’ — through the application, to every available surface, of brightly coloured stickers in the shape of dots.
As with many of Kusama’s installations, the work is disarmingly simple in its elemental composition; however, it brilliantly exploits the framework of its presentation. The white room is gradually obliterated over the course of the exhibition, the space changing measurably with the passage of time as the dots accumulate as a result of thousands and thousands of collaborators. (read more)
[my 1st photoset post thanks to prostheticknowledge’s technical assistance]
For otaku, it doesn’t matter what you love as long as you love it wholeheartedly and purely. There’s a word that helps describe this intensity of delicate feeling: moe (mo-ay). “Moe is a way to capture emotion you can’t verbalize,” … “It’s like a second form of love.
In industrial capitalism’s past, the working class could fight against a target that was precisely identified: the boss, the entrepreneur who owned material things like the factory and the products of his employee’s labor. Today, the boss has vanished. He is fragmented into billions of financial segments, disseminated into millions of financial agents scattered all around the world. The workers themselves are part of recombinant financial capital. They are expecting future revenues from their pension fund investments. They own stock options in the enterprise exploiting their labor. They are hooked up, like a fly in a spider web: if they move, they get strangled, but if they don’t move, the spider will suck their life from them. Society may rot, fall apart, agonize. It is not going to affect the political and economic stability of capitalism. What is called economic recovery is a new round of social devastation.
So the recession is over, capitalism is recovering. Nonetheless, unemployment is rising and misery is spreading. This means that financial capitalism is autonomous from society. Capitalism doesn’t need workers: it just needs cellular fractals of labor, underpaid, precarious, depersonalised. Fragments of impersonal nervous energy, recombined by the network. The crisis is going to push forward technological change and the substitution of human labor with machines. The employment rate is not going to rise in the future, and productivity will increase. A shrinking number of workers will be forced to work overtime to produce more and more.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi - “After the Future” (via effusionofbiopower)
The jobs just aren’t coming back.
They left on what was supposed to be a round-the-world cruise and the ship sank somewhere off the coast off China.
Baby sharks birthed in artificial uterus
Wired.co.uk, who chose a much better photo for the story than wired.com
An artificial uterus, designed to give live birth to sharks, rests in the lab of the Port Stephens Fisheries Institute, in New South Wales. It’s an atypical maternity ward. The uterus, a series of tanks, tubes and fluid-exchange systems, is a proof-of-concept for now. But one day it could boost the dwindling numbers of the grey nurse shark. Nick Otway, a fisheries biologist, was charged with devising a plan to breed this threatened shark with a bizarre reproductive cycle. In a paper published in Zoo Biology, on 8 September, he and his colleague Megan Ellis, report they have done just that. Grey nurse sharks, known as sand tiger sharks in the United States, are regionally endangered off the east coast of Australia, and listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Though not intentionally targeted by commercial and recreational fishing, many are caught and die by accident, said Otway. And the death of even one is a huge loss, since babies are so hard to come by. After mating, a female produces as many as 40 fertilised embryos, separated between two separate wombs. The embryos take nearly a year to fully develop, but they begin hunting long before that. After about two months, their own yolk sacs go dry. Hungry, they start eating their brothers and sisters. After the rampant in utero cannibalisation, only one shark — the biggest and strongest — is left in each womb. At birth they’re three feet long and experienced hunters, with a good chance of survival. But the tiny brood size, nearly year-long gestation period, and relatively restricted maternal capacity — after giving birth, mothers must wait a year to reproduce again — limit the number of young sharks. “I was essentially charged with coming up with a breeding programme and it is a tall task,” said Otway. “The only way to do it is to bypass the cannibalistic phase.” Otway and his research partner for the work, Megan Ellis, decided to use wobbegong sharks (Orectolobus ornatus) as their lab animal. Wobbegongs have a similar gestation period to grey nurse sharks, but are smaller, less threatened and easier to keep in captivity. Initially Otway and Ellis tried to keep embryos, one month away from birth, alive in small aquaria. But the wobbegongs died within a week. The artificial uterus they developed is essentially a complex aquarium, with air vents, bacterial filters, peristaltic pumps, observation ports, water exchange systems and a host of monitoring sensors. With this set up, Otway and Ellis brought six embryos to term. The sharks, taken from one euthanised female captured by divers, spent the final 18 days before birth in the artificial uterus. When born, the pups were average size. They all survived to be released in the wild after about three months, or were given to Ocean World Manly or Sydney Aquarium. If this research were to continue, a logical next step would be to rear younger wobbegong embryos. Prior to the late-term stage, the wobbegongs, like the nurse sharks, rely on a complex and delicately balanced uterine fluid. Creating this artificially would be a difficult but feasible challenge, Otway said, but he’s not sure it’s the best idea. According to Otway, studies of grey nurse sharks in the wild are a better conservation plan than artificial birthing setups. If fisheries managers know the shark’s migration patterns and feeding habits, they can mandate fishing restrictions in certain areas at certain times to protect the sharks. “We proved, I think, that this concept could work. But it would be incredibly expensive, a few million dollars at least, to fully develop this for grey nurse sharks,” Otway said. “I’m not sure the cost would be worth the benefit.” The artificial uterus will remain as a backup plan, however, if conservation becomes dire.
This still looks futuristic…came out on iOS today…O__O
out of this world 1991 PC game (by chadherrella)
Wasn’t much of a gamer but I recognized this immediately. Really captured my imagination when it was new and I found a copy recently and ran it on a DOS emulator - completely stood the test of time. If I remember correctly this was largely the creation of one person.
G is for Graphic Designer
“The vast majority of designers make ugly things for incompetent people.”
Thanks to Mad Men and the countless ads on TV for schools that “allow you to express your creativity to its fullest potential,” the thought is that every design job is a sexy glamorous job. Once you’re through with school, you’ll land a job at Leo Burnett, BBDO, Nike, Apple, or another company that has a pool table, sexy promiscuous secretaries, very entertaining socio-political drama, or something your parents and friends would recognize on the shelf.
The reality of it is the vast majority of designers will work to make ugly things for strategically incompetent people only to have more people still think very little of you. The GAP logo for instance, was more than likely the victim of a long line of vice presidents, product managers, communication directors, marketing chiefs, and other people with business degrees who think themselves experts in design solely because they work for a company that is reputed to care about design. Even designers across the world joined the flogging though they, by personal experience, know how little it takes from a VP to completely destroy the integrity of a project.
There is also the myth that by sheer virtue of your talent, you will receive adulation and recognition. That is the most accurate theme in Mad Men that can translate to today: we are an industry of networking and meritocracy. Who do you know? What clients have you worked for you? If you went to a fantastic school like SVA, Parsons, SCAD, SAIC, ACD, or another acronym that none of your friends or family will recognize, it won’t matter till your portfolio can reflect where you want to work. You are an ant in a colony with many queens.
Most clients are small, so your work will likely go unnoticed. Nobody who looks at a can of Coke thinks a big agency hired a small firm who in turn assigned an underpaid designer to typeset the word “classic” on the can. The credit goes to one hotshot designer that billions of people cannot and should not be able to name. I say they shouldn’t because the biggest myth about design is about recognition.
Design isn’t a job, a career, or a calling. It’s a total lifestyle. We dominate decision making that is about cultural construction and make-up: music, food, bikes, clothing. You can’t walk down the street and safely guess who’s a doctor or lawyer, but you can guess who has an interest in graphic design.
It’s not simply pushing a button and clicking a few functions in Photoshop. It’s a complicated industry with its own ecology made up of incredibly hard work individuals that is routinely undermined by its own customers.
I love what I do. I wouldn’t change much about what I do. Some people can’t go vegetarian, I can’t stop thinking or practicing design.
Dieter Rams’ ten principles to “good design”
Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design helps us to understand a product
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is honest
Good design is long-lasting
Good design is consequent to the last detail
Good design is concerned with the environment
Good design is as little design as possible
Excited to try Wacom’s new “Inkling” pen when it’s released this month.
Andrew Kolb’s Space Oddity seems inspired by Charley Harper - and Todd Oldham’s massive coffee table book. In a good way. Want this for my boy.
Venn diagram: Advertising geeks vs. actual geeks.
Source: Kevin Rothermel via Percolate
