+ all of the above

I’ve been going through my old notebooks. Here are a few notes:
imaitoonz
Moebius
Lance Wyman
Istvan Banyai
Bradley Munkowitz
Hillman Curtis
Philip Castle

videos.antville.org have posted the top user voted 101 music videos of the decade. Now before I start to argue or get angry, I’ll just stop and agree that this is certainly a great collection of music videos.

Equal parts disturbing and alluring, My Life Is Average via Make No Sound

Today I was talking online to my friend. They were boring so I said I had to go and signed off. I stayed online for three more hours looking at pictures of the new pandas at the local zoo. MLIA

Well, I’m back from San Fran, with plenty of new shiny things (and a busted up elbow, but more to come on that later). Check out these freakin awesome badges from the folks over at Loyal Army and extra thanks to Katey for making me the badges on the spot!

So I’m off again. No posts at least until the end of the week, though you can follow me on twitter if you were really so inclined (now that I have an iPhone I can’t help but twitter occasionally). Expect photos of San Fran soon!

Well, it’s about time. MTV has launched a website dedicated to, of all things, music videos (gosh!). It’s called MTVMusic.com Which isn’t redundant at all since the MTV acronym was changed to ‘Mediocre TV’ in the 90′s.

A lot can happen in a couple of weeks, and I’ve got the photos to prove it. I’ll be posting a few select ones here but I’ll be uploading them all over at my new flickr account: Man Killed (thanks go to Owen for the name, I hope you don’t mind but I heard you weren’t using it anymore…).

via 1001 rules for my unborn son

from the LA Public Library

Photographer Jill Greenberg is a freelance photographer who was hired by The Atlantic to photograph Presidential hopeful John McCain. Greenberg has an iconic, Photoshopped style and creates vivid portraits of people and animals. It’s almost guaranteed you’ve seen her work in an advertisement somewhere, and if you ride the NYC Subway you are well acquainted with her Monkey Portraits. When photographing McCain however, Greenberg has created controversy by boasting about deliberately casting him in harsh light and also by denying him the photo-retouches which is the customary post-production for magazines.

“I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad … Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for [The Atlantic] to hire me.”

Apart from the Atlantic accepting and running with the Cover Shot (click to see), which I think is actually quite a good picture, Greenberg also took another few shots, the most notable of which involved a bloody shark’s jaws super-imposed on top, which is the picture you see below.

Without casting judgment on any of the parties involved, I think that this is only the beginning of a renewal of the debate of the role of Artists in politics. Remember the Dixie Chicks? And after seeing how the brawl over Bill Henson’s work was handled (Kevin Rudd thinks Henson’s work is revolting? So what?), I am a little fearful. However at the very least, and putting aside any moral incursions which may or may not have happened here, I’m glad there’s a debate going on. Especially since I happen to agree with Jill Greenberg’s opinion. This is game-changing, it’s guaranteed they’ll be talking about this for years. Jill Greenberg has cemented her position as political discontent and this picture will be referenced for many years to come. If it was hard taking photos of politicians before, it will be impossible now. We’ll be seeing it on Illegal Art soon enough, pending a court case of course.

Finally, watch the hysteria unfold at Fox as the Atlantic’s editor is put in the hot seat (no matter what your persuasion, alignment, leaning or inkling I think we can all agree that Fox gets it wrong, on purpose, every time). One interesting thing to come out of this interview however is that photo re-touching now appears to be an expected right. Much different from the Kate Winslet fiasco of yesteryear. Aaaah, simpler times.

Read more at Gawker and at Digital Journal (which also has a full gallery of all of the manipulated shots, including the one with the monkey and the you know what…)

Review
Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2
Interview Part 3

What? Obama’s favorite song is the Fugees ‘Ready or Not’? Will we just hurry up and give him the presidency! I want an election promise from him though, the first item of business directly after being sworn in? A presidential order for the Fugees to reunite and record a new album.

and check Hushie out for internet music search goodness.

Source is BBC News

Lucy and Bart (freak the hell outta me)

Moodstream

uvlayer

“it’s not that New York is that fast. It’s that you’re living it in fastforward.”

- Rex Sorgatz

Devo are playing at the park near my house. (as well as Gogol Bordello!)

You can’t make this up. Seriously. Let me take a deep breath.

Mischa Barton is starring in a movie called You and I (being released later this year), which is based on the book “Come Back” by Aleksey Mitrofanov which is a book of text messages between the russian girl group T.A.T.u. Seriously. T.A.T.u will also be making an appearance in the film which tells the story of two of their fans who meet over the internet.

As you wrap your head around that, I might just add some more wtf by drawing your attention to the aforementioned Aleksey Mitrofanov’s wiki page which states (among other things):

Aleksey Valentinovich Mitrofanov … is a Russian politician and former deputy of the State Duma of Russia … and served in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union.

He holds degrees in international relations from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and from the USA-Canada Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

In 2005 he made and released a controversial erotic movie titled Yuliya, which portrayed two people called Misha and Yuliya in various sex scenes who resembled then Prime Minister of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko and President of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili.

Whoah…. What?

A map of relationships among scientific paradigms.

Go here for the explanation or here to buy the print, or just go here to jump straight in (always recommended).

Head over to Muxfind to search Muxtape for all your favorite songs. Quickly before everyone is sued.

Metric – Monster Hospital. I fought the war but the war won.

After the failure to prevent the war in Iraq by the largest amount of protesters in history, my frustrated acceptance that this brutal reality is actually happening has set in.

Will we bother to protest next time around?

Strange Maps

WTF CNN

Passive Aggressive Notes

I blogged about this exhibit when it was upcoming and hadn’t yet opened. I finally managed to see it on the second last day, just before it ended. Yeah, I’ve been working a lot.

The actual exhibition was decent, with a few works standing out from the rest. I thought that the whole thing lacked identity which was disappointing. There were a couple of problems with space, it felt like we were in a storage closet or some other place that they’d had to create to accommodate the event. And of course the last-minute-crowds didn’t help at all. The other point I’ll make is that the exhibition offered very little that would encourage anyone to come and visit the Museum. Almost all of the works featured have their own dedicated websites and the material shown was the same on the website as in the exhibition. But any way, onto the work.

FRONT’s Sketch Furniture was a highlight. I have actually blogged about them in one of my first blog posts, but this was the first time I’d seen the furniture in person. I was struck by how much the furniture looked like it could be functional as well, which was a surprise, I wanted to sit on it. Check out their website for more.

Graffiti Research Lab’s L.A.S.E.R Tag was there, but unfortunately it was just the video and nothing that we could actually play with. The Troika SMS Guerilla Projector was there right next to GRL however we weren’t allowed to play with it either. The Painstation and Bitfall were also present and were also similarly switched off with only documented material on display.

The New York Talk Exchange from Senseable Laboratories was a highlight. It’s a visualisation of the connections of both voice and data made by New Yorkers with the rest of the world. It was impressive to see so much data represented so fluidly and in such an easy to understand form.

Similar to the work from Sensable Laboratories and in the field of data visualisation was Cabspotting from Stamen Design a beautiful work that tracks the Cabs in San Francisco’s bay area. Another was the Million Dollar Blocks Project by the Spatial Information Design Lab which dealt with a massive amount of different data sets all to do with the US Prisons and highlighted the disparities and contradictions of the system. Also in data visualisation, but with more of an appeal to emotion than is usual in this area was I Want You To Want Me by Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar If you go here, you can watch a video explaining it’s applications in the dating world.

A cab being tracked in Cabspotting:

Dimitri Taylor worked well with Processing to create a program that looked for conversational language on the web based on a search query and generated visualised social landscapes from its finds.

At the opening/exit to the exhibit we had Simon Heijdens’s Lightweeds greeting us. And although the photograph below is pretty poor, and the documentation on his website isn’t very good, I thought it was one of the highlights of the exhibit.

All in all, it’s something that I would recommend, but maybe if you can manage it, go on a thrusday evening when admission is free (that is, if it hadn’t already closed last week… I have to get some more free time).

Being without a computer has left me out of the loop for so long that often I just put things off, to be caught up with at a later date. Sometimes even the things that I can easily catch up on. Simon’s animation is one of them. I’m a few months late with this post but check out Simon’s animation entitled ‘Rain.’ It’s wholly deserving of all the praise its gotten and much more.

Also check his blog, The Animator.

Portishead published their new video to their website this morning and it was promptly 404′d by all of their fans. So unfortunately all we have is this low quality video posted on youtube until they unclog their tubes. After all people, it’s not a truck.

In other Portishead news, Sterogum lavishes praise and pictures on their appearance at Coachella.