How Space Fills

July 10, 2003

Rhizomatic, space-filling poetry from Bataille: […]the earth first opens to life the primary space of the waters and the surface of the ground. But life quickly takes possession of the air. To start with, it was important to enlarge the surface of the green substance of plants, which absorbs the radiant energy of light. The superposition of leaves in the air extends the volume of this substance considerably: In particular the structure of trees develops this possibility well beyond the level of the grasses. For their part the winged insects and the birds, in the wake of the pollens, invade …

The Accursed (Samba) Share

July 10, 2003

Ben emailed me to ask me something about the provenance of some of my Discreet Computing stuff, which led me to thinking (although I don’t think I’ve answered his question yet): “There’s probably a riff to be done on how current tech burns away attention because of some link with the conspicuously consumptive assumptions of the business world — damn it I have 10,000 people in back offices staring at screens, and my machines are sucking the attention of that many minds, therefore I must be successful…” In fact that might be the way in — computers (used the way …

Cinema Scope / Pass the Pig

July 9, 2003

OLEDs and epaper with the contrast and resolution of the real thing, foldable and flypost-able like the real thing. Wait til you see what I have in my pocket. And cinema is worrried about HDTV! Let pixel-perfect flowers of the new new media bloom. From Headmap: The next generation of devices is going to give us new animals, less easilly defined with preconceived ideas An out-of-content excerpt which fills me with a dreadful excitement. Which reminds me. Banksy does live animals later this month.

Glanceware

July 9, 2003

Lightweight informational awareness…

Brakhage Also

July 8, 2003

Tim points out that there’s a new Criterion DVD of Stan Brakhage available. Good year for experimental film (so far). The ones I really really want to find are a couple of short things I saw at the London Film Makers’ Co-operative screenings in Camden about 10 years ago. I can’t remember the titles, but I think they were by John Tappendam, about whom I know nothing. One was black and white, high contrast, the other colour. Both were formalist things probably made by filming the shadows cast by hanging mobiles or similar. Very fine.

Begone Dull Care

July 3, 2003

The bfi has released its Norman McLaren 2 DVD ‘Collector’s Edition’ set. Mine turned up today. Beautiful. Fantastic transfer, and good selection of films. Lines Horizontal (1961), Mosaic (1965) and Synchromy (1971) are extraordinary visual toccatas. Expensive, but worth it. Buy a video projector, tape down the curtains, and turn up the volume.

Japanese Reprimanded For Denuding Media

July 2, 2003

According to the BBC, Japanese bookstores are set to launch a national campaign to stop so-called “digital shoplifting” by customers using the lastest camera-equipped mobile phones. The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association says the practice is “information theft” and it wants it stopped. It is the kind of thing that most Japanese young women wouldn’t think twice about doing. The Japanese use their phones for much more than just calling. They might spot a new hairstyle or a new dress in a glossy fashion magazine and they want to know what their friends think — so they take a quick snap …

100 Percent Solution

June 30, 2003

The 100th posting…

Mental Picture 91

June 26, 2003

There’s a big Tillmans retrospective on at the moment at Tate Britain; we’re going to make a day of it tomorrow and, if the weather’s nice, catch the new Tate river bus up to Tate Modern afterwards. I’m listening to Dub Tractor’s More or Less Mono. Sparkly music for an otherwise glum day.

Mental Pictures

June 26, 2003

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogs and wikis. HTML seems so ill-suited to dense intertwinglings of thoughts. Ok for simple document layout, but the chunking/scoping seems at the wrong level for anything very fine-grained. I want to be able to pick this site up by a concept, shake it and see how everything else falls into place around it. Some approximation of that would be possible with heavy metadata and hyperbolic trees, but I feel like the map and the document should be the same thing. At the very least I want those visible interconnections within documents that Ted …