Like, look at this river. All these different places it could enter the lake or the sea, but no, it goes ALL THE WAY to the very tip of the land to enter the water. Artificial? Maybe, but who would bother? Totally unrealistic. pic.twitter.com/9vxBvtEQRT
an RPG designer tweeted a series of posts critiquing the landscape of New Orleans as being an unrealistic design. It's pretty awesome. He even, halfway through, invents a freelancer named Steve, who is supposedly submitting this thing.
And speaking of sloppy: Did you seriously just label this thing as a LAKE? It is ATTACHED TO THE FUCKING OCEAN, STEVE. THAT MAKES IT, BY DEFINITION, NOT A LAKE. pic.twitter.com/MdodcUrjje
The model was constructed (from wood) in interlockable blocks, and showed every single building extant in the city at that time (!!!) so if your building was around then, you can see not only the tiny facsimile of it, but its actual color at the time.
The current project, an installation called "Public Knowledge: Take Part," is planned as a library treasure hunt: "A map is available, to be stamped at each branch. There will also be four bicycle tours covering six to eight libraries per ride."
When the exhibition ends in March, “the hope is to put the model back together,” Lochman says. She has identified three locations big enough to hold it: the Light Court at City Hall, the Roberts Family Gallery at the new Howard Street entrance to SFMOMA, and the Ferry Building.
The installation will be on display in various libraries through March 25.
I was going to squee, but I'll leave off. I think I'll organize a tour myself though.
just sticking my head in here for a second to draw your attention to these awesome photos by Shaun Clover. He selected archival photos from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and then took photos from the exact same spot and blended them together. They look like sci-fi stories where two moments in time are blended by a wormhole or time-warp, or whatever the current fashion calls them. Awesome.
I saw this and thought: now that's some reparative terraforming! It's one of the less grandiose things we can do to reverse the damage we've done to our biosphere (although I think it's plenty grandiose as it is) but it hits a lot of buttons.
First of all: who doesn't love a reef? There are already schools of colorful, curious-looking fish taking in the sights. And seaweed hanging off the cement people's faces. Who doesn't love a reef?
Secondly: it's an invasive/noninvasive project. I mean, yeah, the guy did just plunk down tons of concrete into the ocean where no concrete was before. The fish might find that invasive, particularly during installation. But no one is actually seeding chemicals or changing the terrain, or blocking the sunlight or anything. Just dumping concrete.
And then there's that whole aesthetic issue: i.e. the non-issue until you ask yourself why. Why isn't terraforming aesthetic? I mean, if all the stuff discussed during the conference is really as science fictional and underfunded as all that, why can't they play around with more aesthetic attempts at a fix?
I love that the figures are looking around in wonder at the fish surrounding them. It's cheesy, but effective. I can't wait to see what they look like a few years from now, wreathed in kraut and crusted with molluscs.
I've been working with Kaya Press for about a year now, and we've produced two book trailers, each one for a book that it's really difficult to describe in words. The one above is for our new title -- available next week -- HYPERART: THOMASSON by Genpei Akasegawa. Akasegawa is a Japanese conceptual artist -- a contemporary and colleague of Yoko Ono -- who came up with the concept of "Thomassons" in the late seventies, early eighties.
When an urban structure loses its usage, but remains standing, attached to the property it used to serve, and still being aesthetically maintained, then it is a "Thomasson." We're talking about staircases that lead to nowhere, bricked up ticket windows, outside doors in the third story of a building, etc. Akasegawa contends that these things are not stairs, windows, and doors, but rather art shaped like stairs, windows, and doors: unintentional art created by the city; hyperart.
He and his colleagues refined the name to "Thomasson" because at that time, 1982, American baseball player Gary Thomasson was playing for the Japanese team the Yomiuri Giants ... or rather, NOT playing, because he couldn't seem to manage to hit a ball. Yet they still paid him to be there. Akasegawa thought him the perfect, living hyperart, and named the whole phenomenon after him.
In the mid-eighties, Akasegawa had a column in a Japanese photo magazine about Thomassons, where he accepted submissions of thomassons: photographs, and descriptions. He published these and discussed whether or not they were thomassons, why, and what kind. These columns were eventually collected into a book in the 80's which quickly became a cult classic among Japan's youth.
This publication is the first time that Hyperart: Thomasson has been translated. To mark the occasion, translator Matt Fargo created a Thomassons website where people can submit their own thomassons, as well as vote on whether or not submissions are thomassons, and discuss these.
And I'm working with Kearny Street Workshop to develop a guided performance tour of local San Francisco thomassons. The project is called "SF Thomassons" and there's a special page on Matt's Thomassons website for local exemplars from our stable of photographers.
And finally, Kaya and KSW are having a book launch partay on December 18 in San Francisco, where you can get a free preview of the tour. Yay!
There's also a New York version, and, you can commission any city you want. And here's the best part: you can commission street maps as well. Omigod, I want a Berlin and a San Francisco! Arrggghhh!
a lousy tutorial, but a fun visual. (A clue to why it's a bad tutorial: he was a big Frank Miller fan. Plus, this is his first tutorial.) Anyhoo, don't watch the whole ten minutes, just skip through it.
This one has no soundtrack, which is also a mistake. And it's hard to see what's going on. Also, not as cartoony, so not as fun.
Whoa. That is trippy. It's a 180 degree image, as if taken with a fish-eye lens. This guy says he can go up to six-point perspective. That's drawing on a sphere. Wait, he's got one:
Isn't that crazy? Dude has insane spatial relations in his head. That's something I might could learn to DO (with pain and suffering and a lot of help), but could never learn to SEE.
This just makes me remember that all these drawing tricks are just tricks, to make us think we're seeing what we see when we look around us. 2D drawing is an illusion. Adding points to perspective doesn't bring you closer to how you actually see the world, it just allows you to draw more from the same vantage point. More from your 360 degrees from the same vantage point. Which is ridiculous, since you can't SEE 360 degrees from one vantage point.
So, how many points could you add, just to be ridiculous? And how would you do it? Where would you add the seventh point? Where would it take you, anyway? Would you be drawing 360 degress in all directions from the same vantage point, rather than just 360 degrees around the horizon line? And at that point, does it lose all visual coherence and become illegible?
well, I really haven't checked in on the NASA Mars missions sites in a while (something like three years.) Part of the problem is that the massive amounts of data the rovers are collecting (yes! they're still active!) take a while to sort through, and even then, the globally significant implications (Yes! there was water on Mars! Yes! There was rainfall! Yes! There's still localized magnetic fields on Mars!) are few and far between. And slow in coming.
Of course, my main, perhaps my only, interest in Mars is for my nobble (seven years and counting I've been working on that thing.) So I'm looking for very specific information, and I get bored and wander away fast if I don't get it.
So I've been missing this sort of coolness (see above.)
Anyhoo, I just talked about this with someone a few days ago. Perspectives on what Mars looks like have improved enormously with the rover missions and the reconnaisance orbiter missions. Before then, all you had was basically a satellite view, and a dog's eye view from the previous rover. The dog's eye view of a dog with a very short leash.
Neither of these perspectives is a human one. Our elevation from the ground, or our shape or wiring, is such that we don't look down, or feel a closeness to the dirt and rocks under our feet. We're always stretching up and up to get a higher view. And the first thing we do in terra incognita is to go find a hill or promontory and get on top of it, so we can see around better. The human perspective is one of constantly changing perspective, five feet off the ground, but off an extremely variable and quick-changing ground. The human perspective is the one that fills the gap between the dog's eye view and the satellite view.
The current rovers are much taller (man's eye view) and can go much farther, and have lasted much longer. So there have been many opportunities to change that perspective. And the reconnaisance orbiter has come far lower into the Martian atmosphere than intended, and of course far lower than any previous orbiters have done. So much so that the orbiter's images have been almost at fighter-jet-eye-view. That's close to the range of human perspective.
But. There's still a gap between the rover's perspective and the orbiter's perspective. They're filling that gap with clever science and CGI. But the CGI isn't Pixar enough (even Pixar isn't Pixar enough) to read as "realistically" as a photograph. Nor should it. So the human perspective on Mars is still missing.
The end of the video above demonstrates exactly what I mean. (Starting at about 3:30.)
this one is nifty, if random and, ultimately, pointless. And half of it is credits. But I like how the figure gets smaller as it goes off into the distance: perspective! Yeah! And it proves that you don't have to be able to draw to create lifelike movement in an animation (although it sure helps.) Mild kudoes.
And here's the opening shot, an amazing, eight minute rolling shot of row after row of worktables on a factory floor. You start out thinking, oh this is just a boring factory scene ... an interior. And after about a minute of row after row after row going by, you start to get it: this is a landscape, not an interior.
And here's a segment with Burtynsky himself speaking from a Canadian tv show.
I still haven't seen the film, but this whole things excites me to no end. I'm gonna go consume some of his product and then report back (maybe).
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
-- George Orwell
Geography and space are always gendered, always raced, always economical and always sexual. The textures that bind them together are daily re-written through a word, a gaze, a gesture.
-- Irit Rogoff
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