As everyone knows, the Japanese have a highly idiosyncratic brand of trouble with the English language, resulting in enormous quantities of inadvertently hilarious yet weirdly poetic Hello Kitty phrases. No doubt these arise mostly from dictionary-based translations led astray by the unfathomable differences between the two languages, which have little in common beyond using vocalizations and marks on paper to communicate meaning.
Downstream is an arresting vision of the Colorado River by renowned landscape photographer Karen Halverson. The Colorado, crucial to development in the West, is at once wilderness, natural resource, recreation area, and wasteland. In seventy large-format color photographs, Halverson captures the river's natural majesty as well as the strange and unexpected beauty of its altered state. The images take us on an intimate exploration of the Colorado's entire length--from its rugged upstream canyons, to its dams and reservoirs, to where it disappears into the desert, entirely consumed. In an insightful, personal introduction to the photographs, Halverson tells how she explored the Colorado--accessing it by car, on foot, and by raft--while learning about its transformation into a complex water delivery system. In a lyrical foreword, historian William Deverell sets the photographs in the illuminating context of Colorado River history and discovery. In both images and prose, the book gives an extraordinary view of the Colorado's great and enduring splendor and a clear-eyed look at the many ironies contained in its waters.
While every computer these days comes pre-loaded with an adequate number of fonts, sometimes you want to create your own. Maybe there's a special project like a family cookbook or class assignment that requires a personal touch. Or maybe your kid wants some AC/DC-esque Trapper Keeper lettering to show his classmates how much he rocks. Whatever the reason, here's how to make your own font.
BookLamp.org is a system for matching readers to books through an analysis of writing styles, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music. Do you like Stephen King’s It, but thought it was too long? The technology behind BookLamp allows you to find books that are written with a similar tone, tense, perspective, action level, description level, and dialog level, while at the same time allowing you to specify details like... half the length. It’s impervious to outside influences - like advertising - that impact socially driven recommendation systems, and isn’t reliant on a large user base to work.
New bass and beats plus live guests (musicians, DJs, poets) and an ear for the global south. Cumbia. Dubstep. Gangsta synthetics. Sound-art. Maghrebi. International exclusives.
Dostoevsky famously railed against Turgenev not for attending an execution, but for being unable to watch the final, grisly moment when the condemned's head was chopped off. "No person has the right to turn away and ignore what happens on earth," Dostoevsky later fumed to a friend, "and there are supreme moral reasons for that."
I am reminded of this Russian literary dispute whenever I watch the films of Michael Haneke.
The dwarfing, Lilliputian qualities of some large urban screen genres could be avoided by these less common configurations and new technologies, their size and resolution instead causing the technology to start to open up, as though walking around inside a giant TV set and getting to know its structural components. This particular aesthetic possibility was given further impetus by the work of Jim Campbell – an American artist whose LED sculptures were another highlight of the Outside the Box exhibition. His ‘Ambiguous Icons’ series, produced around 2000 to 2002, are all based on DIY low resolution matrixes of red LED lights, often as few as 10 by 15, on which surveillance style footage of street scenes are softly rendered at the limits of recognition. The difficulty in reconciling the illusion of continuous moving figures with the rigidity of the discrete LED’s turned the video screen into the site of an alchemically charged tension. When the individual pixels are scaled up into light bulbs you can directly handle then we become simultaneously aware of the electronic moving image as a phenomenon and of its materiality as an open construction – a mysterious medium that is nevertheless within our grasp, our understanding and our participation. It was also tempting to allow it to suggest an image of the Big Screen Network as a disconnected matrix across which one occasionally infers the ill defined scurry of our national media policy. But on a more practical level it is an image of how public screens might turn into a space for both criticism and to motivate active experimentation, a lure to pull the viewer closer into its politics of scale and distance. There should be no remote control for urban screens ...
Theo Jansen is the Dutch creator of what he calls "Kinetic Sculptures," where nature and technology meet. Essentially these sculptures are robots powered by the wind only.
