[ recap ] Last week we looked at Gordon Pask's Musicolour (a machine that stopped responding in the same way when its performer became repetitive). [ thoughts ] In 2011, Pixar story artist Emma Coats began posting things she learned about storytelling. Twenty-two observations were collected and named Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling. One reads: "When you're stuck, make a list of what WOULDN'T happen next." Coats is describing something to try when you do not know what should happen next,...
8 days ago • 2 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening. [ thoughts ] Earlier this month at Ars Electronica in Linz, Jue Wang presented The Unseen Realm, an installation in which looking changes what you see. A wearable eye tracker maps the viewer's gaze onto a simulation of 64,000 astronomical bodies while also shaping projected geological textures from an abandoned quarry in China. It sounds pretty complicated, but seventy years earlier, Gordon Pask, a cybernetician interested...
15 days ago • 2 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Bruno Munari and art with the Xerox machine. [ thoughts ] This week I've found myself digging into archives. The January 1985 issue of Whole Earth Review opened with Monkey Trap by Birrell Walsh, described as, "Thinking machines grab our attention and won't let go". A sentence from Walsh was highlighted at the beginning of the issue: "It is not our hand that we put into the computer, it is our attention." Walsh was writing in 1985, before the World Wide Web....
22 days ago • 2 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Sol LeWitt, wall drawings and Casey Reas. [ thoughts ] Bruno Munari was an Italian artist and designer whose work crossed graphic design, books, objects, education and experiments with machines. In 1963, he began experimenting with a Xerox 914, a plain paper copier. He was interested in what happened when the material being copied moved while the machine was scanning it. Corraini, Munari's long-time publisher, describes the results as reproducing both the...
30 days ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Ivan Illich, Ink & Switch and malleable software. [ thoughts ] Give two people the same instruction and you can get two different results. You can be very clear and still leave room for interpretation. The American artist Sol LeWitt spent decades making art this way. Before his work became known, he worked in graphic design and in the office of the architect I. M. Pei. By the mid-1960s, LeWitt was making art from simple forms such as lines, squares and cubes,...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at art + technology, technē, Open Score and AARON. [ thoughts ] Sometimes a tool will not quite do what you want. A piece of software has no setting for the thing you need, so you change the way you work instead. By tool here, I mean something made to help us do a job, from a hammer to software. In 1973, the Austrian social critic Ivan Illich published Tools for Conviviality. For Illich, a drill and a school curriculum could both be tools because both had been...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at commonplace books, Abraham Moles, Joan Didion, Niklas Luhmann, and Walter Benjamin. [ thoughts ] I have been thinking about what we mean when we say art + technology. The phrase has become a category of its own. The Guggenheim runs the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has an Art + Technology Lab. In January, the Doris Duke Foundation and Mozilla Foundation launched Artists Make Technology, which brings...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at what survives: the termination of @contemporary.blueprint, seven problems that keep coming round, and archives that outlive accounts. [ thoughts ] I opened the reading list this week and found a book I have no memory of saving. Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, by Abraham Moles, which applies Claude Shannon's information theory to how a person perceives a piece of music, originally published in French in 1958 and in English eight years later. I found...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at hidden defaults: Humboldt's drawing of Chimborazo and a kettle in Quito that won't reach temperature. [ thoughts ] On Friday morning Instagram terminated my page @contemporary.blueprint and forty-three thousand followers went with it. Copyright strikes, for clips of Alan Moore's storytelling course for BBC Maestro. Meta had warned me more than once but the warnings went to an email I don't keep up-to-date with, and some of the posts had been up for over a...
2 months ago • 3 min read