Street graffitis as equalizer viz

When street graffiti looks like low-fi equalizer visualizations.
Seen in Lyon, France last week.

New departure with Pierre la Police

As a tribute to my first blogpost 4 years ago, let’s get back to real things with some Pierre la Police stuff (a french cartoonist that I like):

Taken from an exhibit with Marthes Bathori, pierre la police – “sans titre” – 2003
gouache sur papier marouflé sur bois – 46 x 34 cm

Perhaps an interview of the author will be more helpful to grasp his attitude towards “the future”:

“It occured that I brought some drawings I made in my dreams back into the real world. But never made it a guiding line for my work. Surrealism is the artistic expression of something that exists anyway and that is part of each of us. I wasn’t particularly interested in it. I think a walnut is more surrealistic than I am.

What are your other influences (writers, science fiction, music, cinema…) ?
A tuna tin, gunshots, dog clothes, certain types of dust bags, the phenomenon of steam, microwaves…“

Why do I blog this? as with the interview of William Gibson the other day, I often find interesting to know how people write about the future. Pierre la Police is very relevant for that matter… revealing how a tuna tin and dog clothes, as small details, are important to show new avenues.

Left pair of shoes

Left shoes (as well as other kind of clothes) are usual suspects in cities, it’s very often that you can encounter them. Gloves are perfect condidates too but it’s less intriguing to understand what happen after a person lost his/her gloves than the shoes. What is even more curious is when you have the pair of shoes nicely dropped at certain places, as shown on the pictures here.

Who does this? Why? Apart from smiling, what happen when you see this?

Anyway, unnoticed by lots of people, this sort of street artifact is part of the cultural life of cities, always refreshing to run across. The peculair ways they are positioned (especially when you have a pair) a good trigger to imagine what could have happened in these situations. To some extent, it forces the observer to try inferring the history of that place.

(First picture spotted yesterday in Amsterdam, second picture three years ago in Zürich)

Mise-en-scène

“The most obvious way to create a mise-en-scène to support communication is to gather objects in a space, such a room, where they are simultaneously visible, and where not only the objects themselves but also the spatial relationships among them can assume significance. (…) It operates at an architectural scale when centrality asserts the importance of a building or an entrance relative to others, or a corner office suggests the status of its occupant“

Bill Mitchell, chapter 1 of “Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City

Why do I blog this? reading this excerpt of Mitchell’s book, I just thought it fits with this picture I took this week-end.

First life externality

A dish washer that has been trashed with clothes still inside. One of the critical externalities of the our techno-material world… one hour later in the night the device has been removed… soon to be hijacked by silent and tech-savy wizards who operate at the heart of our cities.

Pay attention to these artifacts on the street…
In this case the engine might very well be used soon for quite different purposes (like those people ripping off steal/metal parts and selling them).

Entomological typography.

Research about insects and typography seems to be very curious, look at this description by Dexter Sear of how certain cultures (Egyptian and Mayan culture) incorporated many insects as characters of alphabets throughout history:

Photographer, Kjell Sandved summed up the motivation behind his life’s work when he said, “It is written on the wings of butterflies.” After over 25 years of field photography and scouring through museum insect collections, Kjell Sandved succeeded in finding all characters of our current alphabet within the astoundingly beautiful and varied wing pattern designs of butterflies and moths. Although our understanding of the biological purpose behind such elaborate beautification might focus on behavioral tactics, Kjell’s achievement in producing “The Butterfly Alphabet” is a great example of cultural entomology.

Inflatable simulated targets in the form of tanks/aircrafts

Military Decoy is a company that sell huge military-like inflatable objects such as tanks, aircraft and trucks:

Founded in 1992, Shape International, Inc is a world leader in the research, development and manufacture of simulated military target equipment for the industry. We specialize in inflatable simulated targets satisfying the needs of legitimate defense clients worldwide.
Utilizing cutting edge camouflage technology, Shape provides its customers with beyond state-of-art simulated target equipment. Innovative development allows Shape to achieve unprecedented unprecedented and extraordinarily realistic camouflage and target simulation for a variety of strategic defense applications.

Why do I blog this? because I am crazy of inflatable stuff. Those objects are terrific and there could be very intriguing use for them. In the last issue of Carhartt’s Rugged magazine, some folks explain that it can be deployed for keeping your spot on a parking lot.

RepRap: cheaper 3D printing

RepRap seems to be a Bruce Sterling -esque tool that may allow the existence of spimes. What’s curious here is that it will be cheaper, based on an open source model and available on various computer platforms.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is a practical self-copying 3D printer.

RepRap will make plastic, ceramic, or metal parts, and is itself made from plastic parts, so it will be able to make copies of itself. It is a three-axis robot that moves several material extruders. These extruders produce fine filaments of their working material with a paste-like consistency. If RepRap were making a plastic cone, it would use its plastic extruder to lay down a quickly-hardening 0.5mm filament of molten plastic, drawing a filled-in disc. It would then raise the plastic extrusion head and draw the next layer (a smaller filled disc) on top of the first, repeating the process until it completed the cone. To make an inverted cone it would also lay down a support material under the overhanging parts. The support would be removed when the cone was complete. Conductors can be intermixed with the plastic to form circuits – in 3D even!

The RepRap build cost will be less than $400 US for the bought-in materials, all of which have been selected to be as widely available everywhere in the world as possible. Also, the RepRap software will work on all computer platforms for free. Complete open-source instructions and plans are published on this website for zero cost and available to everyone so, if you want to make one yourself, you can.

Exquisite welding helmets

These welding helmets are impressive:

Why do I blog this? I am still waiting for augmented reality glasses that would look like those superb helmets. Moreover, the “weird” category has been left aside on this blog, I need to catch up.

Barcode Jesus

Scott Blake is an artist who plays with barcode; maybe one of his bets piece is this Jesus portrait made out of barcodes. In Scott’s words:

This is the Bar Code Jesus that I created using my first refined bar code halftone program. The bar code images used look like regular bar codes, but they go beyond the normal density allowed by the bar code technolgy. I created a bar code signature, in the lower left corner using the bar code from a Pepsi 2-Liter.

Why do I blog this? Using barcodes as patterns à la Roy Lichtenstein dots to create new structures seems to be curious. With all those folks trying to find the face of whoever in whatever, it’s strikingly curious to see artists taking it the other-way around: employing non self-revealing pieces like barcodes to create the face of Jesus. What’s next? This is about using everyday artifacts to creat higher-level representations.