2012-04-24
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The original slides are part of a slide presentation by IBM from 1975, putting forward the case computers and networks in business.
From the description of the plusslashfour site: “Art in the style of my first computer”, presumably the Commodore +/4.
2012-04-23
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A lovely photo of car park space 1982, which sits underneath where the new cinemas are being built. 1982 was the year the Barbican Centre was built.
2012-04-21
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Fast Co. Design: Long-Exposure Pics Turn Toyota Factory Into Action Painting (via new-aesthetic):
For these photographs, which are more than four feet long, Stéphane Couturier spliced together images from various points and times in the assembly plant, and then stitched them together to document a whirling, automated motion in which human figures and machines are all intricately involved in a dance of mechanical production.
2012-04-20
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A snapshot of a few trees from my fractal trees demo.
I like black and white minimal things. I think I may have mentioned that earlier.
2012-04-19
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Blurred billboards by Ben Long, via It’s Nice That, submitted by Joe C.
Specifically, variations on Dedham Lock and Mill & Stour Valley and Dedham Church by John Constable.
(I wonder whether Turner’s work would have been more appropriate?)
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A series of photos entitled “Contrasts” by Amelie von Oppen.
I don’t often reblog pictures from Tumblr Radar, but when I do they’re high-contrast black and white multiples. (It’s worth clicking through for more like that.)
On Tumblr, Radar, and advertising
Ars Technica: Tumblr to launch ads starting May 2:
On Wednesday, Tumblr announced in an apparent about-face that it would be allowing paid advertisement on the popular blogging platform. David Kamp, Tumblr CEO and founder, made the announcement at Ad Age’s Digital Conference today in New York.
As recently as April 12, Kamp toldAd Age that advertising was “a complete last resort.” In 2010, the CEO famously said, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times,that the company was “pretty opposed to advertising. It really turns our stomachs.”
Yesterday, however, 25-year-old CEO added that putting ads on Tumblr Radar would get an advertiser 120 million impressions per day and will be available as of May 2.
I can’t say I’m surprised or overly disappointed by the announcement - for a free service it is more of an inevitability.
I’ve noticed a few posts recently in Tumblr Radar that, if not paid, felt as if they weren’t quite arising from sheer popularity- there were some related to the Hunger Games film, and another for the new John Cusack Edgar Allan Poe movie. Perhaps these weren’t actually paid for, but were testing the waters.
The fact that I wasn’t sure if they were paid or not seems to show that the Radar slot feels ripe for advertiisng. It’s small, but well-seen (I’m sure plenty of people check their dashboard multiple times a day, if not hour) but it’s also not too large or garish. If the paid ads aren’t too jarring or obtrusive, I can see it working fairly well for everyone.
I also suspect that any Radar items have to be on Tumblr itself, so that you can like or reblog them. That’s also smart for getting brands on the site, much as I prefer my social networks filled with people, not businesses. (I’ve been musing a post about why I like Flickr for this reason: there are unusually popular accounts around, but if they’re not photographers, they tend to either be states or government departments, like the various NASA institutions, the President, or Downing Street.)
2012-04-16
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Mad Men: Bittorrent Edition, by Conor McGarrigle (via, via):
the video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state.
It also avoids infringing the copyright of Madmen as it is incomplete.
There are some interesting reactions to this on a Metafilter thread. For example, here’s Malice (#):
I’m not so sure that’s the “bittorrent edition” so much as the “online streaming of pirated tv shows” edition.
I also just don’t get how this is lovely at all. It’s rather annoying. Why anyone would voluntarily watch that is beyond me, this is the sort of thing that happens on rainy days to satellite subscribers, or when Netflix is being shitty.
It’s very pretty! And the theme of damage and incompleteness being wreaked upon a background of superficial aesthetic appeal works really well for its source material. Coupled with the (also very pretty song), I found this to hold a compellingly melancholy kind of charm for me — far more so than the AMC show holds, in fact.
shakespeherian added (#)
I think you’re missing what the draw is here for some folks, myself included. One of the ways that art functions is to draw attention to the overlooked, to find weird little spaces in common experience that people tend to skip over impatiently when they’re looking for the Real Meat Of Life, and to say: What if we just look at this one little thing? What if, instead of skipping over it, we acknowledge its commonality, we indulge it in the things we recognize about it, we allow it to play out and examine what it has to offer? Is there anything it can reveal, any way its random parts can accidentally work in concert to make something interesting? This process that so many of us participate in— torrenting episodes of a glossy-looking teevee show— what alternative results can spring from that same activity, and what happens if we just look at those results as if that was what we were trying for?
Also in the thread, as Kevin Slavin noted, there’s a good description of how the effects emerge by Rhomboid.
2012-04-14
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scanzen, from nationalmuseum.af.mil:
General Dynamics F-111A Aardvark. The F-111A could change the angle or “sweep” of its wings in flight. This image shows three different wing positions. With the wings swept forward, the F-111A had more lift to carry heavier loads, and it could land or take off at a slower speed. With the wings swept back, the F-111A could fly at very high speeds.
