Brightwash

The Sixth Sense. “It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment.” Created by the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT, it’s really neat! But just a prototype for now – it currently looks like a bird cage toy! Oh and you get to paint your nails different colors (a la ice truck killer!) OR wear marker caps on them. Sounds like my kind of future.
See the video from the TED conference.

It feels wonderful, for once, to be so unoriginal, to be lost in this enormous planetary crowd and to share this crowd’s wishes, its excitement, its probable coming delight.

– Momus

Photo from an excellent series by Callie Shell

Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

Most of us assume that artists – musicians, writers, poets, painters – are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.

Taken from “The Creative Personality” via The New Shelton Wet/Dry

Image by Wang Qingsong

Quietly wait for the catastrophe of your personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

Tell that punk to find a cardboard box, put all his things in it and get out of here.

One reason concerts are alive and records are dead is that there’s a new value in things which can’t be uploaded as digital content to the internet. I call this phenomenon “the post-bit atom”. It also explains why the art market is booming. Art and music have become social occasions. An art opening or a concert (or, even better, an art opening with a concert included) is a chance for people who spend all day in front of computer screens to see their fellow human beings and share an intense, loud, colourful, real experience with them.

Art and music are also “distinction machines”: efficient ways for people to sum up complex clusters of values — social, political, aesthetic and ethical — and connect with like-minded souls. None of this is going to become less important any time soon.

The golden ratio and it’s occurrences in nature, math, geometry and art is interesting stuff. As far as math goes, the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio are so easy to wrap your head around:

In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The golden ratio is approximately 1.6180339887.
A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden spiral.

It’s said that aesthetically people prefer shapes that employ the golden ratio for proportion. I’ve never tried using this number in design, but last week I came across the Phiculator, it’s a simple flash application that does the math for you. You enter in a dimension and it will calculate the corresponding dimension based on the golden ratio. I know it’s not hard math to do (divide your larger side by 1.618), but the calculator makes it funner.

At some point I created a point system, like breaking my life down into categories, and then in each category trying to achieve certain things in a week’s time. Every Sunday night I would tally up what I had achieved, for a total possible of 35 points. It was mind, body, career, personal management/ relationship contribution. It was pretty funny. It was really ambitious in retrospect. The stuff I set out to do each week was pretty much impossible.

– Demetri Martin

Today I found out two things. #1: Lou Reed is playing the Norva on April 25th. I’m into old Lou Reed and want to go out of curiosity, although I’m not real current on the goings on of Lou Reed. I hate it when the classics only play their new stuff even though I can see why they would. #2: Stefan Sagmeister is giving a presentation, I assume in support of his new book, on April 18th at the Contemporary Art Center in Virginia Beach. Interesting: These two have collaborated a couple times, here is a link to a kind of old interview/conversation.

Whenever I do something that needs a little bit of my guts, it turns out fine and whenever I go the wimpy way, it doesn’t.

– Stefan Sagmeister

I also “found out” (realized) the ladies at the bagel shop actually look like bagels. As close as people could look to bagels – pale and doughy and the same everyday. That’s probably mean, but they are too, I guess the bagels and me make them cranky.

And one of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he’s such an unprecedented figure in American politics—so much so that everything he’s trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal.

I think it’s much more incontrovertible that he’s actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that’s not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition—but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control.

– Michael Beirut

Our generation has no choice but to indulge in a revised futurism beyond the historically-anchored concept of Futurism. Uninhibited time-shifting and multi-directional time-travel are more advanced than constantly pushing the seams of forward progress. With no new territory, we cannot simply be the New Adventures of Lewis and Clark to etch our names in heavy tomes. We must move back and forth, side to side in our honest attempt to break new ground.

-W. David MARX, Neojaponisme Manifesto

Despite it’s narrow color scheme, Neojaponisme covers a wide range of topics in depth. I love essay blogs, even if this one calls my blog content into question … “#5. We refuse to abandon the Net to hollow carbohydrates!” Also see it’s less formal companion, Meta no Tame.