Shooting Wide Open

You know that mini planet effect that you can create in Photoshop by using polar coordinates? Well, this guy has figured out how to make a 360 lens. And his camera is pretty beefy too! Take a look at the Tokyo Camera Style blog.

(Via John.)

[Technology] doesn’t do anything for creativity. Yeah it makes it easier and you get home sooner, but it doesn’t make you more creative. It’s the disease you have to fight in any creative field – ease of use. Technology was heavily distracting everybody. People spent weeks getting the perfect snare or gated reverb sound.

Jack White, It Might Get Loud

By color, I’m not referring to the $40 million flop, but the process of making inks. If you ever thought machine printing these days lacks the personal craftsmanship of darkroom printing, the first video contains some neat footage of colorists (Chief Ink Maker!) mixing and processing CMYK inks from giant drums to mixing by hand. I, for one, had no idea that the ink mix was put through a bunch of ball bearings to break up pigment clumps.

The second video is just a quick snapshot of inkjet cartridge production and is much more industrial, but I thought the contrast in production (not to mention music) was amusing:

Printer Resources for Independent Art Publishers is a blog of “a list of printers recommended by artist book publishers.”

(via Rhizome)

Each entry has the requisite contact info for the printers as well as a brief assessment of what they’re good at and tags indicating location and level of expense. A viable alternative to print on demand? Maybe POD isn’t the answer and we just need better aggregation of information on affordable independent avenues.

On that note:

The thing about information is that information is more valuable when people know it. There’s an exception for business information and super-timely information, but in all other cases, ideas that spread win.

Why Curation Is Just as Important as Creation (via Bryan)

As groundbreaking as it is in terms of empowering individuals to produce high quality objects, the problem with publishing on demand is that it still veers toward the mass produced and impersonal. When will we get to the point where we can assemble somewhat customizable packages like these on demand? I can easily imagine some standard size boxes with a choice of material/print and nubs for CD/DVDs or pockets for postcards. Different compartments for objects of various sizes? A couple of examples, albeit of high volume sellers (it’s the only way prices are affordable for the average person):

1. To expand on my love of McSweeney’s, pictured is Quarterly Concern 36, which is a head containing pamphlets and goodies. $23 on sale. (I altered the image to show the closed head. There is no smaller box; that’s just wishful thinking…)
2. One of the editions of Radiohead’s new album King of Limbs will contain 2 clear vinyl records in a custom built sleeve and “many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradeable plastic to hold it all together” in addition to the CD. $48.

There are no images available of the Radiohead package yet, but fans will buy it sight unseen not just because it’s a limited edition, but because based on past experience, there’s trust in the craftsmanship and uniqueness of the object itself. Who doesn’t want an object that shows off someone’s eccentric vision rather than tames it for the mass market? The economics push the market toward cheap from template, but the individual consumers lust for personalized pieces that look great.

What intrepid businessman will start a company that packages books and printed matter with multimedia? (Blurb expansion?) A quick search brings up places like Elegant Packaging or Aspen, but it’s very expensive for producer and consumer.

What intrepid blogger will do a post surveying photographers and publishers about the production of their loot?

Washington Post, A Gadget’s Life

The Post has a cool little interactive graphic on how different gadgets sales have trended since 1980. MP3 players have trended down and digital cameras have plateaued now that smartphones are on the rise. The radio DJ in me found it fascinating that even though boomboxes and tape players have pretty much died, there is still a healthy if unimpressive number of radios sold, and radio prices haven’t fallen nearly as much as that of other devices.

The only things that have steadily increased in this period are computers and camcorders (guess multifunction devices are too expensive or still not that good).

In this vein, here’s a video in which small French kids try to make sense of old technologies like floppies and vinyl (“an old CD,” which I suppose is true) that are less than 30 years old:

(Thanks Jenni!)

Trimpin: Sound of Invention

Sound and electronic artist Trimpin (New Yorker profile) came in to talk to my video art class, and we did a short little performance on the spot that turned out to be similar to one of his early pieces. We brought in various sound-making objects and as Trimpin tapped on the keys of a typewriter, we made our sounds for our respective keys. It was fun, if a bit imprecise, as fleshy humans are known to be… I think I might use the footage of the typewriter for an unrelated video.

Afterward, he talked to us about his work, which he thinks of mainly as sound art, but which usually involves complex set-ups of analog and digital objects assembled to be interactively auditory. The most memorable one for me was also the silliest – he tells of finding a cannister of recording wire and, unable to find a player for this obsolete technology, of outfitting a small unicycle clown toy with a little backpack holding a tiny amplifier speaker with a the head from a record player trailing behind the clown. He then held the wire taut across a room and let the clown cycle down its length, playing what was recorded on the wire as it went, with varying levels of intelligibility depending on speed. That to me is a great example of how simply we can alter and rework technologies and presentation of media if we just thought hard enough (creatively enough?) about it.

In a similar work, he makes metal shavings, mixes them with alcohol and paints the stuff onto a regular sheet of paper. After it dries, he uses a record head from a record player attached to a mic to record his voice onto the paper by simply moving the head across it. Viewers can then use a play head to move across the paper and hear his voice on headphones. So simple! I love these little things more than his large scale projects, the most widely known one being the guitar sculpture in the Experience Music Project in Seattle. The smaller projects seem less about impressiveness than about illuminating underlying principles, which to me has always been the more striking experience. So what if something is huge and expensive if it doesn’t really change your perception of things, doesn’t give you a new way of looking at things?

For him the week was a week of giving slideshows all over campus multiple times per day, and he seemed to appreciate the more active, spontaneous (and noisy!) interaction in our class. Next quarter, he’s co-teaching a course with Terry Berlier to build a bunch of the structures that will be used in the performance of Gurs Zyklus in May, and I’m really hoping to be in it. Terry’s teaching my sculpture class this term and is a fun instructor – the two of them together is irresistible. I hope I signed up in time. His description of the project is utterly discombobulating in the best way: fire organ, water drops spelling out names, steam, sound… !!

What!

We have built a camera that can look around corners and beyond the line of sight. The camera uses light that travels from the object to the camera indirectly, by reflecting off walls or other obstacles, to reconstruct a 3D shape.

The device has been developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group in collaboration with Bawendi Lab in the Department of Chemistry at MIT. A laser pulse that lasts less than one trillionth of a second is used as a flash and the light returning from the scene is collected by a camera at the equivalent of close to 1 trillion frames per second. Because of this high speed, the camera is aware of the time it takes for the light to travel through the scene. This information is then used to reconstruct shape of objects that are visible from the position of the wall, but not from the laser or camera.

Sounds completely kooky, but you can’t ever underestimate those wizards at MIT.

Now is the time. The time to get rid of real singers in favor of holographic projections. Of course this has to happen in Japan… We can only hope that motivational speakers and politicians are next. Maybe even CEOs.

I just had to post this after I saw android actors on Conscientious Redux

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

In all of these Carr-like articles we are talking about constant new digital stimulation, right? Not simply use of devices to, say, do work. It’s not really so much digital stimulation as stimulation period? If that’s the case it seems as with many things, to come down to an issue of self-control and discipline, whether you can resist the draw of the internet for the sake of your own health or sanity…