Creating work where the work is generated by the work itself

Marker – Window – Blind

A winning formula.

Historical Arc

Point a)

From 'A Second Childhood' by G.K Chesterton.

Point b)
 

Eye Guy from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episode 'I, Eye Guy'.

Corruption

'Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life' Harmen Steenwyck c. 1640 [Formatted for HD PS3 background]

A good blog takes commitment, dedication and work. Recently I purchased a PS3 (almost precisely one month before a price-drop) which has begun to vie for my affections. I changed the background image of my PS3s theme to Harmen Steenwijck's 1640 'Vanitas' painting (above) in order to help remind me of the fleeting nature of the moment and that I am potentially wasting my time on trifles before the inevitability of the void. To date this strategy has been remarkably ineffective.

Corrupted Data icon on custom PS3 Vanitas wallpaper background.

Corrupted Data text on custom PS3 Vanitas wallpaper background.

Recent mix: 8 types of Drugs

One of my favourite Talking Heads songs is 'Drugs' – also known as 'Electricity', 'Drugs (Electricity)' or 'Electricity (Drugs)'. I know a few versions of it and thought I would put some together into a 33-minute mix of variations of the song. The mix is not chronological and I tried to make it follow an arc of the song's character as well as attempting to consider the mix for listenability, so similar versions of the song do not appear subsequently.

Some trivia: The birds recorded for the album version (occurring around 11:40 on this mix) were recorded at the Lone Pine Koala sanctuary in Brisbane, Australia. The sanctuary is still open and is a 24 minute drive from my fathers house.

Download [76.4MB 320kbps .mp3 file via Mediafire]

Tracklist:
1. Drugs (Live bootleg) - Recorded at Boarding House, San Francisco, 1978
2. Electricity (Instrumental) - Bonus Rarities & Outtakes [Buy .mp3 download*]
3. Drugs (Electricity) - The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads. Recorded at Emerald City, Cherry Hill, 1980 [Buy]
4. Drugs - Fear of Music, 1979 [Buy]
5. Drugs (Live bootleg) - Recorded at Palalido, Milan, 1980 [Watch]
6. Electricity (Drugs) - The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads. Recorded at The Agora, Cleveland, 1978 [Buy]
7. Drugs (Alternate Take)- Bonus Rarities & Outtakes [Buy .mp3 download*]
8. Drugs  (Live bootleg) Recorded at Sun Palace, Tokyo 1981


*An American credit card is (still) required to purchase this album, much to my chagrin.

Additional:

This is a new Tumblr by me: #as# (pronounced hashashash).

Self-imposed criteria for posting to #as# are as follows:

• Screengrabs only
• Any cropping must be done with the screengrab software
• No post-production
• Posts can only be made via dropping files into a scripted folder
• Scripted folder will scale the images to 1200 px, date-stamp and automatically post new images (via email).

Go to a Web Site

The notebook dilemma partie deux

To choose a more expensive notebook with robust, high-qulity paper or to choose a less-expensive notebook with cheap, flimsy paper that has a 3D image of a dog wearing glasses on the cover.

The notebook dilemma

To draw on both sides of the page, favouring economy or to draw on one side of the page to prevent ink bleeding through, thus causing the journal or notebook to last half as long.

Commercial work

The client called me, asking for an illustration. I agreed and he gave me the following brief: "I want an image of a stylised new moon - an illustrated perfect circle - black, with a black drop-shadow with a blending mode of 'Multiply' on a black background. I obliged, and sent him an image of what appeared to be a consistently black square. "Nope" he said, "I can still make out the outline of the new moon and a touch of the drop shadow". "Aha!" I cried triumphantly. "I never made the moon or drop-shadow. What I am giving you is in fact, a consistently black square without a pixel of detail or variation". "Sure" he replied, unfazed by my jubilation and edge of superiority. "But I can still imagine it there, which is altering my ability to see a consistently black square which is ultimately what I'm after". "So essentially you want me to create an image of a stylised new moon - an illustrated perfect circle - black, with a black drop-shadow with a blending mode of 'Multiply' on a black background that also stops you from thinking of or seeing in your mind an an image of a stylised new moon - an illustrated perfect circle - black, with a black drop-shadow with a blending mode of 'Multiply' on a black background that is essentially a consistently black square".


"Exactly. And I want it to be 800 pixels square".

A neglected blog becomes a blog about neglect

It's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you
Without a strong rhyme to step to.
Eric B. and Rakim

October was a long time ago. I'd like to write a piece of software that sits on a web server and as you neglect a site it makes said site grow weeds and go to seed. In order to keep the site in check, you need to constantly update it so you're not so much creating content but gardening. Neglect begats neglect. It's like when you forget someone's name and you leave it for too long and pass beyond the threshold of asking their name again. You should know, right?

By way of summary, this:

'

Stay tuned!

(P.S. The baby's name is Louis Francis Matthews - born on the 25th of November, 2011).

Single-step recursion

If I were a t-shirt model I would have a t-shirt made of me modelling the t-shirt and wear it as a t-shirt. Created with the zazzle.com custom t-shirt creator.

Additional: The blank 'Design a Mug' mug:

"Fake" September post

Under a branded sky

Drum solo for single midi xylophone

New sound work - John Bonham's drum solo from 'Moby Dick' .midi file converted to midi xylophone data. Click on the image for a 7.3MB .mp3 version.

More sound stuff is available at my soundcloud.

A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single click

New video work. Contains flashing/strobing colours. More video stuff here.

Recent mix: Melangetout

New quasi-ambient mix of material found from all over the place. Including, but not limited to:

SID noise waves, Wise Scenes, Graeme Revell, FM Einheit, Inuit Eskimos, Boris, The Great Stalacpipe Organ, Tomoko Sauvage, ... , Ursula Bogner, Delia Derbyshire, Wendy Carlos, Broadcast and the Focus Group, ... , The Antenna Repairmen, Dennis James, Bali: Gamelan & Kecak, Knud Viktor, .... , Kenyo Sekimori, Deva Loka, Australian Crawl, ... ,  Nikolay Oorzhak, Gerhard Trede, Ice Lords, and Hydrothermal Emerald. (Some artists uncredited due to unintentional deletion of source files).

Download [98.29MB .mp3 file]


Melangetout is a portmanteau of Mélange (a mix, breccia [rock] or 'The Spice' in Frank Herbert's 'Dune') and 'Mangetout' (from the snowpea or French: 'eat all').