Music — :

Currently (as of 12:58:13 PM AEST, Monday 14th January 2013)...

... Apple computers auto-capitalise 'facebook'.

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.

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

Under a branded sky

Emptiness must be perfect

'Nietzsche's Mirror'

'Axiomatic Re-draw: Silence'

'Slight Delay on the Journey Home'

'Progress Through Reduction'

'The Dandy'

'The Isometricity of Loss'

'Axiomatic Re-draw: Silence (Redux)'

'The Fuzzy Cog Gets the Blog'

'Greater Definition Through Tools'

'The Illusion of the Illusion of Depth'

Selected from a compendium of in-between iPhone screens, 2009-2010, 320 x 480 px. Digital.

Arguably the best itchy cat game on the iPhone

NekoIjiri iPhone app by Tsubasa Azumagakito. "A cat with itchy skin on your iPhone".

You play by touching certain points on the twitching cats body.

Choose a correct spot (which is random each time) and you are "safe". The second picture in the sequence below looks like my childhood cat. The third picture in the sequence looks like a slimmer version of my current cat.

Some spots will annoy the cat and it will hiss at you and the spot you touched will be yellow rather than green.

And choose the wrong spot and it's GAME OVER.

Also, you can submit pictures of cats to be used as the screens in the game, which I have done, so there's a community aspect to it as well.

Available in the iTunes Store FOR FREE [iTunes link].

Art history in 8 swatches

'Art History' swatches, Adobe Illustrator CS3

Selected 'Baroque' swatches, frame.


Technology's not necessarily getting better, just more Baroque.

History is so, like, yesterday

Ahh, Geocities...

For those who came in late, Geocities is/was one of the first free webhosting services on the Internet. Geocities was bought by Yahoo in 1999. In the recent past, Yahoo decided to close Geocities down (effective tomorrow), offering existing users the option to use a paid Yahoo service to host their sites. Archive.org is also working on archiving the old sites, but they are relying on users to submit their sites which will cause some to fall through the cracks.

Which is OK, I guess. These sites make for interesting historical evidence of where the web once was - the tools available, the styles, the sounds. In the archaeology of the multi-layered stratum of digital earth that forms the Internet, Geocities was an important layer. Web rings. A conspicuous absence of gradients. Animated gifs of fires. Midi files. The 256 colour palette. Blue underlined links. Halcyon days.

It's a shame that Yahoo is closing these sites down, but it's their prerogative and they aren't making any money off of the existing Geocities sites, many of which probably aren't even being updated any more. And it is about making money, right? Some of these sites are linked to or bookmarked, and after tomorrow they essentially become an ad for Yahoo via the web being peppered with thousands of additional 'Pages not found' linking to Yahoo and containing massive ads. It's also sad that a huge part of the Internet's collective history will be gone. You may not notice it right away, but you will be notice.

Vale Geocities, VALE.

Roy Orbison - In Dreams (.mid version) [4.6MB .mp3 file]
(Original .mid file found on a Geocities site).

29 minutes for 47 minutes

Recent work:

Actually that's not entirely true. It's a screngrab of the outlines of some work I've been doing for a local comics anthology. The final work does not look like this.

Anyway, there have been many progress bars in my life of late. I'm thinking that whoever coined the term 'progress bar' was being ironic. My laptop has been in the repair shop twice. Almost three times actually. Seems I was a victim of the infamous 2007 NVIDIA fiasco.

Know what I mean?

I'm getting a real sense of the organic and tricky nature of electronic technology. For example: I'm reinstalling some software and the estimated time has been fluctuating wildly. This suggests that the computer is actually uncertain of the time remaining, but it's guessing anyway. What's better, an honest assessment of uncertainty or an educated yet inaccurate stab-in-the-dark?

Computer, ANSWER ME.

Latest Mac OS X can take screengrabs of DVD Player!

Ehh, just kidding. Actually, in a way this is true. Under previous Macintosh operating systems the user wasn't even able to take a grab of the whole screen if the DVD Player application was running. Even if the window of the DVD playing was behind other things or you were selecting a quadrant of the screen not including the Player window you would get an alert and be unable to make the capture. Now, with OS 10.6 or Snow Leopard, whole-screen grabs are OK. Selection grabs are OK and even the Grab application can capture a DVD Player window. However, as you can see above, it sees only gives you a lovely grey grid. Luckily, my latest experimental film is 98 minutes of a grey grid formatted especially for the DVD Player application.

It's a love story.

The Universe is a dome ...

... And the Moon's a balloon.

While researching some work I've been exploring the Google Earth app, which is helping me think about stuff. Recently they added maps of the ocean floor, Mars and the Universe. I was intrigued by the Universe map, and how Google Earth would interpret this. After "flying" around for a while I noticed this:

I thought at first it was an odd cluster of stars, but it looked too neat, too precise. Note that you can see the facets that make up part of the rest of the Universe in the above picture.

The Universe "model" is actually a (relatively) enormous polygonal dome (or two domes forming a sphere), with images of aspects of the Universe laminated onto it. What these images show is the point on the dome where the textures converge. The nadir, I guess.

We can go a little closer in, until it becomes a beautiful, noisy explosion of picture-shards.



The whole Universe/dome thing made me think of the Flammarion Woodcut:


I started wondering what lies "outside" this representation of the Universe, and all I could think of was data without end. The pilgrim looking beyond the veil in the Flammarion print represents a looking beyond preconceived notions of the known Universe and also beyond representations of the Universe. I think with digital technology we also can look beyond the representation until we spy the workings underneath it all, even if they are entirely conceptual. I mean, you need to take a conceptual break looking at the stars to not consider them part of a dome as we are trained to see them this way after living all our lives on a sphere-like object.
Google Earth does an excellent job of serving up the harvested data of the Universe in an easily navigable and accessible way. I reckon it will only be a matter of time before technology can gather actual 3D representations of the Universe, piece by piece. Maybe.


With apologies to David Niven.

The Importance of Being Updated

I got a text today telling me that the iPhone software update to 3.0 had arrived - a day early! There's some nice changes/updates/additions. Now I can (among other things) send and receive MMS messages, which is good, but I'll be watching for any additional charges for these. Interestingly enough, I updated my phone and it downloaded all my latest emails (quite a number of) without being asked. I'm pretty sure I've turned this function off now, but it's nowhere near as transparent as the previous version of the OS. This is an important consideration in the bandwidth-starved mobile hinterland of the antipodes.

Note that my first MMS (above) was not successfully sent at first attempt (thus the exclamation marks). It did eventually get there, assisting me in contributing yet another baby picture to the tiny particles of Wonkavision-esque static flying over our heads at any given moment. I doubt I will send many more, but who knows. I'd like to consider myself some kind of futurist, but I can remember when text messaging first came out thinking to myself: 'That's never going to catch on'. Here we are. :P LMAO, etc.

Looking up while looking up

I enjoy "looking up" in Google Street View on my iPhone. While searching for a business recently I looked up and noticed that almost always a kind of lens-flare effect appears in the sky - must be something to do with the cameras the Street View vehicles use. Sometimes it looks quite beautiful. Here is a selection of the flares over various Melbourne locations:










The last image is the "Sky" over my "Studio". I may yet do something with these, or this idea. Large-scale canvases complete with Google logo and location circle maybe...