Blog posts from 2011

We’re a design studio, so we like going to the degree shows that pop up around London this time of year — London has a number of extremely strong design courses, and seeing what the students are up to is always an inspiration. A couple of weeks ago it was the Goldsmiths Design 2011 Show, and my personal favourite there was Ditto by Matt House. This is what he says:

Copying is fundamental to development and social interaction, yet it is viewed negatively in education and creative fields. With new media, reproduction is engrained in culture allowing us to embrace this phenomenon. How do individuals respond when you reiterate, reprocess and reclaim their property? We are the generation that remix, parody and re-enact. Go henceforth and copy.

(He says it twice, naturally.)

So what did he do? At the core of his show piece was a performance: he sat opposite you wearing a bowler hat (like a Magritte), and copied exactly everything you did, while you were doing it. What you spoke, how you moved, what you drew, your expressions.

I have never felt anything so uncanny. You lose yourself in the mirror-feeling, and it gets confused in your head where free will comes from.

His work speaks directly to the nature of novelty and invention, culture and the individual, and to the creative act — particularly now, in the 21st century, where everything is copy-and-pastable, the whole world is a palette to be dabbed and painted using our new brushes. It’s a wonderful feeling, to be forced to encounter this insight so abruptly!

Anyway, Matt House recently put a new video online, where he literally puts my words and the words of Matt Jones in his own mouth.

He’s taken bits of our public talks and patched them into his own movements. It makes me think: where does character come from? Ideas? He is deliberately being a blank slate, and this accentuates the individuality of Jones, me, and him.

This is weirder for me than for you, I’m sure, but I love it, and here it is:

berg copy from Matt House on Vimeo.

…Putting the right book in the right kid’s hands is kind of like giving that kid superpowers. Because one book leads to the next book and the next book and the next book and that is how a world-view grows. That is how you nourish thought.

Cecil Castellucci, “Better to Light a Candle than to Curse the Darkness” on the LA Review of Books blog

I first came across Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” through the Strictly Kev/Paul Morley masterpiece mix “Raiding The 20th Century”.

It’s an incredibly simple but powerful piece, that becomes hypnotic and immersing as his speech devolves into a drone through the feedback loop he sets up in the performance.

The space that he performs in becomes the instrument – the resonant frequencies of the room feeding back into the loop.

From wikipedia:

I am sitting in a room (1969) is one of composer Alvin Lucier’s best known works, featuring Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have characteristic resonance or formant frequencies (e.g. different between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are emphasized as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The recited text describes this process in action—it begins “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice,” and the rationale, concluding, “I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have,” referring to his own stuttering.

Playing around with the kinect/makerbot set-up at Foo set me thinking of Lucier’s piece, and how the sensor-vernacular interpretation could play out as a playful installation…

First, we need a Kinect chandelier.

Then, we scan the original ‘room’ with it.

Next, we print a new space using a concrete printer.

Which we then scan with the Kinect chandelier…

And so on…

One could imagine the degradation of the structure over the generations of scanning and printing might become quite beautiful or grotesque – a kind of feedback-baroque. And, as we iterate, printing spaces one after the other – generate a sensor-vernacular Park Güell…

If anyone wants to give us an airship hanger and a massive concrete printer this summer, please let us know!

I’m at FooCamp, and I’ve brought a copy of SVK fresh off the press to show some of the folk here.

The Make space at the O’Reilly HQ has Greg Borenstein showing the possibilities of Kinect-hacking, and we were playing around with pointing the UV torch that will come with SVK at the Kinect sensor… and found it punches a hole in the point-cloud of depth-data that the infra-red structured-light of Kinect senses…

It’s quite a striking ‘sensor-vernacular’ image, and my folk-physics explanation of it (at midnight last night, after some Lagunitas IPA) was that the UV was cancelling out the IR – but it might just be that any LED torch light source might have the same effect – just blowing out the sensor – can’t find anything online as yet…

I’m away from my physics–punching colleagues who would put me right in short-order I’m sure (as probably, someone here at Foo will today) but if you have any thoughts…

Update from Greg in email:

For the record, my bet is that the torch’s universe-whole punching power came from its plastic sleeve. Things that are reflective tend to do that by bouncing the IR back directly at the Kinect and giving it a blind spot. Check out the hole where Max Ogden’s eye should be in the scan we made of him last night:

Max wears glasses and his lens’ reflection caused this.

You can actually do wickedly clever things with a mirror and the Kinect to pull different bits of space into the depth image. It’s like being able to cut-and-paste space. For example, Kyle McDonald is trying to use the trick to scan all sides of an object at once.

I like using it to make wormholes…

It’s an extremely busy week here, so I’ll keep this weeknote short and sharp.

On Monday, Alex, Denise, Matt and Timo went to witness the first SVK comics coming of the production line at Pureprint in Sussex. They returned to the studio a bit wide-eyed and delirious, and not just because they had to get up at 7am to make the journey out of London in time; the comic looks beautiful, and we can’t wait to get it into people’s hands.

There’s now a flurry of activity from Webb, Denise, Simon, Alex and myself around how we organise the logistics of warehousing, shipping, labelling and packaging, and all of the other pieces of the “selling physical things” puzzle.

Webb is taking a well deserved break, and by now is refueling his brain in the Mediterranean sun. Just before he left, he took to the stage at the Serpentine Gallery for a discussion with Mark Leckey, and has also been strategising on longer term goals for the company.

Joe started off the week in self-imposed quarantine, but pulled through and is now back with us, thinking around and feeding ideas into our Chaco work. Conversely, Timo’s now out of the office now, but spent some time filming the initial SVK print run, and we should hopefully see that released next week.

Simon and Andy have been on other aspects of the Chaco work, working with our external suppliers, and generally project managing the heck out of things, and in a similar vein, Kari has been chasing suppliers, and tending to the many HR and finance tasks.

Jones is off to FOO camp, but not before looking at potential studio space for us to translocate into, and working on sales documents with Jack and Webb. Jack has also been swapping between our ongoing Chaco work, and with his Facilities Manager hat on, fitting one last desk into our existing space, ahead of our new arrival. More on this subject next week!

That is week 313.

If you’ve heard of artist Royal Robertson, chances are you heard of him the same way I did: via Sufjan Stevens. Sufjan’s most recent album, The Age of Adz, was inspired by Royal Robertson’s art and features one of his pieces on the album cover.

Robertson (1936-1997) was born and lived most of his life in Louisiana. He left school at age 13 and in his late teens apprenticed as a sign painter in the western US. Later in his life, when his wife of 19 years – and mother of his 11 children – left him for another man and took all their children to Texas with her, he descended into paranoid schizophrenia. He declared himself a prophet and began to record his visions in his paintings. Frequent themes in his paintings included spaceships and aliens, futuristic cities, Biblical and religious references, numerology and misogyny, the latter apparently spurred by his wife’s betrayal.

In this video, Sufjan Stevens talks about Robertson and performs “Get Real, Get Right” with some of Robertson’s images appearing on the screen behind him.

As we get closer to shipping SVK, there’s a bit more appearing about it.

Matt ‘D’Israeli’ Brooker, our incredible artist and co-creator is interviewed in the pages of the Judge Dredd Megazine this month.

Alongside insights from the man himself about working with Warren, the technology and techniques he employed to illustrate SVK – there’s a bit of a scoop…

…in that there’s a sneak peak of his awesome cover art for SVK…

Another Friday, another round-up of the various things that have been flying around the office mailing list this week.

Core 77 are running a feature on visualisations of The Metropolis in comics. Part 1 is all about the night:

Simon sent this around – a video from the camera mounted on each of space shuttle Endeavour’s rocket boosters:

Timo sent around the trailer for producer Amon Tobin’s live tour:

Matt Jones sent around Olafur Eliasson‘s latest exhibition ‘Your rainbow panorama‘ – a 360 degree viewing platform ‘suspended between the city and the sky’, which looks incredible.

Denise pointed us to this (via @antimega), a wonderful video of dust devils lifting plastic sheets from strawberry fields:

Finally, as the sun’s out here in London and music features fairly high on our agenda at 6pm on a beautiful Friday evening, Matt Webb sent around this video from Brighton based duo Rizzle Kicks – a superbly produced video, and quite a nice track as well. Enjoy!

Icon magazine asked us to contribute to their monthly “Rethink” feature, where current and commonplace objects are re-imagined.

We continued some of the thinking from our “Media Surfaces” work with Dentsu, around how retail receipts could make the most of the information systems that modern point-of-sales machines are plugged into…

A little quote from our piece:

We’ve added semi-useful info-visualisation of the foods ordered based on “what the till knows” – sparklines, trends – and low-tech personalisation of information that might be useful to regulars. Customers can select events or news stories they are interested in by ticking a check box.

We think the humble receipt could be something like a paper “app” and be valuable in small and playful ways.

Read all about it in this month’s Icon #97, available at all good newsagents!

A library is many things. It’s a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It’s a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. If you want to find out about something, the information is in the reference books—the dictionaries, the encyclopedias, the atlases. If you like to be told a story, the library is the place to go. Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together—just the two of you. A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people—people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

E.B. White in a letter to the children of Troy, Michigan, on the opening of their public library.
via Letters of Note