The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.
The Disintegration Loops arrived with a story that was beautiful and heartbreaking in its own right. It's been repeated so many times that Basinski himself has grown weary of telling it: in the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results.
Shortly after Basinski digitized his loops came the September 11 attacks. From the roof of his space in Brooklyn, he put a video camera on a tripod and captured the final hour of daylight on that day, pointing the camera at a smoldering lower Manhattan. On September 12, he cued the first of his newly created sound pieces and listened to it while watching the footage. The impossibly melancholy music, the gradual fade, and the images of ruin: the project suddenly had a sense of purpose. It would become an elegy for that day. Stills from the video were used for the covers of the CDs, and eventually, the hour-long visual with sound was released on DVD.
I come to DC for a couple weeks of education, culture, and fun. The museums and food are fantastic. But the city is so miserable and grim, everyone is so exhausting to look at, so I try my chances at a club. Nobody is dressed hot, and everyone has uneven lips and fat shoulders that broaden their face and long torsos and dry elbows with nary a clue that they look like that. The fact that I saw Chelsea boots on a woman, a woman who I presume is college-educated and aware it is the year 2022, a woman who was wearing stone washed boot cut high rise jeans as well, like some sort of time traveler with her notes mixed up, made me so profoundly distressed that I had to go back to my hotel and rest. Additionally, I have never been in a club where people are so grimly determined to look like they're having fun. Where is the sprezzatura? Must you all look so pained?
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Dream Club Lab is light, video and robot installation at 72 South 2nd St in San Jose that responds to both the sunlight and projected light at night creating a space for dreams and new visions of a city and space – yet there is no way to get inside. Inhabited by light, dreams and two robots it explores access and disembodiment both in abandoned physical spaces like the Lab and perhaps by metaphor in our everyday lives, where connections primarily exist in the ether.
American architect Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866-1946) was also an artist, writer and stage designer. ... In A primer of higher space (1913) he attempted to provide a visual representation of the fourth dimension through two-dimensional projective drawings.
Spanning twenty feet in diameter, Negev Wheel is an immense, slowly spinning disk filled with sand from the Negev Desert in Israel; the piece presents an ever-changing, mesmerizing image of tumbling change. The sand from that region is made of a mixture of sands from a great many geographic sources, representing complexity within unity and constant evolution within permanence. Completed in 2016.
The visual technique library for visual technique lovers. Enjoy. Learn. Don't gatekeep.But that's just an excuse, it's worth it for the eyecandy alone.
Scott Alexander (pseudonymous author of high-readership blog Slate Star Code/Astral Codex Ten) is insightful and clever, if a bit "too online" for me to subscribe to outright. He's a psychologist by training and that's where he started blogging, but in the past decade his blog's contents have wandered anywhere and everywhere, with posts lengthy and frequent enough I don't understand how he would have time left enough to actually see patients.
Anyway. The post I've linked here is his book review of Tom Wolfe's 1981 critique of modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, which has nothing to do with psychology (except, you know, the psychology of spaces, man) but is fascinating anyway. Fascinating because I don't possess the stamina to read a book-length Tom Wolfe critique of anything, but also because Alexander doesn't just regurgitate Wolfe's points but actually dissects them, prods them, pokes them to see whether they hold up to scrutiny. I can't say whether Alexander's being fair to the source material (as, again, I ain't reading that, and I know zilch about modern architecture) but I can say that I like that he's churned it into something which I can digest, and thus feel enlightened by despite doing none of the work of having to actually *shudder* read the damn thing. Thanks, Scott!