I’ve been looking for cool art lately (yup, there is a girl :) and I’m happily surprised to find there are lots of great stuff on the web. There are hundreds of web shops of amateur and independent artists out there (here’s one: boygirlsparty). DeviantArt was a first stop, of course; later followed by Etsy, a big place to find craftsy stuff which has some nice things going on and thru which I found Poketo, an artsy store specializing in wallets and apparel, where I finally found the gift (which will be perfect for her, I swear—had I had it custom-made it wouldn’t be this good).
And ogling through artist’s websites I found the perfect gift for, well, me: Io: Art of the Wired. I don’t know, I can simply feel it: this is a great book. Look at the rave reviews and the great art included:
But what really blew me away was Poketo’s flat worldwide shipping rate and Guu Media’s even bolder FREE global shipping. Nothing says one world louder than free shipping anyplace.
This blog had been gone for quite a while, a while in which I never stopped writing, it’s just that I saved it to a local text file. You see, I wanted (and want) something quite different from this blog than what it is now and I was experimenting with new formats. I was close to figuring out what I wanted but then this whole wonderful Imagery media blitz got a hold of me and I’m focusing all my energies on it. So the new blog will be another while coming and I thought that it was pointless (and rude of my part) to not publish anything in the mean time.
Most of what I’ve been doing this past month or so has been reading my ass off. Oh boy, have I good taste or what:
Wrote this eons ago but I just found it yesterday. Got a sudden urge to do some minor tweaking and re-show it to the world. I know it’s oversimplified and naive but I still find it interesting to play with.
There are also some interesting thoughts on the intersection (and contrast) of art, design, decoration, and advertising on A List Apart’s The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes writeup.
Truth be told, I usually find Jaron Lanier obnoxious, unconvincing, and mushy. His obsession to fancy himself the last bastion of humanism amid the rabid, materialistic techno-geeks bores me, and, though he’s a virtual reality pioneer, I’d never found any of his ideas particularly visionary. Until yesterday.
I was teetering (with excitement) when I read his answer to Edge’s 2005 question: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?:
My belief is that the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use.
He goes on to describe what must surely be one of the most mind-blowing ideas I’ve ever read: “post-symbolic communication.” (Yup, I’ve got the weirdest fetish with symbols themselves—which seems to me to be the mother of all fetishes.) Anyway, wow. That sort of thing is precisely what I imagine when I ramble madly about VR to people (Sergio and Beca can attest to that) only to get the same dull, unimpressed answer: “So what? It’s all fake.” (As if they don’t already spend well over half of their lives in media, which is just another name for artificial, fake, realities: the web, IM, TV, movies, books, games, radio, ads…)
But I digress. I think this extract from an interview to Lanier, The giant worm to Saturn (~1000 words), is a great intro to “post-symbolic communications”. Go read it.
The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.
You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I
am American! I’ve been
devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”
I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.
Of course I’m fascinated with the Speech Accent Archive: a massive (521 samples) archive of English accents from all over the world! They put native and non-native English speakers to read the same sound-rich English paragraph, record them, and then painstakingly transcribe the reading to phonetic symbols and even point out error generalizations (it turns out Mexican poblanos speak with “final obstruent devoicing”, “interdental fricative to stop”, and so on…). It’s pure beauty —though it’s a shame that there’s only one Mexican accent in there, I’m thinking of sending my own recording (they do accept them and even have some precise instructions).
I’ve been walking a lot lately, walking and driving, and I’ve seen more people in the last 2 weeks than in the past 2 months. What never fails to surprise me every time I pay attention is the multiplicity of their circumstances. What troubles that sad woman in the car behind me? That man right there is obviously cheating her wife. The father on the coffetable at my side talks to his daughter and son about graduation trips, money, leisure, the future, whatnot. That well-off lady over there, the one sipping her coffee and chatting with her friends, doesn’t know her two tweens are being stabbed to death right now by the ex-boyfriend of her eldest daughter.
I read somewhere, Savater I guess, about a dying old lady who, confined to bed, comforted herself thinking that, somewhere, someone was making love at that very moment. I couldn’t find that particular quote (there go 3 hours), but my quest wasn’t entirely fruitless. I chanced upon the same thought carried to the extreme: a (looong) list of right-now happenings. It’s often quite tacky (cursi)—Andrea’d love it—but surprisingly original at times (specially at its many gay moments).
No es mi estilo escribir diatribas (habiendo ya gente que ha llevado el genero a alturas insospechadas) y esta no lo sera, pero si estuviera muerto, me revolcaria en mi tumba por lo que Publico ha hecho de su portada. No es la pesima combinacion de colores. No es el nuevo tipo de fuente para los titulos, ralo y demasiado grande. No es el texto enorme de libro infantil ni la consecuente disminucion brutal de contenido real (Para hacerle espacio a una opinion? Son ya las opiniones noticias de primera plana?). No, lo que me mata son esas lineas —ridiculamente gruesas, dolorasamente innecesarias. Tufte habla de chart junk, propongo un nuevo concepto: newspaper junk. Ya mencione lo ridiculo que es poner un articulo de opinion en 1era plana, hace falta volver injuria el insulto con ese marco gris gruesisimo y esos cuadritos de colores?
Y ni siquiera hablemos de los ultrajes que le hicieron a la contraportada…
La primera impresion de mi primo al ver el nuevo diseño fue pensar que Publico se habia vuelto un periodico gratuito. Comparto su opinion. Publico se ha depreciado.
Have you ever chanced upon someone’s blog only to suddenly fall in love and realize here was someone so similar to yourself (only dazzingly more brilliant) with whom you’re bound to cross paths sooner or later? I have. Today. Twice. Here and here.
