creativity/machine

Via cityofsound’s del.icio.us I just discovered PingMag. Where have I been?

The most recent entry is about the amazing Social Suicide line of suits.

They have a line that’s available in stores and online, but it seems they still do bespoke suits as well. Here’s a taste:

If you are a man with a tattoo, we might arrange a photo session with you where we take a shot of your tattoo in its exact position and measure you for your suit. We then have your tattoo embroidered on your jacket. Now when you take that jacket off you have your tattoo on your shirt, and when you take that shirt off it shows on your body - in the exact same position.

These suits start from £3 600/ $6 600 dollars.

More at pingmag. For someone who fantasizes about the perfect generic white shirt, endlessly repeated in neat rows in my wardrobe, it’s all a bit creepy, this endlessly customizable future. Creepy, but cool.

Also very interesting:

An interview about the book 3030: New Photography in China:

This fully illustrated survey of 30 of China’s brightest photographers under 30 shows a new generation of artists, unburdened by ideology and immersed in the economic and social changes that have transformed China over the past 20 years.

In the mail yesterday, I got a buddha machine, brought to us by FM3. I love it, and I made a minimalist lo-fi film to celebrate (see below).

Incidentally, it was not only shot but also edited in about 10 minutes using the VideoDJ application (which is a perfectly functional video editing tool) in my Sony Ericsson K800i. Very cool.

alternate link

Excellent review of the buddha machine at PopMatters.

I am sitting in our digital storytelling masterclass, where Daniel is showing us some of the work of the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players - this is a bona fide family of three who scavenge boxes of slides from garage sales, make up wacky suburban post-folk punk 3 chord rock songs to go with them, and turn them into even wackier movies.

From Maximum Ink:

…a couple of years ago in Seattle…Tina found and bought some old slide photos at a yard sale. The box was marked “Mountain Trip to Japan 1959 and that was what was on the film, someone’s color slide photos of a trip to Japan in 1959. Jason, who was a mild mannered struggling singer/songwriter in a city filled with aggressive and thriving singer/songwriters, put his talent to work and wrote songs around the slideshow and The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players were born.

Their songwriting technique has not failed them yet. “We found these slides with eggs on them, so we thought well obviously this song is going to be called “Eggs,” said Jason.

Daniel showed us “eggs”. It was v. good.

I like the idea of cultural “junk” being repurposed in this less-than earnest way. There is plenty of joyful parody going on, but without taking the piss out of the anonymous authors of the “found” photographs.

In the world according to Ultima, apparently the Virtue with which I am most aligned is compassion. Thanks to Ben for leading me on the quest to yet another Internet quiz.

Just got this link via email from my associate supervisor. You have to wonder what makes the voice of the shuttle any kind of expert on such matters, but in any case: they have a whole section of the directory devoted, not to “cool” but to laws of cool, with subsections on “cool sites of the day”, “alternative web aesthetics”, “antithesis of cool”, and, of particular interest to me, ordinary cool - a list of links to everyday life blogs, random webcams, and other mundane stuff. It really is so 1G web. In pidgin French: tres amusement.

But also contains a link to a (2002) C-Theory piece by Jeff Rice on cool, intellectualism, and popular culture (esp digital culture, Wired style) - be interested to hear what readers think about Rice’s formulation of “cool intellectualism” (by which he means academic work, mostly).

The mix, consequently, is the lesson for future intellectual work.

[…]

Instead of [the] traditional vision of intellectual work as private and individual, I consider cool intellectualism as a mix. Cool mixes discourse with discourse, practice with discipline, theory with work. The cool methods I outline here in these notes require further definition, and only through discussion and practice will they eventually be established in the university setting. By drawing on samples to construct discourse, the highly participatory cool medium McLuhan described becomes actualized. Discourse commutates into an ever interlinking chain connecting the university’s ruins […] as samples mixed down in our writing.

P.S. Jeff blogs here.

These and other funny, heart rending and disturbing secrets addressed to imaginary publics at postsecret.

Whatever autotranslator the spammers are using creates the most beautifully proximate language. Got this one this morning, and since it’s the first example I’ve had for ages that wasn’t about viagara, I thought I’d post it.

Our late sight displays that it requires usually of just 2.4 boozings to induce a hang-over. But this pills succours you avoid katzenjammers and awake sensitive immense from head to abdomen and all over else.

I reckon i would quite like to awake “sensitive immense from head to abdomen and all over else” - you’d really know you were alive, wouldn’t you. Especially after 2.4 boozings.

Summer holidays require a lot of conscious allocation of time. A list like this one from found magazine might help:

Apparently a lot of disappointed Americans are joking about moving to Canada (which I guess is analogous to us joking about moving to New Zealand). Personally, I’d rather go the whole hog and move to Norway, but of course the other solution is to simply redraw the borders. Thanks Carlos, who really should start a blog.

There are more of these wondrous timekeeping contraptions at Klockwerks.