Thought for the day

"You gotta hear this new box I got, it creates the most offensive noise..." - Robert Quine, speaking to Lester Bangs

Street with a (point of) view

Google’s Street View feature has captured private moments before, but “Street with a View” is the first example of public art we’ve seen that was designed specifically to be documented by Google’s roving cameras, and viewed online through Street View.

For “Street with a View,” artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley enlisted the help of a full cast of artists and performers to set up a series of tableaux—including a parade, a sword fight, a rooftop escape, and a perplexing giant chicken—along Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They then invited Google to drive through the scene and immortalize it in its Street View feature.

GOOD magazine: The Most Exciting Street In The World (10 November 2008)

Related: "Street With a View" project

Photoshop interface physicalized

as real as it gets posted by wandaaaa on Flickr

taa-daa ... print and poster work for software-asli.com

agency : Bates141 Jakarta
creative director : Hendra Lesmono
art director : Andreas Junus & Irawandhani Kamarga
copywriter : Darrick Subrata
photgrapher : Anton Ismael

Via BoingBoing

Public art and architecture has rarely been so exciting

Here's the best photo caption I've seen in a while:

People drink wine at the unveiling ceremony of an enema syringe in a sanatorium in the southern Russian spa town of Inozemtsevo June 18, 2008. A health spa in Russia has unveiled a bronze monument of three cherubs carrying an enema, a design inspired by the 15th century Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.

Russian monument to enemas inspired by Botticelli (Reuters)

A pointy stick and an idea

An artistic Good Samaritan pointed me to Jim Denevan's site:

Jim Denevan makes freehand drawings in sand. At low tide on wide beaches Jim searches the shore for a wave tossed stick. After finding a good stick and composing himself in the near and far environment Jim draws-- laboring up to 7 hours and walking as many as 30 miles. The resulting sand drawing is made entirely freehand w/ no measuring aids whatsoever. From the ground, these drawn environments are experienced as places. Places to explore and be, and to see relation and distance. For a time these tangible specific places exist in the indeterminate environment of ocean shore. From high above the marks are seen as isolated phenomena, much like clouds, rivers or buildings. Soon after Jim's motions and marks are completed water moves over and through, leaving nothing.

I'm still getting over the fact that the man just walks out on the beach with a pointy stick in his hand and an idea in his head and makes beautiful, large-scale art... that is destined to go away at high tide.

I'd like to grab a copy of every photo on his site and post them here, but that would be rude, and also it would deprive you of the fun of checking them out yourself.

The (patent) claim vs. the reality

Philip Greenspun has some useful and interesting thoughts on Internet software patents:

A basic theory of human endeavor suggests that the smartest people who will ever work in a field are those who work in that field when it is new. When a technology is new and exciting, it attracts the best people that it will ever attract. No modern oil painter has ever developed the skill of Vermeer or Rembrandt, guys who pioneered the use of paints that were then new. In computing, among the pioneers were Alan Turing and John Von Neumann. Can we honestly look at Windows Vista and say "Whoa, the guys who built this are way smarter than Turing and Von Neumann"?

If programmers get dumber every year, how come we're smart enough to keep discovering clever new things to patent, things that those pioneers in computer science didn't dream of? We can buy all of our books on amazon.com and the early Internet pioneers couldn't go shopping online because they weren't smart enough to envision online shopping, right?

The answer is that the early Internet pioneers did envision essentially every service available on the present-day Internet. They wrote about it and distributed those writings to tens of thousands of people. They demonstrated prototypes, sometimes to rooms full of more than 1000 people, and distributed films of those demos. The only reason that we believe ourselves to be innovative is that we are too lazy to go to the library and read what was done in the 1960s.

If those old guys were so smart, why didn't they build amazon.com, eBay, and Google? Well, many of them died before the 50,000th person obtained Internet access. There wasn't much point in having an online store when there were only 50 or 100 computers on the Internet.

Read the whole thing. You wouldn't want to miss his timeline of Net innovations. :-)

Internet Software Patents (Philip Greenspun, 15 Feb 2008)