oh my gosh i love tate modern

i was there yesterday... oh yes.

reasons why i love tate:

Johnny Hardstaff lecture podcast - download
you must download and listen to these lectures. the first also includes scott eaton from supernatural studios (supernatural studios), who mostly talks about digital sculpture and takes you through the development of a digital scultpture of a greek titan who gets his stomach eaten out everyday by an overly chubby fairy grandmother. it's interesting.
Even more interesting is Johnny Hardstaffs talk where he asks not how we make digital media but why. if you havent seen any of his work (you silly, silly person) get yourself educated:
johnny hardstaff
personally, i think he's a genius.
It's a very inspirational lecture, where he discusses the ethics of design, wether or not digital media will ever be accepted by contemporary art, and the effect of digital mass media.

some lovely, lovely quotes:
"If you can imagine it, you can make it and it's as real as anything else. The definition of real has gone, and i think that is glorious. And we're all making our imagined worlds that we live in and the question is, to what extent are these pollutted by the commercial agendas of others, to what extent are they really us?"

"Designers can speak to the public in a language they understand, they speak this language. Well they don't speak it but they can read it and largely they can because they've always been meant to, they've been schooled and educated in it."

"Work inspired by technology itself, or by a new plugin is always going to be crass and invalid, theyre isn't going to be anything real there, that's not enough. All too often you see that, there's no substance behind that."

"The irony is digital technologies not only facilitate our liberties but they encroach on them aswell. They give you it and they take it away, and it's up to you to determine what it is... embrace photoshop but make it work for you in the design of marxist pamphlets that you can distribute, running through the streets."

YUM.

also...

exhibtions i did see, and you should too because they're great.

rings of saturn
i had to pretty much run around this one as i was about to miss my coach, but it is gorgeous. Unlike anything i've seen before. The work feels surreal but with a very contemporary edge. Some brilliant photography and sculpture.

UBS Photography exhibition
Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky... some other people i'm probably forgetting and will be kicking myself for later. wow. It features "99cent" by Gursky (follow the link for an image that doesn't do it justice) which is a great example of his work, photographs the size of walls, which are sometimes manipulated in sublte ways, which makes what looks like an authentic image feel unreal. I think he uses a large format camera (he must do, the photographs are huge), the people in the photographs are blurred, it looks like they don't belong in the environment they are in, which is brightly coloured and strangley symmetrical.
This exhibition also features Thomas Ruff's "Portraits", which i've read about but never seen. Rows of portraits which tell you very little of the person that has been photographed. Every face looks indifferent, baring nothing (Ruff believes that photographs can only show the surface of things) and making you wander why they're all looking at you like something they scraped off their shoe. Kinda makes you question wether or not you're worth something... or maybe that's just me.
Olivo Barbieri is also included in this exhibition. He usually photographs from above, and uses a depth of field technique to make the subjects look like models that have been placed by a malavelent giant child who might turn on them at any minute. once again, that might just be me.

states of flux
collection of design, photography and film (ie. heaven)
machine eye
If you have even the slightest interest in photography, you should go see this pernament display. I was stood drooling in front of several photographs by Rodchenko (russian constructivist who's photographs are absolutely brilliant. Influenced by the idea of 'ostrananie', or making the everyday strange, he is the master of forshortening), Stiegltiz (founder of "straight" photography), and Atget (working at the same time as Stiegltiz but virtually unknown in his lifetime). There was so much joy in my heart when i was in that room! i learnt about all these people last year and it was brilliant to see their work.

USSR in construction
i love constructivism. i love Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova. I love El Lissitsky. And now that i know that Nikolai Troshin was the magazines art director i love him too. The compostitions are influenced by ideas of constructivism and suprematism, which basically means they're brilliant. Stalinist propaganda with avant garde design. go see!

Richard Hamilton
the citizen
i might post something more in depth on his work later, but it's definately something you should check out. his paintings are amazing.

one more thing...
chemical brothers vs. jacob epstein
oh yes.

the rage... the anger...

the horrible feeling of seeing my lovely website being raped by google ads.
DAMN YOU GODADDY! YOU ARE POO.
anyway, since i managed to figure out how to setup ftp, only to see something that burned my retinas, for now all you're going to be seeing of my lovely website (it really is lovely) are these screen grabs. sorry.













index (FISHIE!!)












music (needs more work methinks)















photography (oooh.. pink)

i'm pretty happy with the design, i got to develop on my existing skills and learnt how to tidy my code up abit. I went for quite an image heavy design, aiming at people with broadband connections and nice wide screens. i tested it out on my imac at home as well which has a smaller screen than these lovely G5s and there weren't any problems, i didn't have to do much extra scrolling as i tried to keep my design quite centered and screensize-ish, using the overflow tag on any layers with lots of information in them. I think that if you don't have broadband in this day and age you're being a bit silly, and don't deserve to see all the lovely photos and graphics i put so much effort into without a wait.
i would to do a bit more work on the music page, there isn't much content there really, i would like to add a little flash music player or something, or maybe video.

i abused a cube - animation

more animation research

yet more animation research. i likes me research. entered names found in motion blur into google taskbar and found more interesting things to look at.





there's no direct link to this little animation, so...
go zeitguised > work > amino assets > .mov link at bottom of page

i'm not sure why i like this one so much, i actually really like all the films i found on that page. In the about section the style is described as "Zeitguised’s high gloss artschool 3D punk" and "complex geometries, surreal subjects, artificial behaviours and the recycling of digital readymades into their distinct halluzinatory narration style."

while your there look at "the zoo"




and "dancing about architecture"

i <3 my copy of motion blur - animation

mmm... research.

Zeitguised - website
"Henrik Mauler and Jamie Raap assemble motion graphics that mediate between our need to make sense of an increasingly confusing world and the complex systems that compromise that world. They do this with pristine infographic mediations and architectual motion explorations. The duo comment on the proliferation of pre-visualization techniques and prefabrication, while creating stark and beautiful forms based on these processes, moving beyond image-led motion graphics to one driven by philosophies."
Ooh.
no C no K


Kontakschmelze (contact fusion)

alexander rutterford - website (no info in profile yet!!! RAAH)

grantz graf - autechre
(yes, i'm still going on about it)


3space



go to sleep - radiohead

now there's a planet!

it's animated and everything. but i can't figure out how to export it as a nice movie.

i still can't animate...

but look!! pretty flames!

i finally made something in maya

that works!!! wooo!!!

flyyy little rocket flyyy...

i've been reading...

"structuralism and semiotics" by Terance Hawkes. It's about structuralism and semiotics. I'm reading it so i can get a better understanding of semiotics and understand what Roland Barthes is going on about in "Mythologies", which i've also started reading. I found this quote which seems applicable to the effect of digital media on communication even though it discusses written forms of communication (books and "administrative machinery").

"...In this respect it is, rather than modern societies that should be defined in negative terms. Our relations with one another are now only occasionally and fragmentarily based upon global experience, the concrete 'apprehension' of one person by another. They are largely the result of a process of indirect reconstruction, through written documents. We are no longer linked to our past by an oral tradition which implies direct contact with others (storytellers, priests, wise men, or elders), but by books ammassed in libaries, books from which we endeavour - with extreme difficulty - to form a picture of their authors. And we communicate with the immense majority of our contemparies by all kinds of intermediaries - written documents or administrative machinery - which undoubtedly vastly extend our contacts but at the same time make those contact somewhat 'unauthentic'.
...We would like to avoid describing negatively the tremendous revolution brought about by the invention of writing, while it confered vast benifits on humanity, did in fact deprive it of something fundamental." - (Claude Levi-Strauss, 1972)

It's all so interesting. (btw i'm a geek)

site map idea - comm design

here's a couple of diagrams of how i think i'm going to do my website. It's going to have five pages. i want each page to have it's own layout, maybe the same standard layout for each page but with different colours and elements / illustrations.
Index / home - links, photos of me, "stuff", ramblings, flashy things (like floria sigismondi?)
Films i like to look at - layout idea - drawings from stills of characters from films etc
- 2001, house of flying daggers, requiem for a dream, the meaning of life
Photography - layout idea - mix of photograms and doodlings (like bjork vespertine artwork)
- my work.
- "mechanical eye" - i want to get this idea across
musics i like to listen to - layout idea - not sure yet, want to include piccies and vids from gigs i've been to and fav lyrics
- muse, radiohead, garbage, bjork, placebo, soulwax, tom waits?
books i do love - layout idea - photos of books and doodlings
- list of fav books
- reviews?
- quotes
i don't want the pages to be too different from the others, i want some elements to cross over the sections. i like the idea of combining photographics elements with illustrations, i think if i do this on all of the pages it will bring it all together.

i think this idea has been heavily influenced by one of my favourite (mini) websites, bjork's greatest hits website (here). each page (one for each song on the album) has it's own feel and colour scheme but uses the same style of illustration on each page. i really like the effect this creates, and i really like the style of illustration used. i also think the layout of the pages is very effective, and allows for alot information to be put onto one page with out it seeming overcrowded or hard to navigate.

random little doodle of layout idea for index / home page. uses elements from my montage. hmm...