"findingmukherjee" via Abhishek in Google Reader

Bare

2012-02-09T13:11:16Z

Bare

Surprise!

2012-02-05T03:21:45Z

Laptop tag group

Cast: Abhishek Mukherjee

Tags:

Reversed

2012-02-02T19:32:38Z

Over the next few months, I will be undertaking a video project that requires to be shot at night in black and white. Low light videography generates the use of a camera more substantial than my iPhone 4S. 'Reversed' is an experiment on shooting video using a DSLR. The video is entirely shot using a borrowed Nikon D90.

All shots were filmed during Art Walk on the first Wednesday of February in Jacksonville FL. What was a few random shots quickly started to tie into a story within the editing software. Editing video is becoming a favorite hobby. I reversed the cuts and slowed them down to 30%. I drew heavy inspiration from John Carey's video "Waiting" -- fiftyfootshadows.net/2010/01/20/waiting/.

Katie Grace Helow's song, Come Home fit the pace perfectly.

Cast: Abhishek Mukherjee

Tags: reverse, art walk, d90, nikon, black and white, bicycle, jacksonville, FL and night

Comprende

2012-01-31T02:26:17Z

“Riding like that … you must not be from this country … you comprende??”

The one, obviously non-hispanic lady in the passenger seat of a beat up little Saturn yelled at me while passing. The Saturn was easily less expensive than the bicycle I was riding and possibly less reliable.

This happened yesterday evening, a low traffic Sunday in the purportedly tolerant Riverside area. The insult made me smile, even chuckle a bit unlike the last one directed at my non-citizen status. That incident happened in 2009. Even from two cars behind, the angry gentleman was cultured enough to know I was from India! He had yelled, “This is not India!! You can’t ride your bike like this!” I was controlling the lane on my bicycle on my way to work on a roadway that was barely ten feet wide. Unlike the ladies who yelled at me yesterday, this gentleman from 2009 seemed more affluent since he wore a tie, douchey sunglasses and drove a shiny, black Acura TL.

I do not blame motorists, affluent or otherwise, for being astonished at a bicyclist controlling the lane — few bicyclists and even fewer law enforcement officers are aware of this leeway. I do find the yelling and honking unnecessary, uncivil and threatening. As a bicyclist, I understand my position is of a minority in Jacksonville. This position of minority comes with resistance from the majority, especially since our paths intersect so often. As unacceptable as this resistance should be in a civilized society, it is even more unacceptable when the said resistance involves threats to beat me up like the douche in the Acura promised before the traffic light turned green. And he was not the first one to threaten to assault me for controlling the lane either.

One does not quit riding a bicycle from fear of motorist’s vengeance. I surely did not quit. If your house gets burgled, you don’t start living in a cave with a very large boulder for a door. If market conditions favor, you could change neighborhoods. Mostly, we beef up security, and get additional padlocks and stronger doors and windows; a dog even. For a bicyclist, there isn’t much that can be done to reduce the incidence of abusive behavior from motorists than to simply chug along, participate in City planning and hope the planners in charge are aware of this problem. One can change the route they use but not always. One can change the time they commute but not always. During the 2009 incident, I was commuting to work and an alternate route would add four miles to my two mile commute.

The infrastructure dictates a bicyclist to operate as if operating a vehicle, leaving us at the mercy of the motorist’s attention. Distractors like a cell phones, radios and passengers are worrisome. We negotiate opening doors of parked cars, potholes, merging traffic and insufficient bike-lanes, all designed with cars and motorists in the primary. On narrow roadways, controlling the lane or even riding on the right tire mark are suggested ways to avoid collisions with either opening doors or getting squeezed into the curb by passing cars. I do all of them and have been for years. However, I do not have the audacity and might to promote it … especially to people who are already intimidated by bicycling in traffic. That’s like saving, “Hey, your house got burgled, consider leaving your door open”.

As a renter, I could change where I lived and where I rode my bicycle the most. My stay in Southside had run its course. I moved to Riverside … only to get hit by a JTA bus and called a Mexican.

I didn’t quite mind being called a Mexican as I did getting hit by a bus.

5 Vignettes // Laya Goes Walking

2012-01-28T18:01:56Z

5 Vignettes is five clips, each five second long with original sounds.

This is five vignettes of Laya going for a walk. She loves being out sniffing around as much as she loves lazing around the couch (which is what she has been doing all morning while I edited and uploaded the video).

Equipment: iPhone 4s, Glif+ and a tripod.
Editing: iMovie

Cast: Abhishek Mukherjee

Tags: 5 vignettes, 5x5, greyhound, walk, river, jacksonville, FL, St. Johns and dog park

Hitler Advocates Bicycling in Jacksonville

2012-01-22T20:39:28Z

A Hitler parody video of bicycle advocacy. This video also invites people to attend the Tweed Ride of 2011 in Jacksonville FL.

Beginning Clip: Fuller Warren Bridge and the Riverwalk of Jacksonville FL, shot by Matt Uhrig.
Hitler's Clips: Bunker Scene from Downfall (2004)

Music
Intro: "You Can't Have This" from the soundtrack of Imprint
End: "Cura Me" by Goliath Flores

Subtitles are created by Bike Jax (Koula, Matt and Abhishek) with help from Micah.

Cast: Abhishek Mukherjee and Bike Jax

Tags: tweed ride, jacksonville, JTA, bikejax, hitler, parody, imprint, goliath flores, cura me, comedy, advocacy, bicycle and bridge

5x5 // making breakfast

2012-01-19T16:32:38Z

This is my first 5x5.
5x5 is five clips, each five second long with original sounds.

Ceramics: Koula Redmond Ceramics
Coffee: Sweetwater Mexico Chiapas
Equipment: iPhone 4s, Glif+ and a tripod.
Editing: iMovie

Cast: Abhishek Mukherjee

Tags: 5 Vignettes, brekafast, coffee, grinding, sausage, eggs, greyhound, 5x5, iphone 4s and iphone

Arboretum

2012-01-11T23:30:23Z

An afternoon's visit to the Arboretum accompanied by Laya.

Shot on iPhone 4S using GorillaPod Video, Glif+ and a tripod. Edited using iMovie.

Music
Andvari by Sigur Ros

Cast: Abhishek Mukherjee

Tags: jacksonville arboretum, arboretum, iphone, 4s, glif, gorillapod, nature, trail, lake, sun, walk, driving, florida, spring and greyhound

Breakfast With The Ojedas

2011-12-25T12:21:03Z

Bicycle ride from my apartment to The Fox for breakfast. Meeting the Ojedas (Alex, Dyana and Maya). Commuting via the Surly Big Dummy Xtracycle. Music by Bill Hailey & His Comets.

Cast: Abhishek Mukherjee

Tags: xtracycle, breakfast, The Fox, Ojeda, Surly, Big Dummy, Jacksonville, FL, Florida, Riverside and Avondale

September JTA Accident

2011-10-05T04:42:47Z

I was hit by a JTA bus while riding my xtracycle on Riverside Ave in Jacksonville FL. The police found JTA at fault. The video footage is from cameras mounted on the bus.

Cast: Abhishek Mukherjee

Tags: JTA, Jacksonville, bicycle, xtracycle, abhishek mukherjee, cycling, accident and chris burns

An Afternoon at the Arboretum

2012-01-13T07:00:10Z

Click here for the High Definition version

The Jacksonville Arboretum is a 120 acre property north of the Regency Mall. It offers a few hours of hikes through some nature trails that seemed inviting last Sunday. I also thought it would be a good subject of my next iPhone-video project, so I brought the tripod along. I have an attachment that can mount my iPhone to the mounting screw of the tripod. The little mounting-plate that carries the mounting screw was sitting in my camera bag on my dresser back home while I set up to do my first panning shot.

The result was a crude set-up of mounting the iPhone on the Glif to the GorillaPod and GorillaPod to the tripod. This is the reason for uneven panning in the video — the best edits from a huge number of failed panning attempts — the missing mounting-plate being the cause of my frustration and anger at the situation and everything around me. Only when I went through the footage in the comfort of my home did I hear me cursing in the background of some of these shots. Cursing at Laya for not being steady, cursing at the tripod etc, all of which have been edited away and replaced by a beautiful song by Sigur Ros.

Constraints are a wonderful teacher of creativity. Only towards the end of the Ravine Trail did I start to embrace the constraint of the missing mounting-plate. Setting up a shot took longer than necessary but it resulted in the panning shot of the meandering stream that emerges from the tiny spring a few hundred yards away. After that shot, I packed away the tripod and the iPhone and focused on Laya, the trail, and the walk. A better, more in-depth movie about the Arboretum will have to wait for another day.

If nature teaches us one lesson, it is that of patience.

Now I want some chocolate fuckyouverymuch: We are fans of The...

2012-01-10T04:37:47Z

Now I want some chocolate

fuckyouverymuch:

We are fans of The Mast Brothers.

kitchen

2012-01-08T06:22:21Z

kitchen

Perhaps we have been focusing on too much of that one thing. May...

2012-01-01T13:34:00Z

Perhaps we have been focusing on too much of that one thing.

May 2012 bring us fresh perspectives.

Equilibrium

2012-01-01T02:57:12Z

I wrote about form and function earlier. Balance between the form and function of ideas and things attract my attention. The article I wrote was at best a hasty rambling. Here is me revisiting the subject in its fundamental with hopes to better explain it.

I am coached in the school of function. My degree in Industrial Engineering was a product of the industrial revolution — the revolution that resulted in mass-produced things that are seemingly emotion-less. This revolution drove some artists to an opposite extreme of architecture and design that I often find superfluous and thus useless, serving no purpose than an emotional one. My education along with my personality leaves little room to appreciate subjective qualities (which I try to discover through explorations in the arts).

Dimitri Fadeyev writes about User Interface and User Experience. His writing weaves around the same topics that interest me: of perception and utility, of form and function. In his blog post, Too Plain, he mentions the reaction of some designers to Apple’s skeuomorphic app designs. iBooks looks like a wood bookshelf while Find My Friends app looks like it is made of stitched leather. His theory is that Apple is trying to strike a balance between a minimalist hardware design—iPhone, and a rich software design, one balancing the other’s lack of emotional appeal. Robert Pirsig would have called the balance between elegant hardware and software quality — the intersection of romantic and classical (subjective and objective). This balance is something the Windows Phone with Metro UI fails to achieve with it’s minimalist hardware and typography centric software.

A designer’s job is to bring human emotions to an emotion-less software. Apple’s skeuomorphic designs appeal differently than Metro UI’s minimalist design. A play on human perception can be seen with the icon for the phone app on most phones. It represents a traditional land-line handset without the chord attached to its end. Traditional land-line phones are getting less and less popular but the image of the handset resonates with us who have grown up in a time when cell-phones were not ubiquitous. Maybe in fifty years or so, when cell phones completely take over the land-line business, the current generation may not relate the handset-icon to making phone calls. A re-design might happen. We may quit making calls altogether. This is already happening with the ‘Save’ floppy-disc icon. Not only are we talking about redesigning it but Apple operating systems are doing away completely with ever having to save an electronic document.

Oftentimes, design distracts from the soundness of the engineering behind it for better or worse. We have all been conned into watching a crappy movie due to its kick-ass trailer. An Aeropress coffee maker lacks the panache of the Chemex but still makes a bitchin’ cup of coffee. Mass produced goods often appear soul-less but it is a product of perception. People who are guided more by intuition than by reason may not find subjective quality in a product mass-produced a gazillion times over simply due to the abundance of it. They would prefer something hand-made and make an emotional connection to it. This handmade product will hold very little promise of soundness and more importantly, consistency of soundness. Consistency of soundness leads to trust which is what consumers really purchase … Patrick Rhone spoke about this on his podcast. Handmade goods do not always carry a history of their construction quality. Soundness of construction of a Shaker Broom may be well known but how can you tell if that coffee table you have been eyeing at the local Arts Market is going to hold up to daily use. The skill to recognize quality is not easy to find or cultivate. Also, good quality products are not always accessible, financially or logistically. If it was, so many would not be shopping at big-box stores for brittle particle-board furniture. One has to trust the craftsman out of a sense of judgement and pure intuition. This can be risky depending on the product at stake.

Further, in Too Plain, Dimitri Fadeyev talks about William Morris’s design aesthetic.

Morris considered Gothic architecture to be the only viable style to build on in England. One interesting aspect of his view was that walls in a Gothic house should never be barren, but instead every inch should be adorned in decorations, tapestries, paintings and furniture so that they all fuse together to create a building as one complete work of art.

When I come across designs that are more decorative than their function demands them to be, I always wonder if any effort that should have been spent in the quality of the function was hurried away and spent on the beautification of the form. I get curious to discover how much the design distracts from the soundness of the engineering. After all, staging a home for a sale is becoming an occupation. A current example is the architectural design of the building my employer leases. This building has wide windows terminating into architecturally decorative arches. While breaking the dull horizontal lines of the exterior, these arches let-in direct sunlight straight into the eyes of some of the employees during certain hours of the day. The arches are impossible to cover up with blinds. Instead of designing functionless arches mimicking the form of Roman aqueducts, the architect’s energy could have been spent in making the layout of offices and cubicles better so one could access the stairwell better — this is currently a logistical nightmare when evacuating during fire-drills.

Similarly, few residential homes seem to be built for living and moving effectively between rooms; few are designed to embrace the sights and sounds outside while balancing insulation and privacy inside. They are built for form and their names reflect it: the Queen Anne, the Craftsman, the Bungalow, the Ranch, the Suburban and so on. However, some designs like Shotgun Style homes are based on the flow of people between rooms, not the exterior design aesthetic. Either way, the appeal puts a design heritage in the primary and finding the most elegant solution of accommodation in the secondary. This reversed logic appears narcissistic to me and makes me revolt away from the form completely despite the few functional merits they may carry.

The excess of form would not bother me as much if function was not compromised. I am not bothered by Apple’s skeuomorphic app design as long as the software functions seamlessly and the mass-produced hardware is elegant and robust. I am not bothered by Metro UI’s lack of ‘emotion’ either (I do find subjective pleasure in using some skeuomorphed apps when my human instincts find familiarity in the software’s design). When using Windows Vista at work, I customize the look and feel of the operating system so that it may be least intrusive in my work-flow, which is primary. I hide the pixel-robbing Excel ribbons, resorting to a handful of small icons and to my memory of key-board shortcuts so I can maximize viewing the rows and columns of a large Excel document. As a response to multi-tasking and constant distractions, I keep my desk uncluttered and knolled.

The abundance of function-less form overwhelms my senses. Inefficiencies of a poorly laid out building, jittery software, jam-packed menus and buttons in excel, throw-away appliances, wasteful use of space and many more get noticed constantly. My brain aggregates them all. My actions compensate for these inefficiencies, subconsciously finding equilibrium. I am, therefore, attracted to concepts of minimalism, to japanese aesthetics, utilitarian bicycles, easy recipes, plain clothing, cellular hiatus, and so on. And I am happy as long as I have an Apple product within easy reach.

Yelping with Cormac: Chili's Grill & Bar

2011-12-29T15:36:41Z

Yelping with Cormac: Chili's Grill & Bar:

“Then we can agree your action has changed the course of the universe in some infinitesimal but irrevocable way. To remove the croutons would not remove the action. You see?

The waiter closed his eyes.

Look at me. Look at me. If you look away I will remove two stars.”

Lifelines

2011-12-29T01:40:50Z

Lifelines

Capturing Life

2011-12-25T19:19:40Z

This video is in Standard Definition. Please visit the Vimeo site for the High Definition version

Photography, videography and web-design go hand in hand. Artists wanting to control the entire experience of the viewer end up with good design all around. John Carey from Fifty Foot Shadows does this better than I can ever hope to do. I religiously use his images as wallpapers on my laptop and phone. They act as a constant source of inspiration and reflection within. This video by him — Waiting — captures the essence of a train-station in India better than any. It was impromptu, unplanned and beautiful. Taken with a handy iPhone, it shows a sliver of life at that railway station better than any photograph taken there would. It tells a story. For me, it is a time machine.

I spent a majority of my life thinking analytically, like an engineer. Artists like John Carey inspire me to look deep and discover my artistic instinct so I may recognize a notable moment when I see it. Devices like my new iPhone make capturing that moment effortless and possible, either by video or photo.

The video above is only my first attempt in capturing a snippet of a part of life that is dear to me. I frequently meet with my good friends Alex, his wife, Dyana, and their daughter, Maya for breakfast on the weekends. We chat, laugh, share, and watch Maya draw. The restaurant is only a few miles away and I typically ride my bicycle to it. It is such an important part of the morning and sets the mood and pace of the remaining day.

Drama

2011-12-25T16:01:13Z

Drama

Big Dummy

2011-12-23T00:58:14Z

Big Dummy