stuka

Compressed 02

pieter | today and tomorrow — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:57:55 +0000

Kim Pimmel combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism. Watch it fullscreen!

Interactive Robotic Painting Machine

pieter | today and tomorrow — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 22:26:07 +0000

“Interactive Robotic Painting Machine” is an installation by Benjamin Grosser. I guess won’t have to explain to you what it is. The machine uses artificial intelligence to paint its own body of work and to make its own decisions. While doing so, it listens to its environment and considers what it hears as input into the painting process.

found at triangulation blog

Make Photoshop Faster

swissmiss — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:55:00 +0000

Here’s a nifty, simple trick to speed up Photoshop: Go into your preferences and set cache levels to 1 and then set image previews to “Never Save”! Hat tip to Dan Rubin!

makephotoshopfaster.com

(via designworklife)

The Sartorialtwist

Will Hudson — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:00:00 +0000

Think you’re familiar with Scott Schuman’s ever popular fashion photography blog, The Sartorialist? Well think again, this random fashion generator shouldn’t provide insight on what to wear this weekend but could perhaps help in the hour leading up to it. Refresh away…

www.thesartorialtwist.com

Eduardo Paolozzi – Screenprints

Kie — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 12:10:46 +0000

Time once again to electroshock Sci-Fi-O-Rama from it’s semi-dormant state, here with a selection of work from the late Scottish sculptor and artist Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (7 March 1924 – 22 April 2005).

Paolozzi has always been a favourite of mine, particularly his beautifully composed, ultra-vibrant graphic screenprints. This post was sparked when I recently picked up a copy of “Paolozzi” a 1999 paperback publication that gives a chronological overview of Eduardo’s work. Here is the back page synopsis, note that I’ve embellished this slightly, altering present to past tense.

Eduardo Paolozzi (of Italian descent) was one of the major figures of postwar British art: A father of Pop Art a creator of key icons of the nuclear age, a brilliant manipulator of the images produced by the media, an iconoclast and traditionalist, an outsider and academican.

Onto the notes, I’ll keep it simple and won’t attempt a heavy analysis. If you would like to read more about Paolozzi, his methods, motivations and technique then the best place to start is his in-depth wikipedia page. One (patronising!) point I will make is when viewing, remember that all of these images hail from the 60′s or 70′s, long before the age of Photoshop. An obvious point for sure, but for me something that underlines just how sophisticated and forward leaning this work was at the time.

Top: “Hollywood Wax Museum from Zero Energy Experimental Pile (Z.E.E.P)” 1969-70 Screenprint on paper. We kick off here with a real trademark pieces, and I’m actually referring to the title not just the artwork, every bit as out there! A real diverse mix of elements features here, Sputnik, attitude indicators, giant Mecha robots, Marylin Monroe and the uneasy focal point of a NASA space monkey (Sam?).

2nd top:“B.A.S.H”1971 Screenprinted on paper. A flat colour, more geometric offering, this one gives clues as to Paolozzi’s background in surrealism.

3rd top: “Silken World of Michelangelo from Moonstrips Empire News” 1967 Screenprint on paper. Another great example of the way that Poalozzi used repeated patterns, to layer up composistions, at no point here does the eye rest easily. Also of note; the deconstructed Disney image worked down to mosiac form, something that appears in other screenprints.

4th top:“Print from Mein Kolner Dom: Blueprints for a New Museum” 1980-81lithograph and screenprint. Another playful and innovative composition; a giant blue bottle, Skylab (remember that?), Albert Einstein, jet packs and more, all playfully juxtaposed over the inners of a grand gothic cathedral.

5th top: “Part One, Frozen Terror… Part Two, Fangs of Death”1965 screenprint. This piece and the subsequent lower two are taken from http://www.paolozziprints.comand are available to buy, signed by the artist with the edition number. Another fab title, this mixes familiar pattern geometrics with pin girls and a strange alien type crusader creature, printed with a typically vivid contrasting colour palette.

6th top: “Cover for a Journal” Screenprint. This more abstract piece features a slick example of overprinting.

7th top: “Why children commit suicide…read next month’s issue” Signed and numbered photolithograph 1965-70. Another crazy title!

8th top: A photo of the artist, taken at a Hamburg ship breakers yard in 1961.

***
Images taken from paolozziprints.com scanned from Paolozzi (Fiona Pearson 1999) http://amzn.to/mwl61i

Public Collectors

Ray O'Meara — Thu, 26 May 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Interesting. It can be inspiring to find a back catalog of imagery and composition from such a vast array cultures/sub-cultures. Crossing a broad spectrum of past printed material, Public Collectors can be a welcome and entertaining resource. What’s interesting is the dialogue between imagery from one scroll page to next, intentional or not. And how, by being collected and documented, they offer a new value.

www.publiccollectors.tumblr.com

Fractal Lab, Disabling WebGL, Bitcoin Miner

(author unknown) — Thu, 19 May 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Fractal Lab

Fractal Lab by Tom Beddard is a WebGL fractal explorer. It has great quality rendering of all kinds of strange 2D and 3D fractals, with tonnes of options and a great interface.

If you want to get started with the really cool stuff, click Fractal library then select something that looks interesting. There are tabs on the right-hand-side of the rendering with further options. Be careful with the number of iterations and max steps, else you might redline your CPU for a bit!

There are keyboard shortcuts which control the position of the camera (WASD + QE and ZX for speed); the controls make it feel like walking around strange 3D landscapes.

This is no mere WebGL demo, it’s fully-featured. In fact, it’s probably one of the best fractal apps that I’ve played with for some time (and I’m a Processing nerd!)

The author also wrote a blog post about Fractal Lab here: Fractal Lab – A WebGL based web application for rendering 2D and 3D fractals in real-time.

Disabling WebGL

In How To Disable WebGL, James McQuaid talks about how to disable WebGL in Chrome and Firefox for Windows 7. This is in response to the WebGL security issues reported last week.

James says:

Once WebGL is effectively sandboxed by Google and Mozilla, I will be happy to turn it back on. Until then, the eye candy will have to wait.

If you’re using a Mac or other unix you should be able to run Chrome/Chromium with --disable-webgl or edit Firefox’s settings with about:config.

JavaScript Bitcoin Miner

bitp.it is a JavaScript bitcoin miner. The author announced it in a post on the Bitcoin Forum.

He says:

We are hoping this will be viewed as an exciting new alternative to banner advertisement that actually has the potential of not being annoying to website visitor and actually generating bitcoins for the website operator.

That sounds pretty optimistic, but it’s extremely intesresting nonetheless.

Note that if you visit bitp.it you’ll actually be contributing to the generation of bitcoins in a shared pool.

Screen-shot-2011-05-08-at-13.51.23.png

Thomas Traum — Sun, 08 May 2011 12:51:48 +0000

25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments

(author unknown) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:51:16 +0000

The King of Limbs Newspaper Album by Stanley Donwood

Eliza Williams — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Earlier today, Stanley Donwood gave CR a first glimpse of the special 'newspaper edition' he has created for Radiohead's latest album, The King of Limbs.

The artwork is designed in the guise of a Sunday newspaper, complete with plastic packaging printed with the album name and imagery. It contains two 10-inch clear vinyl records in a sleeve, a CD of the album, a perforated blotting-sheet artwork, and a newspaper containing art and texts by Donwood.

The newspaper was printed in the US, and uses a standard US newspaper format, which conveniently folds down to approximately album size. The initial idea behind the artwork was to turn away from the elaborate packaging Donwood used for the band's last album, In Rainbows. "In Rainbows was a great big, solid cardboard thing, if you were determined you could probably kill somebody with it, it was very heavy, and almost like a definitive statement," he explains.

By contrast, Donwood and the band wanted the King of Limbs artwork to express something less conclusive. "It's not like the news stops when a newspaper comes out," he continues. "It's just 'this is what's happening today'. So this is released into the world on this day, and this is where this band are right now... it is a continuing thing."

The album artwork is released following the free giveaway by Donwood and Radiohead of the newspaper The Universal Sigh, which was recently conducted all over the world. The King of Limbs paper is a larger and more elaborate offering than The Universal Sigh, though contains some of the same texts and artworks. The newspaper giveaway was inspired by Donwood witnessing the free paper mayhem that often takes place on the London Underground. "It was the biggest art project I'd ever engineered really," he says. "To persuade a lot of people that doing it was a good idea in the first place, and then following it up and making sure that it happened. I think it happened in 61 cities around the world in roughly the same 24-hour period."

Donwood is drawn to the throwaway nature of papers. "Newspapers are eminently disposable," he continues. "Every newspaper is at least 30% a newspaper that's been before, they're 30% recycled... They will fall apart very, very quickly, unlike a Kindle or an iPad that's going to end up on the shores of some subcontinent somewhere. They're almost harmless things to me. And I love the heritage of them, and what newspapers have done to change the world from being a really class-based, almost feudal system to people being able to get information cheaply."

Donwood is conscious, however, that fans are likely to cherish the packaging, despite its ephemeral nature, and also enjoys the idea of it being something that might be protected and well looked-after. He was in part inspired to make the works after discovering a box of old copies of Oz and other 60s radical newspapers that was left, unacknowledged, on Radiohead's Colin Greenwood's doorstep. "They were printed really cheaply and in a real hurry," he says of the discovery, "and they were sort of decaying, they'd lost their corners. You had to open them quite carefully... they'd become this archive that doesn't exist anywhere else, it's not on the internet. So all of these flyers and newspapers and fanzines had acquired a value. Because they rot and they fall to bits, they'd acquired a value that they wouldn't have had. And it was really interesting to read something that was meant for the moment, but had been looked after."

The 60s link continues in the blotting-paper artwork Donwood has created, which could be seen as a large sheet of LSD tabs. "I wouldn't like to push any of those associations," Donwood says coyly, before going on to muse on the idea of someone turning the innocent sheet into the drug. "In theory, not that I would propose such an illegal thing, but somebody could...," he says. "And I don't think that's been done as a marketing thing before."

The humble nature of the artwork for The King of Limbs flies somewhat in the face of the overly elaborate record packaging that has been in fashion of late, particularly for album reissues (this topic was recently covered by Gavin Lucas on the CR blog, here). "It's gone into this almost King James Bible sort of thing," says Donwood of the products. "Where the music is elevated by the packaging into something almost spiritual, almost holy... I wanted to get away from that thing where you elevate the music into something it isn't. Because it's just something you hear, it's in your head. [Previously], the technology to record music has driven what the packaging is, but now that's no longer relevant, you don't really have to have the music in packaging at all. You could just make a whole bunch of art, and if you buy the music, you might want to buy the art."

Donwood has a particularly aversion to CDs and CD packaging, which explains why, of the King of Limbs pack, the CD design is a touch underwhelming compared to the rest of the contents. "If it could have been any worse, it would have been," he says. "There were difficulties with making it any worse. The original idea was to put 'X Format' on it and nothing else. Because I've hated them ever since I started doing record cover designs." The vinyl cover sleeve, by contrast, is beautifully designed, featuring details from a series of oil paintings that Donwood worked on while the band was creating the album.

The newspaper element of the packaging was designed by Donwood, alongside "a certain band member", presumably Thom Yorke. It features fonts scanned from 1930s Depression-era American newspapers, which were compiled by Andrew Leman, of the H P Lovecraft Historical Society of America. "So they're all old fonts in there from the American Depression, the worldwide Depression - the last one, before the one we're apparently in, or hovering around, or are about to enter, or have just left, or whatever it is," says Donwood. "I wanted to make it look old-fashioned rather than like a new graphic-designed, minimal thing."

The King of Limbs Newspaper Album will be shipped to those who've already ordered it on May 9. It costs £30 and can still be purchased online here.

CR's current issue is The Annual, our biggest issue of the year featuring an additional 100 pages of the best work of the past 12 months. If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine. If you subscribe before Wednesday April 27 you will receive the May issue/Annual as part of your subscription.

Xerox Star : Interfaces

colt — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:02:46 +0000

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Kufi Frag

50 Watts — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:09:38 +0000

Form Art

pieter | today and tomorrow — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:52:55 +0000

Form Art is a project made by Alexei Shulgin in 1997. In 1997! He used formal elements of the HTML language, without adding anything to them, to create compositions, animations, images, … The website is packed with little pieces, but make sure to check out the animations and the game.

Node Tutorial Part 19: Backbone.js

(author unknown) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Welcome to part 19 of Let’s Make a Web App, a tutorial series about building a web app with Node. This series will walk you through the major areas you’ll need to face when building your own applications. These tutorials are tagged with lmawa.

Click to show previous tutorials.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Installation and Skeleton App, source code commit: 4ea936b
Part 3: RESTful Methods and Testing, source code commit: 39e66cb
Part 4: Templates, Partials, Creating and Editing Documents, source code commit: f66fdb
Part 5: Authentication, Sessions, Access Control Middleware, source code commit: 03fe9b
Part 6: Interface Basics, source code commit: f2261c
Part 7: Node Library Versions, Jade Tricks, Error Pages, source code commit: 929f5
Part 8: Flash Messages and Helpers, source code commit: 841a49
Part 9: Remember Me, source code commit: 1904c
Part 10: Markdown, source code commit: 11d33
Part 11: Better Testing, source code commit: 6a269ce
Part 12: Updating Mongoose, source code commit: 2a8725
Part 13: Stylus, source code commit: 0a70e40
Part 14: Email, source code commit: 2e81a7b
Part 15: Node Versions, npm Publishing, source code commit: 89abea1
Part 16: Updating to Node 0.4.2 and Express 2, source code commit: 19fbb2
Part 17: UI Improvements, source code commit: 5c5fb5c
Part 18: Full Text Search, source code commit: ceb9b32

Backbone.js

Backbone.js is a library for writing client-side JavaScript. It provides base classes for models, collections, and views. If you’ve ever worked on a project with a library like jQuery and found client-side code becomes unwieldy and hard to navigate, Backbone.js can help!

Nodepad’s simple structure means we’re mostly interested in Backbone’s models, collections, and the persistence layer. The persistence layer is the part that talks to the server, communicating using JSON. The views are also useful, however. As Backbone’s documentation says:

It’s all too easy to create JavaScript applications that end up as tangled piles of jQuery selectors and callbacks.

To put it simply, a Backbone application uses models to interact with data, collections to manage sets of models, and views to link events to models and generate dynamic HTML based on templates. The templates are typically hidden HTML, so in our case we’d write stubs in our Jade templates with display: none, then Backbone views would be used to clone and populate these HTML fragments with data.

Planning a Backbone Application

Planning a Backbone application is a bit like planning server-side software — separate out the data from the views and controllers.

Our application consists of:

A document with an ID, title, and body
A document title row
A list of titles which can be selected, added to, and deleted

This already sounds like Backbone primitives:

Backbone.Model, Document: A document with an ID, title, and body
Backbone.View, DocumentRow: A document title row
Backbone.View, DocumentList: A list of titles which can be selected, added to, and deleted
Backbone.Collection, Documents: A collection of documents

Models

Defining models is simple. Use Backbone.Model.extend to create a new model for your application:

var Document = Backbone.Model.extend({
});

We can’t actually do very much with this yet, and there also needs to be a collection of models. Collections can be reusable or almost like a singleton (for collections that are used once). In this case we just want one list of documents, so I like to create this type of collection by instantiating a Backbone.Collection:

var Documents = new Backbone.Collection();
Documents.url = '/documents/titles.json';

Each model and collection has a url property — it can be a function or a string. Our collection will always use the same URL. And the reason I’m getting the titles and IDs rather than /documents.json is because we can load the full document on demand.

I usually use functions when I need to use data to construct the URL:

var Document = Backbone.Model.extend({
  Collection: Documents,

  url: function() {
    return '/documents/' + this.get('_id') + '.json';
  }
});

As you can see, when loading a Document the URL will contain our Mongo object’s ID.

There’s something slightly fiddly still left to do. While we could use Documents.fetch() to load the titles, the Backbone authors suggest writing it into the template on the server-side to cut down on the extra Ajax request. We can do this in views/layout.jade like this:

script(type='text/javascript')
  Documents.refresh(!{JSON.stringify(documents)});

The part that reads !{JSON.stringify(documents)} is actually server-side, and Documents.refresh() just overwrites all of the collection’s data in the browser.

Views

The two main views are DocumentRow and DocumentList. The DocumentRow view requires some Jade changes as well. It also uses Backbone.View’s events property to watch for clicks on the document titles:

var DocumentRow = Backbone.View.extend({
  tagName: 'li',

  events: {
    'click a': 'open'
  },

  template: _.template($('#document-row-template').html()),

  initialize: function() {
    _.bindAll(this, 'render');
  },

  open: function() {
    $('#document-list .selected').removeClass('selected');
    $(this.el).addClass('selected');
    this.model.display();
  },

  render: function() {
    $(this.el).html(this.template({
      id: this.model.id,
      title: this.model.get('title')
    }));
    return this;
  }
});

The corresponding Jade template looks like this:

ul#document-list
  li#document-row-template(style='display: none')
    a(id='document_{{ id }}') {{ title }}

The document-row-template part will be hidden and used to generate several instances of DocumentRow. The events property in DocumentRow is Backbone’s convention for mapping events to methods. The left-most part, click is the event, then the rest of the string is used as the selector to observe. The Underscore method, bindAll is used to make sure this refers to an instance of DocumentRow when render is called from an event.

I’m using the standard Underscore _.template method to insert each document’s value:

_.templateSettings = {
  interpolate : /\{\{(.+?)\}\}/g
};

To implement displaying a document it simply populates the form fields:

Document = Backbone.Model.extend({
  Collection: Documents,

  url: function() {
    return '/documents/' + this.get('_id') + '.json';
  },

  display: function() {
    this.fetch({
      success: function(model, response) {
        $('#editor-container input.title').val(model.get('title'));
        $('#editor').val(model.get('data'));
      }
    });
  }
});

Conclusion

I’ve only scratched the surface of Backbone here, but you can see some of the major components of the library. When using Backbone with a larger project it may make sense to keep each class in its own file. In general it can certainly help improve over a monolithic soup of selectors and callbacks.

I’ll continue implementing Nodepad’s client-side code with Backbone next week.

This week’s commit was 8e86240.

Slow motion lightning / gifbin.com

(author unknown) — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 13:34:20 +0000

Portraits of a Criminal, Vintage 1920s Portraits from the Sydney Police Archives

AdoreVintage.com — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:34:00 +0000

So in love with the melancholic grit of these 1920s archive photos from the Sydney Police Archives. Many of the photos are featured in a book by Peter Doyle entitled City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948. (Early birthday gift, pretty please?)

Image Credits: Sydney Police Archives
Via: Wolf Eyebrows & La Boite Verte

[image: APTOPIX Austria Bregenz Opera Festival]

rane — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 05:19:34 +0000

Chat Up the Web With the New Chrome 11 Beta

Scott Gilbertson — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:14:56 +0000

The Google Chrome team has pushed out a new beta release of the Chrome web browser, which adds support for the nascent Speech Input API. Yes, now you can talk to the web, it just might not exactly understand what you’re saying.

If you’d like to try it out, subscribe to the Chrome beta channel and then head over to Google’s voice-controlled demo app.

The Speech Input API is designed to give developers a way to write web apps that allow full speech recognition — the transcription from speech-to-text occurs on a speech server after your voice is recorded.

Chrome 11 beta is currently the only browser that supports the brand new Speech Input API and in my testing the results were mixed. So long as you raise your voice the app generally gets things right, though “Webmonkey” was interpreted as, ahem, “wet monkey.”

It’s worth noting that I did my testing using a built-in mic on my MacBook Pro, which is perhaps not the best sound source, especially since others seem to have had better luck. But, like most software that uses voice input, clearly the transcription in Google’s sample app is far from perfect.

However, as the Speech Input API gains more support it will open an entirely new set of possibilities for web apps, enabling everything from online speech-to-text services, realtime video transcriptions, voice chat logs or song lyric generators. Voice input could be particularly helpful on mobile devices and would go a long way toward making web-based apps as compelling as native apps. Voice input also opens up a whole new range of possibilities in creating a more accessible web — fill in forms via speech, browse by voice and so on. Not all of these features are specifically addressed in the new API or Google’s demo, but it’s not hard to imagine creative developers finding a way to make them possible.

Unfortunately, based on this early, very experimental example of the Speech Input API it’s going to be a while before you’re talking your way around the web.

See Also: