Archive for January 2016
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness”*…
Conversely, it’s amazing how how complete the delusion that all mistakes are ugly…
Corey Johnson runs a Tumblr called “Art of the Glitch,” where he posts images that he’s captured of erratic irregularities in analog technology, but only those that meet the requirements of his personal interest in glitch art…
“There was a precision and a refinement to that particular glitch style that I’ve been chasing after in my own work,” Johnson says. He’s not interested in the total destruction that some glitch artists practice; he sees the glitch as “more a storytelling tool than an aesthetic unto itself.” More resolutely, he says he’s looking for that “weird balance of destruction and tangibility.”
No more is this obvious in his latest series of images that have been created from obstreperous VCR errors. These often skew a single subject—the centerpiece of his story—especially faceless people: juddering skulls wrapped in pallid skin with sudden bands of discordant color ripping across them like the scratch of a claw. Add to this the inescapable repetition of the GIF, and these images almost seem depraved, resembling hell’s endless torture of its sinners…
More at “The Creepy Beauty of VCR Errors,” and “Art of the Glitch.”
* Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
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As we glory in glitches, we might send delightfully-drawn birthday greetings to Paul Gustave Doré; he was born on this date in 1832. An engraver, illustrator, and sculptor, Dore is probably best-remembered as the man who showed us Heaven and Hell: the canonical illustrator of works by Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, Cervantes, and Dante.
Don Quixote, his horse Rocinante, and his squire Sancho Panza after an unsuccessful attack on a windmill.
The Tempest of Hell in THE DIVINE COMEDY
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”*…
The first issue of the the first volume of the first scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
Scientific papers, at the very dawn of that writing form, hadn’t yet evolved the conventions we’re so familiar with today. As a result, the contents of that first volume (and those that followed) are a fascinating mix of the groundbreaking, the banal, and the bizarre. Some are written as letters, some take the form of essays, some are abstracts or reviews of separately published books, and some are just plain inscrutable…
For example, this contribution from Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry and a pioneer of the scientific method:
A New Frigorifick Experiment Shewing, How a Considerable Degree of Cold May be Suddenly Produced without the Help of Snow, Ice, Haile, Wind, or Niter, and That at Any Time of the Year – Robert Boyle (again!) (Phil Trans 1:255-261). The word “frigorific”, which Boyle apparently coined for this title, meant “producing cold”, and Boyle’s claim was that simply mixing ammonium chloride into water would cool the solution down. This doesn’t seem to actually be true (saltpetre is frigorific; straight ammonium chloride can keep water liquid below normal freezing point, but isn’t actually frigorific). But although Boyle’s title is a bit hyperbolic, and he does go on a bit, he describes his experiments quite lucidly, so it’s probably unfair to call this one a weird paper. Whether Boyle was right or wrong, here he was doing modern science…
Stephen Heard observes…
Boyle’s Frigorifick paper raises an important point: not every paper in the early Philosophical Transactions was weird, even if in a few case it takes a close reading to realize that. The oddities are interspersed with important observations (like those of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot) and descriptions of major advances (like Robert Hooke’s microscopic observations of cells). But the oddities are there by the dozen, and they give the impression of a freewheeling, chaotic, and perhaps somewhat credulous period at the birth of modern science. It was not yet quite clear where the boundaries of science were – where to draw the lines between science and engineering, or architecture, or alchemy, or wild speculation…
Sound familiar?
See more examples and learn more at “The Golden Age of Weird Papers.”
* Albert Einstein
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As we scratch our chins, we might spare a thought for Max Born; he died on this date in 1970. A German physicist and Nobel Laureate, he coined the phrase “quantum mechanics” to describe the field in which he made his greatest contributions. But beyond his accomplishments as a practitioner, he was a master teacher whose students included Enrico Fermi and Werner Heisenberg– both of whom became Nobel Laureates before their mentor– and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Less well-known is that Born, who died in 1970, was the grandfather of Australian phenom and definitive Sandy-portrayer Olivia Newton-John.
“When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor”*…
Studio portrait (circa 1935), one of only three verified photographs of Robert Johnson
Eric Clapton once described Robert Johnson as, “the most important blues singer that ever lived”. The recordings that Johnson made between 1936 and 1937, collected in two volumes entitled King of the Delta Blues Singers, not only mark the apogee of the blues form, they stand among the most influential recordings of all time…
And now, nearly 50 years after Columbia first packaged his work as King of the Delta Blues, we discover that we’ve been listening to these immortal songs at the wrong speed all along. Either the recordings were accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78, or else they were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting. Whatever, the common consensus among musicologists is that we’ve been listening to Johnson at least 20% too fast. Numerous bloggers have helpfully slowed down Johnson’s best-known work and provided samples so that, for the first time, we can hear Johnson as he intended to be heard…
* Bob Dylan
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As we make our deals with the Devil, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that Billboard magazine published the first pop music chart– the “Music Popularity Chart”– based on record sales. A listing of the ten most popular records, it became a weekly feature in 1940. It fluctuated in size from ten to 30 records until 1955, when Billboard introduced its first Top 100 chart. The “Hot 100” chart, now recognized as the definitive singles chart in the US, was first published on August 4th, 1958.
“The claim that lies beneath the notion of intellectual property is similar or identical to the one that underpins notions of privacy… You can’t trash privacy and hope to retain a sense of respect for IP”*…
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From Peter Sunde (co-founder of Pirate Bay and leader of Finland’s Pirate Party), “Kopimashin“:
The Kopimashin creates an endless amount of copies of a specific audio track (gnarls barkley’s crazy). The audio track is copied to /dev/null, a unix data pipe for avoiding permanent storage. The Kopimashins lcd display consists of three rows of information, the serial number of the mashin, amount of copies created and the dollar value it represents in losses for the record labels (Downtown Records / Warner Music), currently represented by USD1,25 per copied piece.
The goal of the kopimashin is to make the audio track the most copied in the world and while doing so bankrupting the record industry.
This project is part of the psk value series.
86mm x 54mm x 19mm. Series of 13.
raspberry pi, lcd display, python code
* Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant
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As we tickle the torrents, we might send exquisitely-phrased birthday greetings to Marcus Tullius Cicero; he was born on this date in 106 BCE. A Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist, Cicero was one of Rome’s greatest orators and prose stylists.
He was executed in 43 BCE (his head and hands were amputated) for his Philippics, a series of speeches attacking Mark Antony and calling for a restoration of the Republic. Sic semper prōtestor.
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