Analog Process

One of my interests that I don't talk about a lot on the blog is human color vision. Cones, the cells that detect color, do not simply pick up red, green and blue. It's more like this:

thanks, Wikipedia

 ...where 700nm is pure red, and 400nm is deepest violet. Two things I find interesting about this are 1. we see that certain colors and combination of colors "peak" in perceived intensity, and 2. there is a high degree of redundancy between cones, that is your red cones pick up some orange, yellow, green etc. This redundancy gives humans an advantage over modern digital cameras when it comes to color vision: we can see a wide range of wavelengths, whereas cameras rely on the RGB color model. This means that certain color phenomena such as fluorescence cannot be photographed, only seen.

Guessing from my previously paragraph, you can probably see where I'm going: I've been working with highlighters fairly intensely for the past month, but they don't photograph well. I'm sharing anyway.

All of these drawings are fairly small. After recruiting some volunteers this afternoon (thanks frakbuddy and weh) I tried a larger drawing today, and I'm pleased with the result:

webcams, 36"x12", highlighters on gesso/MDF

Be Thoughtful

 Thanks, Google. New pages:

ENTER THE INTERNET

blobs

crystal lumia

crystal lumia 2

groovy

flag (found gifs)

hack test

pixel possibilities

I need to post some new writing soon! As those of you who follow my Twitter account might know, I recently discovered at the library some books detailing the history of kinetic art from this guy on. Seems to me that when the art world encountered the Duchamp situation in the 20s that there was some sort of schism, driving some artists towards meaning and and the object, and others toward a study of space-time. There seem to be a lot of gaps in the literature, so once I have a clearer picture I'll draft something.

no surprises here

CHATS ARE BACK

Tabbed browsing is pretty hot, too.

   ASK any young net artist today "what's hot on the net," and they will tell you "CHATROOMS." Remembered for their infamy and inanity in the days of AOL, chatrooms were a staple of the web until some unspecified date in the mid-2000s. The two places that you could go to share your thoughts in realtime with friends and complete strangers were either AOL Instant Messenger or the wild landscape of IRC, Internet Relay Chat. I personally hold fond memories of discussing videogame programming with teenagers from eastern Idaho at two in the morning, back in 2003. When the web made its big semantic jump from "me-specific" to "you-specific" back around the mid 2000s, we searched for truth in spite of our companions, and the chatroom fell from glory.

With the rise of Chatroulette and dump.fm in November 2009, the Internet was proven to be growing weary of the predictability of Web 2.0 and searching for a more meaningful social existence. Facebook and other social networking sites had demonstrated to the constituents of the web the gestalt nature of humans in conversation, and a need had arisen. The missing ingredient to this return to social existence was speed. People want to share and hear thoughts - in realtime!

But the tired forms and emoticons of old proved to be insufficient.Several services are now quickly growing that prompt not only new forms of discourse (such as the aforementioned sites, scannerjammer, tinychat, and turntable) but also allow for a person's login to grow a history and personality in the forms of logs, "likes," "DJ points," and "favs" - generally, a rewards system. This encourages the user, and prompts them to put more energy into the strength of their interactions. All in all, a community benefits everyone involved.

Pictures from BYOB

More under the cut!

Happy Customers

highlighter and white-out on paper

holoframe

mappings

levels

watcher of the grid