March 4, 2011
Pogo is an electronic music artist living in Perth, Western Australia. His work consists of recording small sounds from a film or a specific scene, and sequencing the sounds together to form a new piece of music, a method of sampling first made popular by House music producer and UK Garage influence Todd Edwards in the 1990s.
His track Alice is a composition of sounds from the Disney film Alice in Wonderland. Pogo took part in a project hosted by Disney/Pixar to produce a track based on their film, Up. He has later since produced two more mixes, ‘Toyz Noize’ and ‘Buzzwing,’ based on the movie Toy Story. Pogo has since produced tracks using samples from films such as Mary Poppins, Snow White, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Sword in the Stone, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Hook, Toy Story, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
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March 3, 2011
Bridget Riley (b. 1931) is an English painter who is one of the foremost proponents of op art. She was born in London and studied at the Royal College of Art, where her fellow students included artists Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach. Her early work was figurative with a semi-impressionist style. Around 1960 she began to develop her signature style consisting of black and white geometric patterns that explore the dynamism of sight and produce a disorienting effect on the eye.
They present a great variety of geometric forms that produce sensations of movement or color. Visually, these works relate to many concerns of the period: a perceived need for audience participation (this relates them to the ‘Happenings,’ for which the period is famous), challenges to the notion of the mind-body duality which led some people to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs; concerns with a tension between a scientific future which might be very beneficial or might lead to a nuclear war; and fears about the loss of genuine individual experience in a Brave New World.
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March 3, 2011
C. Allan Gilbert (1873 – 1929) was a prominent American illustrator. He is especially remembered for a widely published drawing (a memento mori) titled ‘All Is Vanity.’ The drawing employs a double image (or visual pun) in which the scene of a woman admiring herself in a mirror, when viewed from a distance, appears to be a human skull.
It is less widely known that Gilbert was an early contributor to animation, and a camouflage artist (or camoufleur) for the U.S. Shipping Board during World War I.
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March 3, 2011
The term illusory motion is used to define the appearance of movement in a static image. This is an optical illusion in which a static image appears to be moving due to the cognitive effects of interacting color contrasts and shape position.
Another type of motion illusion that causes an optical illusion is when a moving object appears to be moving in a path other than what is perceived by the brain. An example of this can be demonstrated by placing a colored filter over ones eye of the observer, and swinging a ball back and forth in front of them. To the observer the ball appears to be swinging in a circular motion.
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March 3, 2011
An optical illusion is characterized by visually perceived images that differ from objective reality. An illusion is different from a hallucination; a hallucination is sensing something which is not real, but an illusion is interpreting what we sense wrongly.
The information gathered by the eye is processed in the brain to give a percept that does not tally with a physical measurement of the stimulus source. There are three main types: literal optical illusions that create images that are different from the objects that make them, physiological ones that are the effects on the eyes and brain of excessive stimulation of a specific type (brightness, tilt, color, movement), and cognitive illusions where the eye and brain make unconscious inferences.
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March 3, 2011
Seattle Hempfest is an annual event in Seattle, Washington, the world’s largest annual gathering advocating decriminalization of marijuana. Founded in 1991 as the Washington Hemp Expo (attended by 500 people), it has grown into a 2-day annual political rally, concert, and arts and crafts fair with attendance typically over 250,000. Speakers have included Seattle city council member Nick Licata, actor/activist Woody Harrelson, travel writer and TV host Rick Steves, and former chief of the Seattle Police Department Norm Stamper.
Sixty people were cited for illegal marijuana use at the 1997 Hempfest, and about twenty were arrested the following year. Eventually Hempfest and the police reached a modus vivendi: there was only one arrest in 2001. The political context surrounding marijuana in Seattle and Washington has changed considerably over the years. Washington legalized medical marijuana in 1998. In 2003, Seattle passed an initiative that made adult personal use marijuana offenses the city’s lowest law enforcement priority.
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March 3, 2011
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is a 2007 American documentary film that follows Steve Wiebe as he tries to take the world high score for the arcade game Donkey Kong from reigning champion Billy Mitchell. The film premiered at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival.
A scripted film adaptation is already in the works. Director Seth Gordon has said that the movie might be a sequel instead of a remake, telling the story of how the documentary changed both men’s lives, as well as their continuing rivalry.
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March 2, 2011
Transcendent Man is a documentary film by filmmaker Barry Ptolemy. The film chronicles the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, and author of ‘The Singularity is Near.’ ‘Transcendent Man’ presents his vision of technological singularity, the point in the future in which technology will be advancing so rapidly that humans will have to enhance themselves with artificial intelligence in order to keep up.
Kurzweil predicts the dawning of a new civilization in which humans will no longer be dependent upon their physical bodies, will become trillions of times more intelligent, and lose the ability to distinguish between real and virtual reality. He believes this will cause human aging and illness to be reversed, world hunger and poverty to be solved, and death to be ‘cured.’ Critics accuse him of being too optimistic, and argue that the dangers of the Singularity far outweigh the benefits, pointing out the apocalyptic implications.
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March 2, 2011
Kenneth Knowlton (b. 1931), is a computer graphics pioneer, artist, mosaicist and portraitist, who worked at Bell Labs. In 1963, Knowlton developed the BEFLIX (Bell Flicks) programming language for bitmap computer-produced movies, created using an IBM 7094 computer and a Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. Each frame contained eight shades of grey and a resolution of 252 x 184. In 1966, Knowlton and Leon Harmon were experimenting with photomosaic, creating large prints from collections small symbols or images.
In Studies in Perception I they created an image of a reclining nude (the dancer Deborah Hay), by scanning a photograph with a camera and converting the analog voltages to binary numbers which were assigned typographic symbols based on halftone densities. It was printed in The New York Times on 11 October 1967, and exhibited at one of the earliest computer art exhibitions, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, held Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1968.
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March 2, 2011
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters of the ASCII compliant character sets. The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, as on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.
Among the oldest known examples of ASCII art are the creations by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton from around 1966, who was working for Bell Labs at the time. One of the main reasons ASCII art was born was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banners, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk. ASCII art was also used in early e-mail when images could not be embedded.
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March 2, 2011
Superjail! is an American animated television series produced by Augenblick Studios. The series follows the events that take place in an unusual prison. The pilot episode aired on television in 2007. Superjail! is characterized by its psychedelic shifts in setting and plot and extreme graphic violence, which give the series a TV-MA rating. These elements are depicted through highly elaborate animated sequences, which have been described as ‘baroque and complicated and hard to take in at a single viewing.’
The majority of Superjail! is set inside the eponymous prison. Externally, Superjail is built inside a volcano which is itself located in a larger volcano. Internally, it seems to constitute its own reality, where the fabric of time and space is extremely fluid and changes at the whim of the Warden. Each episode begins with a linear story revolving around an irresponsible scheme concocted by the Warden to satisfy some whim. The episode builds up in both violence and surrealism until a climactic, psychedelic blood bath during which dozens of inmates are brutally murdered, either by one another or some external force.
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March 2, 2011
Adoniran Barbosa (1910 – 1982) was a famous Brazilian traditional samba singer and composer. The themes of his songs are drawn from the life of low-wage urban workers, the unemployed and the vagabonds. His first big hit was Saudosa Maloca (‘Shanty of Fond Memories,’ 1951), where three homeless friends recall with nostalgia their improvised shanty, which was torn down by the landowner to make room for a building. His next hit ‘Joga a Chave’ (‘Throw me the Doorkey,’ 1952) was inspired by his own frequent experiences of arriving late at home and finding the door locked by his wife, Matilde.
In his ‘Trem das Onze’ (‘The 11 PM Train,’ 1964), the protagonist explains to his lover that he cannot stay any longer because he has to catch the last train to the Jaçanã suburb, and besides his mother will not sleep before he arrives. Unlike the samba songs of the previous decades, which generally used the formal Portuguese of the educated class, Adoniran’s lyrics are a realistic record of the informal speech of São Paulo’s lower classes. He once said ‘I only write samba for the common people. That is why I write lyrics in ‘wrong’ Portuguese, because that is how the common people speak.’
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