dcinput

Spent this evening having drinks and dinner with Alistair McClymont an old friend who has that rare mix of artist and technologist talents which lie in perfect harmoney. He’s recently been to Rome, exploring the Sistine Chapel and so we exchanged art museum stories and techniques, as well as a fair amount of geeky computer chat.

Alistair has a new exhibition at the Wyer Gallery showing now.

I will probably be attending the MiniBar3 this comming Friday where Michela Ledwidge will be talking about Modfilms, a platform for re-mixable films and interactive story-telling. The theme of discussion for the evening is online video. Rumour has it there will free beer. If you are going drop me an email - dcinput at gmail dot com.

Some random notes on enjoying museums following my excursion to the National Gallery yesterday. These are what worked for me and you might not find anything that follows of any interest to you.

Be in a good mood. It’s important to get your inner you warmed up. Your brain is like a muscle and needs to be stretched before you attempt to ingest new ideas. If you’re all stressed and having a bad day, ideas will make it in there but they’ll be all hard and closed and so they won’t interact, connect or merge and they certainly won’t be able to bounce around and have fun. First, go have some lunch, meet some new people, have a beer.

Decide on a 1 hour time limit. Just like shoping, if you’re not careful museums can suck the life out of you and the weekends are like the January sales. Face the facts, you’re not going to be able to see everything, in fact you don’t need to see everything. Give youself a time limit and stick to it.

Ignore everyone. People talk alot of shit in museums and there is no right or wrong way to enjoy art. This is what worked for me. Relax your mind and slowly turn around until a painting catches your eye. It might not be a famous one, you probably won’t know why it caught your eye yet, but that’s ok, it’s normal. Walk over to it.

Wear the walkman/headset thing. If they have one of these, get it. It probably works best if it has a number pad where you punch in the number next to the painting. I don’t normally get these, I always figure that I like to make my own mind up about things. There are benefits. The currators accents will most likely be really posh but don’t worry about that, it’s not their fault.

As you look at the painting they set the scene, explaining some historical nuances that you were most likely not aware of which make the painting more relevant to you. When you start to understand the context you can more easily relate your experiences to it. At this stage it might become apparent why you were attracted to the painting in the first place.

Often they have sound effects in the background which gives a real documentary feeling to the canvas. At times yesterday it really felt like I was looking through a window into another world, a story somehow encoded in the brush strokes. I’d never really seen paintings this way before.

Experiment with your surroundings. When I’d seen all the paintings I was really interested in, which by the way only ended up being around 1/4 of them, I decided it would be interesting to punch in random numbers into the keypad and listen to the explanation while watching the wrong painting. This turned out to be pretty interesting.

It didn’t work straight away, but I think that because I was in some form of story mode from previous paintings, if I relaxed and made a conscious effort to stop noticing the differences between the voice and the picture, I started to notice similarities and then eventually my brain started to fill in gaps and create the story itself. Weird but great fun.

Once I’d done all the art, I sat in the middle of one of the large rooms on a bench and now payed particular attention to everyone else in the room. I found it very interesting observing other people’s reactions to the paintings, and trying to figure out their museum technique.

When the hour was up and we headed outside I noticed that I was in some way more aware than usual of my suroundings, colours, sounds and smells all seemed more accentuated. I think art is good for the sole.

Andrew Orlowski’s take on the Net Neutrality saga is very interesting.

Scott Kirsner: “In a world where channels are increasingly irrelevant, content producers need to pay attention to ways to build a loyal following, by building mailing lists, maintaining RSS feeds and blogs, or getting viewers to “subscribe” in some other way to a continuing string of videos”.

Hugh MacLeod’s is collecting and publishing manifestos. Great idea. I like the latest one - the social customer manifesto. Good ideas need to be spread around. He is also organising a day out at the Tate in the hope that it might drag people away from their screens and inject a bit of culture into our web heads, init.

David Sacks seems like a pretty interesting entrepreneur. His new project called Geni will attempt to create a family tree of the whole world.

Sundance’s online efforts are ramping up. I attended a screening in Second Life only a few days ago which was certainly interesting and they are to start selling short films on iTunes“. It’s really exciting to see film makers starting to embrace the web and start to experiement. In the comming years independant film making is going to explode.

Wired: “The festival seems eager to come to you. A push to make the influential event accessible to the masses is under way, with a series of initiatives designed to spread the gospel of Sundance-branded independent film around the world”.

Robert Scobble: “[Verisign are demoing] a peer-to-peer system for selling and distributing high-def videos. It really rocks. I downloaded a movie while there in the booth and the quality wasn’t distinguishable from the HD-DVD’s I get from Netflix […] It made me realize why would any of us go into a Blockbuster in the future, or wait two days for a DVD to show up from Netflix.”

I recently visited a dvd authoring facility. The people there were all extremely talented and they have to be because the one thing I noticed was how incredibly complicated it is to make dvds. If you can download HD quality movies in a resonable time, I can’t see a reason for dvds.

Remember photobooths?

I mean the old ones that took 4 pictures, one at a time so you had to choose which one you looked less rubbish in. When those dissapeared from the back of supermarkets a little piece of me died. One of the greatest things about getting back to reading feeds is that I’m able to keep track of great things people are doing again.

Bre Petis has been doing some great photography projects recently including the webcam photobooths, fauxtography [with Steve Garfield], the stranger project and the self portrait cult. Bre is awesome!

Mark Chandler: “Fundamentally we wanted an open approach. We hoped our products could interoperate in the future. In our view, the network provides the basis to make this happen—it provides the foundation of innovation that allows converged devices to deliver the services that consumers want. Our goal was to take that to the next level by facilitating collaboration with Apple. And we wanted to make sure to differentiate the brands in a way that could work for both companies and not confuse people, since our products combine both web access and voice telephony. That’s it. Openness and clarity”.

How interesting to see a guy at the top of Cisco calling Apple out like this in such a public way. Will Apple respond? I dought it. They don’t have a voice on the web. Steve Jobs certainly doesn’t. I have friends inside the company, if they decide to have a voice they get fired.

In the Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls has this to say about companies having a voice on the web:

“The party’s already started. You can join or not. If you don’t, your silence will be taken as arrogance, stupidity, meanness, or all three. If you’re going to join, don’t do it as a legal entity or wearing your cloak of officialdom. Join it as a person with a name, a point of view, a sense of humour, and a passion.”

…and Memeorandum shows us that people sure are talking about it.

Robert Scobble: “I’ve never seen a blog used like this”.

UCL News: Professor Mette Hjort will give a public lecture on ‘The New Danish Model for Filmmaking: A Cultural Resource for Small Nations’ next Wednesday.

Al Jazeera: “US forces, backed by helicopters, have raided the Iranian consulate’s offices in Arbil, the Kurdish capital in northern Iraq.”.

Most popular Bre Petis snaps.

Hugh McCleod: Hollywood endings.

Ask a Ninja: Net Neutrality.

I haven’t been listening to any Daily Source Codes since my ipod broke - 6th time now but the warranty seems to have just expired on this last one. I’ve been treating it as a DSC holiday which has actually been quite nice as I’ve been able to do read some books on my commutes.

I was looking at the shownotes for the last few shows and it seems that Adam has been talking about net neutrality quite a bit. Check out this show [skip to 19:50] and this show [skip to 6:55]. He seems to have quite a lot of experience in this field and it’s worth listening what he has to say. He is against the net neutrality bill. If I get time I will try to summarise his views later today.

CNet: “Senate panel narrowly rejected strict Net neutrality rules on Wednesday”.

A few days ago a big water pipe exploded under the road just near my house. We now have two enormous holes in the road and a little river. This morning the water supply had been cut off which meant no shower and perhaps more importantly no tea.

I’ve ventured down to Upper Street and am having a nice lunch in a cafe. Great wireless! Turns out the whole of Upper Street now has free wireless in some Islington council initiative. They are calling it ‘Technology Mile‘. Two very enthusiastic thumbs up.

My cousin Deirdre Mulrooney is soon to start working for Cirque du Soleil in Montreal. She has a blog which I really hope she’ll start writting a little more on. I’d love to know what adventures she’ll be getting up to. Good luck with it Deirdre.

Today has been a tourist day - in my own town. I’ve been living in London nearly 10 years now and you can easily forget how beautifull it actually is. I went down to the Tate meuseum to have a look at some modern art. It’s really refreshing to do this every once and a while, it changes the way you look at things.

I took some tourist photos all along the river during my travels but it seems that flickr won’t play ball. It’s actually been doing this for around a week now and I’m starting to worry that there is something wrong with my account. Can you imagine loosing all you Flickr photos? I mean they’re all backed up but what a pain to find them and ontop of that all the links that would break in the blog…

Downloaded the Flickr uploader for Mac OSX. No joy with that either. Urrgh.

Andrew Gursky (Germany) had one photo which simply has to be seen in its full glory. It is called 99 Cent and is taken in a US store. He has digitally altered the colours so that they are far more vibrant than normal.

Other pieces that caught my eye were ‘Siena’ by Olivio Barbiera who takes arial photographs using tilt shift lenses to give the impression that everything is a scale model. Here is an example.

Magritte’s painting of the man reading the newspaper was there too. This is one of my favorites. The way he changes the perspective ever so slightly in each quadrant combined with the fact that the man only apears in the top left quadrant makes me just want to keep looking at it.

Magritte, a Belgian surrealist, apparently prefered quiet subversion over public action. If you know Belgium and its people well you might have seen this in its culture, a part of which has definitely rubbed off on me from my years there.

I’m not too sure of the legality of any of these pictures being on the blog so I’ll be happy to remove them if this is a problem. Just mail me.

I was really happy to find that Kosso is again writing in his new Kosso’s Braingarden Wordpress blog [Hehe - Snap!] and really currious about his treedia.com site. Not sure how you get an account but I’d love one! He posted a few days ago about a demo of this amazing touchscreen that featured on YouTube. This is quite honestly the coolest thing I’ve seen in ages. Also very blown away.

I’m sure that if my buddy Toby a.k.a *spark could use this in one of his sets he would cause even more sensational club night visuals. Looks like he’s just cut a brand new showreel which brings together some of his best work all to a kick ass tune. Hey and its ipod friendly…very modern. I spent many a night shift with Toby when we both worked at the Creature Shop learning about his adventures in vjland. He’s one of the original guys behind AVIT, a truely global VJ festival. This video really caught my imagination when I first saw it. A MUST see.

And by the way how great is YouTube?

Yesterday I met with Ali McClymont a friend I’ve known since my Uni days. Ali is an artist but has had his fingers deep into technology his whole life and is also a fantastic web and graphic designer. He explained to me that during his time at the Royal College of Art he noticed that the majority of artists there were complete technophobes. This is such a shame because these are really creative people with fantastic ideas.

I told him about Nerd TV interview #9 that Robert Cringely did with Anina who is an international model but also a blogger and mobile technology power user. Its great to see non techies using the web in interesting ways as she is with 360 Degree Fashion. What’s also great is that she’s so keen on showing others in her world that its not so hard after all. Its not that artists are rubbish with computers, its just that they need to be shown a little bit.

Ali is developing a great new site to help artists with their portfolio, biography and blog. It’s powered by Wordpress and he’s got a few tricks up his sleave that sound really interesting to me. This could really be a great community thing. Lets get these artists on the web!

On a similar note I was talking to Toby Richardson, an old School friend, while I was up in Scotland last week. He’s a great musician but has found it hard to find other artists with similar tastes and direction to team up with. It can take several months of playing together to realise that they don’t want the same thing which can be a real waste of time. It strikes me that an artist with a blog would find it much easier to find the right sort of musicians to play with. You can listen to The Summerines new track “I know you well” here.