I believe in credit where credit is due, which is why I will only post material to which I can provide the source.
photo by Andreas Gursky, São Paulo 2002
One of my favourite photographers and one of my favourite buildings. It’s also very good on the inside:
More at deathproofarchitecture.
(Source: bildwerk)
Three feet under, 48x36”, Oil on canvas, 2011: 5900.00 USD
It’s not about detail or precision, but an intimate understanding of light.
Cueva de los Cristales, Mexico.
300 meters underground, scientists in cooling suits explore the cave of crystals, enduring extreme humidity and temperatures up to 58°c.
From back to front:
- Mud Circle (2011)
- Basalt Ellipse (2000)
- Sandstone Circle (1977)
- Autumn Turf Circle (1998)
- Berlin Circle (1996)
- Black and White Circle (1988)
- Turf Line (1990)
Richard Long
26.05.2011 — 15.01.2012, Hamburger Bahnhof
Mud Circle was especially pleasing, a coarse, muddy version of Eliassons sun. Mud from the river Avon, hastily spread on the wall by hand, spraying wildly over the circumference and drawing a nice curve along the base of the wall, like a chart describing the amount of mud used at any given point on the x-axis.
As someone who has a rather irresistible urge to arrange things in patterns for others to find, I found this very enjoyable. If I had thought big, I could possibly have made a living out of it.
Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.
The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.
Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, July 1945
Silver Lake Operations # 2, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia, 2007
Burtynsky filmed the documentary Manufactured Landscapes in 2006, which accompanies him on his shoots around the world, showing the very worst of what industrialisation has to offer, and how oddly compelling it can all look. The film’s pace is somewhat glacial, but it’s well worth watching.
from Yangtze - The Long River, 2009
Another fantastic photographer with a dysfunctional Flash 8 website. Sometimes I think they just don’t care. When your pictures sell for tens of thousands of Euros, you can probably afford not to.
All I want is a bright room that is wider than deep.
Gary’s Manhattan Penthouse, a rentable event space right next to the Empire State Building. The rates are a couple of thousand dollars a day. There’s a roof terrace, skylights and one of those old free-standing bathtubs. The windows are huge and low, like windows should be, and the views are staggering. The furniture, however, is pretty terrible. But the space itself is ridiculously amazing.
Secret Universe
Horst Ademeit
13.05.2011 - 25.09.2011, Hamburger Bahnhof
mir geht so
schlecht wie nie
nur ein leichtes
antippen des
Körpers bewirkt
großen Schmerz
Wall of daily polaroids. The quote is one of the last entries in his calendar. Thousands of pages and polaroids, obessively filled with almost illegible handwriting, 2-3mm line height at best.
Driven by a wish to chronicle an imaginary physical phenomenon, he took photographs and measurements of his surroundings every day, for over 20 years, and annotated every single one in the manner seen above.
In the end, it becomes a chronicle of his degenerating health, with photographs of bruises, excretions, anatomic details, recollections of doctor’s appointments, his diet, his pain, his gradual decay. The writing grows larger, but only just. His dedication is unwavering.
The last word he wrote in his life was Joghurt.
Conversion Mate I - Better Window Management in OS X
I switched from Windows to Mac recently, and while the transition has been amazingly great, one thing annoyed me a bit: window management. OS X has this design paradigm of only making a window as big as it needs to be, which clutters everything up immensely. At the same time, full sizing a window is surprisingly inconvenient. In fact, arranging windows in general is surprisingly inconvenient: no one-click interaction for proper, distraction free full screen, and the only bit of flexible resizing UI is that terribly tiny, fiddly thing in the bottom right corner. Meh.
So, Divvy! I thought. Divvy is a 14$ app designed to help you with this. But it’s actually only marginally less annoying: you have to define and remember keyboard shortcuts, and there’s an extra interface that pops up whenever you resize anything. There must be a more unobtrusive way of doing this.
And there is. If you have a magic touchpad, that is. So imagine these gestures:
- five finger tap: expand window to fill screen
- four finger tap: revert to previous window size
- rotate left: resize window to fill the left half of the screen
- rotate right: resize window to fill the right half of the screen
No UI, no keyboard shortcuts, no remembering anything, just four simple gestures that integrate wonderfully into any workflow. And seriously: doing that splitscreen thing? I need that about 20 times a day. And now arranging two windows side by side is a three-second process involving exactly four simple touch pad interactions. Neat.
So here’s how to do it:
- Download BetterTouchTool and install it
- Under Gestures → Trackpad / Magic Trackpad, set up the four gestures shown in the above image
- Arrange windows for 5 minutes because it’s just become so stupidly convenient
Sure, it’s not as flexible as Divvy et al., but personally, I’m not missing anything. This setup has sped up and de-annoyed my work day immensely, maybe it will do the same for you. If so, consider donating a few of whatever your local currency is to the author of the tool.
Also, I can’t help but like an app that has a checkbox marked “Only activiate this if I told you to.”
Happy windowing!
Which is why the point [of Wikileaks] is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire.
