WW1 Razzle Dazzle ship camouflage
"Most camouflage is based on the idea of concealment and blending in with its surroundings. However another school of thought has argued for making the item in question appear to be a mashup of unrelated components. Naval camoufleurs found this theory particularly appealing. Blending didn’t work because ships operated in two different and constantly changing color environments - sea and sky. Any camo that concealed in one environment was usually spectacularly conspicuous in others.
Norman Wilkinson, a British naval officer and painter, suggested a scheme that came to be known as Dazzle or Razzle Dazzle painting. Wilkinson believed that breaking up a ship’s silhouette with brightly contrasting geometric designs would make it harder for U-boat captains to determine the ship’s course."
(FoundNYC Inc, 4 April 2009)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Interpretation is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly and stifling
"Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex. For the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs 'behind' the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud's phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning -the latent content -beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art) -all are treated as occasions for interpretation. According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.
Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling."
(Susan Sontag, 1966)
Susan Sontag (1966). "Against Interpretation: And Other Essays". Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Monoface: an interactive exquisite corpse toy
"mono is a Minneapolis-based company that believes in the power of simplicity, putting it to work to create innovative communications for clients that include Herman Miller, Apple, Blu Dot and the Harvard Business School."
(Mono, Minneapolis)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Image Metrics: hyperrealistic CG facial animation
"When [Image Metrics] first started working on Emily, our goal was to create an exact replica of the real actress Emily O'Brien. Why? Because there was no other way to determine how close we had come to reality if we did not replicate a 'real' person. Judging from the reaction of people at SIGGRAPH 2008, and the hundreds of media hits, we've come pretty close to the mark.
...
Image Metrics began planning the Emily project in March 2008. After Image Metrics developed a script for the animation, the ICT Graphics Lab scanned O’Brien to develop the template for her CG double. A team of eight artists working part-time on the internal project then built a custom rig for the Emily character, captured O’Brien’s performance with video and applied it to the CG character with its proprietary facial animation solution. Once the capture and rigging processes were finalized, the 90-second animation took just one week to complete."
(Image Metrics)
CONTRIBUTOR
Deb TuckSHARE
Los Mono, Promesas: lo-fi motion-tracking music video
"A Chilean super-group, Los Mono is the collaborative effort from some of the top musicians/producers of the country: Cristian Moraga aka Funky C, (also released by Sonic360) is one of the most recognised musicians in Chile and, as founder of the 'Los Tetas', which was one of the most influential alternative bands that heralds from Santiago in the last decade with sales that garnered 4 Gold Records. Other members include Sebastian Silva (member of the popular Chilean band CHC), Gonzalo Gonzalez (acclaimed sound engineer -Los Prisioneros, Los Tres, Los Bunkers), Vicente Sanfuentes (as part of the duo 'The Hermanos Brothers', winner of MTV Latin America's 'Best Independent Artist' and Nea (singer from the bands CHC and Yaia)."
(Sonic360)
[This Los Mono music video uses lo-fi compositing and motion-tracking as a central feature.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
