The Biggest Drawing In The World

I stumbled upon this project several months ago. The basic idea is that using a GPS receiver one could make a self portrait over the entire world with the GPS route acting as a pen. With the project Erik Nordenankar released a video of him travelling with the receiver in various parts of the world culminating in a big pile of delivery notes and a plotted chart of the effects.
Unfortunatly the project was announced to be a work of fiction. Nordenankar had produced it as a graduation project for a graphic design and advertising degree and had always planned it to be a fictional piece due to budget constraints
Even so the project was one that put a big smile on my face when I saw it and the fiction was good enough to make me think the whole thing had been done as a publicity stunt for DHL

It has the power to move you

Its strange how a simple story told well has the power to move so many people. This comic has been doing the rounds since about 2006 and is still bounced around from time to time. The original story can be found here. From here it was converted into a comic and made its way onto ytmnd.

I first saw it it struck me as a lovley little story not only focusing on the love of a parent but also how games can be a real aid to those who are housebound.

That was a long time ago, before my father passed away. Now when i read it its the last line that really gets me

"Show your parents as much love as you can, while you still can guys"

Because its true

Riceboy (or how i learned to stop worrying and love the one electronic)

Over the past few years I have aquired a pretty big reading list of webcomics, ranging from simple dilbert updates (there funny because there true) to the rambling epic that is Megatokyo. Although many of these have become firm favorites I can think of only a handful that have held such grace and wonderment as Rice-boy.
Riceboy itself takes place on a surrealistic world known as Overside. Here agents, The One Electronic and Calabash on a 3,000 year quest seek "The Fulfiller" a mystical figure who will unite the world.
The figures in the story are to say the least surreal with all manner of multi legged creatures aiding and hindering our heroes thoughout the jorney.
The author Evan Dahm has succeded in creating a strange and enchanting tale, an epic that uses its sheer strangeness to combat the po-faced seriousness that often plagues fantasy epics.

The lost art of the low rez

When i was a kid games had pixels the size of a babys head, 800x600 resolutions were this weird holy grail and PC screens were about 15" and an 8mb graphics card was the talk of some kind of babbling futurist madman.
But these limitiations caused a strange thing: good bright designs. Think about your favoite games pre 2000, think about the mario games, the sonic games, theme hospital/park. these were games where being bright and clear to make things out wasnt just nice, it was vital to there funciton. Now look at Gears of War, brown men on grey worlds killing brown and grey monsters.
I've herd software designers working in 1990 talk about how starting small forced them to make correct design decisions. maybe we in our world of high-def screens, phong shading and textured bump mapping have indeed lost something: how to make a good, simple design

Tattoo Woman

Tattoo Woman, originally uploaded by C0nt1nu1ty.

Its been a while since I put a post up on the blog, i suppose nothing really has caught my eye, nothing has screamed out at me. So I thought that I would blog about something old rather than something new.

This photo is something that i feel has come to define my career, the hits it gets on flickr outnumber any other photo i've taken at least 10 to 1, its been submitted for competitions and was chosen for last years photobook, in shot it has dominated everything else. And yet it happned just by chance.
I used to work in a nightclub in Reading called the Fez, basically i took pictures of drunks for there website and got paid in alcahol. Most of the photos were ok, mostly pretty good group shots of people to show to there friends the morning afterwards. But this one came out by chance: I took it in the middle of the dance floor, first one was a dud so i took another, the woman thanked my and dissolved back into the crowed.
So i uploaded it to flickr and immediatly people seemed to warm to it, more and more people viewed it, now it gets between 1 and 4 hits every day.
The thing that made me think of it again was that i saw her this morning, she was standing in front of me at the supermarket and i just diddnt twig to who she was untill i saw the tatto as she was walking out. I couldnt catch up with her and now i'm in a bad mood as i couldnt get her name or more importantly a release form.

Because machines want to make music too

The all poweful StumbleUpon has come up gold with the work of Glasgow artist James Houston


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

The piece is called Big Ideas (don't get any) and was produced for his graphic design art show. the basic idea was based on the Radiohead track Nude after realising that Radioheads initial public challenge to remix the song was to say the least difficult (its rhythm and tempo clashes with dance music mechanics) he decided to fashion a "band" of sorts out of redundant hardware, in his own words:

"Based on the lyric (and alternate title) "Big Ideas: Don't get any" I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they're trying their best to do something that they're not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.

It doesn't sound great, as it's not supposed to."

I'd have to say i disagree with Houstons verdict on the piece, I personally thing it sounds amazing and I would love to hear more work done by this "band"



After reading about this piece i was reminded of an old favorite of mine, IBM 1401: the musical.



Wired did an article on 1401 back in 2007 when it was still touring. The piece is the brainchild of Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson who based the piece on work his father Jóhann Gunnarsson did whilst working with the 1401 mainframe in 1964. Gunnarsson noticed that due to a production fault the 1401 would produce an am frequency which could be read as a tone, armed with this information Gunnarsson wrote programs for the mainframe in order to modulate this frequency thus producing one of the earliest Scandinavian electronic instruments. Armed with his fathers work Johannsson teamed up with dance coriographer Erna Omarsdotti to produce a piece based on the 1401.

Musically the 1401 sounds a bit like a Cello with a definite string feel to it not found in the early synthesisers, this sound is used to produce a haunting ghostlike tune as though the Mainframe is talking from beyond the grave, which, considering The University of Manitoba gave there old IBM a burial, it is

Stronger than my brother

Stronger than my brother, originally uploaded by C0nt1nu1ty.

Photosoc went to Kew a few weeks ago and took are new shiny Sigma 70-300 with us that has a (relatively basic) macro facility on it, this was one of the results.
Artistically it may not be all that (the wilting flower in the background being seen as a bad thing in flower photographing circles) but I think it has character