What Matter Who's Speaking?
March 7th, 2010

the New Shelton wet/dry blog by JC from Brooklyn, New York, is simply brilliant. I am very grateful for its deepness, intelligence and obscurity.

Found the illustration on Sofía Stefanich's wonderful Tumblr site.

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Paula Scheer
March 6th, 2010

From Identity Forum: "I never knew a designer that got hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a logo.  Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace.  This is a process that can take a year or more.  Getting a large, diverse group of people to agree on a single new methodology for all of their corporate communications means the designer has to be a strategist, psychiatrist, diplomat, showman, and even a Svengali*. The complicated process is worth money.  That's what clients pay for. The process, usually a series of endless presentations and refinements, persuasions and proofs, results, hopefully, in an accepted identity design."

* From Wikipedia: "Svengali is the name of a fictional character in George du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby. A sensation in its day, the novel created a stereotype of the evil hypnotist that persists to this day. (...)
The word svengali has entered the language meaning a person who with evil intent manipulates another into doing what is desired."

Filed under: People

Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs
March 5th, 2010

From Dangerous Minds: "Let's face it, with all of the many, many entertainment choices we have facing us, every minute of every single day, when it comes to the matter of what we choose to give our precious attention to, music videos tend to rank pretty low on the totem pole. There's probably a pretty compelling reason MTV is no longer calling itself a music channel. So '80s, isn't it? A three-minute music video? Who has the time?

So when you hear about some cool new music video — maybe your tweeps told you about it — it had, well, better be good. Chicago-based indie rockers OK Go know this. Their 2006 video, Here It Goes Again, featuring the group doing a synchronized dance routine on treadmills, has been viewed by about 50 million people, so the follow-up had, well, better be good too.

Trust me, it's great. I could describe for you the Rube Goldberg-inspired centerpiece of the new This Too Shall Pass video, but since their record company finally relented and allowed the piece to be embedded (I mean, what was that all about?), you can simply press play and see for yourself.

Engineered with help from CalTech and MIT, and built by Syyn Labs, the video — and its kinetic sculpture centerpiece — is nothing short of astonishing. Like its predecessor, it's bound to snag all kinds of kudos and awards."

Also, don't hesitate to review Fischli & Weiss' Der Lauf der Dinge.

Filed under: Wunderkammer

or (Radical) Constructivism
February 25th, 2010

From Wikipedia: "Constructivism criticizes objectivism, which embraces the belief that a human can come to know external reality (the reality that exists beyond one's own mind). Constructivism holds the opposite view, that the only reality we can know is that which is represented by human thought (assuming a disbelief or lack of faith in a superhuman God). Reality is independent of human thought, but meaning or knowledge is always a human construction. (...)
Constructivism proposes new definitions for knowledge and truth that forms a new paradigm, based on inter-subjectivity instead of the classical objectivity and viability instead of truth. The constructivist point of view is pragmatic as Vico said: 'the truth is to have made it'. (...)

'And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed.' (Gaston Bachelard, La formation de l'esprit scientifique, 1934)

'My hand feels touched as well as it touches; that's reality, and nothing more.' (Paul Valéry)"

Also check out this Radical Constructivism and Daily Life video by Ernst von Glasersfeld.

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Nothing at all
February 18th, 2010

From Wikipedia: "The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term MacGuffin and the technique. (...)
A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin) is 'a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction.'
Sometimes, the specific nature of the MacGuffin is not important to the plot such that anything that serves as a motivation serves its purpose. The MacGuffin can sometimes be ambiguous, completely undefined, generic or left open to interpretation."

From The Colombus Dispatch: "The best way to spot a true MacGuffin is to substitute anything else for it and ask whether the movie would change. If the microfilm in North by Northwest were papers or jewels or a safe-deposit box key, would the rest of the movie change? Not at all.
While the MacGuffin propels the story, it shouldn't be mistaken for an essential plot device. The shark in Jaws isn't a MacGuffin but a key character. It has to be a shark, or the story can't be told. (...)
As Hitchcock said of the microfilm in North by Northwest: 'Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!'"

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Gagosian Gallery's homage to J.G. Ballard
February 17th, 2010

From Dangerous Minds: "As a tie-in to the Gagosian show, Iain Sinclair, writing in today's Guardian, offers up a wonderful account of his trip to Shepperton, where Ballard spoke of the art and artists that most inspired him. When it came to such things, Ballard was clearly a lucid, passionate speaker. You can get a rare glimpse of this yourself in the '93 interview from British television."

From Guardian: "The incantatory manifesto, What I Believe, deploys Ballard's favourite device, the list, as he curates a museum of affinities: 'I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dalí, ­Titian, / Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, / Redon, Dürer, ­Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, / the Watts Towers, Böcklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists / within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.'"

(Painting by Ed Ruscha)

Filed under: People

Valentine's Day
February 14th, 2010

"Ada's letters breathed, writhed, lived; Van's Letters from Terra, 'a philosophical novel,' showed no sign of life whatsoever."
"Finito! It was now the forming of soft black pits (yamï, yamishchi) in her mind, between the dimming sculptures of thought and recollection, that tormented her phenomenally; mental panic and physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one making her pray for sanity, the other, plead for death."
(from "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle" by Vladimir Nabokov)

If you are interested in my favourite book, the one above all others, check out this fantastic online resource.

(Painting by Eric Fischl)

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Matthew Hoffman (2009)
February 11th, 2010

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Visualize music! 3 + 1 covers
February 8th, 2010

This week Christian Schäfer and I are hosting a 3-days-workshop from February 8th until 10th, 2010 at Baden-Württemberg Film Academy. Four Film Music/Sound Design students and four Motion Design students will participate.
We are talking about the three best album or CD covers - the favourites of the students and ours. And, the students are visualizing one song in a square format. Obstructions: Choose three paper clips (with closed eyes), use them for your cover and work without computers. The only option is a b/w xerox machine. For the typography: Letraset, stamps and handwriting.

Filed under: Talks & Workshops

at the Philip Johnson Glass House
February 7th, 2010

From Design Observer: "Since it reopened last year, the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, has been the venue of a series of intimate conversations. They've been moderated by, among others, Roger Mandle, Laurie Beckelman, Maurice Cox, and John Maeda; the themes have included Breaking the Rules, Transparency, and Design and Civic Leadership."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Dr. Jane McGonigal
February 3rd, 2010

Tomorrow we have another round of final-year project's presentations at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. One of the students, Roland Sigmond, will present a concept for an alternate reality game.

From Wikipedia: "The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium."

That might be the reason why I was thinking about Jane McGonigal today. She just launched a new ARG called Evoke.
In 2006, Dr. McGonigal was named one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35 by MIT's Technology Review.
In 2008, Dr. McGonigal was named one of the Top 20 Most Important Women in videogaming, and World Without Oil received the South by Southwest Interactive Award for Activism.
Check her out, she is really something.

Filed under: People

Keep those tears hid out of sight, let it loose, let it all come down.
January 29th, 2010

to disengage
to loose
to release
to relinquish
to unclasp
to unhand
to lay so. to rest
to let go
to let loose
to let sth. loose
to loose one's hold on sth.
to lose one's hold of
to release a load

Filed under: Wunderkammer

A Perfect Match? On The Alliance Of Sound And Visuals
January 27th, 2010

Jörg Süßenbach, head of the music devision at Goethe Institute Germany, invited me to give a talk on the relationship between the audio and the visual on January 27th, 2010 at the Goethe Institute in Berlin. More information on the lecture here.

Filed under: Talks & Workshops

is drawing dance.
January 26th, 2010

William Forsythe: "So I began to imagine lines in space that could be bent, or tossed, or otherwise distorted. By moving from a point to a line to a plane to a volume, I was able to visualize a geometric space composed of points that were vastly interconnected. As these points were all contained within the dancer's body, there was really no transition necessary, only a series of foldings and unfoldings that produced an infinite number of movements and positions. From these, we started making catalogues of what the body could do. And for every new piece that we choreographed, we would develop a new series of procedures."
(Thanks to Phillip Schulze!)

Filed under: People

A practice of mindfulness
January 21st, 2010

Jim Gagné: "The practice of mindfulness is growing in popularity among psychotherapists as a means to deal with painful emotion. It consists of deliberately taking the time to notice and acknowledge whatever you're thinking and feeling. You don't do anything with thoughts or feelings; you simply notice them. When you react emotionally, notice that. If you're upset, notice that. Ditto if you're happy or content. When you judge or evaluate your experience, notice that. Notice whatever. (...)
I have a mental image of leaning back in a chair, feet propped up on the desk, munching popcorn as I observe my experience. Kind of like watching a movie. This is a particularly useful image when your experience is upsetting. Maybe it's a horror movie, or a suspense drama!
Whenever you can just hang out with your experience, and with whatever reactions you have to it, the sting of painful memories begins to dissipate. Your judgments and evaluations are just thoughts; actually they aren't any more real than anything else. You don't always have to be right. All those rules you learned from your parents are just that, rules. You begin to appreciate the humor in your self-righteousness. You stop struggling and begin to relax. You no longer feel overwhelmed or pursued. You're alert and present in the moment, not spaced out or numb.
When a particular emotion or experience is particularly troubling, you can address it directly, with an even more powerful technique than mindfulness: what I'm calling radical acceptance. If mindfulness is watching the monster chase you in the dream, radical acceptance is hugging the monster and inviting it for tea. (...)
Strong emotion brings all sorts of cognitive distortions you can learn to recognize and not take seriously.
Radical acceptance is choosing to accept the experience you are having this moment, no matter what. You accept without believing them whatever judgments and evaluations come to mind. Like it, hate it, fear it, whatever happens, you accept it."

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Visualising Information in Graphic Design
January 17th, 2010

From Gestalten: "The application of diagrams extends beyond its classical field of use today. Data Flow charts this development, introduces the expansive scope of innovatively designed diagrams and presents an abundant range of possibilities in visualising data and information. These range from chart-like diagrams such as bar, plot, line diagrams and spider charts, graph-based diagrams including line, matrix, process flow, and molecular diagrams to extremely complex three-dimensional diagrams. Data Flow is an up-to-date survey providing cutting-edge aesthetics and inspirational solutions for designers, and at the same time unlocks a new field of visual codes..."

Filed under: Reading

by Barbara Hero
Januar 12th, 2010

From Dangerous Minds: "The Lambdoma Matrix is attributed to the philosopher Pythagoras (500 bc) who spent over twenty years as an Egyptian initiate. The concept of the Lambdoma Matrix in the present age is relatively unknown, and is not cited in most dictionaries. On the surface, it appears to be nothing more than a mathematical multiplication and division table. On a closer look however, it bears a one-to-one relationship to musical intervals in a very specific harmonic series. Because of its numerical framework of ratios, it can be translated into frequencies of audible sound. The Lambdoma bears relationships to aromatics, chemistry, crystallography, cybernetics, art, music, geometry, all of which may be explored by those interested in the above disciplines. The Lambdoma bears mathematical relationships to Issac Newton, the Diophantine equations and the Farey series, as well as in the present century to Georg Cantor…"
Check out the video demonstration by Barbara Hero.

Filed under: Visual Music

by Orson Welles (1915-1985)
January 11th, 2009

From bright lights: "When we get to a late film in Welles' career, the documentary F for Fake (1976), he formulates his most explicit statement about contemporary reality, leaving little room for greatness, let alone tragedy. And if F for Fake seems a superficial film, we will then have experienced the first lesson of postmodernism: playfulness, conscious illusions, and an undisguised reflexiveness about making movies. Put another way, what is seen in the film that seems real is not as real as it appears — but most especially we can't trust the filmmaker Welles himself, he will lie to us and deceive us, if only to get at the heart of the movie's main contention: you cannot trust anyone, especially anyone who asserts his or her authority without any basis or proof." ("F for Fake, The Ultimate Mirror of Orson Welles, In which Welles deflates expectations of greatness — and transcends them" by Robert Castle).
(Thanks to Nina Juric!)

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by DJ Sprinkles aka Terre Thaemlitz
January 9th, 2010

Always had this thing going for Terre Thaemlitz. Listen to some excerpts of his Midtown 120 Blues album.

From SFBG: "DJ Sprinkles is one alias in a vast arsenal overseen by Terre Thaemlitz, who also makes records under the monikers G.R.R.L., Terre's Neu Wuss Fusion, and Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion, among others. Thaemlitz's approach to electronic music is playful and dead up serious about its capacity for political content. His (or her, depending on your preference; Thaemlitz's gender identity is fractured and fluid) current release as DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues (2009, Mule Musiq) opens with a thesis statement: House isn't so much a sound as a situation."

Filed under: People

A permutation poem by Brion Gyson
January 6th, 2009

"He's the only man I've ever respected in my life. I've admired people, I've liked them, but Brion Gysin was the only man I've ever respected." William S.Burroughs

From UbuWeb: "The Englishman Brion Gysin, one of the founders of the beatnik movement and inventor of such new formulas as the collage-novel, has composed his phonic texts on this principle. I am is a classic of the genre. Composed exclusively of permutations of the biblical words 'I am that I am', with ever more marked accelerations, he succeeds in rendering, from the initial nucleus, a crowd of 'I am's, the creation of the world in geometrical progression until it fades away in the sidereal silence."
Also check out Brion Gysin in UbuWeb Film.

Filed under: People

Ten points - Dix point - Zehn Punkte
December 31st, 2009

Coffee In 2009 I celebrated my addiction to coffee. Had the best in Milan, right across from the hotel where I stayed for a week while teaching at NABA. The lady who made it was in her 80s. 7am, the air clean and the heat still asleep.
Film Keep The River On Your Right is a fascinating movie because its subject is so fascinating. Calm, pleasant, self-deprecating, Schneebaum manages to draw you in to his obsessions and joys.
Insight The results of my Five Factor Model or FFM test. In contemporary psychology, the "Big Five" factors of personality are five broad domains or dimensions of personality which have been scientifically discovered to define human personality at the highest level of organization. Who beats my 97% openness?
Occupation One song, repeat mode, glue, scissors, three scraps of paper.
Quote "When the shadow of your house would be your home, the moment of arrival would determine where home is" by Tomas Schats.
Role model for coming of age Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) 
Song Murphy's Law, sure out to get you!
Talk "Joseph Campbell - Transformations of Myth Through Time" consists of 14 hour-long programs selected from over 50 hours of Campbell lectures and is introduced by "THE HERO'S JOURNEY," an award-winning biographical film.
TV series Big Love, a fair portrayal of polygamy without being judgmental. The series' theme song is God Only Knows by The Beach Boys.
Website I check out This isn't happiness nearly every day and it nevver fails to surprise, irritate and delight me.

So, here we are... And what is next?

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Clarissa Pinkola Estés (*1945)
December 30th, 2009

Women Who Run With the Wolves is a book that was scarcely reviewed after publication but has become a best-seller. I read it despite its self-help book cover and weird sounding abstracts. Just because a male (!) friend recommended it strongly. It is absolutely not what you would expect reading the descriptions on the back of the book. Instead it is hortatory, ecstatic, and, ultimately, irritating.
From New York Times: "In the book, Dr. Estes has interpreted old tales in ways that merge Carlos Castaneda with Bruno Bettelheim, from Bluebeard to the Little Match Girl, that reveal an archetypal wild woman whose qualities she says have today been dangerously tamed by a society that preaches the virtue of being nice."

»If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman… have faith… there is yet time.«

Filed under: Reading

TED talk The power of time off by Stefan Sagmeister
December 29th, 2009

From Motionographer: "One of those most intriguing parts of his talk is the idea that we spend around the first 25 years of our life focused on learning, the next 40 years are dedicated to work (and lots of it in our industry) and around 15 years towards the end of our lives are reserved for retirement. Sagmeister not only suggests, but has put into practice the idea to cut off 5 of those retirement years and intersperse them between the working years with creative sabbaticals."

Filed under: People

Minnie Riperton performs "Loving You" on Soul Train
December 24th, 2009

Lovin' you I see your soul come shinin' through.

Filed under: Wunderkammer

...not to be understood.
December 17th, 2009

Via This isn't Happiness.

Filed under: Wunderkammer

Mark Pellington and Jon Klein
December 16th, 2009

Today, for no reason, I thought about Mark Pellington and Jon Klein's 13-part international series Buzz, which they created in the late 80s. This format had a huge impact on my work back then. From boing boing: "Buzz was a fantastic experiment in non-linearity and cut-up that drew heavily from - and presented - avant-garde art, underground cinema, early cyberpunk, industrial culture, appropriation/sampling, and postmodern literature. Experientially, it feels like what Mondo 2000 would have looked like as a television show, and in fact Mondo founder RU Sirius was interviewed on the first episode. Other notable contributors/subjects included William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Genesis P-Orridge, Syd Mead, and many other happy mutants. This was the future of television, circa 1988. Too bad it didn't quite pan out this way."
Amongst others Mark Pellington also directed the video clip for U2's One, which I still like a lot.

Filed under: People

songs from the past
December 15th, 2009

Every time I think of you
I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue
It's no problem of mine
But it's a problem I find
Living a life that I can't leave behind
But there's no sense in telling me
The wisdom of the fool won't set you free
But that's the way that it goes
And it's what nobody knows
well every day my confusion grows

Every time I see you falling
I get down on my knees and pray
I'm waiting for that final moment
You say the words that I can't say

I feel fine and I feel good
I'm feeling like I never should
Whenever I get this way
I just don't know what to say
Why can't we be ourselves like we were yesterday
I'm not sure what this could mean
I don't think you're what you seem
I do admit to myself
That if I hurt someone else
Then I'll never see just what we're meant to be
 
Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou
December 2nd, 2009

Am currently enjoying the wonderful Logicomix book and totally recommend it.
From the Logicomix website: "Covering a span of sixty years, the graphic novel Logicomix was inspired by the epic story of the quest for the Foundations of Mathematics.
This was a heroic intellectual adventure most of whose protagonists paid the price of knowledge with extreme personal suffering and even insanity. The book tells its tale in an engaging way, at the same time complex and accessible. It grounds the philosophical struggles on the undercurrent of personal emotional turmoil, as well as the momentous historical events and ideological battles which gave rise to them.
The role of narrator is given to the most eloquent and spirited of the story's protagonists, the great logician, philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. It is through his eyes that the plights of such great thinkers as Frege, Hilbert, Poincaré, Wittgenstein and Gödel come to life, and through his own passionate involvement in the quest that the various narrative strands come together."

Filed under: Reading