Ajay Murthy

Technology. Music. Photography. Advertising. Food. Politics. Pop culture. Creativity. Sport. Design.

[ajaymurthy]

Pictured as an old woman, Britain is “isolated and fuming with rage”, turning away decidedly from events on the mainland, almost forgetting, as the caption tells us, about Ireland, the rather cute dog she keeps on a leash.

(via Europe on the brink | 1843)

[ajaymurthy]

Weeknd wisdom.

Digital planning insight in a Pitchfork review.

...In the face of digital endlessness, restraint is just as important as creation.

Source

[ajaymurthy]

...Miles being Miles, he didn’t merely dabble, but made creating art as much a part of his life as making music in his final decade. He was said to have worked obsessively each day on art when he wasn’t touring and he studied regularly with New York painter Jo Gelbard.

(via The (almost) unknown art of Miles Davis | Dangerous Minds)

[ajaymurthy]

Who are you wearing? .. IBM Watson.

A color-changing dress sounds simple enough, but the shifts weren’t random. Prior to the gala, Watson analyzed Marchesa’s social media to translate followers’ sentiments into colors. 

It turned emotions into information, and created a color palette for the LEDs from that analysis. In real-time during the gala, Watson processed the huge volume of tweets surrounding the event, and changed the color of the dress according to the emotions in them. 

Rose signified joy, coral meant passion, aqua was excitement, lavender denoted curiosity, and butter indicated encouragement.

(Karolina Kurkova wore the most high-tech dress at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Met Gala)

[ajaymurthy]

Fullest House We fed every Full House script into a artificial neural network machine learning algorithm. Each day, a new episode of Full House will be generated by a computer, forever.

http://fullest.house/

[ajaymurthy]

At some level the sheer boredom and drudgery of managing these large data leaks make them immune to casual interest; even the Ashley Madison leak, which I downloaded, was basically an opaque pile of data and really quite boring unless you had some motive to poke around. We have a new kind of thing in the world—the giant global leak (Snowden, Wikileaks, etc.)—and it has become the de-facto job of the media to parse through and process that data, make it usable, and also to keep it private from the larger population. A new responsibility of the media in the 2010s is to turn leaks into products that can be consumed by the larger population and to decide which data from the leaks should be made available. In return the media deals with the complexity of the data, and manages the litigation and personal risks of exposing secrets.

Commenting on leaks — Track Changes — Medium

[ajaymurthy]

Is Rule 34 actually true?

[ajaymurthy]

(via Thank You Creativity: The Weird and Wonderful Realisations - YouTube)

[ajaymurthy]

(via Graphic Means (Official Trailer) on Vimeo)

Graphic Means, now nearing its final stages of production, is a loving homage to the people who blazed the trail to InDesign, and a timely educator for those of us whose lives and livelihoods would shrivel withoutWord, Photoshop or even Paintbrush. You can learn more about the project and how to help get it off the ground here.

[ajaymurthy]

Jugaad

Jugaad is a Hindi word meaning frugal innovation. 

It’s a clever solution born in adversity.

Constraints birth creativity. 

Thoughts currently on my mind as I procrastinate and gaze at this brief in front of me.

[ajaymurthy]

Step inside a memory

The Memory Observatory acts as a bridge between worlds, creating a shared consciousness by blending the physical and digital, the memory and the experience, the personal and the shared.

Step into your own special memory turned into a multi-sensory experience. Or enter the worlds of others and experience their memories brought to life around you.

(via The Memory Observatory – Kodak Moments)

[welcometobusinesstown]

Here’s a look in the mirror… /

[ajaymurthy]

Business Town !

Population: Everyone you know.

[ajaymurthy]

Created by Wieden + Kennedy Tokyo in 2014, the Type range has recently been extended to feature the 11 styles shown above, with the newest additions being American Typewriter, Bodoni and Times New Roman

(via Wear your favourite font on your face with Type Glasses | Creative Review)

[ajaymurthy]

It’s not the tools, it’s the craftsman.

Hal Lasko, who was better known as Grandpa, worked as a graphic artist back when everything was done by hand. His family introduced him to the computer and Microsoft Paint long after he retired.

Grandpa would spend ten hours a day moving pixels around his computer paintings. His work is a blend of pointillism and 8-Bit art.

Welcome to the world of Hal Lasko, The Pixel Painter. See more work at hallasko.com

(via The Pixel Painter on Vimeo)

[ajaymurthy]

What I am getting at, of course, is another way into the agency of non-human agents, a way of visualising the way machines see, which involves a kind of translation into the human sensorium. Duration and perspective are the dimensions of cinema, but there seems to me to be something crucial occurring in this kind of cinema, which is an aestheticisation of the machine view, of the surveillance camera, the drone, the missile, the Street View Car and the satellite (excuse the preponderance of violence in this list, it’s what I have to hand and this post is an attempt to move beyond that set of referents). Of course the human director is there, but it cannot be denied that another framing is available. It’s what we used to call the God’s Eye View, or what I there called the bug’s eye view, but like everything else we must find new terms for – non-deist, non-biocentric – because we cannot continue to pretend our metaphorical environment is that denuded.

Gopro Cinema

[ajaymurthy]

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it 3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

[ajaymurthy]

The word dates back to the very beginning of modern Japan, the Meiji era (1868-1912) and has its origins in a pun. Tsundoku, which literally means reading pile, is written in Japanese as 積ん読. Tsunde oku means to let something pile up and is written 積んでおく. 

Some wag around the turn of the century swapped out that oku (おく) in tsunde oku for doku (読) – meaning to read. Then since tsunde doku is hard to say, the word got mushed together to form tsundoku.