Found Objects

A cabinet of curiosities. More on my website and the fediverse.

[found]

Computer History by Balenciaga, by Azlen Elza. I find it weirdly appropriate to see the grandparents of today's digital technology clothed in what it seems like the ultimate Veblen brand.

Fun aside, I'm more and more convinced such deepfakes should be seen far and wide, and also easy to make. Images (&video) always - always - lied (and don't get me started on how misguided watermarking proposals are).

Media literacy and critical skills are the true antidotes against manipulation. I wrote some more thoughts about Artificial Assistance on my blog.

[curiosity-cat]

i see your “goncharov can’t be made into a real movie cause that would ruin it” and raise you; someone does make a real version of goncharov but films 3 or 4 different versions of each scene/plot point, and than mashes them up to create like 30 different versions of the same movie. it’s released in theaters under the guise of being a perfectly normal film, but every person who goes to see it sees a slightly different version, which will just increase the confusion and amount of unconnected lore. is that possible? probably not. but it would be hilarious.

[wandererthreatening]

In a way Goncharov (1973) really is the greatest gangster movie ever made. There are thousands of people dreaming up their own versions of this movie. With more plot threads than could ever actually fit into a 2 hour movie. No actual film could ever compare to the imagination of a million strangers and that's weirdly beautiful.

[beelzeebub]

Goncharov (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese

“The greatest mafia movie (n)ever made.”

[found]

I'm glad to come back on Tumblr and see so alive! This whole idea of Goncharov feels like something out of Infinite Jest, just like our zeitgeist tbh.

I only have a small nitpick about the concept of Goncharov: it doesn't feel like anything Scorsese would direct! I know the whole thing was started by some text an 'AI' regurgitated onto a knockoff boot - paging William Gibson here - and people too often reduce Scorsese to mafia films with Robert de Niro. Yet, Goncharov strikes me far more as a William Friedkin movie (maybe a kind of percursor to the campy vibe of To Live and Die in L.A.), or perhaps an alt-timeline Francis Coppola who directed it after work on The Godfather proved... ahem... problematic (think of Kubrick directing Barry Lyndon with the leftovers from his unfilmed Napoleon).

Anyway... I hope someone (Robert Rodriguez!!) directs Goncharov for real.

[found]

Erik Wernquist’s Wanderers offers some perspective. 

[found]

Jason K. Smith’s Beautiful Programming is a great collection of P5.js sketches.

[found]

This is an old one, but entirely appropriate, either as a celebration of things done, or as a celebration of what just feels right in times that feel so, so wrong. The Most Satisfying Video in the World, as compiled by Digg editors. Beware that searching for The Most Satisfying Video in the World on YouTube opens a Pandora’s box of endless satisfaction. Do that at your own peril.

[found]

The Old Web, today. An impressive exercise that goes beyond The Wayback Machine and actually emulates old web browsers and their respective hardware. Here’s this very website running on Tim Berners-Lee’s very first WWW browser. It’s impressive that it’s kinda readable despite being rendered by a 25-year old HTML engine.

[found]

People who hang out with me know that even though I don’t have any pets anymore, I am quite fond of street cats, always stopping to greet and (try to) pet those cute little killers. I am not that interested in that endless supply of cat pictures and videos found online, but I can’t but browse through any vintage photo gallery I come across. Lo and behold, both interests intersect in this gallery of 1950s London cats. Enjoy.

[found]

Things that never cease to amaze: Demoni by Theodore Ushev, in which vynil records are turned into Zoopraxinoscope discs through the syncing of the camera shutter with the record player’s rotation.

Ushev is the author of the incredible Sleepwalker (trailer) I watched at this year’s Cinanima animation film festival (where Demoni had won an award a few years back): as if Oskar Fishinger’s classic films had art by Joan Miró, but in an effortlessly undated way. Nice.

[found]

Douglas Trumbull’s Entertainment Effects Group team filming a close-up of Sean Young’s eye for Blade Runner.

Despite being yet another much-unneeded sequel, now that it is confirmed that Blade Runner II is happening, I am hoping Denis Villeneuve will be able to pull it off. Sicario was one of the best films I’ve watched all year, but somehow I can’t see the director making that leap, and it’s worrying to see Ridley Scott announcing the opening scene of Blade Runner II will be something that was deleted from the original Blade Runner script - but on the other hand, I’d love to watch a film including some of the things that the original movie didn’t take from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, like mood control, the synthetic animals thing (including Deckard’s envy of his neighbour with the organic horse) or that scene where he is taken to a police station staffed by replicants.

So, while we wait to see if II will be any good, enjoy this awesome article full of neat tidbits about the original Blade Runner at Cinephilia and Beyond.

[found]

I love the results - and the drive - of Mike Winkelmann’s sci-fi concept art, in which the artist has been producing new images from scratch for 3061 consecutive days - and counting! (via Fubiz)

[found]

This is crazy: the entire town of Whittier, Alaska, population 200, consists of a single large building. Here’s a short but great photo essay.

[found]

Cameron’s World may well be the ultimate collage of 1990s web psychedelia, made from assets found in old Geocities websites. The best way to experience it, though, is definitely in the Windows 93 web browser.

[found]

Every August, the Assembly demoparty reminds us the scene is still around, and perhaps reaching larger numbers of people than ever as one can just go and watch demanding demos such as this years’ winner, Monolith by ASD, as streaming YouTube videos captured from the authors’ very high-end rigs, rather than downloading and having a hard time running an executable on an underpowered four-year old laptop such as your humble narrator’s.

Still, there is something that is lost in that ‘video-ization’ of demos: the notion that what one is watching is not pre-rendered CG, but realtime code - mathematics manifesting as audiovisual aesthetics as one watches. So take also a look at the winner of the 1KB Intro competion, BLCK4777* by p01/ribbon: that is one kilobyte of code - that is, 1024 bytes or roughly a quarter of a page of purely unformatted text - making all that stuff happen in your browser. Just wow.

[found]

This Verge gallery of Casio watches presents a look at what The Future looked like in the 1990s: bold, complicated, and full of optimism and potential - and gadget batteries that actually lasted several years.

[found]

It has been that kind of month in which blogging has dropped very low in my priorities. I must admit, lower than catching up with the last episodes of Mad Men, a TV series that I’ve always regarded as part serious Art for its awesome literary scope and its preocupation with how people are really like, part guilty pleasure for its soap opera-like dramatic twists and turns (isn’t Ken Cosgrove’s eyepatch a self-deprecating joke about that?). I’m sad to have watched the end of Don, Peggy, Joan, Roger, even Pete!, as characters that I’ve known for the past eight years, and that’s a testament to Matthew Weiner’s genius as a writer and showrunner.

Still, we’ll always have the memes. Such as Mad Men Integrated.