Bild: Palais de Tokyo


Die Ästhetik des Codes. Sie lässt sich einfach aus der Form follows Function-Debatte ableiten:

Sullivan developed the shape of the tall steel skyscraper in late 19th Century Chicago at the very moment when technology, taste and economic forces converged violently and made it necessary to drop the established styles of the past. If the shape of the building wasn't going to be chosen out of the old pattern book something had to determine form, and according to Sullivan it was going to be the purpose of the building. It was 'form follows function', as opposed to 'form follows precedent'.

The Modernists adopted both of these equations—form follows function, ornament is a crime—as moral principles, and they celebrated industrial artifacts like steel water towers as brilliant and beautiful examples of plain, simple, design integrity.

Worauf ich hinauswill, ein Code muss genau wie ein Code aussehen und soll nicht hinter irgendeiner Marke zurückstehen - auch wenn das möglich ist.

Der Code ist das Ereignis. Ad.Tagg hat das in einem Beitrag sehr schön dargelegt. Und es verwundert mich nicht, dass das Schweizer Pressehaus mit dem meisten Stil, das auch als erstes verstanden hat (mehr dazu Anfang April).

Cool! So machen QR Codes Spass;) (nicht von uns*)

Ging schnell:)

PS: Das QR-Code Gewinnspiel ist bereits wieder beendet. Alle Preise sind schon weg! Das nächste Gewinnspiel kommt bestimmt.

*Hint: feed2mobile

Michael Silverblatt on books

What did the technology leave out? Only everything. The crucial thing it omitted is the rich and valuable experience of incomprehension, the most important element of reading. The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age, with rereading.

Domus September and Domus Night at the Pavilion, Serpentine Gallery, Friday 15 September, 7pm

Domus, September Issue

Enzo Mari. Mixing identities
The rules of a game for making the most of the unexpected in everyday life. Domus offers its readers a reproduction of the card game about living, designed in the 1970s by Enzo Mari and Paolo Gallerani for Danese.

More details at Design Italia

The playing cards designed by Enzo Mari in the Seventies aimed to encourage designers to approach the subject of living, and are now in the newsstands with the September issue of Domus magazine. The cards are divided into eight decks with 10 cards each, all the same colour, and every deck represents a different series of situations connected to lifestyle.
On each card there is a short description of the situation: profession, home, place, and so on, with neighbours, flatmates and personal belongings, etc. When the players deal the cards and casually choose some of them, they will face some lifestyle situations, different from what they are used to.
Enzo Mari has used the cards during a course of lectures and workshops at the Urban Planning Laboratory of the Architecture faculty of the University of Milan.
He distributed the cards and defined the identity of each student, who could therefore begin to build real life stories. He outlined the personalities, the relationships and the hierarchies of the characters, as well as the value and the meaning of places and objects: he created complex scenarios that became the foundation of the residential projects he developed afterwards.

Letzen Mittwoch las ich ein Interview mit Aljoscha Blau (NZZ, sgl. 1.3.2006), Illustrator des Buches Rote Wangen, und ich war ziemlich beeindruckt. Es hat mich an wichtige Dinge bei Jacques Tourneur erinnert. Zwei kurze Passagen aus dem Interview:

Beim Illustrieren überlege ich mir lange, wie ich zu dem Buch stehe, was ich zu dem Thema sagen würde, auch ohne den Text gelesen zu haben. Dann wird aufgeschrieben, skizziert, und dann reduziere ich dieses Material, bis das "minimal Notwendige" übrig bleibt, um die Idee zu verstehen.

[...] Die Bilder erzählen um die Ecke - man sieht nicht unbedingt das, was im Text steht, sondern etwas, was davor oder danach passiert, alles sehr luftig, denn ich wollte, dass der Betrachter darauf nicht sitzen bleibt.

Great Diagram by Ryan Shaw

The diagram below illustrates how we see media and metadata flowing to and from different activities around media on the web. The corners of the matrix are meant to represent activities, not kinds of people. So, for example, a Flickr user might fluidly switch between creating and uploading her original photos, to enthusiastically tagging and commenting on others’ photos, to passively watching syndicated photos appear on her desktop or phone, to Photoshopping a Creative Commons-licensed photo that catches her eye and re-uploading it… The point of the diagram is simply to emhasize that each of these activities generates different kinds of metadata that potentially can be used to support the other activities.

See also:
a study of an existing community of collaborative multimedia remixers

Something nobody seems to think about that much. What does the copyright holder gain, when his copyrighted piece of works simply disappears in oblivion. Isn't that kind of physical death (films rotting away, VHS cassettes too old to be viewed) worse than if the movie is kept alive by people who love the artwork? Thanks Kevin Marks:

Future of TV thoughts

What is happening is that the edge culture, the long tail, is spreading a bigger footprint, while the locked-up media from the centre is shrinking it context. My cousin Robert does video restoration for the BBC, and often relies on discovered amateur recordings to reconstruct destroyed recordings.

So how do we help this? Tagging, citing and annotating are already working for text and pictures, lets do this for audio and video too.

See also: Getting Ready for Prime Time: Online Video and the Future of Television

Otaku Media Literacy

The activities of otaku may seem extreme and marginal, but my sense is that otaku culture is one prototype for emergent forms of literacy. Much as the growing strength of digital technology was tied to the rise of geek chic, the growing visibility of otaku culture worldwide seems symbiotic with the ascendancy of visual culture and communication in the 21st century.

Definitely true, but a lot of people don't yet acknowledge it.

"I don't think it's a good thing, really, for a filmmaker or an artist of any kind to only want to be appreciated or loved. It's if you start chasing that, then I think you've destroyed yourself."

David Cronenberg

Sounds true and like the difference between Stars (Andy Warhol's 10 minutes of celebrity) and Artists. Still it remains a romantic definition. And how many artists do we have today?

Via Tom Green's Blog

First Audioscrobbler and now The Music Genome Project. Exciting and scary at the same time. And how will I discover music that is totally different to what I already know? If I would have used these tools, I probably would never have found out about Varese and MIngus, about Vinicius (Elenco time) and Terry Callier...

Pandora link via Hannes Del.icio.us