CULTURE ˈkʌltʃə (noun) 1. the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. 2. the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society.
(verb) BIOLOGY 1. maintain (tissue cells, bacteria, etc.) in conditions suitable for growth. DAY-BOOK: (dā′bo͝ok′) (noun) 1. A book in which daily transactions are recorded. 2. A diary.
We’ve been away and I have been keeping of the internet to a degree (it always catches up with you though) so I have drawings and things all backed up and out of sequence.
This still works thought, the assembly is automatic from my bookmarking and music listening so it just takes a bit of finessing and it’s ready to go.
This is working for me now in a way that Tumblr used to.
The image is of the railway line at Collumpton Services where we stopped on the way back from Cornwall.
Be warned there’s a lot of politics this time but it’s been difficult to avoid.
Here’s a round up of links and culture from the last week. As ever I’m always debating whether I should share links and finds one by one like a Tumblr or just put them all in one post in a more of a newsletter type format, like this, often coming to the conclusion that this way is less annoying for the reader, in that it’s more easy to ignore in one go.
I want to blog more. This is me blogging more.
The above moving image was auto-generated for me by Google Photos.
Comic Tragics/Emma Talbot
I have a bunch of work in a show called Comic Tragics at the Art Gallery of Western Australia at the moment. The Guardian just did a nice little piece about it, showing a few pages by Ron Rege (who also did an amazing wall-drawing for the show), Gabrielle Bell, Dash Shaw and others, including one Emma Talbot, who I had not heard of before the invitation to the show. There are a number of reasons why I wish I could have made it out to see the show – not least because I’ve just never been to Australia – but I’m sorry not to be seeing Talbot’s work in person. It looks pretty much unlike anything else – super strange and beautiful, sweet and creepy… and heartbreaking. She does really nice things with panels, something I’ve been thinking about a fair amount lately, and with facelessness, which is also a thing I can relate to, especially in dealing with similar themes. Surprised I hadn’t come across her work before, maybe because she’s in the gallery world, rather than the book world. Hopefully that will change.
Autodesk has bought Arnold and Solid Angle based in Madrid, Spain and in London, UK. The deal was first struck in December of last year, and finalized in February. The plan is for Solid Angle to be a standalone provider, in much the same way Autodesk has done with Shotgun. Solid Angle is now fully owned by Autodesk but sits apart in so far as the brand Solid Angle remains, as does the sales channels and the staff.
The American cartoonist Robert Crumb’s first U.K. solo exhibition in over a decade opens to the public in London on Friday — and features pictures from the latest volume of his “Art and Beauty” magazine series, which has previously seen Crumb faithfully reproduce imagery of women taken from mass media or life studies. Now, he adds cellphone street photos and his fans’ selfies to his wellsprings of inspiration.
Royal Bank of Scotland has reduced its global lending to oil and gas companies and doubled its green energy loans in the UK to £1bn a year, according to new figures released to the Guardian.
Dance is mesmerizing enough all by itself, but the short film Chimera, directed by Steven Briand and choreographedby Cathy Ematchoua, makes the art form all the more eye-catching by cutting together multiple performers, creating the effect of one seamlessly merging and multiplying body. The film takes its name from the Chimera of Greek mythology, a fire-breathing creature with the heads of both a lion and a goat and with a snake for a tail. The film perfectly captures the multi-body chimeric effect, minus the, you know, terrifying bit. Watch the dancers weave poetry in motion below.
Using heavy black backgrounds and considered line-work, Miguel Angel Valdivia’s work is smart in its execution and brave in its layouts. Within a single image Miguel often uses multiple frames, which come together to create a disorientating but clear narrative. As well as working as an illustrator, Mexico-born Miguel is also a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art. When he’s not dong either of those things, he’s at the helm of beautiful drawing zine Le Petit Neant, which is soon to launch its third issue.
It’s a fairly safe bet to say that animation in a few decades will be a different experience than the current one of passively viewing content on a screen. But you don’t need to wait decades to get a taste of that future. The Storyscapes showcase at the Tribeca Film Festival is currently presenting 10 virtual reality and interactive installations that hint at this not-so-distant future.
Julie Mora-Blanco remembers the day, in the summer of 2006, when the reality of her new job sunk in. A recent grad of California State University, Chico, Mora-Blanco had majored in art, minored in women’s studies, and spent much of her free time making sculptures from found objects and blown-glass. Struggling to make rent and working a post-production job at Current TV, she’d jumped at the chance to work at an internet startup called YouTube. Maybe, she figured, she could pull in enough money to pursue her lifelong dream: to become a hair stylist.
…that people should be free to operate outside of the way they’ve been branded, the idea that branding as an act imposes unnecessary, damaging boundaries…
Medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, a vision of paradise lost, is known for being a work of proto-surrealism that has inspired the work of many creative talents like Salvador Dali, William S. Burroughs, and Terry Gilliam. It’s a work that is also highly remixable, as Carla Gannis proved with her emoji-fied rework The Garden of Emoji Delights. Now the painting’s right panel—depicting a hallucinatory hell—undergoes a digital reconstruction as a 3D animation in Hell.exe.
The latest quartet of Kuš! minicomics (pronounced “koosh!”) offers up yet another excellent sampling of the many and varied comics dished out by this Latvian art-comics publisher. For production value and design, the mini Kuš! series represents the pinnacle of what the minicomic art form can achieve. Of note: it wasn’t until several days after I’d first read them that I realized that all four comics were by women (the mini-Kuš! quartet of issues 30-33 were also all-female creations). Despite this year’s Angouleme debacle, it has become increasingly clear, at least in more enlightened comics circles, that excellent work transcends gender (and sexism). The comics in this quartet, by four different creators from four different countries, encompass a variety of styles and tones, from colorful whimsy to somber realism, with settings in the past, present and future. Whatever their subject matter or stylistic approaches, these little books are further testament to the enduring appeal of the elusive-yet-accessible Kuš! art-comics aesthetic.
Everyone has a podcast. Every business wants a podcast. Why? They’re cheap to make, they create community and brand affinity and a loyal subscription base. But the podcast space is still the Wild West. Companies are scrambling to corner the market, an audience, a vertical strategy. What will work? What won’t? We don’t know either, but decided to help y’all out — some of these ideas are serious, some are not. We hope all of them spark your imagination. If you decide to make any of these, let us know. Or invite us on as guests.
I am an illustrator living and working in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in Germany and Belgium before moving to the US to pursue my love of art at the Savannah College of Art and Design where I graduated from in 2010.
Credit: B. Saxton and A. Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF); David W. Hogg, Michael R. Blanton, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Collaboration NANOGrav Animation of Gravitational Waves NRAO Outreach
In a new video, Even Puschak talks about the rise of the serialization genre, from Dickens to Flash Gordon to General Hospital to Star Wars. Now that our entertainment is increasingly serialized, he argues that audiences have a unique opportunity to shape what we watch. (Case in point: the increased importance of non-white and non-male characters in The Force Awakens and Rogue One.)
“Get a job in Animation…” Sure, sounds easy, but with plenty of competition for roles and the ability to study any time, any place with the growth of online courses, do you have what it takes to truly stand out?
Louis CK is broke. Horace and Pete – his self-financed TV show distributed with minimum fanfare on his own website – has not done the numbers he expected.
Oscar Wilde, who knew a few things about censorship, once wrote that he could “tolerate everything except intolerance”. Today, the rhetoric of free speech is being abused in order to shut down dissent and facilitate bigotry. On behalf of everyone with liberal tendencies, I’d like to know why and how we’ve allowed this to happen.
Rob Morgan is the writer of The Assembly, and he spoke last year at GDC about narrative design in VR and the importance of accurate body language in NPCs to maintain a sense of presence. He returned to GDC this year to talk about some of his lessons that VR can learn from writing stories in AR. He has a lot of interesting insights about how to use ambiguity and implication to drive narratives within a first-person story to allow a user to have a more immersive and personalized experience.
That’s a picture of the recent Supermoon over the front hedge.
We were lucky enough to see Dismaland 3 days before it closed on Wednesday, I felt like I was going because I ought to rather than wanted to.. But, no, it was wonderful, for several reasons. Firstly because the visitors there were not your average gallery goe, there were all different kinds of people engaging with what was there.. Secondly because it was like going to a rock concert rather than an art show. Thirdly the range of work there (most of it not by Banksy) was for the greater part technically excellent as well as engaging. But mostly because it didn’t feel like it came out of that art world, it felt fresh and relevant. (Some good animation on show at the cinema bit too!). An uplifting experience, not empty or even dismal in anyway.
An analysis of #ThisIsACoup– with data via Visibrain Focus/A physicist considers the appeal of miracles/Jim Le Fevre Interview/Micachu and The Shapes: The Art of the Happy Accident/The Perfectly Looping Mini-Trips of Hayden Zezula/Weird Facebook is a subculture of meme pages, secret groups, friend networks, and personalities/Essential Crowdfunding Campaigns You Need to Support from Art Aid Nepal, 2D Cloud and Off Life/Frank Krause: Mining the Internet’s Fears/BlenderVR/Music video for Karma Fields by ravenkwok is presented entirely using animated Voroni tesselations/artists are using Google’s Deepdream in virtual reality/Bereavement and Grief Powerfully Examined by Cj Reay and Black Lodge Press/Sunny 5 by Taiyo Matsumoto: to be unreachable, by kindness or hope/
Social
So I nuked the Facebook page I made. I was a nice experiment, but quickly became apparent that using it for a sole artist would require more money and work than I can spare, just to get people to see it. So I reactivated the Follow option on my standard profile, so if you don’t know me IRL you can follow my public posts there. I’m trying real hard to love Facebook, I understand one has to work it to really hard turn it into the space you want. So I am going to give it a go.
Been trying Flipboard in the hope it would give me the curated link feed we use to get in Google Reader, but it doesn’t seem to be responding to the information I give it. Also been trying Pinterest, but I always go back to Tumblr just because.
Ethel The Notebook is getting very full. It might time for retirement soon.
It’s been a beautiful weekend, like the summer’s not ready to let go, I’ve been outside, mostly, hacking at the hedges. Pleasant but very tiring.
Within the space of a week UK politics has changed completely which is a breath of fresh air whether you agree with the direction or not. You can tell how much it has changed by the level of hysterical outrage in the old school press. It can be difficult to take your eyes off the news. Fun times.
If your not watching This Is England ’90, do yourself a favour and get with it. When it’s done, it’s done.
Twitter and Instagram users can learn a lot from a 1920s journalist – Paul Mason/A Graphic Account of Roxane Gay and Erica Jong’s Uncomfortable Conversation by Mari Naomi/Meet the Artist Making GIFs to Ridicule All the Shit Women Deal With: Isabel Chiara/The Tsarnaev trial: Drawing a line/Hunter S Thompson on Now, from the Past/Jeremy Corbyn’s new PMQs has Tory MPs turning to tranquil pursuits like sketching MPs/’Ukraine’s Banksy’ on his time imprisoned by separatist rebels – in pictures/Megan Nicole Dong – “I’ve been doing a series of comics about men being deceived by makeup.”/Judy Pfaff/
Why does anyone share anything ever. Does it help people? These are all thoughts and findings and I collected them over time and then here they are. What I thought was worth passing on. Perhaps I should be weaving it into some kind of artful enterprise, but for the moment there is only this. A list. I’m work on making more stuff, but there is very little time, it’s not easy. I’m posting “daily” sketches at Instagram, so follow me there if you like.
I have to say I have been haunted by thesetwo renderings from real time tech leonardo, Kyle McDonald. When I was little I remember imagining animation as it might be if each frame was as detailed as an oil painting, it didn’t take much practical experience for me to realise that such ideas would lead to certain doom of endless work, no friends and little result.
Bring on neural network analysis, the Inception Network and Google’s Deep Dream. This from the Bethge Lab.
In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities. However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks. Here we introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images. Moreover, in light of the striking similarities between performance-optimised artificial neural networks and biological vision, our work offers a path forward to an algorithmic understanding of how humans create and perceive artistic imagery.
and the algorithm, the dream doings that wre blowing people away a month or so ago there are people around the word making this mad math work on images like this, and as you can read here, it’s not at After Effects plug-in utility level yet (there appears to be many lvels of adjustment and feedback loops), but i’m sure it’s only a matter of time and several levels of genius away.
Copying the final few CGI render frames of a prehistorically massive project which has been keeping us extremely occupied for the last few months. I’m very tired and may spend some time sleeping very soon. https://instagram.com/p/2jOzTMHy-1/
There is a interesting confluence that occurs in the brain when it’s been focused on a project so singularly and for such a long period of time, and then that project ends. After a space of quiet all the thoughts you didn’t have for the intervening months suddenly crash in from all angles. It’s a very fruitful and provides great perspective, but can be over very quickly.
I’ll will post something about the job in question when it gets released, but for now I would just say We had the good fortune to work with animator Rosie Ashforth who turned around several of the miracles we performed to get the job done on time.
So I’ve had a couple of days off to recover, and to remember what the outside looks like.
There’s a lot of catching up to do here as I missed out so much time but that will come. As the country recovers from a pretty dark election result and a new compassion less Britain, and summer struggles to get itself into gear. But there’s no need to mourn.