Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking — a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree — is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you whilst you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life firth of every sort under your feet or spell-bound in a death-like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that…; here and now, the mind has shaken off its harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow.–
IMAGINED
IMAGINED-SPACES: (/ɪˈmadʒɪn/) (speɪs/) (noun)
Autodesk Maya, Arnold, Unity, virtual realities, imagined realities, 360 Video, computer graphics, rendering, augmented environments, realtime processing.
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
– William Blake
8 for Kepler-90
For the first time, eight planets have been found orbiting a distant star, Kepler-90, 2,545 light-years from Earth in the Draco constellation, NASA announced Thursday. It is the first star known to support as many planets as are orbiting our own sun, and researchers believe that this is the first of many to come.
Researchers had known that seven planets were orbiting the star. But Google Artificial Intelligence — which enables computers to “learn” — looked at archival data obtained by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope and uncovered the eighth planet.
Goodbye Uncanny Valley
Interesting video essay by Martin Lockheed on the recent developments in CGI and the repercussions on art and narrative forms.
“Like magic, crime, and power, CGI works best when undetected.”
“El Orfelinato” by oddviz (2017)
“Orphanages are dense and harmonious living spaces housing hundreds of children under same roof simultaneously. Abandoned Jewish Orphanage Building in Ortaköy (OHR-tah-keuy) Istanbul (also known as El Orfelinato) has been home for thousand lives during its century old history. It holds the memory of the past in worn stairs and layers of paint.
“El Orfelinato means ‘The Orphanage’ in Spanish. The name has been used by Sephardi Jews (Jews from Spain) community in Istanbul for decades. Sephardi Jews have a 500 year history in Istanbul since they were forced to migrate with mass conversions and executions by Catholic Monarchs in Iberia in 15th century.
“oddviz sheds light upon the visual and spatial memory of El Orfelinato, documenting it as it is with photogrammetry and presenting it in doll house view.”
On Weblogs in 2017
“I wonder what the Web will be like when we’re a couple more generations in? I’m pretty sure that as long as it remains easy to fill a little bit of the great namespace with your words and pictures, people will.”
“If you’re reading this, you have my thanks. But let’s be honest: I can’t know what you like. Every human product that’s really worth reading or seeing or hearing is made mostly to please its human producer. Because if you aim to please the world you usually miss, the target’s just too big and you can only guess where it is.”
– Tim Bray
From “Writing and Identity”
In Beckett’s novels the reader is lost and confused, stranded in a mire of words that seem designed to be inhospitable and to exclude, accompanying something that speaks its unquestioning I-say-I while forbidding any identification – until you realise that the strange tormenting voice that is mentioned sometimes, the one that tells people what to do, the one that is constantly trying to bring itself to an end but is never able to stop speaking itself, is the same voice that’s been in your head the entire time as you read. It’s shocking, but there’s a sense of joy at the same time. What distinguishes real writing from a legal deposition or a laundry list is its occasional capacity to provoke a kind of joy, even in evocations of sadness, loneliness, misery, loss, repression, and horror, the sheer pleasure of something entirely alien and entirely intimate, of a voice that is nobody’s and everyone’s and yours, there with you in your solitude, of language in the infinity of its play and substitutions, a moment of the freedom that’s still to come.
(image from article)
What led you down this path?
“I became fed up with animation for several reasons. Even though my work had a big impact, I kept going broke making film after film, and even doing high profile jobs was not very sustainable for the kinds of projects I wanted to do. In animation you tend to always be getting shafted by people. People just love shafting animators all day long for some reason. And very few really appreciate what you’re doing.
I also know many people who direct animated features or have their own TV shows and they’re not exactly happy people, which is to say, most of them are miserable. So it started feeling like a dead end. At the same time I started playing with game engines and getting ideas in that direction, so I just followed that.”
David O’Reilly’s game Everything is available for PS4 and Steam.
“The things that you do should be things that you love and the things that you love should be things that you do.”
If I don’t do it, I’ll stop doing it.
Great interview with Laurie Anderson on reality, virtual reality, working practices and the election. Worth reading all of it really.
This on Philip Glass and daily work:
I’ve been playing with Phil a lot lately. It’s been really, really interesting and fun, really nice. I remember one particular thing, the summer before this we were playing Ravello. It was a hard day. We had traveled there. We rehearsed. We’d done the show. We’d gone out for an endless dinner. It was two in the morning and we came back. I had to leave for Rome in a couple of hours. I was just packing and doing stuff. I came up from the garden and he was there with [his girlfriend] Sari. They had just done two hours of yoga. I was like, “Phil, it’s four in the morning. Couldn’t you do it tomorrow?” He said, “No, I wouldn’t of done it today. I need to do it everyday. If I don’t do it, I’ll stop doing it.” He’s like that with music, too. He’s so disciplined. It’s amazing. I’ve known Phil for many decades. He’s always been like that. He’s dedicated. He puts the time in. He’s also massively, musically talented… he’s a genius, and a hard working genius.
Paul Greer 