There’s this one gay club I go to that actually has a problem of straight guys going there to dance with girls. I guess these guys don’t understand that girls can also be gay, because they assume that any girls at the club are there with their gay guy friends.
So one night I was out on the dance floor, and I see this guy. He’s like over six-foot, at least, all beefed-up, muscle shirt, looks kindof like a douchebag. And he’s just circling the dance floor, in one continuous loop, looking at the crowd like a predator, and it’s creeping me the fuck out.
It’s creeping me out enough that I don’t immediately realize what’s going on nearby. Some girl has attracted one of the Assholes, who has proceeded to begin grinding on her. She’s pushing him away, telling him to get lost. He’s pulling that whole, “come on, don’t be a bitch” spiel, and generally just not getting the message.
BAM. Suddenly, the prowling guy swoops in, like some sort of Gay Avenger. He shoves himself between the girl and the Asshole, grabs the Asshole by the hips, and starts dirty dancing him like a God-damned fuck machine. Asshole completely flips his shit, like how DARE another man try to dance with him at a GAY BAR???, starts spitting curses, and tears ass off the dance floor and out onto the sidewalk.
The Gay Avenger turns back to the girl, inclines his head in an, “are you okay?” sort of gesture. She nods, and he returns to his previous position of circling the dance floor, looking for his next target.
Told this story to some guys upstairs. Apparently Gay Avenger is a regular there.
So here are some shots that I took the other day of my completed piece.
Looks so good…my boyfriend Ian Warren took some shots with his camera so I will post those later. Make sure to check out his site he does sculpture and photography!
Alexander Chen is turning into Google’s resident composer. In his latest experiment, he uses the controversial-but-buzzed-about Google Glass wearable tech as a video source for making music. Layering together a series of loops of his solo viola playing, he weaves a contemplative, modal composition. It’s a sort of overdubbed chamber ensemble in video. (The spare, parallel writing is to me reminiscent of a Copland string quartet.)
There’s nothing here that couldn’t be done with a head-mounted camera, but perhaps that’s the lesson. In our camera sensor-filled lives, a big part of the design statement Glass makes is the vision of a point-of-view video, seeing the world digitally as if through our own eyes. And there’s something a bit intimate about seeing the instrument, as his kid wanders around the room.
Three new sculptures may not seem like much of an event, but for artist Ron Mueck—famous for a slow, deliberate process and mind-boggling attention to detail—it's cause for a major exhibition. A follow up to...
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So, as you guys may know, I am a big fan of letters. I mean the things that make up the alphabet, as opposed to the things you get in the mail. Although I do also like mail, and obviously you can’t write a letter without writing letters.
Point being that I like talking about lettering, typography, etc. and it would be cool to have a spot to feature that stuff. So here’s my first shot.
Balkan Sans is a typeface that represents both Latin and Cyrillic Alphabets. Each character shows a pairing of the Latin letter and it’s Cyrillic equivalent. In the cases where they are the same, the letter is shown once, just at double height.
The applications for a typeface of this nature, with regards to education, are pretty cool!
It can be used to translate Croatian Latin into Serbian Cyrillic, for example.
The uses are even more expansive when using all the available faces:
Balkan Sans and Balkan Sans Stencil consist of four styles – three of them have different alignments (e.g., all uppercase characters are Latin and lowercase characters are Cyrillic) and one style consists of uppercase Cyrillic and lowercase Latin characters.
So you can use it in Latin or Cyrillic as you please, not just in the paired version I mentioned above. To truly understand it’s brilliance, check out the video below.
Unrelated, I relaunched my site and accidentally turned comments off. Sorry about that! As of this post it should be turned back on- with the new jetpack integration so you can comment using twitter or facebook as well as the default WordPress.
[Image: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; courtesy of the artist].
The ii gallery in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, is currently showing architect Sean Connelly's installation A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room), a "temporary earth sculpture" made from "32,000 pounds of volcanic soil and coral sand."
[Images: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; images courtesy of the artist].
The resulting prismatic monolith is 7' tall, 9' long, and 4' wide, and it "takes geometry to a new level," we read: "starting with a basic rectangular block, the sculpture will feature a single sloping surface that aligns with the position of the sun and moon on a key date in the history of land in Hawai‘i."
The exhibition title is the definition of the term kuleana, as translated in the Dictionary of Hawaiian Legal Land Terms. Coupled with increasingly contentious perspectives on the future use, development, and management of Hawai‘i’s land and natural resources, A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) uses two of Hawai‘i’s most politically charged materials and highly valued commodities (dirt and sand) to comment on the state of its environmental decline.
It's what the Honolulu Weekly calls "a site-specific, conceptual indoor megalithic sculpture erupting with a breadth of natural materials, Hawaiian history and galactic alignment."
[Image: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly, seen from above; photo by Vincent Ricafort, courtesy of the ii gallery].
The form itself was molded using timber framework to shape, pack, and stabilize the soil and coral sand—
[Images: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; images courtesy of the artist].
—but this, nonetheless, doesn't prevent the granular materials from seeking out their own, more natural shape, released from geometric imposition: sagging, cracking, creeping, buckling, and shedding matter over the course of the show.
[Images: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; images courtesy of the artist].
It is a sculpture that slowly falls apart—the earth exhausted from holding itself in place for so long—crumbling back to a less formal and organized condition, leaving chalky, smudged traces like a beach on the gallery floor.
[Images: Four Instagrams by Sean Connelly of his Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) installation at Honolulu's ii gallery].
Apparently inspired by Walter de Maria's New York Earth Room, Connelly wanted to see "what a version of this might look like in Hawai‘i, on Hawai‘i’s terms."
[Images: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; images courtesy of the artist].
To find out required his own massive earth-moving operation, bringing the 32,000 pounds of soil and sand to the gallery in a truck and carting it in with wheelbarrows; then compressing, framing, and forming the soil into the imposing trapezoid, a rammed earth Euclid.
[Images: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; images courtesy of the artist].
The results are these gorgeous but temporary slopes, planes, and strata, soon to crumble.
[Image: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; courtesy of the artist].
You can also listen to the artist discuss the piece on Hawaii Public Radio. A Small Area of Land is on display until April 27th at the ii gallery, at which point it will be "demolished." I'm not sure if this is a public event or not, but the process of dismantling the sculpture would be an interesting thing to see.
Triage is an iPhone email client (iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, and generic IMAP) by Southgate Labs, meant for just one thing: flipping through your inbox and marking messages as either (a) done with it, don’t need to see it again, archive it; (b) I can just peck out a quick reply right here on the phone and be done with it; or (c) I’ll deal with this one later, leave it in my inbox marked unread, but don’t show it to me again in Triage. It’s a perfect name for the app.
I got a sneak peek at it back in February when I was in New Zealand for Webstock, and started beta testing it soon thereafter. Since I’ve been using it, I’m more caught up on my email than I have been in years. A bargain at just $1.99.
While the work of Charles and Ray Eames is practically synonymous with Herman Miller for most of us in the States, several works by the prolific designers are actually under license by ,...
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Beats, Bass, Keys – a drum machine, a bass synth, and a lead synth, analog and $150 each. Now with MIDI. All images courtesy KORG; click for biggie versions.
The rumors are true: Korg has not one, but three pint-sized, $150 analog groove boxes – two analog synths and a PCM/analog drum machine.
Korg established a bit of a formula with the Monotron and Monotribe: pack some vintage sound and quirky personality into a small box, make it all self-contained (with speaker, batteries, simple touch strips), and then make it affordable. The result is cute, little analog boxes that only Korg could make – and at a price only a big maker could pull off.
Volca keeps to that formula, with new synthesis and drum adding step sequencing features and MIDI that make these into bona fide groove boxes. That MIDI in port finally adds what previously required hacking your Monotron and Monotribe to achieve.
$149.99 for an analog groove box, and these things should sell like candy.
And while Roland seemed to ponder recently whether it should remake the TB-303, the Volca boxes look an awful lot like Roland’s classic bass synth, in form factor and mini keyboard. No matter – first indications are that these will sound very different. Like the MS-20 mini earlier this year, the synths also build on a remade classic Korg analog filter design. (The MS-20 mini, as a more slavish remake of an original and a full-fledged synth with patch bay and keyboard, seems otherwise a different animal, but the fact that it also reuses that filter is significant.)
Adding MIDI to me is a pretty significant improvement. So, while the Volcas do have tiny touch strips for when you don’t have a MIDI keyboard handy, you’re no longer forced to perform finger-twisting feats of musicianship – you can use a real keyboard or sequencer as with a “grown-up” synth. It seems that the Volca has lost none of the trademark, lovable oddness, though, in the process.
Video, so you can hear them:
The three Volca models: Keys, a “lead” synth Bass, a bass synth Beats, a rhythm machine
And they create “the distinctive, massive sounds that can only come from a true analog synthesizer.” (Actually, okay, that’s not really what analog does, but it’d take a really long press release to explain what it means to be analog, so let’s just pretend it’s true and move on.)
Common features:
Loop sequencer (simple phrase-based storage for self-contained groove creation)
MIDI input (for control and sync, it seems)
Battery-powered
Built-in speakers
Minijack output
Minijack sync in/out (directly, for connecting Volcas)
Note that they no longer contain audio input, so the old monotron remains interesting as an effects box. Those three jacks are headphone, sync in, sync out.
Keys:
Three oscillators, tuned in unison up to three-part chords
Filter from the miniKORG700S, the 1974 Korg model (so before the 1978-vintage MS-10/20 filter in recent Korg outings)
16-step sequencer
Delay effects
Korg isn’t pitching this as a toy, either. They call the new synths “a new chapter in Korg’s long history of analog synthesizers,” and boast that the Lead generates sound beyond what you’d think in its small body.
Bass:
Similar to Keys, but focusing on bass sounds rather than leads, and with an eye, Korg says, to acid techno basslines
Step sequencer, “distilled” from Electribe (well, it works in a similar way)
Three oscillators with a voicing controls for different combinations
Beats:
All-analog sounds – not sampled – reproducing Kick, Snare, Hi Tom, Lo Tom, Closed Hi Hat, and Open Hi Hat
PCM samples of clap, crash, etc. (using PCM for that makes sense, and is in keeping with the retro style of these machines)
Variations for sounds, via controls Click, Pitch, Decay
16-part sequencer
Korg oversimplifies what it means to be analog here, it’s true. but it is fair to say that analog circuitry is a reasonable means to the kinds of sonic ends they’re describing. It’s even more true that having synths for the drum machine means that you can create variations stock samples don’t give you.
But I’m impressed that they’ve got a low price and economical use of controls that make these self-contained, wildly portable, and playable. In a way, the fact that you can run them with a pair of headphones and batteries makes it even more appealing that you can also use MIDI when you need it – you aren’t stuck with a closed box, but you can also play away from other gear.
I have lots of additional questions, so I’ll be getting up close with these here in Frankfurt. Keep an eye out.
I’ll also be looking to some of the boutique makers, not just Korg – yes, to readers saying check out MFB, you can bet I’ll do that. (It’ll just be easier after Messe – Korg returns to Japan, but some of these smaller makers go back to Berlin with me.)
Laser scanned and projected onto, 12.000 suspended spheres occupy over 1000m2 of space in this installation created by WHITEvoid for Hyundai’s Advanced Design Center.
140 is an upcoming platform game developed by Jeppe Carlsen, known for his gameplay direction for Playdead’s Limbo. The game is described as a “minimalistic platformer“, using electronic music to create synesthesia as the player manipulates their avatar, a character that can take on several basic geometric shapes. Carlsen described the gameplay as like “an [...]
Advertorial Content: As the days tick away until this year's Milan Design Week, running 9-13 April 2013, we're looking forward to our Designer Master Classes and a slew of other design events to be held at );...
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Folkert
[Image: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; courtesy of the artist].
[Images: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; images courtesy of the artist].
[Image: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly, seen from above; photo by Vincent Ricafort, courtesy of the ii gallery].
[Images: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; images courtesy of the artist].
[Images: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; images courtesy of the artist].
[Images: Four Instagrams by Sean Connelly of his Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) installation at Honolulu's ii gallery].
[Images: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; images courtesy of the artist].
[Images: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; images courtesy of the artist].
[Image: A Small Area of Land (Kaka‘ako Earth Room) by Sean Connelly at Honolulu's ii gallery; courtesy of the artist].
