Artwork by Kara Hammond, from her blog.
I would like to dedicate this to the selfless, hard-working Discogs volunteers, who, no matter how wrong they are nor how shallow their reading of the Discogs rules, work night and day to keep the Discogs database free from corruption by removing the contributions of casual users who have not accrued vote power.
See also: hall proctors
One of the cathode-ray TVs I was using for GIF display in my Honey Ramka show failed shortly after the opening, emitting, as the gallery described it via email, "a distressing high-pitch sound from the back & a nasty burning smell."
A quick eBay search for a replacement uncovered this gem:
New in box, under $100. One thing I learned in my research is that many sellers of unwanted CRTs describe them as "perfect for retro gaming."
That makes sense for me, since I am using them to show looping animated GIFs with a strong "pixel art" component.
On unboxing the Magnavox (no, I didn't do an unboxing video) and connecting a DVD player I discovered this TV cropped about 5 percent off the left side of my perfectly-centered looping GIF. Not acceptable. This necessitated burning a new DVD with a slight offset to the right. My video editing software is too primitive to do this, so I had to do a Rube Goldberg sequence of: resizing the GIF "canvas" and overlaying the GIF slightly off-center; screen-capturing 2 minutes of the GIF looping as an .avi file; exporting the .avi in lossless mode to keep the pixels sharp (especially since the conversion to DVD muddies them slightly); loading the .avi into a Windows 7 DVD-authoring program called "DVD Flick" (hat tip Paul Slocum); burning to disc. Voila, a centered GIF on the Magnavox.
Clement Valla published an article on Rhizome.org in 2012 that I missed about weird Google Earth "mistakes" (hat tip E.D.). Didn't realize (and kind of don't care) that Google uses a tabletop 3D model as an intermediary image between "satellite" and "street" views and imperfect translation "through" the CAD rendering creates deformed landcape incidents such as bridges that appear to hug the earth like snakes, rather than soaring in the sky.
As I wrote to E.D. in an email:
I missed that Rhizome [Valla] article. (It's funny that his commenters found the same effect on iOS.)
Some of the images are notably bizarre. Google should not be proud -- this is like their dirty linen. [As for their] 3D effect where the user switches from satellite view to street view and is taken on a bird's-eye thrill ride through time and space onto the tabletop of street reality: experiencing all that theatrical overkill in the course of something as mundane as looking up a local sandwich shop drives me a bit crazy.
Valla says they aren't glitches but they are! The mistake is using fake 3d reality as a conduit between photo views of sky and street. Why do that?
Weirdly squashed bridges I view as symptomatic of our not-ready-for-prime-time culture, which treats all innovation as a success regardless of whether it works.
Kind of like self-driving cars (speaking of squashed).
After sending the emails was doing an ordinary search and used it as an occasion to "freeze" some of those imperfect (but artistically tasty) "transitional" images.
Alex Katz and Wayne Thiebaud saw the future!
(detail of above)
related: Weird Stretched Zombie
tags: uncanny valley, don't be evil, accidental art, modernist painting
tommoody @tommoody
4m4 minutes ago
was laughing retroactively at the Scott Kildall/Nathaniel Stern PDF about their project "Wikipedia Art" where they used the word "Brooklynite" as my identifying credentials, as in, those damn Brooklynites saying what is and isn't art
tommoody @tommoody
17m17 minutes ago
i have a show opening Dec 15 at Honey Ramka gallery called "Pre-Post-Internet" -- might as well get out front and claim this turf
tommoody @tommoody
20m20 minutes ago
if @furtherfield must break links in the name of website redesign "progress," could they please add, on the "Sorry!" landing page, the sentence "Any old links can be accessed on our archive by adding 'archive.' to the beginning of the URL"
