Brain Bear! | rabisco | 12/08/10
Bill Griffith: Top 40 List on Creating Comics | comics | 17/04/10
Nice tips by Bill Griffith about making comics (though lots of them are useful to any kind of artist), from ideas, technique and art to distribution and publishing. Read all of them here (via McCloud) .
My favorites:
31) Aside from trying to communicate, don`t think of your readers when you create your comics. Please yourself and a few friends. Then hope for the best.
2) It can take years to find something to write about.
25) When starting out, try to get in print as quickly as possible. Seeing your work in print is tremendously educational. All your mistakes leap out. Educational, but painful. If you do strips (as opposed to longer stories) try your weekly papers first. Self-publish. Any way to get into print is good, including the web.
Procedural Painting | procedural | 27/02/10
Procedural Painting aplication made in 2007 to generate an image for a “digital art” contest. Click on the image above to see two images generated on the aplication.
If you’d like a Wallpaper, save the images in the corresponding links below:
Karen Finley | art | 26/02/10
Karen Finley is an interesting and controversial american performance artist. The following excerpts are from quer essay I Was Not Expected to Be Talented (1990):
Why should I pretend to stop drinking? For the children? Shit, they’re the reason I drink!
I know everything, that’s my problem. I’m too smart for this world (…) Clever, smart, driven pain. I’m always right.
I hate people who rationalize suffering. I hate people who have to have a reason for everything.
I’m a living Hell and I intend to keep my devil out.
I want to be dependent on drugs, alcohol, and sex again.
Excerpts from Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: Source Book of Artists Writings (1996), edited by Peter Selz and Kristine Stiles.
Artist’s website: karenfinley.com
Heavy Rain x Façade?! | game | 24/02/10
It’s been a while since I lost my interest for adventure games. There are great titles in the genre, but I just got tired of the frustration of being locked in a room even though I have an axe in my inventory, or having to limit my dialogue to certain pre-defined options.
So I decided to wait for the next big evolution, something that would expand in a significant way the possibilities of interactions I had with these virtual worlds.
Resume of Beatles - White Album | audio | 24/11/09
In this audio experiment I tried to resume the White Album from the Beatles as much as possible, but without “squashing” the sound and keeping both the beginning and end of the songs intact.
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da:
Happiness Is A Warm Gun:
I Will:
To listen to the whole album go to the archive.org page, here. It has around 6 minutes, including both records (If you are interested, I suggest hearing It as soon as possible - they’ll probably take it down). This work was made in 2005.
Youtube Cinema | art | 29/09/09
I just read an article on WIRED about neuromarketing applied to cinema. Here are some excerpts (the highlights are mine):
The filmmakers will be able to track precisely which sequences/scenes excite, emotionally engage or lose the viewer’s interest based on what regions of the brain are activated. From that info a director can edit, re-shoot an actor’s bad performance, adjust a score, pump up visual effects and apply any other changes to improve or replace the least compelling scenes.
(…) This technology doesn’t brainwash anyone. A moviegoer’s brain will reveal their personal preferences, while creators will be able pay attention to those important details to produce better films and know how to effectively market them.
I consider neuroscience to be one of the most interesting fields of our time, but the practice suggested by this article bothers me.
If not “brainwashing” (although at a long term that is practically what it is), when the mind itself begins to determine the world around it the result seems to be some kind of mental short-circuit. It’s no surprise that this strategy would be adopted by the entertainment industry (whether we like it or not, neuromarketing exists for a while now, helping us identify our deepest needs).
I just hope that this kind of approach doesn’t turn out to be a common practice in art and culture. When I go to the movies the last thing I want to see is what I expect.
3rd International Convention for Puredata | event | 27/07/09
This month took place in São Paulo the pd~con09 (3rd International Convention for Puredata), in a series of activities and performances.
Quoted from their blog:
“The International Convention for Puredata (Pd) is a periodic event that started in 2004 and is the most important event of the community of developers and enthusiasts of Pd. The Pd is a programming language itself to the development of interactive applications, allowing the manipulation of data flow in real-time. “
Since I’ve been experimenting with Pd the last few weeks, I was curious to watch at least some of the presentations. I went last friday and saw some performances in the SESC auditorium (Paulista Av.).
The presentation that interested me most was Silent Construction by Jaime Oliver (Peru), because of the beautiful visuals and sound textures that the artist generated with the instrument. Click here to watch a video from one of his performances, including some “behind the scenes” footage from the inner workings of the algorithm used (unfortunately this is not the same performance I saw - the lighting was much cooler, all dark, with only one light source inside the drum).
I also enjoyed [kleine machine], digital poetry by a duo called HP Process (France), mixing sound, visuals and motion capture in some kind of hybrid narrative revolving around the image captured in real time of a woman in a red dress (which eventually ended up in the stage floor). They have audio and video in their myspace page here.
My only complaint about the performances was that the sound was too loud. I’m sure many people went home that night with damaged eardrums.
Lucas Samaras | art | 21/07/09
“Why are you conducting this interview?
I want to crystalize the daily situation of talking to myself. (…)
If you were alone in the world would you be an artist?
I am alone in the world. (…)
Are you nice to people?
No. I am accurate about my feelings.
Do you want to be wealthy?
Not any more.
Why?
Wealth is a profession.
Don’t you want to have wealth?
I want just enough to live and do my work without feeling that I have to give something away out of guilt or generosity.
What’s wrong with generosity?
It perpetuates a moneyed aristrocracy. (…)
Why don’t you drive?
I don’t trust my killer instincts.
Why do you want a megaphone, why reach millions?
I don’t want to reach millions but the equivalent of myself among those millions.”
Excerpts from “Another Autointerview” (1971) by Lucas Samaras, from the book “Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: Source Book of Artists Writings” (1996), edited by Peter Selz and Kristine Stiles (bold highlights not part of the original text).
Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw | games
A while ago I bumped into this series of very funny game video-reviews called Zero Punctuation - a good place to start watching is the comparison between the titles inFamous and Prototype, here (the series are more or less in the line of Angry Nintendo Nerd).
The videos are done by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, author of famous games (at least in the indie scene) such as 5 Days A Stranger, 7 Days A Skeptic and and many others. For other stuff, check out his site at Fully Ramblomatic.
PS: for anyone who cares about the adventure games genre, I recomend hearing what he has to say about it.
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