Point Cloud is an attempt to reimagine our daily interaction with weather data.
"How exactly this happened, in [Chris] Kohler’s admitted simplification, concerns the split between japanese and American gaming in the 1980s. American gaming went to the personal computer, while Japanese gaming retreated largely to the console. Suddenly there were all sorts of games: platformers, flight simulators, text-based adventures, role-playing games. The last two were supreme early examples of games that, as Kohler put it, have “human drama in which a character goes through experiences and comes out different int eh end.” The japanese made story a focus in their growingly elaborate RPGs by expanding the length and moment of the in-game cut scene. American games used story more literarily, particularly in what became known as “point-and-click” games, such as Sierra Entertainment King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, which are “played” by moving the cursor to various points around the screen and clicking to the result of story-furthering text. These were separate attempts to provide games with a narrative foundation, and because narratives do not work without characters, a hitherto incidental focus of the video game gradually became a primary focus."
— Bissell, Tom. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. New York: Pantheon books, 2010. (via carvalhais)
Posted 1 month ago
"The trend toward feudal-romantic fantasy may seem harmless. Heck, I enjoy Tolkien and steam punk and some of the best fantasists. But dreaming wistfully about kings and lords and secretive, domineering wizards is a sugary path that leads ultimately to betrayal. Because kings and lords and wizards were never our friends! Indeed, for most of history they were the chief plague destroying hope for humankind. Oh, some kings and wizards were less bad than others. But they were all “dark lords.” Our fixation on them is a legacy of the 10,000 years in which feudalism reigned, when chieftains controlled the fables by ordering the bards what to sing about. A long, grinding era when humanity got nowhere. When the strong took all the women and wheat, and forced everyone else to recite fables about how right it was."
— David Brin (via azspot)
(via notational)
Posted 2 months ago
stroke test in space testestest
8.5 x 11 inches if printed
2013
"I would define intellectual elegance as a mind that is continually refining itself with education and knowledge. Intellectual elegance is the opposite of intellectual vulgarity."
— Happy 82nd birthday, legendary designer Massimo Vignelli, creator of the iconic NYC subway map. (via explore-blog)
Posted 4 months ago
The Text Message Turns 20
Computerworld: How the SMS got its start in a Danish pizzeria.
Forrester: More than 2 trillion SMS messages were sent in the US in 2011, or 6 billion SMS messages per day.
Pew Internet: The average US teen sends 60 text messages a day.
Falkvinge: How it costs more to send an SMS to someone next door than the equivalent data information from Mars to Earth.
Ryan Kearney: Why it would cost $35 million to send a 4.6 gig HD video through AT&T via SMS (while roaming).
Posted 5 months ago
Glitches made with a custom modified Super Nintendo.
(Source: halogenic, via powderdoom)
"The nature of the innovation established by Creative Commons, by the Free Software Movement, by Free Culture, which is reflected in the Web in the Wikipedia, in all the Free Software operating systems now running everything, even the insides of all those locked-down vampiric Apple things I see around the room. All of that innovation comes from the simple process of letting the kids play and getting out of the way."
—
Eben Moglen
Innovation under Austerity - Transcript - Software Freedom Law Center
(via fred-wilson)
(via notational)
Posted 5 months ago
"I’m increasingly more interested in the relationship society and individuals have with technology, and less interested in the technology itself. I’ve been focused on dealing with the function of art in culture, and intentionally exploring that space in a more concentrated way."
— Colin Darke: Detroit: Artistic Beacon — Evan Roth and Detroit’s Light Festival (via notational)
(via notational)
Posted 7 months ago
Posted 7 months ago
An experimental video made by Antoine Sansonetti for the designer duo PYRN+MDM. This installation recreates a virtual universe where reality becomes illusion, without any 3D technology.
Data Driven Stories: Aaron Koblin for the Future of StoryTelling
Aaron Koblin discusses his high-profile web-based creative projects which have all been groundbreaking:
A sort of dreamscape unto itself, this film charts the creation of several of acclaimed artist Aaron Koblin’s most imaginative and game-changing projects, including the crowd-sourced music video for Johnny Cash’s song “Ain’t No Grave” and the user-customized short film “The Wilderness Downtown,” which is set to Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait” and was created entirely in HTML5. Koblin also describes the genesis and evolution of what may be his most groundbreaking work to date: “This Exquisite Forest,” a collaborative art project and online story generator (created with Chris Milk and the Tate Modern museum in London) built and nurtured by web users. Koblin’s remarkable oeuvre draws increasingly on the immense computing, storage, and data-sharing capabilities of the current generation of computers—as well as recent innovations like hardware-accelerated browser graphics—and demonstrates in the most vivid ways imaginable the infinite artistic and narrative possibilities of crowdsourced digital creation and autonomous storytelling.
(via notational)
