Flow

I wouldn’t let my baby play with an ape, but it’s still pretty cute. Full story here.

• Nick Brad­bury: Hit The Deck: Taste­ful Ads in Feed­De­mon
  If this comes to Net­NewsWire I *really* hope they offer an option to pay for an ad-​free ver­sion of the appli­ca­tion. (If they don't I doubt I'd switch away though - NNW is so much better than the alter­na­tives, espe­cially when you take the iPhone client into account, that there's no app to switch to.)
• Real­i­tyS­tu­dio » Michael Moor­cock on William S. Bur­roughs
• STACK inde­pen­dent mag­a­zine sub­scrip­tion and deliv­ery
  A sub­scrip­tion ser­vice that sends you a vari­ety of mag­a­zines. Bril­liant idea, and not too pricey at £3 per mag.
• The Agrippa Files
  "Agrippa (a book of the dead) appeared in 1992 as a col­lab­o­ra­tion between artist Dennis Ash­baugh, author William Gibson, and pub­lisher Kevin Begos, Jr." It included pages that faded over time, and a Gibson poem that "ran from a diskette once before encrypt­ing itself into oblivion".
• BBC NEWS | UK | Eng­land | Cam­bridgeshire | Love letter jigsaw takes 15 years
  Sweet story, even if it shame­lessly plugs a vanity pub­lish­ing outfit and learndirect.
• Cus­tomize­Google: Improve Your Google Expe­ri­ence — Fire­fox Exten­sion
  "CustomizeGoogle is a Fire­fox exten­sion that enhances Google search results by adding extra infor­ma­tion (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and remov­ing unwanted infor­ma­tion (like ads and spam)."
• tap tap tap ~ 10 useful iPhone tips & tricks

More Goodiepal available here.

45 Adapters by Glen Mullaly.

Mot posted a photo:

“Up to 5MB” my arse. I’m switching to cable as soon as my BT contract runs out.

Lovely covers.

• Another coun­try: Artist Charles Avery dis­cusses the Island - The Scots­man
• VUKZID06 - Good­iepal - col­lected works - V/Vm Test Records
  “Here for the first time in an easy to down­load set of zip files are a series of col­lected Good­iepal works which include at Goodiepal’s request ‘Narc Beacon’ and his ‘Mort Aux Vaches” releases. There are also a selec­tion of rare Good­iepal tracks along with some of his selected advertisments.”
• Pos­ter­ous: Min­i­mal­ist Blog­ging - Read­WriteWeb
  Pos­ter­ous is an inter­est­ing weblog­ging app that you post to via email, and which can then send your posts on to Flickr, Twit­ter, your weblog, &c.. Cool, if not ter­ri­bly secure.
• Why I Chose Pos­ter­ous: a Quick Review - Joel’s pos­ter­ous
• Evo­lu­tion of the visual system is key to abstract art
• Aeeeris Tablet Con­ver­sion Kit
  A custom face­plate for the Eee 70x that turns it into a nice-​looking mini-​tablet.
• Medi­a­Con­sumer 0.1 - David Raynes
• The Pixel Palace
  "Tyneside Cinema, the oldest sur­viv­ing news­reel cinema in the coun­try and one of the UK's lead­ing cul­tural venues, is explor­ing cinema's poten­tial in the new dig­i­tal world, using the latest dig­i­tal pro­jec­tors, high-​speed net­works, games con­soles and mobile devices to help us uncover ways in which we can make cin­e­mas (and per­haps other arts and cul­tural spaces) as rel­e­vant in the 21st cen­tury as they were in the 20th."
• Sucked Into The Tun­nels Beneath Las Vegas : NPR

See the path to where you are in the Finder window’s title bar: defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES. Via TUAW

• The Art of the Title Sequence
• Would cur­rent tech­nol­ogy allow some­one to make an audio record­ing of their life? | Ask Metafil­ter
  Answer: yes, but pro­cess­ing the data would be very hard/expensive.
• Dept. of Tech­nol­ogy: Remem­ber This?: Report­ing & Essays: The New Yorker
  "Gordon Bell… by means of custom pro­grams and gad­gets, now col­lects the daily minu­tiae of his life so emphat­i­cally that he owns the most exten­sive and unwieldy per­sonal archive of its kind in the world."
• The Grid System
• 35 Days Against DRM — Day 7: Prince: Friends with­out ben­e­fits. | Defec​tive​By​De​sign.org
  This is why I didn't buy any­thing from the NPGMC. That and all the songs released were bibble.
• Dinosaur Gar­dens » BBC Radio­phonic Work­shop - Fourth Dimen­sion
• Sucked Into The Tun­nels Beneath Las Vegas : NPR

japanese matchbox label by maraid.

More Japanese matchbox covers, and some Eastern European examples.

I have been told that these 140 characters can be more than enough for effective communication.–Tony Benn, on joining Twitter. Update: Oh, it wasn’t really him after all.

SHEEEEEEEIT by dunkr.

Also, this is the 500th post at Tumble. Sheeeeeeit.

Mot posted a photo:

And, like, if you look, the circle inside the square, is like, drawn on the wall behind it, yeah? By the city itself, yeah?

Also, urban decay.

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

I wonder what would happen if I popped in and said "Afternoon, chaps! Mine's a G&T!"

• BNP member prox­im­ity search
  Enter your Post Code to see if there are any fas­cists in the vicinity.
• Why Were Still Look­ing At You (from The Herald )
  Alter­nate head­line: Why do the Herlad keep cred­it­ing me with James Mottram's work, and he with mine?
• Pub­lish­ing Google docs to your blog
• On the Death and 441-Year Life of the Pixel
• rus­sell davies: spec­u­la­tive mod­el­ing
  Mod­i­fy­ing Hornby model build­ings to look like they might in 2050. I can't wait to see what people come up with (I'm too cack-​handed to par­tic­i­pate, sadly).
• Jon­estown 30 Years Later
• Run Mac OS X on an Eee PC - Wired How-​To Wiki
  I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu Eee, really, but this remains very tempting.
• Aquar­ium Drunk­ard: MP3 Blog, Music Blog » Bob Dylan/Johnny Cash :: 1969 Ses­sions
• Europa Film Trea­sures

This month I’ve made quite a few posts at MetaFil­ter, an Amer­i­can web­site where thou­sands of people gather to share links to cool web­sites and shout at each other. Here they are:

The Tone Generation

The Tone Gen­er­a­tion is a radio series by Ian Hel­li­well ‘looking at dif­fer­ent themes or com­posers in the era of ana­logue tape and early syn­the­sizer technology’. The orig­i­nal globe-​trotting series: Great Britain, France, Ger­many, Italy, Hol­land, Scan­di­navia, East­ern Europe, USA, Canada, Rest of World. Bonus pro­grammes: Expo 58, The RCA Syn­the­sizer. All links are to MP3 files, except the first one. Alter­na­tively, you can slurp down the lot in one go by sub­scrib­ing to the pod­cast feed.

Theatre of the New Ear

The­atre of the New Ear. Two radio plays: one by Char­lie Kauf­man, the other by the Coen Broth­ers, recorded live and star­ring Steve Buscemi, John Good­man, Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man and Meryl Streep.

The Coen Brothers’ Saw­bones can be down­loaded from the site linked above, or streamed along with Kaufman’s Hope Leaves the The­atre here. Via Sub­trac­tion.

L’Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode

A com­plete archive of French mag­a­zine L’Officiel de la Mode, from 1921 to 2008. It’s a trea­sure trove for fans of fash­ion, pho­tog­ra­phy, adver­tis­ing and design.

Architecture, Sampled And Remixed

Dion­i­sio González makes pho­tographs of imag­i­nary fave­las, Filip Dujardin makes pho­tographs of imag­i­nary build­ings.

The Demarco Digital Archive

The Demarco Dig­i­tal Archive holds 10,000 images and doc­u­ments gath­ered by Richard Demarco, gal­lerist, Beuys col­lab­o­ra­tor, founder of the Tra­verse the­atre and a key figure on the Scot­tish arts scene since the ’60s.

The Lost Synthesizer Classics of Ursula Bogner

It seems almost incred­i­ble that Ursula Bogner’s musi­cal tal­ents should have remained undis­cov­ered until now.

• Jour­ney­man Leather Belts
  Nice belts, hand­made in Shetland.
• BNP Mem­bers List Leaked - Com­plete details of all British National Party Mem­bers here!
  One member, a man from Pinner, that the press haven't picked up on, whose notes are just a tri­fecta of fail: "Former police­man. Lec­turer in human rights/data protection."
• RPX: Instant OpenID and Data Porta­bil­ity
  Lets you farm out authen­ti­ca­tion, so users can use their exist­ing accounts on other ser­vices (Google, Yahoo!, Face­book, OpenID, etc.) to log in to your site.
• Iran­ian Blog­ger Could Face Death Sen­tence
  It's Hoder, who I know through MetaFilter.
• Radio Wallah
  "Click on the links below to see some fab­u­lous tran­sis­tor radios from the fifties."
• GREY GAR­DENS ONLINE INFOR­MA­TION DATA­BASE
• Mens Under­wear and Male Under­wear from Sun­spel
  Nice T-shirts. As worn by Char­lie Watts!
• groupr
  "groupr is a small web appli­ca­tion that groups photos in Flickr groups that you belong to into a series of web pages, so that you can easily look at them and see what's been added."
• Offi­cial Google Blog: Feed me! Google Alerts not just for email any­more
• Fix for Flick­er­ing Fullscreen Appli­ca­tion with Compiz | Tombuntu
• Type­Pad - Why Blog - Jour­nal­ist Bailout Pro­gram
  Send a link to your last pub­lished piece to SixA­part, and they'll give you a free Type­Pad account, and enrol you in their adver­tis­ing programme.
• A Tuto­r­ial on Hyper­fo­cus Tech­nique
  Thanks for the link Dad!
• Hyper­fo­cal Focus­ing Pho­tog­ra­phy Tips - Dig­i­tal Camera Tech­niques

A great iPhone tip from Bonaldi: Set Safari to about:blank and save as homescreen bookmark. No more waiting for it to gather its wits and reload some old fat tab.

This is likely to be of lim­ited inter­est to most read­ers, but the denim heads¹ will drool. Iron Heart have just released a new pair of jeans in a lim­ited edi­tion of one hun­dred: the Triple Works Hidden Rivet TWHR01.

A belt-​loop stitched to a waist­band, for extra strength.

Like the mighty Iron Heart IH-634S, they’re based on the 1955 Levi’s cut, though prob­a­bly not too closely, as Levi’s sued Iron Heart and other Japan­ese repro brands last year for trade­mark infringe­ment. Unlike the IH-634S, which is made of incred­i­bly hefty 21oz selvedge denim, the TWHR01 comes in a rel­a­tively light­weight 13oz selvedge, though it’s woven on the same 30” Riki-​Shokki—that’s Japan­ese for “power loom”—and from the same long-​fibre cotton.

Some more nerdy details:

• Goatskin leather patch
• Hidden rivets
• Donut buttons
• Button fly
• Selvedge detail­ing inside the watch pocket and the fly con­struc­tion of the jeans
• Two colour stitch­ing throughout
• Extra-​heavy twill pocket bags
• Half-​lined rear pockets
• Belt loops stitched into waist­band for extra strength

And if you order now, you can get an optional crotch rivet free of charge. Yes, you read that right, an optional crotch rivet!

1. Hello Roger! Hello Mike!↩

Mot posted a photo:

It may end up as a lady spiv.

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

Hannah made some little spivs.

Mot posted a photo:

I should really start using a different desktop picture. It's been the same on all computers (except the Newtons) since May 2005.

• BBC NEWS | Pol­i­tics | Shops may take ID card bio­met­rics
  ‘Supermarkets could be asked to take people’s fin­ger­prints as part of the government’s iden­tity card scheme.’ What. The. Fuck?
• Barack Obama: How He Did It
  Fas­ci­nat­ing, some­times gos­sipy behind-​the-​scenes look at the Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. The fact that the reporters ‘were granted year-​long access on the con­di­tion that none of their find­ings appear until after Elec­tion Day’ is pretty dubi­ous, though.
• Pod­cast Down­load­ing Con­firmed in iPhone Firmware 2.2 | TheAp­ple­Blog
  Cool. (For some reason I’ve got really into lis­ten­ing to pod­casts on my iPhone, though I never did on my iPod.)
• PdaNet — Use your iPhone as a Wire­less Router for your PC/Mac
  If there’s no offi­cial way of teth­er­ing in the next month, I’m going to have to jail­break my ‘phone for this.
• AT&T-sanctioned 3G teth­er­ing on the way for iPhone
  Fin­gers crossed O2 follows.

• wp-​Hyphenate 1.0 beta • KING­desk
  ‘Hyphen­ation is finally avail­able for the web.’ I just installed it, and it works very well.
• Twit­ter / Num­bersSta­tion
• Simon Pegg on why the undead should never be allowed to run
• From Silver Lake to Sui­cide: One Family’s Secret His­tory of the Jon­estown Mas­sacre - News - LA Weekly - LA Weekly
• The Croft
  Mike D.’s new weblog (at least I’m pretty sure it is!) about the Hebrides.
• Hand-​Knitted Luxury Aran Ice­landic Jersey ‘Odin’ from Scotweb Kilt & Tartan Store
  Very nice hand-​knitted wooly jumpers. Bit pricey, mind you.
• Clark­son joke sparks com­plaints
  Looks like funny jokes on the BBC will have to be banned.
• PyRoom — dis­trac­tion free writ­ing
  Write­Room clone. I think I’ll go with this one for the Eee PC.
• tex­troom - Google Code
  Write­Room clone. Has some inter­est­ing fea­tures, includ­ing set target word count, but fiddly to install.
• The Comics Reporter
  "Garry Trudeau has confirmed… that he has sub­mit­ted Doones­bury strips for next week that are based on Sen­a­tor Barack Obama win­ning the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion to be held on Tuesday."

• Word­Press › Blog » The Visual Design of 2.7
  Look­ing good.
• Shep­ard Tones
  "The "sonic barberpole" illu­sion invented by psy­chol­o­gist Roger Shep­ard at Bell Labs. The illu­sion con­sists of a seem­ingly end­lessly rising or falling set of tones. The trick is done by simul­ta­ne­ously sweep­ing eight (or so) pure tones (i.e., sine waves) tuned exactly one octave apart. The human ear/brain has a really hard time fig­ur­ing out which pure tone is the fun­da­men­tal, so it "slips" peri­od­i­cally, just like an eye watch­ing a bar­ber­pole (or look­ing at an Escher staircase)."
• Five Things You May not Know About Net­NewsWire: News­Ga­tor Widget Blog
  The screen­shots of old ver­sions are making me all nostalgic.
• Grif­fin Tech­nol­ogy: iTalk Sync
  Free audio recorder for iPhone. (It irri­tates me no end that a sep­a­rate Mac app is needed to sync files - it'll be the third such app I've installed, when I should be able to mount the iPhone on my desk­top and drag files off it.)
• Does Obama / McCain slash fic­tion exist?
  Of course it does.
• Conky - Home
  A Linux util­ity (equiv­a­lent to Geek­tool on the Mac) that puts info on your desk­top - uptime, net­work activ­ity, email noti­fi­ca­tions and what­not. A bit fiddly to con­fig­ure, but there are squil­lions of sample config files on the web.
• Mine­field
  An exper­i­men­tal new ver­sion of Fire­fox. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now, and it’s incred­i­bly fast. Stable too, sur­pris­ingly, and all my add-​ons work fine (thanks to Nightly Tester Tools).
• hildam​agazine.net
  An art magazine.

Mot posted a photo:

Transparent NHS frames. I was planning to turn them into prescription sunglasses with photoreactive lenses, but they're so nice I might just get normal lenses fitted.

I have a horrible feeling this might be the start of a collection.

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

It's kind of tricky to take decent photos when poking your lens through a chainlink fence. For once I almost wished the Epson let you use the LCD as a viewfinder, like one of them naff DSLRs.

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

If you're in Liverpool, you have to go and see this. Photos and video don't do it justice.

Mot posted a photo:

Transvestite opera-tastic.

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

To the Wirral, not away from it like in the song.

All too often, the curators of group shows are guilty of shoehorning artists together, beginning with a premise, then finding work that proves it. Here, curator Lynne Cook of the Dia Centre for the Arts in New York has done the opposite, corralling three artists - Chantal Akerman, Lili Dujourie and Francesca Woodman - whose work practically begs to be shown together.

All three use the camera, whether to make photographs, film or video; all three train their lenses on themselves in their immediate environs. And in so doing, all three raise questions about gender and the female body in art, make inquiries into issues of identity, and use their chosen media to slip the usual moorings of time. Seeing them together, there are so many shared concerns, so many echoes, such a sense of dialogue between their respective practices that it is hard to believe that Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman were operating in isolation, largely unaware of each other’s work.

Ellipsis opens with Woodman, who died young and relatively obscure, aged 22, after committing suicide. It seems fair to say that her posthumous reputation - at least among the young artists on whom she continues to exert an influence - is in part thanks to the poisonous Romantic notion that a great talent lost is all the greater, but in the room at the DCA devoted to her small black-and-white prints the weight of that reputation is lifted from the shoulders of her work. We see her in her studio, or in the grubby rooms of abandoned houses, relentlessly investigating the possibilities of self-portraiture. Mirrors and glass are everywhere. Woodman hides herself, uselessly, behind clear panes, huddles behind mirrors or crouches like a museum exhibit inside a vitrine. This tendency to reflect, deflect and direct the viewer’s gaze is at its most powerful in a work where, unusually, Woodman appears only by proxy: three women, naked, stare into the lens, their faces obscured by a print of Woodman’s own face.

Elsewhere, the focus is on the female body in its surroundings, with Woodman deliberately making herself invisible, concealed behind drapes of peeling wallpaper. There is a lot of blurring, too, not just to produce artefacts of long exposure, but to introduce the passage of time into the still photographs.

Time and movement are central to the work of Lili Dujourie. Fourteen of her video works, made between 1972 and 1981 - coincidentally or not, the same span as Woodman’s working life - are ranged across a bank of monitors on the gallery floor. The first five of these, all bearing the title Homage à (one of many ellipses in this show) leave the viewer to fill in the possible subject of Dujourie’s tributes. That subject is any artist - male, it is safe to assume - who has ever painted a nude: Dujourie films herself on a bed, or on the floor beside it, shifting from familiar reclining poses to awkward arrangements of limbs, a device that highlights the artificial positions in representations of women’s bodies. Perhaps thanks to the sometimes violent movements or obvious discomfort of some poses, these pieces call to mind more unsavoury examples of such representation - Walter Sickert’s Camden Town nudes, say, or John Deakin’s exploitative photographic studies of Henrietta Moraes for Francis Bacon. In other videos, Dujourie again adopts cliched poses, here a sultry vamp, there a listless housewife. While time is inevitably present in the moving image, Dujourie, in a way that recalls the motion blur in Woodman’s work, injects a sense of progression into her works, only to subvert it. Oostende, a series of images shot from the artist’s studio, are shown as slides, each one with a projector of its own. The mode of display will have viewers waiting with baited breath for the usually imminent shift on to the next image, but it never comes - an ellipsis with no resolution.

More ellipses follow in the films of Chantal Akerman. Je tu il elle, an installation reworking of a feature-length film, offers a deconstructed narrative on three screens. The first shows the heroine played, inevitably, by Akerman engaged in odd rituals, eating sugar from a bag, restlessly rearranging sheets of paper on the floor and, in an echo of Dujourie, shifting between poses on a mattress. The second sees a woman who may or may not be the same character chatting in a bar with a man, waiting with him in an idling truck, and watching him shave. The third is an extended, if not explicit, sex scene in which Akerman’s character, or someone who looks the same, fumbles with a girlfriend. It’s an exercise in mystery, obfuscation and omission, with Akerman setting up possible interpretations and leaving them hanging: are we being shown a split narrative, the imaginings of the first woman, or something else entirely? Akerman’s new edit of the 1971 film Mirror provides, finally, some resolution, reflecting and combining devices just seen in Woodman’s photographs and Dujourie’s Homage series: a young woman stands before a looking glass and dispassionately appraises her own body, feature by feature.

This is a powerful show that explores - if you’ll excuse the term - the first flowering of feminist video art. It is worth noting that these women share more than a common set of concerns in that, while they provided primary texts for feminist critical theory, and their work can only be seen today through the lens of that discourse, none of them made their work explicitly within that context. While the body, questions of identity and the mediated gaze of the camera are to the fore, Ellipsis is also a show about time. This is not the sort of exhibition you can flit through, pausing for a little while before works that catch your eye. Instead, the shifting of time in the works on show - Dujourie’s frozen slides, the long static shots in Akerman’s films, Woodman’s stilled movements - imposes a sort of active torpor on the viewer, slowing time to the pace of a too-hot afternoon. This effect is, at least in part, down to sensitive curation by Cook, who has done much more than simply bring Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman together, and has, moreover, arranged their work in such a way as to expose new, unexpected connections between the three artists.

Ellipsis is at DCA, Dundee, until June 22, 2008.