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Awesome Flash ad for Dennis Kucinich lists names of soldiers who have died in Iraq and asks what they died for. (Answer: Halliburton, Bechtel, the President's rich friends...) It would be wonderful if this could run on television, to penetrate the propaganda fog most Americans see, or just to piss people off. Never forget: Bush is a monster (and stupid). Peace out.
Fire for Pixel, by pixelthork, enlarged from 47 X 46 pxl original. I am in awe of this picture. (I'm told the pixels are fuzzy on Safari and sharp on IE. I'm about ready to say, you aren't "getting" my page if you browse with Safari. Bill Gates is paying me a lot of money. Actually, Netscape and Mozilla work fine, too.)
Update, 2010: GIF remade at 400 x 391 after all browsers followed the Safari lead and involuntarily fuzzed out enlarged graphics. The original sized version looks like this:
UPDATE to my previous post: It appears that everyone sees the animations (e.g. here and here) the way I see them--all moving, all in synch--except Apple Safari users. The "8 frozen gifs, 1 blinking" is a glitch in an earlier version of Safari (only one animated gif per page would move) that can be fixed with an upgrade. Current Safari users see the gifs moving asynchronously because they start moving the instant they load and stay on that uneven "schedule." That might be nice but it's not as rigorous as what I intended (the reason for making a grid out of the image was so the pulsation would happen on a larger scale). I've also had problems with Safari fuzzing out pixel blocks that were supposed to be super-sharp. Of course, it would be the browser associated with the operating system the most graphically literate people use. Oh, well, I'll have to think about this.
One solution would be to have grids where all the animations move at different speeds. In the one below, the dark rectangles move more slowly than the light ones. It probably doesn't matter if all these start at different times:
This is boring, but a friend with a Safari browser running on a Apple PowerBook sees the animations on this page as 8 frozen gifs and 1 moving gif in the corner. It should be 9 animated frames--all identical, all moving. If you're seeing anything different please leave a comment, anonymous or otherwise, and let me know what browser you're using. I'm planning to do more of this work and am curious to find out what anomalies are cropping up. Thanks.
Below: David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, and "Toby" in Escherland (Labyrinth, 1986). As a teenager, A Beautiful Mind Academy Award winner Connelly played the most appealing Everygirl imaginable. Much of what Jim Henson did to her implicitly in Labyrinth Dario Argento did explicitly the preceding year, in Phenomena (released stateside, heavily cut, as the horror film Creepers). In Argento's movie she is poisoned, thrown into a dungeon, immersed in a pool of maggots, and witnesses unspeakable slashings and beheadings and still emerges victorious. What was it about this wholesome, fresh-faced, straight-ahead actress that made directors want to put her in peril? That question doesn't really merit an answer, I just find it weird that Argento's film is the evil twin of Henson's and they both star Jennifer Connelly.
Speaking of A Beautiful Mind, I highly recommend this review by Ted G, who took an MIT class from Nash after the ailing prof was first released from the psychiatric hospital, and whose grasp of the math is better than Ron Howard's.
"Ludo," movements and voice by Ron Mueck (Labyrinth, 1986). Although included in the London-based "Sensation" show as a YBA, Mueck is neither young (he's 44 now), British (he's Australian) or, shoot me for saying this, an artist. Thanks to ad man/collector Charles Saatchi's money and influence, he successfully crossed over from Jim Henson puppeteer to a museum career without significantly changing his schtick--a kind of sentimental high craft. In 1939 Clement Greenberg attempted to nail down what made artists different from illustrators and came up with a dichotomy he called "cause vs effect." Picasso's art made viewers question how the picture was working on them or even what art was (cause) while the Russian neoclassicist Repin painted pictures that told you in every detail exactly how to react to them (effect). For Repin, substitute Mueck's Duane Hanson-style realistic sculptures, which are even less ambiguous than Hanson's because they're deliberately stagy and "spooky." The art world should be more wised up by now. Below: Boy, 2001 (exhibited in the Venice Biennale and elsewhere).