matthewgruman.com

1. Delicious coffee, filled to the top.
2. Sneeze coming on.
3. Changing my sweater.

I bought a copy of Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual based on its Call description here. It was a bit of whim, probably to get $39 worth on Amazon, but I was pretty excited at the idea of a Bringhurst/Chicago-esque manual for graphic design.

I’ve been picking it up here and there for the past couple of weeks and it’s not what I’d hoped. In no way is it a bad book, it has some really useful ideas and examples, but it’s not a manual. Nor is it comprehensive. Comparing yourself to Bringhurst — a typographic authority with the soul of a poet who, contrary to popular belief, is actually very nice — is pretty intimidating. I’d never do it, but these guys did and really shouldn’t have.

There’s a lot of repetition, a lot of flowery language, and the majority is dedicated to typography. I’m not really sure who the audience is: I didn’t learn anything new, but a beginner probably wouldn’t understand the language. Buy it if you like reading about graphic design in the bathroom — there’s no more than 100 words per page so it makes a good quick read.

Evolution is, by definition, a gradual process. So the idea of ?evolving drastically? is sort of a contradiction. In biology, species that attempt to evolve drastically die, because their offspring are hideous mutants that don?t develop past zygotes. The purpose of evolution is to survive by adapting cautiously to the environment.

When judging any human behavior, it?s important to examine the default approach; ie, what do people do, in that context, when they have not given careful thought to their work? In the case of development, ?relaunches? are the default. If you aren?t careful ? if you don?t deliberately fight it ? your projects will amass into mountains. Smart development requires discipline: the ability to say, ?No, we aren?t doing that right now.?. This is the most valuable skill any web developer can acquire.

- Via Jakob Lodwick, a very talented and intelligent man whose ability to irreverently explain complex ideas always astounds me. I’ve emailed him twice over the past few years–once for praise/help, and once to criticize; he responded with equal thoughtfulness and respect both times.

I had very long arguments with every digital arts professor I had in University about what actually defines digital art. One of them told me that yes, if I make a sculpture that included an LCD playing a video I made on an analog camera, it’s digital art. One of them told me that a computer was analogous to a camera, but couldn’t rectify the fact that my computer IS a camera.

The big argument came during a course whose final project was a website. I decided to do an experiment: I took a techno track I’d made the year before and re-recorded it with acoustic instruments. I put both tracks on a song review website, and logged the reactions to this song that exists in digital and analog. I put together a neat looking website and developed a really useful animation technique that I still haven’t found a way to improve four years later. I even came up with a snappy, art-school name: Reorganification.

During the critique, my professor came down really hard on me for not creating website art, but rather art that was being displayed on a (pretty) website. My argument was that it was all web-based: the site, the track reviewing, the animation, etc. How is it NOT website art? In fact, it was more website art than any of the “examples” that she had given the class, and far more than the rest of the class. Her argument was about the experimental aspect of these other projects she showed me, and that mine was still just a display mechanism.

So I was getting critiqued for not experimenting even though I went ahead and developed a technique I’ve never seemed before. I used the Internet’s immediate results to do an experiment that was impossible in analog life. I made a commentary on the parallel existence of digital and analog art.

I went home and starting thinking of ways to improve on my idea, but I was just annoyed and even more unimpressed with the “art” world as usual. So, I set out to annoy people. I made a splash page with a 1 and a 0 (yes and no, respectively). If you click on 1, you get a horizontal string of 1s and 0s that breaks the horizontal rule. The immediate next step for most was to click back, and then click on 0. 0 brought up a “loading screen” that was really just an animated .gif (I knew that the vast majority of the class was inexperienced enough to not check the source code/properties of the “loader”)–it gradually slowed down until it stopped at 70% and just blinked perpetually.

If you had the patience to mouse over the string of 1s and 0s, or check the source code, you’d have realized that random digits were links hidden by CSS. Links brought you to individual reviews of those tracks I’d recorded, along with an embedded mp3 (we were “taught” how to do that in class). The final 0 brought you to my initial, pretty, webpage with the animation and an explanation of the project.

I think 3 people “got” it, and went to the right spot. I saw at least 5 people waiting on the load screen for minutes at a time, getting more and more frustrated. Most of the comments I got were along the lines of “why didn’t you keep your original site?” or “this is SO annoying! I HATE YOU!” I got an A+ and realized that a lot of digital “art” is simply finding new ways to annoy your audience and calling it art.

Anyway, the point of all this is a Valleywag article on Seecoy, “two art and design students from BYU, [who] call their work vintage web. Circa 1996.” I went through my mental digital art checklist:

• Is it annoying? Yes.
• Are they using technology from 10+ years ago? Yes.
• Is it poignant? No.
• Do the artists understand their craft (i.e. the web)? No.

And yet one of the “artists”, Chris Coy, is part of an exhibit at New York’s New Museum. The silver lining is that maybe digital art is intangible enough to not survive for future generations to judge. It amazes me that people with the technology to create anything they want insist on not actually learning how.

The sad thing is that almost all the digital “artists” I’ve met are really, really nice people who are really, really excited about things. Somehow, the genre has evolved into this idea where technique and knowledge is counter-productive to creation. A nice-looking website looks too corporate to be art. Proper technique means you’re trying too hard, so it can’t be art. What is it that prevents digital advantages (i.e. instant learning, scalable techniques) from actually being used in digital art?

These super clear audio files are called holophony (holophonic sound recordings) and are designed to be listened to with headphones for the best effect. They have been recorded with a dummy head that has two microphones, one in each ear. The shape of the head and ears are designed to be similar to a human head to most closely replicate real human hearing. It?s pretty incredible.

You HAVE to listen to these. I was crawling out of my skin.

Accuracy, The Holocaust, and HD from Josh Mohrer on Vimeo.

Related fact: when I’m around, you have a free pass to make as many Holocaust/Nazi jokes as you’d like.

1. Do you like to dance?
2. Do you like pop music by people who actually like music?
3. Do you think that “ya ya ya ya” is an adequate chorus lyric?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you should probably get your hands on on a copy of Architecture in Helinski‘s new record, “Places Like This”. Have a listen at their website.

Still Life from JoshFlowers on Vimeo.

Definitely one of my favourite videos.

More than $45 million has recently been paid to residential school lawyers ? one of the largest legal bills in Canadian history.

- Via CBC.ca.

I’ve worked for one of the research companies who employed “lawyers” for residential school cases. While they had Law degrees, most had never used it in a professional setting. Why? Real lawyers do not do research work on what should be one of Canada’s biggest embarrassments.

There are a LOT of people who were abused at these schools, but there are also a lot of opportunists who weren’t. So you get a bunch of second-rate “lawyers” trying to distinguish, based on hearsay and other usually-invalid sources, which cases are real and which aren’t. Money that could be used to create a sustainable future is instead being funneled, at an alarming rate, into this ridiculous lawsuit.

But what’s worse? A few people who are trying to unethically get money from the government, or a government who has a documented and admitted history of abuse and prejudice? I think that $45 million would be better spent by the victims, and I’d much rather have my tax dollars go into the hands a few undeserving souls if it means that the real victims get their compensation.

1. Dream about having an English butler.
2. Woken up by the sound of an English accent!!!
3. Crushing realization that I’m listening to a toilet paper commercial.