Eduardo Morais

— From the Science Tumblr.

It seems Twitter is seven today, to which my first reaction was “Wow, already?!” Lately I’ve been disappointed at Twitter’s handling of its API, so I’ve been hedging my microblogging through Identi.ca, but it is still worth remembering my first tweet:

Trying hard to do nothing.

January 13, 2009

Some things never change.

Google will shutdown Google Reader on July 1^st.

This is terrible.

Not because I’m a heavy gReader user. I’ll have to move my subscriptions over to some alternative feed reader (like the appropriately-named The Old Reader) and import all my favourites to my Pinboard account, but that’s easy and not much of a problem.

This is terrible because this is the final nail in RSS’s coffin. Without a popular and efficient feed reader, those small personal blogs that made the Web great will struggle even more to find audiences. Blogging is dying, replaced by the efficient ‘sharing’ of Facebook and Twitter. RSS would have been the federated open alternative, but syndication is contrary to walled gardens.

It seems we came full circle. With the demise of Google Reader, it seems having a small online presence on the Web outside of Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter is again the province of hackers and nerds…

If you look for it, there is wisdom in technical manuals: Life Advice from Machines.

A Sudden Gust of Wind, Jeff Wall’s neo-pictorialist recreation of Katsushika Hokusai’s Ejiri in Suruga Province. (via Like a Field Mouse)

Honkey Kong, a photo series by Christian Åslund. (via Neatorama)

Stereograph of man with device designed for flying. (via xplanes)

Big Dreams, by Extra Fabulous Comics. (via inky)

On International Art English, by Alix Rule and David Levine. (via The Null Device)

I am truly sick of reading or watching stuff made by wannabe sophisticates acting as if they invented the wheel, when in fact are just repackaging and reframing stuff made not much long ago by a not-dissimilar sort of people. The materialization of abstract concepts is to be expected then, as plagiarized works are to be seen as new by the inclusion of these invisible new raw materials. In this context, Art English is just a tiresome, predictable symptom of the fact that art the ‘creative industries’ are all just about posing an attitude and about packaging irrelevancies in a way that conveys a feeling of being a (take your pick:) sophisticated / interesting / mysterious / fabulous person, and not about making art at all, not about communication at all, not about sharing and empathizing with other humans at all.

Not even about just showing something cool.

I feel more and more that, in the same way as all professional sports tend to become like Wrestling, so does Contemporary Art constantly tends to become Advertising (of itself and of the artist) and a sad affirmation of exclusivity. Not that this is, mind you, a new critique, people have been making the same sort of point since before Pop Art opened the floodgates of artistic capitalism. And therein, perhaps, lies the root problem. Just say no!

I found an unused roll of slide film which had its expiration date set in 2001. I took some pictures with a Yashica Electro 35, then took the film to the local Lomography shop so they cross-processed it as regular C41 negative.

This is what happened.

Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris. (via MeFi)

See also Prokudin-Gorskii’s color photos of Imperial Russia (previously), the color photography of Albert Khan (hat tip to Diogo), and these color photos of Blitzed London during World War II (previously).

Compiled by Golan Levin & al. Still apropos of my slit-scanning experiments.

These are some of my early experiments with slit-scan photography, made while trying a Processing application I coded mostly as a learning exercise. The software allows you to either ‘scan’ your webcam image or a video file, but since using my laptop as camera is a bit cumbersome, most of the above images were made by ‘scanning’ some random videos I had around. I’ll have to try to shoot video specifically for slit-scanning - so far I found out that stable, sideways shots of slow-moving subjects work the best. (As an aside, slit-scan photography is basically one of the main techniques used by Photo-finish systems, only at very high frame rates.)

Anyway, I think the app is cool and stable enough to be worth sharing, so I made a download for Windows available - head to my Processing sketches page to get it!

World’s Fair, New York (1964), by Garry Winogrand. (via Magnificent Ruin)

And here’s ten things Winogrand can teach you about photography.

Martian dawn. Photo taken August 13, 1977 by the Viking 1 Lander. (via Pruned)

I’m late to write about my impressions of the year 2012, not because I’ve been busy but because I should be busy and somehow a sense of guilt about it prevents me from doing something as egotistical and pedestrian as writing my personal thoughts about those 366 days filed under 2012. Or perhaps I just feel that writing on my blog is just low-priority work disguised as leisure. Or perhaps I feel only twelve people will actually read this, and none of them will be any of the persons I enjoy imagining doing so.

And I’m annoyed I’m writing on my old netbook because my home computer died last weekend. Not a good moment because my PhD requires stuff done. The fucker.

But I digress. Even though it had its moments, 2012 was a shitty year. Even though I try not to mention it to my international readers, lest I be interpreted as belligerant and/or depressing, know this: the Long Depression - that is, structural socio-economical Crisis - got real here in Portugal. I’m actually lucky to have a part-time teaching job which requires me to take a PhD I’ll have to pay for. I’m lucky to be able to pay for a small studio where I can work and study, and that my parents can help with the other things I can’t afford. I’m 33, and like most of my friends my age I’m stuck with little perspectives. And the fear of unemployment and the little money due to frozen wages and rising taxation and the feeling one’s work became an auction won by the lowest bidder while empathy is rarer as selfishness, not selflessness, is generated by and feeds The Crisis, all that is on my mind as I wake up every morning. Lonely mornings. 366 of those don’t make a good year.

And why? Because of turbo-capitalism, because of Euro-banksters, and because of what can only be Northern/Central European governments’ climate envy and racism (an ugly word, I know, but how else to explain the beautifully orchestrated media campaign to convince Southern Europeans they brought this on themselves because they are lazy, when they actually work more hours for less pay, less perks and more taxes?). And obviously, because of those among ourselves (starting with our turbo-liberal - that is, Social Darwinist - government) who honestly or cynically believe such bullshit, that we must suffer for our sins, however factually unspecified those sins are. And there are lots of shit-believers, because The Crisis is actually a Cold Civil War, with external interferences and profiteering like all civil wars, therefore a Civil War indeed. Ongoing in 2013.

Fuck it.

In 2012 I fell in love; things didn’t work out but I loved!

I feel I’m a wiser person. Not always a good thing, but its own reward neverthless.

I made cool stuff: directed a film, released two shorts to the Public Domain. And I learned enough technical stuff to make my geeky self happy.

My friends were my friends and were my friends. That is incredibly important. And even though at my age it is getting difficult, I think I made new friends - and I’m not talking about Facebook.

In 2012 I watched some great, great films: Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, Miguel Gomes’ Tabu, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist and what must have been my favourite Bond movie, Sam Mendes’ Skyfall. But my two favourite movies of the year came right at the end of the year: the powerful Detachment by Tony Kaye and Leos Carax’s fantastically charming weirdfest Holy Motors. Holy Something, indeed!

2012 was also the year I rediscovered music thanks to (advertising alert) Vodafone.fm, a radio station I got in the habit of listening to while driving and manages to have a playlist that doesn’t prompt me to switch channels every other song (something we in Porto had lost in the late 1990s and I thought would never come back). Here’s a beautiful automated medley of my favourite songs of the year, courtesy of This is My Jam.

And in 2012 I read David Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. That book is a keeper.

A few hours ago I went to the movies for the first time in 2013. I watched Michael Haneke’s Amour, the 2012 Palme d’Or at Cannes and a wonderful film - one of the saddest I have ever seen. And yet another item that underscores my growing realization that being a busy person is worthless, working a lot on stuff is worthless, if you prioritize that over the people in your life, if you value the bustle above the building of relationships and friendship and love (and if you don’t want to just take it from me, go read Tim Kreidler’s The Busy Trap, who puts it a lot better than I do). I do want my PhD and I am driven to do stuff. But if I’m going to choose a future regret, between failing a deadline for a paper and failing to accept a coffee date, I know which regret I’ll choose. If this makes me a lazy Southern European, so be it: I choose love.

Happy New Year, everyone! (photo via Flickr Commons)

As the World Continues (but now with gradually improving sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere), spare a thought for all the pointless posing and bullshit and ineptitude at communication that would have been such a sad summation of human History had the Mayan calendar actually been the territory rather than the map. Just go and call someone you like.

And let’s try not to scale honesty back too much, shall we? (via xkcd, obviously)

A Short History of the GIF. I remember when I was a teenager ‘gifs’ was slang for digitized porno imagery (was this a portuguese thing or did the video authors gloss over that?). That this was followed by annoying Web 1.0 animations and banner ads didn’t do wonders to rehabilitate people’s view of the Graphics Interchange Format. That day only came a quarter of a century after the format’s introduction, when we got enough bandwidth to start doing all kinds of awesome things with it.

I wonder what goodness may come if we just insist on certain technologies rather than eagerly adopting shiny new things whenever they appear. (via Ideas Repository)

The More Pixels Law: Gigapixel Cameras and the 21st Century Reality Effect is an interesting read, but the above graph forgets about the 41 megapixel Nokia 808 cameraphone which completely closes the high-end/low-end megapixel gap. Anyway, I shudder to think of smartphones with gigapixel sensors running something like PlaceRaider (by then bought by Facebook and turned into the ultimate 3D augmented reality chat app or whatever kids will do in the 2030s). Will future society think there’s something wrong with people who keep their lenses covered with pieces of black electrical tape? (via New Aesthetic)