Tag: Artistic

Becher on Becher by Kahn


I’m fascinated by this derivation of a photographic study.

Idris Khan’s super imposed photgraphs, trade on the rigourous methodology of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Bechers photographed and catalogued industrial buildings around Germany and the USA, maintaining a strict set of guidelines that encouraged objective analysis and comparison between similar built types.
Khan’s photographs superimpose each photograph from one of the Becher’s series onto one another to form a single photograph. Admittedly (and I don’t want to play chicken and egg here…) the method is similar as that used in Megan Gould’s “Google Averages”as well as Jason Salavon’s “Every Playboy Centrefold”. However in this case the effect not one of an abstract blur but an emphasis in the similarity of form and the minor discrepancies of detail.

You can find more examples of the work of Idris Khan here.

Becher on Becher by Kahn : : architectural ephemera

xRez – Extreme High Resolution Images

Wow. Impressive set of photos. The interface is whats nice. Very Google / Yahoo maps like. I seem to remember a freeware app that would let you do this with your own photos. I’m going to have to dig that up… Still, these photos are very nice.

xRez is a consortium of digital artists committed to exploring new creative opportunites made available by the advent of extremely high-resolution gigapixel digital photography. We believe this is clearly the next revolution in photography, allowing photographic experiences with a deeper level of fidelity and impact than previously seen. Further, by combining powerful 3d tools and techniques appropriated from the visual effects field, possibilites arise of new imagery and animation that are truly novel and unprecedented.

[via Red Ferret Journal]
xRez – extreme high resolution images

Otona No Kagaku Crystal Radio Kit

Otona no Kagaku Crystal RadioOtona No Kagaku, or ‘Science for Adults’ is a ‘mook’ series published by Gakken in Japan. Each issue has includes a kit that goes along with whatever the issues topic is. I could hardly wait for this one! It’s a crystal radio. Very classy design too, that diamond weave coil design is a real eye catcher. It includes a diode that you can use as a detector or if your feeling like playing with the cat’s whisker a bit you can use the tow mineral samples. The reception isn’t as good as with the diode but you get the true crystal experience with this method. In the base of the radio is a small battery operated amplifier so you can use the radio without a super long antenna. I don’t think it’s cheating, your still using a chunk of rock to rectify the signal. It took me about two hours to put everything together and that’s with a few false starts in winding the coil. As my Japanese is very bad, I did have to look up the characters for some basic colors so I could connect the wires in the right order. This page on about.com proved to be quite useful with this. Now, the selectivity isn’t the best but that can be fixed with a little tinkering under the hood. It does receive the local stations quite nicely and best of all it just looks dead on cool. I took loads of photos of the build to have a gander at them and enjoy.

Otona No Kagaku Crystal Radio Kit build  – Flickr photoset

Karakuri Corner

Translated version of the Otona no Kagaku web site

Otona no Kagaku group on Flickr

Buck Godot Comics

Buck Godot Phil Foglio’s ‘Buck Godot’ comic series is an all time great. It may be from the 80’s but it is still a good read.

Buck Godot: zap gun for hire is a comic with a noir sensibility. Here you’ll find hard-drinking detectives, prostitutes with hearts of gold, foul-mouthed alien bartenders and lots of gunfights.

  Wikipedia has an entry on it as well. You can read them as a web comic here if you wish.
BUCK GODOT Comics

Parking Aid For Social Harmony

Learn to park In an effort to undoubtedly promote social harmony amongst people who park their cars, my friend Kevin (aka Dusty Weasle) has come up with a simple to deploy universal sign that you can place on peoples cars when they don’t quite hit the parking slot. Feel free to print out a bunch and keep them in your glove box for when you see someone that obviously needs a little help.

Learn to park

Bastard Operator From Hell

Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH)I’m going to show my age on this one, I can tell. I remember first reading about the BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) back in the early mid 90’s while browsing through the posts on the good old Usenet. At first I didn’t quite know what to think, was this just some sys admin that was venting his spleen in creative way? Turn out, I was right:

The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH), a fictional character created by Simon Travaglia, is a rogue system administrator who takes out his anger on lusers (his colleagues, bosses and anyone who gets in his way).

The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet by Travaglia, with some being reprinted in Datamation. They were published weekly from 1995 to 1999 in Network Week and from 2000 they have been published most weeks in The Register. They were also published in PC Plus magazine for a short time, and several books of the stories have also been released.

As someone in a similar position I have been reading them ever since. The Register has the current archive but you can find older ones at Simons personal page.
And while your at it, make sure you check out the DIY excuse board. I’m sure it will be very handy the next time someone calls and asks why the file they had been working on all morning (and didn’t save) is gone after the power glitch and can’t be recovered from the previous nights tape  backup.

Archive of BOFH
Current BOFH on the Register
Bastard Operator From Hell – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia