creativepro.com - Are You Ready for the Small Web?

Just when we thought that we had it down with web display, eye tracking and layout - a whole new ballpark. sigh.

creativepro.com - Are You Ready for the Small Web?: "
Is this the best way to read The New York Times on a tiny screen?

The digerati talk about Web 2.0 or the Semantic Web. I say, what about the Small Web? What does it mean to make your network available and fully functional to people with 3.5-inch screens as the window? You think it's tiresome waiting for a Flash animation to load now? See what it feels like while you're standing in line at the airport."

image: creative pro

Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006

It must be time for a road trip to DC! Its the National Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt Museum December 8, 2006–July 29, 2007

"The third Triennial brings together the experimental designs and emerging ideas—including animation, new media, and fashion, robotics, architecture, product, medical, and graphic design—at the center of American culture from 2003 to 2006.

Design Life Now features the work of 87 designers and firms who are leaders, innovators, or emerging figures in the world of design. They are practicing across numerous creative fields, including architecture, products, landscapes, interiors, graphics, film, animation, interactive media, fashion, robotics, and more."

I missed the last triennial in 2004, but I am making up for it by reading the book: Inside Design Now with writing by Ellen Lupton, one of my favorite designers, teachers, commenters and critic (all in one!)

Public Art in a Virtual World

Through an article in the NY Times, I am becoming interested in the possibilities of communicating visually via the role-playing game/community Second Life:

"...the Infinite Mind outdoor visual event is available on the sim. It replicates the photography exhibit, Our Walls Bearing Witness – Darfur: Who Will Survive Today?, that was projected onto the walls of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. during the Thanksgiving week in the U.S.

The virtual exhibit was scheduled to be dismantled on December 12, however, in light of the circumstances, it may remain until the interview can be rescheduled. It also includes a video of the real world exhibit installation. Don’t miss out. Take a few minutes and teleport over. This is yet another example of the powerful communications tools Second Life affords.

Halocaust_005 I often refer to '360-degree' content when urging clients and colleagues to rethink information presentation in 3D spaces. By that, I don’t necessarily mean an object which an avatar can walk around, through or physically interact with. I also mean rethinking more powerful content through multimedia...." Public Affairs in Second Life: Crisis in Darfur with Mia Farrow

Creating art (or curating the art to create a statement, such as this photography exhibit) on an intimate level is nice, but the potential for creating public art, at your desk, via your computer, which can communicate to the multitudes seems incredible! No more waiting for exhibition space at the local coffee shop or trying to persuade a gallery owner of the merits of this exhibit. This will make it possible to have multiple exhibits in a short period of time, assuming that one has the content to mount them.

Snowglobe travels

Childlike does not have to mean shallow or cloyingly sweet. Two New York artists have been experimenting with snowglobes, those glass balls filled with water, glitter and a small scene.

Most snowglobes are a cliche, without much surprise and certainly no contemplation. As I child, I loved to stare in them and imagine journeys. Thanks to a pointer from Kim Carney's blog, I have found a whole series of snowglobes by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz that not only have the mystery of my youth, but go way beyond in possibilities to ponder.

"Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz, in their recent work entitled Travelers, reconstruct the journey as transition, adventure or mishap and they monumentalize it by means of a snowglobe, a symbol of souvenir and memory, which since the 19th Century, has aimed to capture the beauty of the snowscape and the silhouette of cities in a winter fantasy.

The snowglobe seems to encapsulate in a fictional mockup that quaint, kitsch tale of the sublime experience as a formulation to popularise the intensity of the romantic journey.

Each of these snowglobes has been constructed and designed to contain a snowy tale that is later on photographed. Inside the sphere, life becomes a transition to nowhere, characters appear lost in a hostile environment and vainly try to find a path which has ceased to exist: they are a metaphor for the modern world, constructed as a continuous landscape of spaces of transit and paths, lines of communication or waiting areas....

The work of Martin and Muñoz certainly connects with these proposals of a constructed reality to the extent to which it acts as a mock-up, but on the other hand distances itself from them by tackling a world of fantasy, inscribed on the imaginary and without contact with the credible, putting to one side any bleeding between reality and fiction. Their winter no-lands are spaces which take in the imaginary occurrence of small individual disasters, extolled as monuments of daily desolation

Schubert’s Winterreise isn’t a journey through a landscape, but an itinerary of feelings and passions which lead to an interior which is both shredded and wished for, a decisive journey which leads to one’s own rescue. In this way, the snowglobes in Travelers construct a journey to the interior of fear. The snowglobe is only apparently innocent: it contains black humor, it’s an impossible tale of modern terrors. Travelers who haul their suitcases through the snow, a couple meet and embrace, blessed out, on the tip of an impossible iceberg, a couple who drag a prefabricated cottage through an inhospitable winter or some drivers detained by a soldier amidst a snowfall...." Winter Journey by Santiago B. Olmo

Domino Pressure

I have found it! An engrossing, tomato squashing game of dominoes! One could argue that it increases the players three dimensional manipulation skill. Then again, it could just be regarded as addictive fun!

The point is to figure out the pattern in which the dominoes will fall. You then have to figure out which is the first one in the line. Tap that first one and watch the tomato squish!

Score is tabulated by pieces left standing at the end of the game. Oh, and its a race against time.

Old coke machine

This is an old, rusting coke machine in the woods behind my house. These woods are littered with refuse from the 1940s-60s. It used to disturb me because I thought of it as destroying nature. Now, I see it as a part of living in this area. This is not the North Cascades wilderness. It is a rural area which has been manipulated by man for better or for worse. The rust and slow decay of the cast off appliances are a reminder of the temporal nature of man within nature.

Man versus nature

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