Artists Michelle McSwain and Ryan Warnberg (known collectively as MRI) demonstrate how to paint with light. The premise: combine LED lights with long photographic exposures.
Painting with light
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Tag Archives: culture
Get Your War On: The Surge
Radiohead Remixes
I wanted to share a remix an old co-worker of mine, who goes by the name Umami, of the Radiohead song Nude. I think it’s really good. If you do you too, you should vote for it.
You can also see him perform live at Seattle’s lovely McLeod Residence this May 17.
Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus
While I was at the Web 2.0 Expo last week I saw Clay Shirky give a talk on Cognitive Surplus. Out of all the things I learned at the event this one has really stuck with me. You can find the the full transcription online as well.
I need to get his new book “Here Comes Everybody” which is about organizing without organizations. You can watch the interview of him discussing the book on the Colbert Report.
The Hair Trader
Who knew that there is a bustling market of selling hair online. If you take a look at the site – Hair Classifieds, Sell Your Hair & Hair Products you’ll see that people are asking good money for the hair on their heads. I wish I had this site back when I went from hippy to normal hair cut.
Trouble with modern day education?
I can’t agree more with these people. School wasn’t good for me and that was before the internet, but for many of the same reasons just different tech.
The Uncanny Valley
I find the concept of the uncanny valley very interesting. Having worked with 3D modeling and design, I’ve watched the work of people much more talented then myself create human like characters. I never knew there was a name for it before, but I’ve felt the instinctual feelings that something was wrong with the person in the image. Take the Miss Digital World Contest for example. If you follow the link and check out the images and videos you’ll start to get a feel for how visually they don’t really look right.
Some still image models have been done very well and they seem to cross the valley. I think the KAYA model is a good example of that (images here) However, if you watch the video, the animation makes the character slip right back in to bottom of the valley. I do think this is very subjective and observer based however fixing it by toning down the human like characteristics is fairly straight forward. The new movie Monster House uses stylistic human characters to a much stronger effect.
Robots have the same problem. Currently the most advanced looking human like robot is the Repliee Q1Expo. It sort of scares me. I’m excited about the progress being made in the area of more human like design, but I find that I have a stronger emotional association with the Aibo or QRIO. I’m not sure what it’s going to take to make the fully animated android / robot cross over that line, but when it does I think it will be exciting for sure. However until they do look like Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner, I think they need to keep the creepy zombie creatures (NSFW link) out of the public eye. It’s scaring people away from the whole study and development.