May 25, 2010
The China beat goes on:
Ines Brunn after Li Wei
Some notes on the People’s Republic before the second chapter on the Fabled C[hinese]hipster…
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Wu Yulu’s amazing mechanical men:
After suffering a series of life changing set backs such as a burnt down home, spraying himself with battery acid, and experiencing great financial debt—all in the name of art—Chinese farmer Wu Yulu is finally gaining some recognition for his homemade robots.
–Designboom
DB also has a gallery of Wu Yulu’s ‘Peasant Da Vincis’ for Cai Guo-Qiang’s inaugural exhibition at the newly restored Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai; some images interpolated below (cue egregiously ironic juxtaposition of images + text):
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Click image to see Robo-Pollock in action at DB
Chinese news site Southern Weekend recently sent intern Liu Zhiyi undercover at the Shenzhen site of Foxconn, “the world’s biggest contract electronics maker and a major supplier to Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other companies,” which has been under scrutiny for the suicides of nine workers this year (more background info at NYT):
I know of two groups of young people.
One group consists of university students like myself, who live in ivory towers and kept company by libraries and lake views. The other group works alongside steel machineries and large containers, all inside a factory of high-precision manufacturing environment.
–Liu Zhiyi, Southern Weekend via Engadget
The translated article is definitely worth reading, though the Apple connection clearly raises the profile of these otherwise-overlooked incidents.
Skeptics (or fans of Apple) have taken to pointing out that this suicide rate, in a plant with four hundred and twenty thousand workers, is no higher than that in a Chinese city of comparable size.
–Evan Osnos, Items of Interest, Letter from China blog on the New Yorker, May 25 2010
Again, clickthrough for sweet vids on DB...
On a lighter note:
“I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said. “And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible.”
–Chinese Factory Worker Can’t Believe The Shit He Makes For Americans, The Onion
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Essay Question (10 pts): To what degree does electronic music reflect the alienation of technology and hyperindustrialization?
Let me take this opportunity to explain my music. At first I liked drums, they were fast and noisy and that’s what I first produced. After a while I listened to more electronic, quieter music. I like fast music, but it’s more melodic as a general rule. I added more melody into my music, more baritone. My latest work has slowed down in comparison to my older music. In the past it’s always been very young, punkish, full of joy. Now, I like slower, blacker, darker music. Also, I like the Chinese influence. I cant explain it, I just like it. I add a little bit of Chinese music in everything.
–Sulumi, via Intel×Vice’s Creators Project
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A few more for good flavor:
- Wild Wild Westernization: “16 Items They Only Sell at Chinese Walmarts” (Buzzfeed)
Henri Cartier-Bresson – Shanghai, 1948
- A glimpse into a Chinese toy factory.
Li Wei via the Guardian
May 24, 2010
“Let’s go to another commercial.” –PC (1:45)
Apple’s iconic “Get a Mac” ad campaign is no more: Jobs & Co. have pulled the plug on the cheeky TV spots that pitted stuffy-button-down-middle-aged-guy John Hodgman against relatable-young-hip-dude Justin Long (human representations of PC and Mac, respectively).
Here’s a montage of some memorable moments between the two titans of technology:
It’s an easy metaphor for the shift from the PC vs. Mac decade to a full-fledged, multi-platform war between Apple and everyone from Google to Adobe to Amazon—not to mention Microsoft ever-looming in the background—though it’s far to early to tell who will be the next Hodgman.
April 19, 2010
This ironic meta/PoMo infographic has been making rounds in the memesphere lately:
It’s true for the most part, though the 3,274 seems a bit over the top.
In any case, here are a few of the better infographics I’ve seen lately:
Julian Hansen has created an extremely thorough visualization of typography for dummies.
Click the image for the full, unadulterated 1983×1402 version.
Inspiration Lab
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Yesterday, before I discovered the video above, I came across a dollar bill with a red “Where’s George” stamp on it and I decided to enter it into the database (I’ve logged a couple in the past). It seems that I’ve since spent said dollar, as it is no longer in my wallet, but I managed to find it in my Firefox history. Apparently, it was in Greenpoint almost exactly a year ago; who knows what sort of wonderful adventures George #B2078 7046J has had in the mean time…
Follow the Money via Visual Complexity via PSFK
Almost (but-not-really-at-all) related: Redesigning the Dollar Bill; UPDATE: The new $100 bill.
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Gizmodo’s guide to the current fronts where the Big Three are vying for tech/information world domination.
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April 5, 2010
*Updated on 4/7.
So I happened to be in Midtown on Saturday morning (long story short: I was trying to get to MoMA early enough to see Marina Abramović) and I decided to swing by the cube.
While I didn’t have a chance to see the iPad in person, I’ll probably swing by an Apple store some time this week to check it out. I don’t plan on getting one at this point but I’m intrigued by the device, which may or may not revolutionize computing and media consumption as we know it. If the iPad has been criticized for being some kind of hedonistic Swiss Army Knife for entertainment at the cost of productivity (citation needed?), I should think that it is rightfully billed as more of a grown-up supertoy than anything else—it is neither overgrown iPhone nor underpowered laptop; the iPad is something else entirely.
Furthermore, insofar as the iPad represents Apple’s foray into the space(s) currently occupied by netbooks, e-books, textbooks, regular books, magazines, newspapers, television, digital picture frames, portable gaming devices, board games, and (lest we forget) tablets, I think it has the potential to redefine media in new and possibly unexpected ways. The fact that it is an easy point of entry for a mass audience to own a piece of the Apple brand (/marketing machine) almost certainly belies its true significance, whatever that may be.
Of course, I suppose that anyone who is curious about said significance has already been inundated with news, reviews, photos, videos, etc.—the iPad has been broken, jailbroken, jailbait, photoshopped and photo-opped—from the likes of Engadget, Gizmodo, TUAW, et al. Love it or hate it, we’re far past the point of making jokes about its name.
For superbly-curated and less overwhelming opinions and aggregation, I recommend John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. Similarly, I still think that Dan Hill’s essay on the iPad is the best analysis of the its true significance (I buried a link to it in another post, but here it is again).
There are tons of demo (and demolition) videos already out there, but I happen to like this overview of magazine app art direction:
January 31, 2010
Slow strings set a maudlin mood for Philip Bloom’s visually stunning time-lapse footage of Dubai—my own admittedly predictable/uninspired soundtrack would be “Red Sky,” a chilled-out techno track by Shanghai’s B6 (Sulumi‘s labelmate). Other contenders included AC’s “What Would I Want? Sky,” either of Dam-Funk’s sky-related tracks, Kid Cudi’s “Sky Might Fall” and M83′s “We Own the Sky.”
» B6 – Red Sky (B6 Mix) (7:06) – 12.8MB mp3 @ 251kbps
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January 24, 2010
–Pingdom has some web usage stats for 2009, such as:
- 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
- 47 million – Added websites in 2009.
Nice to know that IYK is among 47 million new websites. There’s also numbers for e-mail and social networks. Definitely worth checking out: Internet 2009 in Numbers.
Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering.
Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.
Executives of The New York Times Company said they wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers. But fundamental features of the plan have not yet been decided, including how much the paper will charge for online subscriptions or how many articles a reader will be allowed to see without paying.
–The New York Times recently announced that it is going to start charging online readers (in 2011) with a ‘paywall’ system. Or, as Gothamist bluntly puts it: “the Gray Lady’s going to start making bitches pay.”
–Apple has announced that it will unveil its “latest creation”—the digital world is certain that it will be an Apple tablet—at an event next Wednesday, January 27th. (Engadget; also on NYT, the Guardian, etc.; rumormongering has also caused a backlash in the world of tech journalism)
–P.S.1 just announced that Brooklyn’s SO-IL (Solid Object Idenburg Liu) is the winner of this year’s Young Architects Program design competition. Arch Daily has more pics and info.
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