I think the strangest example of compulsive documentation is the bizarre need we feel to photograph events that are definitely going to be documented anyway. The athletes filming the Opening Ceremony from within the parade last week is a great example of this. I was very taken with this at the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Games and took a really bad photo of the athletes filming the crowd during that ceremony.
And I’ve noted this oddness before, when thousands took photos of the 2008 Presidential inauguration, Malia Obama among them. In these actions, (entirely superfluous in the age of the mass media), we see the audience authenticating their own experience. “I was there and I took my own pictures to prove it.”. It’s the digital equivalent of picking a pebble off a beach – banal in itself, but imbued with meaning and sentiment for the one who took it. Continue reading
Tag: Visual (Page 3 of 17)
Reviews, comments and thoughts on visual arts and graphic design
The colour palette for children’s TV is very green, isn’t it?
There are two reasons for this. One, many of the shows are set outside, which encourages kids to play outside too. It is a shame that this is not a given, but there we go.
Second, many of the programmes mix live action with animation. The easiest way to insert a person into a make-believe world, or bring an imaginary character into the real-world, is to use green-screen technology. If there is lots of grass in the set (imaginary or otherwise) it makes the job of the CGI teams easier, and it makes the resulting product better. It’s interesting that this technical requirement should mean that more programmes for kids are set outside.
In The Night Garden
Continue reading
I thought this image posted by Anthony Painter was emblematic of… something.
@anthonypainter: will.he.is #hackneyweekend http://t.co/NUM95DTg
As an aside, it is amusing that Twitter thinks will.i.am is a URL, but that’s not what set my mental cogs in motion.
Instead, I was struck by the fact that Antony was at the Hackney concert over the weekend, but was still reduced to watching the events on a screen. I am sure that anyone who has ever been to one of the big summer festivals (Glastonbury, &ct) will have experienced the same phenomenon, that of watching an ostensibly ‘live’ event on screen, because the actual performers are too far away.
I was reminded of a scene in The Simpsons (Season 7, Episode 9, Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming, thanks Google, thanks Wikipedia) where Homer refuses to crane his neck to watch the jets at an air show, preferring to let the TV decide what he watches.
One might say that there is no conceptual difference between the a festival-goer watching the concert from the back of the crowd, and a viewer tuning in to coverage of the same festival on a TV set. In both cases, the cameras and the broadcast technology magnify the performer. However, this discounts the value of the atmosphere, the sense of communal experience, one gets from being at the event. This explains why people will stand for hours in order to see the Queen’s white coat in the far distance for a few seconds, rather than simply allow the BBC to give us constant, glorious close-ups of the wDuke of Edinburgh developing a bladder problem.
On a lesser scale, it explains why people choose to watch Euro 2012 (and all the other tournaments) in pubs. Communality counts. It also explains why others will actually travel to the tournament host country, merely to sit in a park and watch the match on a Jumbotron outside the stadium. Proximity counts too.
Nevertheless, I do think that it’s an odd sort of culture that prizes the live and the immediate over the transmitted, and yet those attending live, immediate events still find their experience of the show mediated through a square electronic screen. And we haven’t even discussed the second-order oddness of the TV stations broadcasting the sight of other people standing in a field (or on the Mall) watching a screen, as a form of entertainment in itself.
Related: That thing that happens during a lull in a live sporting broadcast, when the director cuts to a shot of the crowd, and the person spots themselves on the screen in the stadium, and waves at it, then realises that the camera is shooting them from another angle, and so they look around for the camera, and the director cuts back to the action…
I’ve been laughing at this online web comedy series, asdfmovie by Thomas Ridgewell. Here’s episoide 5, which I sumbled upon because its one on the most top rated YouTube uploads today.
It feels like a distillation of comedy down to its purest elements. The punchline is all, illustrated in 2-dimensional simplicity. Its like tweeting on video. Very much of the internet age.
Those of us who have been anally removing the tags of ourselves in Facebook photos are feeling pretty smug today, as the latest privacy scandal breaks. By default, they’ve turned on a new automatic facial recognition feature. Online provacy groups are worried that this, since information about what you look like could in theory be sold on to third parties.
Two links to share. First (via Kottke, inevitably), Dazzle Camoflage for Faces. Using the same principles that the Navy used to foil submaries in the First World War, its possible to confuse facial recognition software by the clever use of makeup and hairstyles. The only problem is, to confuse the all pervasive Facebook, one would need to permenantly adopt a makeup style similar to the 1980s New Romantic look, at all times, professional and social.
Second, read this diverting short-story by Paul Ford, ‘Nanolaw With Daughter‘. When companies can gather very specific biographical, personal and location data about you, they can send you targetted law suits:
On a Sunday morning before her soccer practice, not long after my daughter’s tenth birthday, she and I sat down on the couch with our tablets and I taught her to respond to lawsuits on her own. … We had gone to a baseball game at the beginning of the season. They had played a song on the public address system, and she sang along without permission.