Friday, November 23, 2012

Sprinkles

Lecture: Terre Thaemlitz (London 2010) from Red Bull Music Academy on Vimeo.


Producer and DJ Terre Thaemlitz talking about music, media and context. Worth watching through. And a Sprinkles tunes, just to balance it out.  (Ignore the visuals, they're someone else's)

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Disco Eclipse




















At the Artbar last Friday night. Full dance floor provided by the Wax Wizard.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Thursday, November 08, 2012

Introspective Video




Just got this done to my shoulder. Arthroscopy is cool, thought the stabilisation procedure seems pretty crude. Don't watch if you're squeamish!

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

@ Frieze






















Beautiful diptych from Eric Baudelaire, composed like a renaissance master.





























Money changes hands. Apparently an alcove that size costs around £40,000. For the weekend.

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Jane'll Fix It



An inspiring and insightful talk from Irish inventor Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh on fixing and fixers.
(I don't usually gush)

Monday, October 08, 2012

How to brand.



This video is beautifully shot. Still not wearing DCs though.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

The Wallander


Kenneth Brannagh makes a good stab at Wallander but the writing lets him down and Jan Krister Allan Henriksson already owns the character.

Soyuz!

And go NASA for getting Curiosity down in one piece.

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Product Journey


Diagram from an eBay shipper's page. You are the customer. 


Sunday, July 29, 2012

Furniture Design, Iraq

















Still from Lessons of Darkness. Herzog '92

The Wild East




A Russian spokeswoman interviewed on the BBC this morning about the Olympic Opening Ceremony was very proud of the fact that they had the 3rd largest team at the games. They are right up there in the brutal regime stakes too.  

The Attitude Era



Scenes from a late-stage empire. 

Grime Invective




'So I hear you like big mini skirts', grime MCs from London laying down a stream of hate, power and humour. Pretty amazing if a bit sore on the ears.

Slough

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! 
It isn't fit for humans now, 
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death! 


Come, bombs and blow to smithereens 
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens, 
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, 
Tinned minds, tinned breath.


Mess up the mess they call a town- 
A house for ninety-seven down 
And once a week a half a crown 
For twenty years. 


And get that man with double chin 
Who'll always cheat and always win, 
Who washes his repulsive skin 
In women's tears: 


And smash his desk of polished oak 
And smash his hands so used to stroke 
And stop his boring dirty joke 
And make him yell. 


But spare the bald young clerks who add 
The profits of the stinking cad; 
It's not their fault that they are mad, 
They've tasted Hell. 


It's not their fault they do not know 
The birdsong from the radio, 
It's not their fault they often go 
To Maidenhead


And talk of sport and makes of cars 
In various bogus-Tudor bars 
And daren't look up and see the stars 
But belch instead. 


In labour-saving homes, with care 
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air 
And paint their nails. 


Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough 
To get it ready for the plough. 
The cabbages are coming now; 
The earth exhales.




John Betjeman 1937

Friday, May 04, 2012

Chicken Nugget
























Spotted by my brother on the side of a fried chicken shop in Dublin.

The Carriers




























'When word of a crisis breaks out in Washington, it's no accident that the first question that comes to everyone's lips is: 
"Where's the nearest carrier?"' 
President Bill Clinton, March 12, 1993 aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Square Peg

 

This ad was released in 1998. I was 16. It's aged well.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Rough Loop



This scene terrified me when I was little. The idea that your attempts to kill something are making it stronger is pretty unsettling. It seems to resonate a little with the current war on terror..

Déjà vu?






















Have you seen this house before? I'd swear I have.
Maybe because it looks a bit American to me? Some kind of media memory?

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Atoms For Peace




















There is a very utopian feel to the IAEA logo.
Feels out of place in these uncertain times.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Content and Delivery


Plan B talks sense at TED and the disproportionate funding of the Olympics gets ticked off nicely in his Ill Manors video.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Modernity

The life of the modern jet pilots tends to be most unexpectedly lonely. . . . foreign countries are places to reach accurately and to leave on time. Distance is a raw material to work with.
Mr John Pearson writing in the Sunday Times, 4 Feb 1962.

Friday, March 09, 2012

Jolly Good

That painter is going to have some funny coloured spittle at the end of his working day.

Friday, February 24, 2012

Some common aspect ratios


1.333:1 (4:3)
Old television & computer monitor standard
1.41:1
Lichtenberg ratio 1:√2 ~1:1.4142, ISO 216paper sizes (A4)
1.5:1 (3:2)
Classic 35 mm film
1.6:1 (8:5)
(Credit cards are 85.6 × 54 mm which is ~1.59:1)
1.618:1
The golden ratio
1.667:1 (5:3)
A common European widescreen standard
1.778:1 (16:9)
HD video standard
1.85:1
A common US widescreen cinema standard
2.39:1
A current widescreen cinema standard

Friday Treat

Monday, February 06, 2012

Sunday, February 05, 2012

Pedigree




















Apparently 70% of all Land Rovers ever manufactured are still in use. Brilliant.
Speaking of which, I quite like this new Defender Squared concept shown at the RCA Vehicle Design Interim Show last week.









Monday, January 30, 2012

A confession.

Over Christmas I played a lot of Lego with my 8 year nephew. (Yes, I'm 29!) But while he got bored after an hour or two I kept going. Below is the result. I'm happy with the proportions and the tilting cab. It's based on the Leyland DAF T244 as used by the Irish Army. They used to park the trucks outside our primary school to go to the shop and from my lower vantage point I could see the universal joint spinning and driving the rear wheels. It was fascinating! Getting that detail right was the main point of the exercise. It also has a crude gear box with a neutral and forward gear so it can be driven by motor or by hand. Think my nephew liked it...













































































Kidulthood






















Outside Morrisons on Saturday morning.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Shapes and Colours!



















Very well behaved contestants too.



KICK IT.



Do you find that if a piece of work looks like it was fun to make it's usually good to watch as well?

Saturday, January 28, 2012

BANG!



An oldy but a goody, Cillit Bang gets reworked by some techno germs.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

The Greater and Better World of Tomorrow






















Norman Bel Geddes designed the 'Patriot' radio in 1939. You can just imagine the cheerful propaganda of To New Horizons (see below) piping out of this star spangled box.


I Love Lego (and lego makers).

A selection of the brilliant and bizarre Lego models people put on Youtube. The Pneumatic Caterpillar is truly mind warping (skip to 2:50 if you're impatient!) while Jennifer Clarke's Crane stands out for sheer quality of aesthetic and technical detail. I love the industrial atmosphere and meta-functionality* of the Pin Sorter and last but not least the Felt Tip Printer and its crew of operators just reeks of fun...





* I may have made this term up. But I'm happy with it. Are you?

That's You!






















That's you, back then, celebrating the deregulation of the financial industry and the end of western manufacturing with some plastic gizmos from the far east.

Monday, January 23, 2012

1938...

























































Images from a Himmler sponsored "scientific" expedition to Tibet.
The whole thing is bizarre and pretty horrible. Tibet looks cool though.

Villains






























1. Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes.

Name it.

Do You Like Maurizio Cattelan?
























Vehicles































































A little something for the school run..

Restrepo



















Still from Restrepo, the best documentary I have yet seen about soldiers and war.
Tim Hetherington (Photographer and Directer) was killed by Gadaffi forces whiled reporting in Libya last year. There is a really moving tribute to him and his incredible work here.
His partner in making the film, Sebastien Junger, has published a companion book entitled WAR. It is up there with any of the Hemingway pieces on American conflicts.

Made In Britain



















Part of the information display system on the first computer at Bletchley park.
Reminds me of an AIR album cover...

Roll, Pitch, Yawn.




















Actually not yawn, I love these terms.

Organised Leisure


Screenshot from The Inbetweeners Movie.