Ok ok, I’m a reasonably good person, and a reasonably good son, although i really really suck at remembering birthdays and so on.
This has proven problematic since my moms 50th birthday is coming up… Which prompted me to create this homepage, which you should check out if you want to save me. Unless I get something nice together my only other options are either to
1) Stop smoking as a gift to my mom
2) Cut my hair as a sacrifice on the altar of ‘looking decent for once’
or
3) Get a tattoo of my mom
Truth be told, I don’t think number 3 is all that popular, since according to mom only convicts and bikers have tattoos. Anywho. Check it out, and help me the hell out…
Yesterday, in spite of the hang-over, I could actually be seen whistling and even humming to myself. Not often that happens; I’m in a sweet spot – I’m not totally broke, I finished my two week stint at the store, the exhibition came together “well” (by “well” I mean “it’s over and no-one has hit me in the face”) and the allergies & accompanying asthma have left me for now.
Here’s the video I’m showing at monumental, followed by the text from the exhibition catalogue.
“The uncontested order of things: A slideshow curated by Google image search.” 2006
More a proof of concept than a finished work, The uncontested order of things was created by following a set of predefined rules applied to google image search.
The search query consisted of each letter of the Swedish alphabet (A-Z + Å, Ä, Ö), and the first forty resulting images were downloaded. Duplicate images were not downloaded, nor were gif animations, although they retained their position in the “top forty”, resulting in some queries resulting in less than forty downloaded images.
One random image per queried letter was then put into a slideshow in the order of the alphabet, and the resulting movie was adapted for the 90-second screen time.
The motivation for this process, of which the resulting slideshow is but one possible combination (let alone one possible way to present the combinations) is:
1) To see how many apparently random images we can fit into a narrative, and
2) Given the omnipresence of Google, how easily received/understood/accepted the images are when
3) A qualitative analysis of the images (and search results in general) shows an (apparently) unproportional US/EU presence, which in turn should
4) Kick us in the nuts for too easily accepting the perceived “freedom of the Internet”, and not reflecting enough on what our online behavior tells of ourselves, but also what actual and very manifest power we are supporting by our actions.
And of course, since Mark actually beat me in ping-pong this afternoon, T don’t command respenct around here anymore, and am thus reduced to making comments in poor taste about people who are dead:
Since last week I haven’t really touched the page, just sort of leaning back and occasionally watching the traffic stats (not all that high yet), but I’ll prolly get around changing some of the texts – as it stands it’s focusing a bit too much on music- & film-piracy, instead of the more general question of “intellectual property – is it a useful concept?” sorta thing.
But for now – feed my ego and go and watch the new video.
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2009 Update: The above mentioned site is now defunct. Go to monocultured.com for a mirror of the project.
Woot! Fina-fucken-ly! The web page that I’ve been working on the past month is finally official. I’m way too tired to write anything about it, so just click on this link to www.guiltyguiltyguilty.org to read more about it.
Yay!
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2009 Update: The above mentioned site is now defunct. Go to monocultured.com for a mirror of the project.
I’ve always had a thing for doing t-shirts. It’s something about wearing my heart on my sleeve (of which I btw have a design), and being obtrusely juvenile. So imagine my joy when I found out about Threadless.com. Lotsa fun tshirt designs, and rather on the cheap side. (unless you order three or more, in which case you end up paying tax when it arrived within the EU)
So I submitted my first design the other week:
And to my surprise it wasn’t even allowed into the competition. What the hell I thought, they’ve had blood and gore and suicide t-shirt, and they didn’t allow this one in? I know they don’t like text-based designs, but I thought I was being rather clever.
Oh, well, I’m not one to give up to easily, so despite not being able to draw if so my life depended on it, I traced and photoshopped this one up:
Again, more clever than well executed, but whatever. If it’s get entered into the running I’ll be sure to post it up here as a minor achievement… In the meantime, y’all better get accounts there so that if it does get accepted you’ll be ready to vote for it and shower me with praise and such like.
I’ve never known much about Benjamin Franklin, and frankly (yes, another pün) still don’t. boingboing.net had an item about him today, and how he compiled a list of 13 virtues which he tried to live by – each day ticking off what he’d done wrong.
I thought the idea was cute, and it fits very well into my own obsessive list-making. So of course I had to make one myself.
He lists chastity as one of the virtues (as he puts it “rarely use venery but for health or offspring“) and I really don’t agree on that, but am in fact abiding by that rule by default, which of course just goes to show how the remaining years of my no-i’m-not-thirty-yet!-age are going to waste…
Anywho. I made three different versions of it, and they are all here:
