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The original members of the Sugababes (Mutya, Keisha, Siobhan) have reunited, and released a rework of Kendrick Lamar's 'Swimming Pools (Drank)'



Lamar's 'good kid, m.A.A.d city', gets better every time I listen to it. I've recently gone back to the first single, 'The Recipe', with its irresistable hook (What more can I say / Welcome to LA)

Seeing as we're on a kind of theme - The-Dream is best known as other people's songwriter (Umbrella, Single Ladies), but "TRON" is anything but a bubbly love(ish) song



And finish it up by slowing it down and stretching it out - like a less chipmunked The Weekend - with Shlohmo and Jeremih's addictive 'Bo Peep (Do U Good)'.

On the radio

Today on the radio I'll be talking about a bargain basement David drawing picked up recently by the Met, the BBC's 'Your Paintings' project (which included the identification of a Van Dyck portrait) and giving a round-up of what's happening in galleries around the country.
 

Loosely connected thoughts

If I was going to run my dream conference next week - with no boring reality-based questions like 'where?' and 'how to get everyone there?' and 'how to make it free?' - my topic might be: art made by technology.

I haven't gotten very far on planning this, but thinking about it has been sparked by Dan Catt's latest post, on simulated landscape paintings made from simulated landscapes.

Catt has used a Photoshop filter by Alien Skin designed to make digital images look like they were handpainted (inside my head, I feel an all-technology link to Dafen, the painting village in China) creating, as the makers say, "a finished piece worthy of printing on canvas and hanging in a gallery".

He's used this filter to process screengrabs he's made from the here.com website. The above image, of Toronto, shows all the glitches in the map-rendering website that Catt has made us of to create a purposefully fake painting by a fake artist of a fake location. Lo-res images are placeholders for their hi-res versions, resulting in skyscrapers that look briefly like stalagmites, some tiles load more slowly than others, leaving blurry swathes of cityscape. He's also kept in all the here.com elements; navigation devices, feedback button, copyright notice.

Catt's piece took me back to Piotr Adamcyzk's presentation at NDF2013 (the video is online, and at just 25 minutes, I thoroughly recommend you give it a watch). Piotr works on Google Art Project, and in the second half of his talk he goes into some of the weird, serendipitous, almost sublime imagery that the technology throws up, making images that don't - can't - otherwise exist.

Take for example this grab of Sanja Ivekovic's atrium installation, Rosa of Luxembourg, at MOMA. As the works aren't copyright-cleared for use in Google Art Project, they are rendered as blocky blurs (very New Aesthetic). In his talk, Piotr went into these felicitous accidents, and proposed that a new form of art could grow from them.

  
This is already happening. João Enxuto and Erica Love's Anonymous Paintings, for example, take these blurred paintings and turn them into inkjet prints on canvas, wrapped around stretchers and hung as paintings. There's a Robin-Sloan flip-flop going on here that I find kind of irresistible  and I immediately jump to the recursive loop: imagine these paintings in an exhibition in a museum that's part of Google Art Project, captured and rendered but being obscured again in turn ....

Another aspect of Google Art Project, increasingly available on museum websites, is the extreme close-up permitted by mega-pixel images.

This, for example, is an extremely zoomed tiny part of Chris Ofili's No woman, no cry from the Tate's collection. The artist never saw the work like this - we viewers (except those equipped with extraordinarily powerful magnifying glasses) never have either. If technology is not exactly making new artworks, it's still doing something interesting, weird, experimental, playful and thought provoking. It is, as James Bridle suggests, the emergence in the real world of a digital way of making and seeing objects. And it's got my head spinning.

Saying goodbye

My heart lurched when I opened Twitter just before boarding a flight and discovered that Google are shutting down their RSS tool, Google Reader, on 1 July (I felt like their announcement pop-up needed a third button: 'OK', 'Learn more', 'Oh my god nooooooooooooooooooooooo').

Reader is how I consume vast swathes of my internet. I have, at the moment, 98 subscriptions, organised into folders called Art, Books, Advice & up-to-date (mostly web-related), Museum & library blogs, Music, Share, and Product alerts (these are searches that I keep tabs on, for example, 'dowse lower hutt'). It's the third thing I fire up every day (Email > Twitter > Reader > Work email) and one of the last things I look at at night. Over the last month I averaged nearly 100 items a day, and clicked through to about 13% of them.

Reader is where I collect ideas for the radio, where I find new music, where I track my friends and colleagues' blog posts - generally, where I stay on top of things. For nearly 6 years, it's been my daily newspaper; carefully organised to meet my needs, regularly being expanded and pruned as my tastes and interests change. This New Yorker post by Joshua Rothman captures some of my feelings (but as an active, not an inactive, user):

Just as a soldier lives for battle, just as a wolf lives for the hunt, so my Google Reader, I felt, was leading the life I was meant to lead. A few months in, after I’d carefully curated my feeds, my Reader really did seem to contain the entirety of the world of ideas.

When I found out, I felt a very genuine sense of loss. And I felt a strange bond as my twitter feed filled up with friends and acquaintances sharing the same sense of bewilderment and rage. No-one talks about using RSS anymore. No-one talks about Reader. But as Matt Howie put it in a post that explains what Reader does and why it will be hard to replace, "it wasn't easy news to take, since I thought it'd always be around like water or electricity, run by the largest technology company on earth." Between now and July, I will be both appreciating Reader more, and casting about for a replacement service. Because the internet won't be the same for me without it.

High rotate

CHVRCHES 'Recover' - icy, airy, a little chipmunky and a super fun transition at about 1.15.



The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 'Sacrilege' - to much fun to not sing along to, badly and unselfconsciously



Ski Lodge's 'Just to be like you' - one of those ostensibly sad songs that, like 'Boys don't cry' and 'Here comes your man', makes me feel happy.
 

MØ's Pilgrim - the stripped back original, so you can contrast it with the 80s-inflected MS MR remix below
 

Trends to watch

Over on The Dowse's blog I've written a summary of the six trends identified in the American Alliance of Museums 2013 ‘Trendswatch’ document: changes in donors' expectations, 3D printing, the convergence of museums and formal education, the Internet of Things & indoor GPS, unplugging, and the return to the city.

While the report is written for the American context, I've found a number of the trends, and particularly the case studies associated with each of them, align really well with things we're thinking about at The Dowse. Happy reading ...

On shaping words

Two very different pieces on bringing words into form:

First, Cliff Curtis, Notes on being thoroughly edited: the New Zealand writer on the editing process for his first full-length novel. The book is set in small-town New Zealand at the start of the 20th century, and the ex-National Library staffer inside of me was pleased to see Curtis mentioning using Papers Past to demonstrate to his editor the language people in 1902 could plausibly been using.

And then Rachel Kolb, Seeing at the speed of sound - on the experience of lip reading:

Some people are all but impossible for me to lipread. People with thin lips; people who mumble; people who speak from the back of their throats; people with dead-fish, unexpressive faces; people who talk too fast; people who laugh a lot; tired people who slur their words; children with high, babyish voices; men with moustaches or beards; people with any sort of accent. 

Accents are a visible tang on people's lips. Witnessing someone with an accent is like taking a sip of clear water only to find it tainted with something else. I startle and leap to attention. As I explore the strange taste, my brain puzzles itself trying to pinpoint exactly what it is and how I should respond. I dive into the unfamiliar contortions of the lips, trying to push my way to some intelligible meaning.

Brain Day

Next Saturday, I'm heading along to Brain Day at Auckland University. The geeky part of me that did as many neuropsych papers as possible at uni myself is thrilled. The art part of me is also intrigued, as the theme of this year's Brain Day is 'Your creative mind'.

While the day is free, seating is limited, and you need to book. I didn't realise this until too late, and so missed out on a seat for the opening lecture by Professor Richard Faull, although overflow seating to watch a video-stream is available. That's more than okay though, because the alternate at that time is a panel discussion on children and play, which hits a few buttons with me right now. I'm also looking forward to Michael Corballis on the wandering mind:

Why do we dream, brood over the past, make up stories, or drift into reveries when we’re supposed to be hard at work? Is it just background noise, like static on an old radio? Professor Corballis will argue that mind wandering is actually adaptive, helping us plan things, find creative solutions, and even define a sense of who we are.

I've increasingly noticed myself creating space to let my mind wander when I have writing deadlines on: it's like I plug in a few seed thoughts, and then try to fool myself into thinking that I'm not thinking about them, in order to let them grind away slowly "by themselves". Likewise, when I'm grappling with a new topic, I can almost literally feel my mind stretching. It "fills up" some nights at jiu jitsu, when it just can't cope with having any more new sequences added to it, or "gets tired" along with my body, and forgets how to make it move properly.

Anyway. I'm excited. And if you're going to be there, let me know.

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The pop music my neighbours must be getting sick of ...

MØ's 'Glass' - I couldn't agree more with the central refrain



Autre Ne Veut's sparkly but still sad 'Play by Play' - I love that there will always be new ways to sing the simple word 'baby'



Fallulah's 'Out Of It' - I dare you to play this without dancing along.



Quadron's 'Hey Love' - just pure fun



The Flaming Lips' remarkably upbeat 'Sun Blows Up Today'

   

But if you're going to listen to The Flaming Lips, then it really should be one of my all-time favourite songs ...

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On the radio

Following the summer break and a few scheduling slip-ups, today I'm back on the radio. I'll be talking about rediscovered artworks, an amazing database of art in Britain, and vacuuming-cleaning visitors to the Sistine Chapel.



Your Paintings - BBC

William Blake etchings found at Manchester Library

Titian painting rediscovered at National Gallery of London

X-ray reveals Madonna and child under portrait of Elizabeth I's spymaster

Tourists vacuumed and cooled to reduce damage to the Sistine Chapel

Responsive

Micah Walter has written a very thoughtful response to the notes from my talk around Ben Cauchi's City Gallery Wellington, 'Has the Interent Killed Photography?'.

I'll be the first to agree with Micah that my talk's title was throw-away. I'm terrible at titling things. I should outsource that work. And I should have renamed the talk as my ideas grew, but I really didn't come up with anything better (for the context, which was advertising the talk on the gallery's website in hopes of getting people along. If I was writing for publication, it would of course have the obligatory Short Snappy Statement: Long Discursive Explanation format).

Micah also noted that my talk came from a museum-y, library-y point of view. This is totally true. This is my point of view (inflected with some web, but my web is museum-y and library-y as well). He continues:

My first reaction would have been to talk about the actual “trade of photography.” The time in our recent history when people trained to be photographers the way plumbers train to be, well, plumbers. There was a perception that photography was first, magic, and then something someone could learn and charge lots of money for. This is where photography begins to die. 

That's why I wished as soon as I read this that Micah and I could have presented together. And if we had, we could have work together to explore the quote his post ends on, from Jean Baudrillard’s Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?:

The traditional photograph is an image produced by the world, which, thanks to the medium of film, still involves a dimension of representation. The digital image is an image that comes straight out of the screen and becomes submerged in the mass of all the other images from screens. It is of the order of flow, and is prisoner to the automatic operation of the camera. When calculation and digital win out over form, when software wins out over the eye, can we still speak of photography? [my emphasis]

If we're not still speaking of photography, what are we speaking of? That's a question that could sustain a really interesting debate, from all sorts of points of view.

Anyway. I'm truly grateful to Micah for taking the time to write in response. People don't do that much any more. I hope we get a chance to talk about this in person some time soon.

Emotion and hypertext

A long, thoughtful post on emotion, archives, linked data and hypertext fiction by Mark Matienzo. Make a cup of tea, find a quiet place, and settle in.

(I was particularly moved by Mark's words around the public expression of emotion. After attending Webstock last week, I've realised this is what I want from speakers nowadays: less a call to action than a revelation of their humanity. Even if the words "linked data" and "hypertext fiction" - or "archives", for that matter - put you off, please give this piece a shot.)