Thursday 25 June 2009

the opposite...



for many years ive marvelled at the 7 series of genius created by larry david...it got to a point i watched it so much i started to think i was a character in it...but that another tale along with the time i started thinking my life was all in folders in a photoshop file being turned on and off...i digress...and wonder what my first grassy rave will be like...something i've allways avoided like the plague, it just seemed like too much of the norm...but of recent i've thought alot about the things i'll never get a chance to do...and how small things lever themselves into your life and end up being sturdy points of reference...i get to go with my beautiful girlfriend, some other incredible rabble, i get to drink some hallucinogenic 'stealth' cider our friends make and i get to listen to him most importantly...

the jury's out till tuesday...here's to saying yes to things you're not sure of...

tired sticks...

Thursday 18 June 2009

R/B/G

same/same

father/daughter shopping trip...

god damn west coast ebay auction finish times...

otherwise i'd be annoying the neighbours with this piece of chugging detroit genius...you can forget sam and dave, this is what soul music is all about...thank god he manged to put gems like this out before his untimely death in February, 1970, after being shot by a policeman in an altercation with his girlfriend...the world's a 'hair's on the back of your neck place' once more...




talc and sunday exercise...



Back in the late sixties in a Loft room on 647 Broadway, a young Timothy Leary disciple and a group of like-minded flower children unwittingly created the blueprint for New York’s disco underground. Beneath a ceiling covered in balloons and streamers, David Mancuso stood before a small Buddha, weaving an eclectic and atmospheric soundtrack (from obscure Latin and African rock, to psychedelic soul and unclassifiable ethereal LP tracks) to match the mood and movement of the dancers; who defined the melting pot that was cooking up in post-industrial New York. Re-launching his party as ‘Love Saves The Day’ in 1969 (after a period of Buddhist disownment and a trip to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital) Mancuso and his friends created an environment where freedom and unity were the watchwords, as dancing became communion. In the early seventies as word about this unique dance space started to filter through, The Loft became a haven for NYC’s outsider art community. The party’s whole aesthetic, from the refined sound system to the family ethic, became a huge influence on New York’s future DJs and their revered clubs, with famous ‘Loft babies’ including Nicky Siano (The Gallery), Larry Levan (Paradise Garage) and Frankie Knuckles (Chicago’s Warehouse).

Mancuso once claimed he was “tuning in to ‘that natural rhythm - that three billion year old dance – I just applied it through these artificial means which were amplifiers and records.” The bearded mystic first brought this party ethic to London at the end of the nineties as a guest of Nuphonic Records. However, it was a conversation with Tim Lawrence while he was researching his book ‘Love Saves The Day’ that led to Mancuso’s Loft parties becoming regular happenings at The Light Bar in Shoreditch, with Lawrence and friends setting up The Lucky Cloud Sound System. These parties have inspired others such as LCSS and Voices collective member (alongside DJ Alex another LCSS partner) Cedric Woo, DJ Cosmo and Simon and Guillaume whose Beauty and The Beat, Cosmodelica and Deep Frequency parties respectively embrace the Loft atmospherics, as London embraces the more cerebral and spiritual side of nightlife.

you'll be there if you should be there.

Wednesday 17 June 2009

it's breezin' outside...

nathan barley lives...


overheard in the studio this afternoon...

"what's gonna cost more...a singing drain or a talking bin...?"

someone put us out our misery....

it's hot outside...



and i think this fork must have got tired...
I was honored to chair an evening of short talks for dandad last night (my post on the executive keeps me increasingly busy)...i truly enjoy seeing and hearing what's in other peoples's minds...what gets them out of bed in the morning...or not go to bed at all...having a sanity check and all that jazz...people's kids seem to be a design factor in the life of many a 30+ year old designer...oops, sorry by this point we should all be art directors shouldn't we?...and it seems like were all still playing/tinkering around as the recession keeps a fair grip on our material aspirations and we all try to keep ehaed of the game...the 'get on and work' ethos seems to be fairly popularist at the mo'...because it's cheap to work i guess...here's what i like most...sometimes peoples work is firmly placed in the 'this makes me belive again' catagory...thanks matt for the photos...

http://www.tweenbots.com






In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination. Because I built them with minimal technology, I had no way of tracking the Tweenbot’s progress, and so I set out on the first test with a video camera hidden in my purse. I placed the Tweenbot down on the sidewalk, and walked far enough away that I would not be observed as the Tweenbot––a smiling 10-inch tall cardboard missionary––bumped along towards his inevitable fate.

The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people's willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining its destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.

87 baby...

i can't begin to imagine how many times i used to stare at pride's section of this clip and wonder what would it be like to live in london and be part of the graf scene down here and go to camberwell college on the back of my graf and make something of myself rather than taking drugs and getting drunk and into trouble...i used to get the clipper down from newcastle on a friday night (£13 return..phew!!) as groove records on greek street would get all the new imports in on a saturday morning which westwood had played the week before, and i'd wing it down to the general in kensington market to get a new tag belt trying to avoid a taxing on the way out...as 15 year old geordie kid it was like a real utopia...a true escape both for my mind and my body...but it felt like a reality too...22 years later and a bit of cleaning up of my act and im sat in my office wondering what i have now in my life that will be an intrinsic part of my life in 2031 and what things ill remember that define this moment...i have my hopes...which are actual possibilities...