MetaFilter posts by vacapinta.
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Generative Art The musician Jem Finer (formerly of The Pogues) has created a musical composition, The LongPlayer, that will play, without repetition, for a thousand years (made with SuperCollider). It is currently playing live at a London lighthouse. The Dream House is another example of a generative art piece, in this case one that was set to run for eight years. These are both examples of Generative Art, Art generated by rules.
The GA community is an active one. Also, see Virangelic - a random composition generator. Art generated by Artifical Life swarms. NewZoid - A false News Headline generator. And, N-Gen - computer generated Graphic Design.
posted on Jul-27-02 at 2:27 AM
The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke (FFM) (in the Tate collection) Richard Dadd, a Victorian gentleman, a convicted murderer and patient at the famous Bedlam asylum, spent nine years carefully crafting his masterpiece. He wrote a guidebook for it and insisted that each of the hundred characters in the painting is assigned a special task. What does he mean? Well, Neil Gaiman, among others, was inspired by this painting (it influenced the Sandman) and considers it a life-long obsession. He also wrote the introduction to a new book being published about the painting as a gateway to the supernatural world.
A bit of background: Dadd was a painter of Victorian Fairy Art. The obsession with fairies was like a fever that overtook the Victorian Mind. Another painter of note was Richard Doyle, the uncle of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes). A.C. Doyle himself was involved in a fascinating controversy that raged at the time. the Cottingley fairies, in which two young girls circulated photos of themselves with fairies. Doyle proclaimed that the photos "represent either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public or else they constitute an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character" Unfortunately for Doyle, it was the former though the hoax was hardly ingenious, relying on cardboard cutouts and the will to believe.
posted on Jul-18-02 at 12:35 AM
The Breakfast of Champions! Drinking too much lately? Menudo (tripe) (not these guys) has been touted as one of the best hangover cures known to mankind (mefi'ers agree). Not to be confused with its kinder gentler cousin Posole, Menudo is part of the canon of authentic Mexican food (what mexicans eat).
posted on Jul-15-02 at 7:07 PM
The Tesseract Charles H. Hinton, eccentric, bigamist, son-in-law of George Boole (yes that Boole) coined the word Tesseract and claimed that we could all visualize the fourth dimension. He wrote several books and claimed to have created a set of cubes that, used properly, would allow anyone to visualize hyperspace. His ideas were all the rage. Salvador Dali was inspired by him. Robert Heinlein wrote a classic short story about a house built as an unfolded tesseract. Madeleine L'Engle wrote a classic children's story. With the advent of Einstein and his claim that "Time was the fourth dimension", the higher spatial dimensions were forgotten. (Until recently that is) And Hinton was forgotten. Or was he? And what happened to the cubes? Rudy Rucker, a huge fan of Hinton,fails to reprint the instructions. Rumours are that, if you build them and use them, they will drive you insane.
posted on Jul-9-02 at 5:05 PM
The Age of Simulation. Do we live in Reality or do we live in a Simulation? Following themes most popularly found in movies like The Matrix or in books like Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress, we are being told via email and even by philosophers at Yale, that what we perceive is not what is. Is this merely paranoia?
posted on Jul-1-02 at 9:59 PM
Karakuri trick Boxes Brought to you by one of the Karakuri craftsmen. Beautiful and intricate, you may also need some patience. RF-4 by Iwahara, for example, requires 324 moves to open (also featured at the Puzzle Museum)! Lest, you confuse these with Burr puzzles, you must know your puzzle-types.
posted on Jun-25-02 at 3:23 PM
The Inconstant Moon is dedicated to our nearest neighbor. Explore the moon with the Selenographica. Also, this Tuesday, Nova will re-broadcast To the Moon, the story of the the science and engineering behind mans trip to the moon. Its been 100 years since Melies' dream. Will the U.S. return? Or will someone else?
posted on Jun-23-02 at 11:33 AM
Trygve Lode ,a Usenet veteran, has one of the funniest sites out there. Check out his Unnatural Enquirer. My favorites are The Philosophy of Kissing, Evil on a Budget, and the minimalist Spycam vs. Spycam. Who is this guy?
posted on Jun-16-02 at 1:17 PM
Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin' daddies,
Knock me your lobes,
I came to lay Ceasar out,
Not to hip you to him.
So says Lord Richard Buckley, a hipster among hipsters , who fused swing jive and beat-era hepcat slang to create some hip and dazzling monologues. The self-proclaimed "Lord" Buckley was "a comic philosopher, a bop monologuist whose vocalese fused the rhythms and patois of the street with the arch sophistication of the British upper-crust to create verbal symphonies unparalleled in their intricacy and dexterity"
posted on Jun-11-02 at 11:02 AM
This is not a medieval woodcut! Though it appears everywhere, this particular woodcut has been repeatedly mis-identified and used most often to support the idea that the medieval world thought the earth was flat, an idea whose inception can be traced to this man, a fiction writer who not only wrote this but also this.
posted on Jun-9-02 at 9:17 PM
The Periodic Table Table now has its own, newly updated website. This had made the rounds on various websites when it was a mere set of construction photos on a bandwidth -constrained site. This is now much better.
posted on Jun-6-02 at 10:44 PM
Weirdo Leonardo "This web site is about the stranger artworks and writings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and includes ideas and images that may disturb." Michelangelo is reported to have said of Leonardo that "He cannot create, only imagine." If so, what an imagination! The grotesque and anatomical figures. The magnificent machines.
posted on May-16-02 at 12:04 AM
I am descended from Charlemagne! And you are too. I found tantalizing ideas in this Atlantic Interview of Steve Olson. Unfortunately, his Atlantic article is not available (for free, anyways). He mentioned, in the interview, the work of Humphrys and Chang. A fwe Google searches later, among a labyrinth of pages about Royal descents, I FOUND! what I was looking for [More inside]
posted on May-11-02 at 9:08 PM
16thandmission: Urban Data Stories is "an investigation into the interplay of data, interactivity and narrative in an urban environment. It takes as its focus the corner of 16th and Mission Streets in San Francisco.... Depending on the state of the bus system at any given moment, the narratives interrelate to a variety of degrees with the map framework." [For you non-san-franciscans, 16th and Mission is a well-known intersection - lively, multicultural, gritty]
posted on May-8-02 at 10:19 AM
"Do It is a manual of artist's instructions for you to actualize. It includes works by over 60 contemporary artists ... Once you have actualized an instruction, please send us a picture and your name, we will include it in the manual" I dont know about you, but I'm going to go get some boards and a bunch of bugs to squash right now - for Baldessari, of course. [via caterina]
posted on May-5-02 at 10:03 PM
A man goes into a restaurant, orders albatross, eats one bite, and kills himself. Real-life scenario? Perhaps not. But it's up to your friends to guess what happened via a series of yes/no questions. Anyone remember these? (found at rinkworks which also has the Book-a-Minute Book Reviews)
posted on May-3-02 at 11:04 AM
A Glossary of HardBoiled Slang will allow you to understand such wonderful, alliterative phrases as:
"You dumb mug, get your mitts off the marbles before I stuff that mud-pipe down your mush - and tell your moll to hand over the mazuma."
Welcome to the world of HardBoiled Fiction. Take some time to brush up on the classics.
posted on Apr-27-02 at 1:18 PM
Can you stump the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences? Every identifiable sequence known to man, including:
Name: Busy Beaver problem: maximal number of steps that an n-state Turing machine can make on an initially blank tape before eventually halting.
Comment: The sequence grows faster than any computable function of n, and so is non-computable.
Keywords: hard,huge,nice,nonn,bref
If your sequence does not appear there, you might want to try the Super Seeker.
posted on Apr-15-02 at 11:16 PM
The Hidden Costs of Career Success Sylvia Ann Hewlett's new book is a hot topic among the business school crowd. Is it possible for high-achieving women to balance career and family?
"high-achieving women are unlikely to get married after the age of 35. They are also unlikely to have a child after 39. Yet 89 percent of younger women believe they will be able to get pregnant into their 40s; many pin their hopes on new reproductive technology."
posted on Apr-12-02 at 1:13 PM
The Paso Doble is an eerie little puzzle game, something like a De Chirico painting come to life.
Oh yeah, a new Mersenne prime was discovered today by a 20-yr old.
Both links courtesy of mathpuzzle.com
(will i ever beat joseph devincentis?!)
posted on Dec-6-01 at 3:09 PM
posted on Jul-27-02 at 2:27 AM
The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke (FFM) (in the Tate collection) Richard Dadd, a Victorian gentleman, a convicted murderer and patient at the famous Bedlam asylum, spent nine years carefully crafting his masterpiece. He wrote a guidebook for it and insisted that each of the hundred characters in the painting is assigned a special task. What does he mean? Well, Neil Gaiman, among others, was inspired by this painting (it influenced the Sandman) and considers it a life-long obsession. He also wrote the introduction to a new book being published about the painting as a gateway to the supernatural world.
A bit of background: Dadd was a painter of Victorian Fairy Art. The obsession with fairies was like a fever that overtook the Victorian Mind. Another painter of note was Richard Doyle, the uncle of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes). A.C. Doyle himself was involved in a fascinating controversy that raged at the time. the Cottingley fairies, in which two young girls circulated photos of themselves with fairies. Doyle proclaimed that the photos "represent either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public or else they constitute an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character" Unfortunately for Doyle, it was the former though the hoax was hardly ingenious, relying on cardboard cutouts and the will to believe.
posted on Jul-18-02 at 12:35 AM
The Breakfast of Champions! Drinking too much lately? Menudo (tripe) (not these guys) has been touted as one of the best hangover cures known to mankind (mefi'ers agree). Not to be confused with its kinder gentler cousin Posole, Menudo is part of the canon of authentic Mexican food (what mexicans eat).
posted on Jul-15-02 at 7:07 PM
The Tesseract Charles H. Hinton, eccentric, bigamist, son-in-law of George Boole (yes that Boole) coined the word Tesseract and claimed that we could all visualize the fourth dimension. He wrote several books and claimed to have created a set of cubes that, used properly, would allow anyone to visualize hyperspace. His ideas were all the rage. Salvador Dali was inspired by him. Robert Heinlein wrote a classic short story about a house built as an unfolded tesseract. Madeleine L'Engle wrote a classic children's story. With the advent of Einstein and his claim that "Time was the fourth dimension", the higher spatial dimensions were forgotten. (Until recently that is) And Hinton was forgotten. Or was he? And what happened to the cubes? Rudy Rucker, a huge fan of Hinton,fails to reprint the instructions. Rumours are that, if you build them and use them, they will drive you insane.
posted on Jul-9-02 at 5:05 PM
The Age of Simulation. Do we live in Reality or do we live in a Simulation? Following themes most popularly found in movies like The Matrix or in books like Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress, we are being told via email and even by philosophers at Yale, that what we perceive is not what is. Is this merely paranoia?
posted on Jul-1-02 at 9:59 PM
Karakuri trick Boxes Brought to you by one of the Karakuri craftsmen. Beautiful and intricate, you may also need some patience. RF-4 by Iwahara, for example, requires 324 moves to open (also featured at the Puzzle Museum)! Lest, you confuse these with Burr puzzles, you must know your puzzle-types.
posted on Jun-25-02 at 3:23 PM
The Inconstant Moon is dedicated to our nearest neighbor. Explore the moon with the Selenographica. Also, this Tuesday, Nova will re-broadcast To the Moon, the story of the the science and engineering behind mans trip to the moon. Its been 100 years since Melies' dream. Will the U.S. return? Or will someone else?
posted on Jun-23-02 at 11:33 AM
Trygve Lode ,a Usenet veteran, has one of the funniest sites out there. Check out his Unnatural Enquirer. My favorites are The Philosophy of Kissing, Evil on a Budget, and the minimalist Spycam vs. Spycam. Who is this guy?
posted on Jun-16-02 at 1:17 PM
Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin' daddies,
Knock me your lobes,
I came to lay Ceasar out,
Not to hip you to him.
So says Lord Richard Buckley, a hipster among hipsters , who fused swing jive and beat-era hepcat slang to create some hip and dazzling monologues. The self-proclaimed "Lord" Buckley was "a comic philosopher, a bop monologuist whose vocalese fused the rhythms and patois of the street with the arch sophistication of the British upper-crust to create verbal symphonies unparalleled in their intricacy and dexterity"
posted on Jun-11-02 at 11:02 AM
This is not a medieval woodcut! Though it appears everywhere, this particular woodcut has been repeatedly mis-identified and used most often to support the idea that the medieval world thought the earth was flat, an idea whose inception can be traced to this man, a fiction writer who not only wrote this but also this.
posted on Jun-9-02 at 9:17 PM
The Periodic Table Table now has its own, newly updated website. This had made the rounds on various websites when it was a mere set of construction photos on a bandwidth -constrained site. This is now much better.
posted on Jun-6-02 at 10:44 PM
Weirdo Leonardo "This web site is about the stranger artworks and writings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and includes ideas and images that may disturb." Michelangelo is reported to have said of Leonardo that "He cannot create, only imagine." If so, what an imagination! The grotesque and anatomical figures. The magnificent machines.
posted on May-16-02 at 12:04 AM
I am descended from Charlemagne! And you are too. I found tantalizing ideas in this Atlantic Interview of Steve Olson. Unfortunately, his Atlantic article is not available (for free, anyways). He mentioned, in the interview, the work of Humphrys and Chang. A fwe Google searches later, among a labyrinth of pages about Royal descents, I FOUND! what I was looking for [More inside]
posted on May-11-02 at 9:08 PM
16thandmission: Urban Data Stories is "an investigation into the interplay of data, interactivity and narrative in an urban environment. It takes as its focus the corner of 16th and Mission Streets in San Francisco.... Depending on the state of the bus system at any given moment, the narratives interrelate to a variety of degrees with the map framework." [For you non-san-franciscans, 16th and Mission is a well-known intersection - lively, multicultural, gritty]
posted on May-8-02 at 10:19 AM
"Do It is a manual of artist's instructions for you to actualize. It includes works by over 60 contemporary artists ... Once you have actualized an instruction, please send us a picture and your name, we will include it in the manual" I dont know about you, but I'm going to go get some boards and a bunch of bugs to squash right now - for Baldessari, of course. [via caterina]
posted on May-5-02 at 10:03 PM
A man goes into a restaurant, orders albatross, eats one bite, and kills himself. Real-life scenario? Perhaps not. But it's up to your friends to guess what happened via a series of yes/no questions. Anyone remember these? (found at rinkworks which also has the Book-a-Minute Book Reviews)
posted on May-3-02 at 11:04 AM
A Glossary of HardBoiled Slang will allow you to understand such wonderful, alliterative phrases as:
"You dumb mug, get your mitts off the marbles before I stuff that mud-pipe down your mush - and tell your moll to hand over the mazuma."
Welcome to the world of HardBoiled Fiction. Take some time to brush up on the classics.
posted on Apr-27-02 at 1:18 PM
Can you stump the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences? Every identifiable sequence known to man, including:
Name: Busy Beaver problem: maximal number of steps that an n-state Turing machine can make on an initially blank tape before eventually halting.
Comment: The sequence grows faster than any computable function of n, and so is non-computable.
Keywords: hard,huge,nice,nonn,bref
If your sequence does not appear there, you might want to try the Super Seeker.
posted on Apr-15-02 at 11:16 PM
The Hidden Costs of Career Success Sylvia Ann Hewlett's new book is a hot topic among the business school crowd. Is it possible for high-achieving women to balance career and family?
"high-achieving women are unlikely to get married after the age of 35. They are also unlikely to have a child after 39. Yet 89 percent of younger women believe they will be able to get pregnant into their 40s; many pin their hopes on new reproductive technology."
posted on Apr-12-02 at 1:13 PM
The Paso Doble is an eerie little puzzle game, something like a De Chirico painting come to life.
Oh yeah, a new Mersenne prime was discovered today by a 20-yr old.
Both links courtesy of mathpuzzle.com
(will i ever beat joseph devincentis?!)
posted on Dec-6-01 at 3:09 PM
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