Found Objects

Untreated photos taken with my Voigtlander Bessa-L with a...

Fri, 24 May 2013 00:07:00 +0100

Untreated photos taken with my Voigtlander Bessa-L with a Industar-61 L/D lens (previously). Ilford XP2 Super film. And a decent lab. View on Flickr.

Philosophies as postcards. There.

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:26:17 +0100

Philosophies as postcards. There.

Videolab is an educational software piece that teaches and lets...

Wed, 08 May 2013 02:02:00 +0100

Videolab is an educational software piece that teaches and lets users experiment with concepts of digital video technology. It can be used standalone by students or as a lecturing tool by instructors.

I developed this Educational Software project as part of the coursework required for my Digital Media PhD, but I hope it’ll come handy in my own teaching. This prototype was made with Processing 2.08b and was thoroughly tested on Windows, but should work on other systems as well.

Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib / Dream Machines: there’s...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:58:00 +0100

Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib / Dream Machines: there’s a link to a downloadable PDF (of questionable legality and reliability) at the bottom of the page, so hurry up! (via Radio-Activity)

Nelson, of course, is the wacky David Lynch-esque persona who invented the word ‘hypertext’ and fought for an alternate (some might say DRM-enabled) Web for decades with Project Xanadu. Still, Nelson has none of that tired Silicon Valley entrepeneur bullshit rhetoric. His Computers for Cynics podcast (direct link to episode 0) has more wisdom about technology and control in it than the entire ouevre of ‘open source’ demagogues.

Flash project: I was going to spend last week helping out Joana...

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 13:26:00 +0000

Flash project: I was going to spend last week helping out Joana with a promo video for the FAZ Ideas in Portuguese contest. Everything was going to be shot outdoors, however progress was irritatingly slow due to the heavy rain that fell all week. We couldn’t get a break. So yesterday and in despair, we scrapped nearly everything and started over, shooting stop-motion indoors as the rain fell outside almost to the very end, when we managed to get a couple of shots outside again.

And somehow it worked.

If you can read Portuguese, please visit and vote for us!

Observing a solar eclipse on January 1, 1907, in the Tian-Shan...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 20:56:00 +0000

Observing a solar eclipse on January 1, 1907, in the Tian-Shan mountains, probably in modern-day Uzbekistan. This is a photograph taken by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, a chemist and photographer who invented a new process for color photography and used it to document the Russian empire in the time period 1905-1915. You can view many of the photos on Flickr or at the Library of Congress.

— From the Science Tumblr.

It seems Twitter is seven today, to which my first reaction was “Wow, already?!” Lately...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 01:45:00 +0000

It seems Twitter is seven today, to which my first reaction was “Wow, already?!” Lately...

Google will shutdown Google Reader on July 1st. This is...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 01:30:32 +0000

Google will shutdown Google Reader on July 1^st.

This is terrible.

Not because I’m a heavy gReader user. I’ll have to move my subscriptions over to some alternative feed reader (like the appropriately-named The Old Reader) and import all my favourites to my Pinboard account, but that’s easy and not much of a problem.

This is terrible because this is the final nail in RSS’s coffin. Without a popular and efficient feed reader, those small personal blogs that made the Web great will struggle even more to find audiences. Blogging is dying, replaced by the efficient ‘sharing’ of Facebook and Twitter. RSS would have been the federated open alternative, but syndication is contrary to walled gardens.

It seems we came full circle. With the demise of Google Reader, it seems having a small online presence on the Web outside of Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter is again the province of hackers and nerds…

If you look for it, there is wisdom in technical manuals: Life...

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:30:19 +0000

If you look for it, there is wisdom in technical manuals: Life Advice from Machines.

A Sudden Gust of Wind, Jeff Wall’s neo-pictorialist recreation...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 16:05:50 +0000

A Sudden Gust of Wind, Jeff Wall’s neo-pictorialist recreation of Katsushika Hokusai’s Ejiri in Suruga Province. (via Like a Field Mouse)

Honkey Kong, a photo series by Christian Åslund. (via Neatorama)

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:35:06 +0000

Honkey Kong, a photo series by Christian Åslund. (via Neatorama)

Stereograph of man with device designed for flying. (via...

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:47:41 +0000

Stereograph of man with device designed for flying. (via xplanes)

Big Dreams, by Extra Fabulous Comics. (via inky)

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 02:20:00 +0000

Big Dreams, by Extra Fabulous Comics. (via inky)

"IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension,..."

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:57:00 +0000

“IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension,...

I found an unused roll of slide film which had its expiration...

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 19:57:49 +0000

I found an unused roll of slide film which had its expiration date set in 2001. I took some pictures with a Yashica Electro 35, then took the film to the local Lomography shop so they cross-processed it as regular C41 negative.

This is what happened.

Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris. (via MeFi) See also...

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 14:28:15 +0000

Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris. (via MeFi)

An Informal Catalogue of Slit-Scan Video Artworks and Research

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 23:02:12 +0000

An Informal Catalogue of Slit-Scan Video Artworks and Research: Compiled by Golan Levin & al....

These are some of my early experiments with slit-scan...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:58:18 +0000

These are some of my early experiments with slit-scan photography, made while trying a Processing application I coded mostly as a learning exercise. The software allows you to either ‘scan’ your webcam image or a video file, but since using my laptop as camera is a bit cumbersome, most of the above images were made by ‘scanning’ some random videos I had around. I’ll have to try to shoot video specifically for slit-scanning - so far I found out that stable, sideways shots of slow-moving subjects work the best. (As an aside, slit-scan photography is basically one of the main techniques used by Photo-finish systems, only at very high frame rates.)

Anyway, I think the app is cool and stable enough to be worth sharing, so I made a download for Windows available - head to my Processing sketches page to get it!

World’s Fair, New York (1964), by Garry Winogrand. (via...

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 15:50:00 +0000

World’s Fair, New York (1964), by Garry Winogrand. (via Magnificent Ruin)

And here’s ten things Winogrand can teach you about photography.

Martian dawn. Photo taken August 13, 1977 by the Viking 1...

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 12:44:53 +0000

Martian dawn. Photo taken August 13, 1977 by the Viking 1 Lander. (via Pruned)