putting the j in jjosh

I went to this promo conference thing back in 2002 and went to a seminar on the power of the internet. At this time we were still delivering approval tapes on VHS (wha?), no one posted anything for review online, we still got physical DAT’s from sound studios (instead of posting aiff’s) — it was the dark ages. Anyway, in this seminar, there were 3 guys speaking, and the first two were so boring, going on and on about how our jobs in TV were going to be transformed, and we better be worried and stay on top of technology and so on (true, but boring). Snooze-fest.

The third guy spent his time just telling us what websites he thought were cool. This was kind of revelatory for me. It was so interesting to see what weird stuff was out there, and to have this attitude of surfing the net’s hidden corners, looking for the stuff that keeps the world weird. I don’t remember all the things he showed, but I remember this one that was so dark, odd and good, full of small animations that seemed like they were out of a dream.

Six years later, and they show up on metafilter. Sweet. Dutch cartoonist/animator Hans Hoogerbrugge. Really, you’ve got to click here and go to the website to get the full experience, ‘cuz the clicking and discovering is half the fun, but here’s a small mov of me clicking around on it just to give you an idea of what it is. The sounds, the visuals, the feeling of the thing — so dream-like.

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His main website is pretty cool too, full of weird artworks and this great museum installation that animates the outside of a museum wall and has the character say whatever people text to it. Pretty great.

This is fantastic. At a festival in Ireland (check the electronic thump in the background), a group of jump-suited folks decide to play soccer. Also they are wearing binoculars. Hilarity ensues.

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Beautiful animation done to sync with a semi-legendary interview with John Lennon. According to the youtube post:

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it.

Hi-er-res so may take a moment to load. Good stuff. Time to piss for peace.

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 This month’s banner is a fantastic mural done on the boards surrounding a construction site near our apartment. We walk past it every Saturday, and one morning the artist herself was there working on it. She was really nice, and explained that she got quite a few commissions to do construction sites because normally they’re such an eyesore that they create quite a lot of tension in the community.

She’s got a deal where she gets to keep the art after the site is finished. You can check more of her work at her website, which is full of interesting stuff. She also told us the story of this mural, which was originally going to be flowers (I think that’s what she said), but which changed once she met and started talking to a fellow who lived nearby. He told her the history of the site, that it was the site of The Battle of Brooklyn during the Revolutionary War. So she changed the mural to fit this new theme.

I have to say, I love how surreal it is. The first time I saw it, I wanted to get a picture of it for the blog banner, and I was just lucky enough that when I finally got around to biking down there to get the photo, I took it when that guy was zipping along the street. Nothing like a bit of luck.

It is now summer. Let us celebrate in two ways:

First, by song,

(yo la tengo – the summer)

and then, by poem (this poem is amazing! the ending is so fierce!):

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver   

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung

herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating

sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws

back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with

her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale

forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings

open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what

a prayer is.

I do know how to pay

attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to

kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and

blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been

doing all day.

Tell me, what else should

I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at

last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you

plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Last night I went out in the rain to this event at the Eyebeam gallery in Chelsea. I’ve been to a couple of things there (Robot Talent Show!), and they do these Mixer events every now and then…we tried to go to one when AK was in town but we got there too late. That time, it was pretty much finished, but we could tell that something cool had definitely gone down — leaves all over the ground, and weird screens set up and so on. So last night I got there well in time, and it had bunch of different, interesting things…

First off, there was a stage with bands, DJ’s, etc. and 3 giant screens being VJ’d behind them…pretty cool, the visuals were amazing, but I wanted the music to be better…

In another room, they had a large inflatable pool filled with inky-black water. People would get into a bathing suit, stretch out on some kind of weird rack, and then get submerged into the pool. As this was happening, behind them on a giant screen, somehow a computer was tracking what their body looked like in the water. In realtime. It was really wild. Kind of like Minority Report, or as someone next to me remarked, "It’s a Hybrid!"

This low-fi cellphone movie doesn’t do it justice, and you can only just see the screen at the end, but here, check it:

I should also mention that it was $15 to get in, but then it was open bar(!!), which was nice. So the music was decent, the ink bath was wild, but really, in my mind the real money-maker, the thing that made it all worth it, was Boozbot.

A robot bartender!!!! I got in line and a guy next to me said "A robot bartender?" and for some reason I answered by saying "Finally." Because really, shouldn’t we have had this before? The experience was amazing. You got up to Boozbot and there was a list of drinks he could make (vodka straight, vodka tonic, vodka tonic and cran) next to a USB mic. You’d speak into the mic and Boozbot would chat with you for a bit. When he talked they had this small screen animating an 8-bit graphic-y mouth, and he spoke (naturally) though a metallic speech synthesizer.

There was obviously someone watching you through his camera eyes, ‘cuz Boozbot would talk about your appearance, and make conversation with you that wasn’t computer-based. After talking to him for a bit he’d make your drink by dispensing the quantities of ingredient through the plastic tubes at the end of his hand (see that in the pic)? It was so much fun.

Later in the evening, quite randomly, I ended up running into the guy who made Boozbot and having a conversation with him. He wasn’t geeky at all, more of a space-case type, and really friendly and cool. I was trying to ask about how much Boozbot could actually do on his own and —

"You mean how autonomous he is?" the guy cut me off.

"Right. How autonomous is he?"

"Well actually it would be illegal for him to be completely autonomous because to serve alcohol you need to be able to id people. So he’s only semi-autonomous. But damn I would love to see the cops arresting him for being completely autonomous!"

"Yeah, that would be a great court scene…Boozbot taking the stand…"

I then told him that I was going to borrow his idea and take it out to Burning Man, which he said was fine, so I’m stoked for that. I’ve already got some mods that I think would make it a better experience, so now all I have to do is solve the engineering issue of regulated hydraulic pumps to make the drinks. I think my dad could probably help me out with that, so it’s on. But I can’t call him Boozbot ‘cuz that’d be downright stealing. And it’s too bad, ‘cuz what a perfect name. 

Maybe Robooze? Johnny 500 proof? Liquorbot? Drink-a-tron? Robartender?

Help me out people…

UPDATE – It should be pointed out that when I presumptuously speak of borrowing the idea of Boozbot, I am more speaking to the spirit of the idea, and not to that actual execution. I just read a fascinating blog entry on how Boozbot works, and I love the complexity of it, but it’s…how can I put this?…a bit out of my skill set. Only time will tell whether this is a project that comes to life…

Displacements by Michael Naimark.

Here’s how to do this:

1. fill a room with stuff, camera in the middle, on a rotating platform

2. slowly move the camera around, filming stuff in the room

3. paint everything in the room white

4. put a projector on the platform and turn it around at the same rate, projecting the film of the objects onto the objects themselves…

nice.

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embedded vimeo, via

Wow, check out Muto.

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Found on vimeo, via waxy, done by blu.

This month’s banner picture was taken at MOMA’s Olafur Eliasson exhibit, "Take Your Time". It’s a bunch of light, color and mirror based installations that have to do with the perception of perceiving (apparently). The banner picture was taken in a room that had these weird and intense lights that made everything look either yellow or black. It really messed with your eyes, but in a good way.

Picture to the left was this odd balcony that looked as though it was over an infinitely deep chasm, but was really just clever mirrors. Click here for bigger pic.

Great exhibit.

(pic of mixwit.com, the new mixtape site with a great cassette-style interface) 

Since I started the blog in February 08 I’ve been thinking a lot about this stuff. I wasn’t really sure what joshgranger.com was going to be when I bought the domain. Then while getting ready to start the blog proper, wordpress (whose software powers this site) had a little exercise before you start blogging where you write down what you plan to do, who the audience is, how often you’ll blog, etc., in an effort to make sure you know what you’re getting into.

My little written bit basically amounted to sharing anything I found online that I thought was cool — music, video, linkage — much like my favorite blogs. I’ve come to think of it as an extension of the mixtape, which is an artform I’ve loved since I was taping off the radio in 1982. In college my mixtaping reached a alltime high level: I was using the media lab to tape things off of VHS videocassettes; I had inherited my dad’s old cassette player that could control the level in (yes! no more loud to soft transitions); I was part of a group of fellow mixtapologists who took it very seriously (report cards were made for each mix, a fanzine was published (I show up on page 13)); I was able to scour the college radio station for b-sides and weird rarities, or record myself doing "long-distance dedications"; ETC.

Post college, I was lucky enough to have a father who loved cutting-edge tech, so I could offer people CD mixes when it was still a novelty. When I decided to try DJ’ing, I did a lot of research before deciding to go with CD decks (more flexibility, don’t have to buy records all the damn time). I could run the decks into my computer and record the mixes, then split them into tracks with other software.

Part of the joy of the mix (both making and receiving) was getting/hearing something that made you say "where did THAT come from?!" And of course, the mixtape merely offered you the track name. There wasn’t really any context, so a really obscure track (I remember putting a Crooked Fingers track on a tape for Dan R before Eric B had even become Crooked Fingers…coup!!) could have an air of mystery about it that really added to the fun, and prompted attempts at one-upmanship.

The same is true of forwarding links to your friends — you just send the youtube link, not usually where you got it from. And this keeps that sense of mystery, that great feeling of "where did they find THAT?!"

my gosh, so interesting! tell me more!

I should mention that this month’s banner photo is from Maxine’s friend Charlotte who was staying with us in February (apologies for my photoshop fakery, Charlotte!). She posts on flikr as madeinsheffield and she’s got some really good stuff there — apparently she won some photo competition that got one of her photos on the front page of The Guardian or something? And has some photos in galleries as well. We went to Coney Island for a winter visit and all 3 of us took pictures — it was such a great scene there on the vacant beach…

I took photos using this Holga camera (pictured above in a madeinsheffield shot) that Laird M gave me years and years ago; the camera is purposefully broken, so it has light leaks and double exposures and so on, which should hopefully result in interesting photos. Now I just have to find somewhere that develops the Holga film…I’ll post the photos once I get them…

madeinsheffield’s New York set here.

Sunday Maxine and I finally got around to checking out the Murikami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, and lemme tell you, it was a mind-blower! If you are in the area (it’s on until July something) you gotta see this. It would probably make a great field trip too, ‘cuz it seems very kid-friendly (umm, except for the weird, blatantly sexual ones like Hiropan).

But most of the art is simply great — from canvases with layers of paint meticulously sanded down, to weird anime-style plastic figures, to installation-style rooms full of eye-popping imagery, the exhibit is stimulating on many levels. We didn’t get to see his short films in the little theater area because the line was too massive, but then in the elevator on the way out we heard a couple of guys talking about how the films really weren’t worth the line. Nice.

In among all his smiling flowers and cute characters, he also had a series of canvases that have things like death skulls with rings of flowers for eyes (above, titled "time bokun missing"; below, titled "time bokun black"), or psychedelic-style caricatures of famous buddhist monks. It’s the kind of art that really gets me going, and I was pretty excited that Maxine was into it as well.

There’s also a whole side to his art that has to do with blending art and commerce (the exhibit is really called ©Murakami). For example, Murakami was brought on by Marc Jacobs to do a specially designed Louis Vitton bag and design print that’s apparently been a huge sensation, so they had a Louis Vitton store as one of the art installations in the middle of the museum. Weird, mind-bendy, but somehow cool.

From digging around online I found this sort-of promotion animation he did a couple of years ago for his Louis Vitton design. It’s called "Superflat Monogram," the concept of Superflat being a central tenet of Murakami’s work. Some decry this little film as a 5 minute commercial for LV, but I think it’s kind of playful, lyrical and beautiful too. It’s on youtube, but I dug up a hi-rez version of it for you ‘cuz low-rez Murakami is weak!

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