serial consignserial consignSerial Consign is the blog of designer and curator Greg J. Smith. The site serves as the nexus of an ongoing discussion about design, technology and culture. Content includes commentary on software and tools, reviews of exhibits and texts, the catalo Articles
eduardo navas interview
2007-09-25 01:06:00 [galibier design's quattro turntable] One of my favourite blogs over the last year has been Remix Theory, a writing project quarterbacked by media theorist and artist Eduardo Navas. Eduardo is also the author of Remediative and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, a fantastic essay that beat-juggles a variety of paradigms that range from remix history through to data mashups. Eduardo and I have been firing questions back and forth over email for a few weeks and he has provided a compelling window into his research. How did you get started researching the remix as a critical paradigm? It was more a matter of bringing together activities that I had been exploring throughout my life. At the age of 12, during the early eighties, I became a break-dancer and at the age of 18, or so, I bought my own turntables and sound system. Then I began to DJ in the Los Angeles area, something I would do until 2001 or so. During this time I also played percussion in a couple of Salsa cover bands. I ... More About: Interview
curate the glitch
2007-09-22 19:53:00 [steven reid / screen burn (please wait) / 2005] I capped off a really exciting week on Thursday with a micro-lecture at the first Toronto edition of talk20. Talk20 is an informal salon that operates in the same style as Pecha Kucha and Dorkbot. The gatherings are dedicated to bring together a variety of artists and designers to present work connected by a common thread. The first talk20 explored Error, and I was invited by the series coordinators Mason White and Lola Sheppard to showcase a selection of glitch art culled from the Vague Terrain archives. When Neil Wiernik and I launched Vague Terrain in September 2005 we dedicated our first issue to an exploration of digital detritus and glitch art. This theme of interrogating software, hardware and modes of production has remained central within the work we have curated and it was exciting for me to highlight this specific vector that runs through the entire history of our digital arts quarterly. [tony scott / endemerol (detail) / ... More About: Glitch , The G
art vs. architecture
2007-09-20 09:30:00 [felix schramm / revealing the pinnacles / 2004] The most recent edition of Artkrush is dedicated to exploring the intersection of art and the design of space. The issue contains a feature by Bryony Roberts on the cross-pollination between artistic practice and architecture, as well as an illuminating (if concise) interview with video and installation artist Dan Graham. The Bryony Roberts feature discusses the work of Rachel Whiteread, Liam Gillick and a number of other relevant artists. The piece introduced me to the work of German installation artist Felix Schramm. I am completely enthralled by the rawness of his work. Schramm's sculpted archi-debris reminds me of the inexact precision of Gordon Matta-Clark and the energy of some of Coop Himmelb(l)au's installation work. [dan graham / two-way mirror cylinder inside cube and a video salon: rooftop urban park project for dia center for the arts / 1981 & 1991] Within the constraints of a short interview with Sara Raza, Dan Gra... More About: Architecture , Architect
proto-network culture
2007-09-18 05:34:00 There has been a bit of a lull in my posting over the past few weeks as I recently began a teaching position at the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University in Hamilton, just southwest of Toronto. I'm teaching a course entitled Interactive Digital Culture , providing a survey of new media paradigms and theoretical positions to a group of undergrad software engineers enrolled in the program's game development stream. This is a great opportunity for me to consolidate a sprawling body of research I've been working on over the last several years, and I also expect the pile of texts I'm digging through to drive the content here at Serial Consign over the coming months. With this course, I am tracing the roots of "new media" and tapping into the lineage of technological research and development, both overt (Xerox Parc, The Media Lab, WWII cryptography) and more obtuse (Modernist literature, the history of the document, the process of archiving). In sett... More About: Network , Prot , Proto
ars electronica 2007 links
2007-09-13 02:13:00 [josephine starrs & leon cmielewski / seeker / 2006] I've spent some time over the last few days researching what went down at this year's edition of Ars Electronica and thought I'd pass along some of the choice links I've found. The theme for 2007 festival was "Goodbye Privacy," a nod to our increasingly transparent, socially networked society. An excerpt from the festival statement: Mobile and ubiquitous?no longer just here and now, but being present wherever you want to be, whenever you want to be. These long-nurtured yearnings that have been projected so euphorically onto new technologies have now materialized into the reality of our time. A reality that is woven from a network in which every user is a node, every exit simultaneously an entrance, every receiver a transmitter too. The proceedings just concluded in Linz and info about the showcased work is beginning to pop up all over the net. The most thorough coverage that I've found comes by way of Jasper Schelling who... More About: Links
meta-markets: speculating on social media
2007-09-11 04:21:00 A few weeks back I reviewed ffffound!, the first of a number of web projects that I've been beta-testing this summer. Another application that has made a significant impression on me is Burak Arikan's Meta -Markets . Meta-Markets is an economic simulation which reconsiders individual units of social media as commodities and creates a forum for their exchange (you can see my portfolio above). Arikan describes Meta-Markets as: An online stock market for trading socially networked creative products such as YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, blogs, or social network profiles. In NYSE or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of bookmarks, profiles, videos, or blogs. Just like companies, socially networked products have ever growing values. When product owners issue their shares in Meta-Markets, they raise capital ? today play capital, but tomorrow real capital. With Meta-Markets we aim to help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor i... More About: Social , Media
escape the game
2007-09-04 04:43:00 A few weeks ago, in preparing a post on David Lynch-related links from around the net, I stumbled upon Emmanuel Papillon's Black Lodge. This immersive game inspired me to start thinking about the potential for interactive fiction on the web, and has drawn my girlfriend and I into a downward spiral of online gaming over this past long weekend. We've both ventured into the worlds of several game designers and these works are worth discussing for their narrative and aesthetic qualities. Leaving the biggest imprint on me are the works of Polish graphic novelist Mateusz Skutnik. Skutnik is the author of the Submachine series of games, each of which finds you escaping from an elaborate, explorable puzzle box. Captivity is a familiar theme in this genre of games, known as escape the room games in the point-and-click world. This gameplay style evolved from Robyn and Rand Miller's 1993 classic Myst, which shaped the game industry as much as SimCity and Doom. The Submachine games could all... More About: Game , The Game , Escape , Scape , Esca
nestle chocolate museum
2007-08-31 21:17:00 I came across a dynamic architecture project this week that excited me on several levels. The Nestle Choco lat e Museum near Mexico City's Paseo Tollocan was recently completed by Rojkind Arquitectos. The project is characterized by a playful, faceted geometry, inexpensive materials and clever detailing. This linear and expressive form programs a museum along the trajectory of a zigzagged hallway, which is wrapped by a series of continuous folded surface. The exterior is clad in corrugated metal and the detail demarcating the edges between adjacent faces alludes to a digital wireframe aesthetic. The volume expands and opens up to accommodate key display and theatre spaces inside the museum, and also allows for direct access to an adjacent Nestle factory. It is great to see this lively energy permeate the entire project. The polygonal geometry is fully taken advantage of in guiding creative detailing within the interior. Angular handrails and a staccato rhythm of fluorescent light fi...
site news / some links
2007-08-29 22:21:00 For the second time this month the site was down for a few hours, that coupled with a misplaced Purolator package has made for a rather stressful afternoon. The site has been undergoing some informational surgery of late, so please bear with the growing pains. I've been digging into the Drupal views module and am starting to think about how I can create a few interesting content clusters to provide additional sidebar menus. These experiments coupled with my recent integration of adsense into the mix should make for a stream of steady changes until I get the interface configured in a manner that I am happy with. Serial Consign has received some very positive feedback in the past few weeks from some great design blogs. Software artist Paul Prudence of Dataisnature was kind enough to highlight several of my online projects. This praise means a lot to me as Dataisnature has been an invaluable resource in curating Vague Terrain over the last two years and it also an important reference ... More About: News , Site News , Links , Site , Some
lost and ffffound!
2007-08-28 19:17:00 Over the last month I've been beta testing a number of social bookmarking and database projects. With new web applications you can always tell if a project is on to something if use of the service creeps into your daily workflow without your noticing. One new service I'm really enjoying is ffffound!, an image bookmarking site that exists somewhere between the worlds of del.ici.ous and flickr. The project is described as: ...web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user's tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience. fffound! succeeds for the same reason that del.icio.us does, the bookmarking process is transparent, and the site interface for browsing archived images is simple and versatile. [image: screen capture of the ffffound! UI with "related images" thumbnails on the right] If you take a look at my ffffound! profile you can view the image archive as a l... More About: Lost
paper space ? an introduction
2007-08-27 01:35:00 Over the last 18 months there has been no shortage of discussion on the death of the newspaper industry. This continually revised obituary now undermines not just the business model behind print journalism, but the methodology of news collection and reporting. As Craigslist killed the classified ad, Jay Rosen's Huffington Post experiment Off the Bus is redefining coverage of the campaign trail. It has now been about three months since I finished Movable Parts, an architectural response to the problems facing the contemporary editorial space. The project focused on the particularly dire situation of the floundering Los Angeles Times. I'm excited to come back to the topic after stepping back for a few months, and I will begin republishing commentary and interviews here in the near future. The new Renzo Piano-designed New York Times headquarters has provoked intelligent discussion about the intersection of media and architecture. The Times' presence in the skyline of New York, as we... More About: Space , Introduction , Paper
scanning catalogtree
2007-08-24 17:48:00 Last night, while researching a graphic strategy for an architectural competition I am working on, I had the pleasure of stumbling across the work of Catalogtree. I spent a good 90 minutes "infographic rubbernecking" at the fantastic portfolio of this Arnhem, NL based graphic design firm. Their studio has been active since 2000 and seems engaged on numerous fronts: layout, branding, web design, visualization, as well as teaching and exhibiting. The graphics above are from a suite of diagrams prepared for the April 2007 issue of Architect Magazine which visualizes the buzz around top shelf American architecture firms. Data backing up this work includes American Institute of Architects awards, appearances in the news and profitability. The resulting matrix of images yields something akin to an A-List architectural annual report. The graphic above is from a series of images prepared for a text entitled Werken aan de naoorlogse stad, a book about a research fellowship between 2002 and ... More About: Scanning
an open (face)book?
2007-08-22 16:24:00 There has been an interesting conversation brewing at WIRED and Mashable this month on the shape of social networking to come. A WIRED article by Scott Gilbertson entitled Slap in the Face book: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up called out Facebook for "locking down" their product as if it were a cell phone or DRM audio. An accompanying wiki illustrates how numerous open social tools can be utilized to almost recreate the full range of functionality of facebook: Start by setting up a blog. Say what's on your mind. Unlike your blog on Facebook or MySpace, everyone will be able to read it. From there, you can pull in your photos from Flickr or Zooomr and show off your impeccable musical taste by creating a profile at iLike or Last.fm. You can share your web bookmarks using del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia and publish a list of your most recent reads using Shelfari or LibraryThing.All of these services have open APIs, making it easy for third-party developers to build widgets for displ... More About: Book
information and warfare
2007-08-20 15:55:00 After years of reading around him, I finally have dug into a text by theorist Manuel De Landa. A friend recently gave me her copy of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines and I've thoroughly enjoyed working through it over the last few weeks. In this writing project, De Landa reads military history in relation to philosopher Gilles Deleuze's notion of the "machinic phylum," a term Deleuze used to describe the paradigm of self-organization. The text repositions the military as an abstract entity and provides an alternate history of technology that deals exclusively with the will of the military machine. The following excerpt outlines De Landa's conception of the elements of military metabolism: If we think of tactics as the art of assembling men and weapons in order to win battles, and of strategy as the art of assembling battles to win wars, then logistics could be defined as the art of assembling war and the agricultural, economic and industrial resources that make it possible.... More About: Information , Fare , Warfare
ghetto ambient
2007-08-19 19:23:00 I've been a longtime fan of musician and artist Sebastian Meissner who releases beautiful and often unsettling ambient music under the moniker Klimek on Kompakt. I began a dialog with Sebastian when I tipped him off that I had used a Klimek track to score my Kamera Obscura project, and as we chatted back and forth I realized he was the creative force behind a number of other projects that have showed up on my radar over the years. Sebastian is also behind or was involved in: Bizz Circuits, Autopoieses (with Ekkehard Ehlers) and Random Inc. In addition to the Klimek material that I find so mesmerizing, the Random Inc. record Walking In Jerusalem was one of my favourite albums of 2002, and Autopoieses's locked-groove laden La Vie À Noir Transposed didn't leave my crate for two years when I was still playing records. What interested me so much about about Walking in Jerusalem, was that the album proposed a remixed urban space. In Meissner's Jerusalem, political and cultural boundar... More About: Ghetto , Ambient
semi-automatic drawings
2007-08-16 00:25:00 I always get excited when I come across a body of work that explores the intersection of drawing and computation. David Lu is a San Francisco based designer, software developer and disciple of the drawing board. With his Computational Draw ings project, David has created a suite of nuanced and imperfect computer assisted drawings. While generative strategies are at play in this work, the project statement describes the process as being "semi-automatic" as geometry and linework grow out of the gesture of the operator of these systems. These drawings are created with varying combinations of: processing, c#, visual studio, and a tablet PC. [image: detail of broadcast red] If you dig around David's personal site, you'll find more lovely drawings and some amazing information visualization and conceptual design. Lu also has a catalog of other drawing applications which include: Droom Zaacht, a modded etch-a-sketch, and The Line Drawn (from which the image above is derived). I enjoy the ... More About: Automatic , Semi
state of the art(s)
2007-08-13 14:53:00 Like many digital arts netizens I've spent a good portion of the summer reading about festivals, exhibitions and events that I cannot actually attend. For the most part, this is fine as awareness of what is going on is usually enough to keep me placated. However, there are two exhibitions taking place right now on different sides of the planet that I would kill to get to. They are: Zone_V2_Unstable Media: Act-Interact and Project to Surface taking place in Taipei and New York City respectively. These shows explore database culture and the reconciliation of 2D representation with 3D fabrication, two topics that I expect will command a lot of my attention in the coming years. Zone_V2_Unstable Media: Act-Interact is curated by Alex Adriaansens of the Rotterdam based V2_Organization. The V2_Organization has been on my radar for about a decade due to their broad research into all aspects of new media; from curation and publishing to running the minimal techno label Audio.nl, they've re... More About: State , The A
jan jelinek interview
2007-08-11 21:54:00 Last year I had the pleasure of inviting Jan Jelinek to Toronto to perform at the Music Gallery's X Avant festival. Jan delivered an incredibly visceral, droney set which was largely comprised of material from his Tierbeobachtung album. I'd be hard pressed to name another musician who has released as many groundbreaking and ambitious recordings over the last decade. Some artists define genres, but I think others destroy them by pushing them to their logical conclusions and breaking through stylistic conventions into uncharted territory. Jelinek cracked open minimal house with his Farben project, and the full lengths he has released on ~Scape have served as essential documentation of his ongoing experiments. This interview was originally published in Vague Terrain 05: Minimalism in December of 2006 [image: jan jelinek in the mix / 2006 - from pil01's focus:berlin photoset] Lets start out with your musical roots, and try to move through your body of work semi-chronologically to try... More About: Interview
the black lodge / some lynch links
2007-08-09 21:39:00 After viewing David Lynch's Inland Empire earlier this summer, and then revisiting the fractured narrative of Fred Madison in Lost Highway, I recently decided the time was right to return to Twin Peaks. For the uninitiated, Twin Peaks was Lynch's 29-episode foray into television drama on ABC in 1990 and 1991. I can't exactly imagine the circumstances through which television executives would let David Lynch on prime time, but the medium is better off for it. Twin Peaks perfected and serialized the picket-fence surrealism of Blue Velvet and contained some of Lynch's most endearing characters and puzzle box plots. The series utilized the murder of a troubled teen, Laura Palmer, as a MacGuffin to draw viewers into orbit around an eccentric community in Washington state. The central protagonist of the show was Special Agent Dale Cooper, an FBI investigator who would gradually become entangled in a sinister local mythology at the root of his murder investigation. Attempts to appease ... More About: Links , Black , Lodge , Lack , Some
misc. music infosnacking
2007-08-03 20:54:00 It has been a bit of a slow week here at Serial Consign, through no fault of mine the site was down for the majority of yesterday and now I'm feeling a little under the weather. In lieu of a coherent post, here are a few music related links: In writing my foreword to Vague Terrain 07: Sample Culture I had to give a shout-out to The Bomb Squad, the production team behind Public Enemy. I first was exposed to It takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back when I was wee lad of 13 in 1989. I can honestly say the record changed my life. Not only was I listening to intelligent lyrics for the first time (sorry LL), but the production wrapped around said lyrics was dense, frantic and historically charged. I lost track of The Bomb Squad in the mid 90s and haven't heard much about them since. GRANDGOOD just tipped me off about an extended interview with Bomb Squad member Hank Shocklee in Cool'eh Magazine. Schocklee sounds off on artist development, copyright, social media, and reveals he ha... More About: Music , Misc , Music I
vague terrain / x avant festival
2007-08-01 02:58:00 I'm thrilled to announce that Vague Terrain has once again been invited to assist in programming the X Avant festival in Toronto. We co-curated a show with the Music Gallery last fall as part of the inaugural edition of their festival and built a night around the Toronto premiere of Jan Jelinek. I am completely confident that our event this coming Friday September the 14th will be equally provocative. X Avant will feature the Toronto premiere of Marc Leclair's 5mm project. Marc is quite famous for the work he's recorded under his Akufen pseudonym and his 2002 album My Way is probably one of the most influential techno albums of the last decade. For X Avant, Marc will present a project he premiered at Mutek 2006 which marries the sleek introspective minimalism of his Musique pour 3 Femmes Enceintes project with the video of Gabriel Coutu-Dumont. We will also be welcoming one of our favourite artists back to Toronto, Montreal's Des Cailloux et du Carbone. Neil Wiernik and I have ... More About: Festival
generative layout and typography
2007-07-30 21:31:00 I stumbled across some interesting graphic design and typography work this weekend courtesy of Benedikt Groß. Benedikt just completed his studies at HFG Schwäbisch Gmünd and focused on Generative Systems. His thesis project, produced in collaboration with Julia Laub, yielded a fantastic series of posters documenting their experiments with Adobe Indesign scripting and Processing. The posters are definitely worth looking at, and Benedikt has been so kind as to share his Indesign scripts which are available for download to anyone interested. Some of the scripts lend themselves to auto-annotation of design syntax (i.e. the point size of every word is written underneath it) and others deal with paper-space (i.e. a rectangle is generated at the end of each line of text which demarcates the ragged right side of a left-justified paragraph). There is also a processing applet for generating recursive tiling patterns which can be used to determined nested grid systems like the one utilized in ... More About: Typography , Layout , Graph , Typo
thom mayne speaks
2007-07-30 01:34:00 Having just engaged in a discussion with Santiago Ortiz and subsequently listening to Charlie Rose dig into David Lynch and Daniel Libeskind while working this weekend, it appears that interviews are the flavour of the week here at Serial Consign. That said, Archinect has just posted a casual and meandering interview with Thom Mayne conducted by Orhan Ayyüce. Mayne is the principal designer behind the ubiquitous Los Angeles based firm Morphosis, who have done a remarkable job in translating their culture of (seminal) experiments in representation into a pragmatic building practice over the past two decades. The Archinect interview breezes through the history of the "Santa Monica School," office workflow, pedagogy, and the benefits of urban thinking in architecture. Mayne waxes rather poetically about the potential for Architecture to be a critical discourse above and beyond the expected investment in developing form. The excerpt that follows is probably the most inspiring thing I'v... More About: Peak
santiago ortiz interview
2007-07-27 19:22:00 Last week I posted an involved review of Santi ago Ortiz 's 6pli project. I was really capitvated by the manner in which this application allowed for the navigation of a link database through the social bookmarking service del.icio.us. Santiago and I exchanged a few emails and I decided he would be an ideal first participant in a new series of interviews which will be published here on Serial Consign over the coming months. A member of the Barcelona based Bestiario collective, Santiago currently lives in Lisbon. Over the last several years Santiago has developed an impressive portfolio of imaginative and dynamic software art which explores a number of contemporary paradigms. I first found out about his work through the Sound and Energy suite of "interface instruments" which includes the delightful Sound Sticky Elastical Structure pictured above. Santiago has been kind enough to talk about his work, so without further ado... In looking at your body of work, I notice several themes: na... More About: Interview , Tiago
cassette tape fever
2007-07-25 03:42:00 The cassette tape has been skulking in the shadows for the past few years and it appears that this near-obsolete format is beginning to creep back into the spotlight. First there was Autechre's infamous Draft 7.30 promo, then the 2005 Thurston Moore edited Mix Tape: The Art Of Cassette Culture, which positioned the cassette tape as American folk art. More recently, recordings of countless mixtapes from the 80s and 90s have been popping up on music blogs the world over offering listeners an opportunity to listen to the sounds of a specific moment in time. Adding fuel to this fire is a recent Designboom feature which explores several facets of contemporary cassette tape culture. These include collecting vintage blank tapes, repurposing tapes as digital storage media, all manner of fashion related retrofits and, of course, the now quite played out your-text-on-a-tape image generator. Check the article out, it is good fun. More About: Fever , Asset , Cassette tape
essential online reading
More articles from this author:2007-07-23 05:59:00 I had a strange realization earlier today while perusing my news reader. I subscribe to about 150 RSS feeds, which means that at any given moment I have far more information to sift through than you could cram into any given Sunday edition of the New York Times. That said, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to try to isolate a handful of my most essential sources of information. The list that follows is a selection of what I consider to be some of the most consistent and unique online writing projects. Architectradure is the project of Cati Vaucelle, a PhD candidate within MIT's Tangible Media Group. Vaucelle described herself as a "knowledge shopper" in an interview with Regine Debatty earlier this year. This playful take on design research shines through in the range of material Vaucelle examines with her blog. Physical computing, informatized industrial design, contemporary installation and design history are examined with an emphasis on usability and a sense of delig... More About: Reading , Online , Essential 1, 2, 3, 4 |
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