Guthrie Lonergan

And/Or show #12

2007-10-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited to be in a two-person show with Kevin Bewersdorf opening this weekend at Paul Slocum's gallery, and/or, in Dallas, Texas! Here's a press release.

Dates: October 20th - November 24th
Opening: October 20th, 6pm - 9pm w/ performance by Tree Wave (Paul's band) at 8:30

I'll be there. I'm not 100% sure what I'm showing yet, I'll let you know :)

(btw major thanks in advance to paul..)

*Update: check out documentation

cover this youtube in blood

2007-09-16T15:25:00.000-07:00

Hi I made a button for your browser that covers youtube movies in blood — please go install it and try it out when you get a chance. Works best on dull home videos, like video logs, etc… o, the horror of the mundane! (here’s a sample of what it does)

(btw, shout out to Ilia’s similar flag from a couple of weeks ago, which not only beat me 2 the net, but is really wonderful)

(p.s. firefox highly recommended, totally sux in i.e. …sorry)

New blog

2007-05-03T20:32:00.000-07:00

hey guys, I made a new blog..... for research... things I find and original things in progress,.. sorta more relaxed (and more frequently updated) than this one. However, I'll keep posting more important announcements here on "Blogger".

(and if you really want rss for my research u can have it, but i'd rather you just look at the page from time to time, if at all..)

Total Artwork-related expenses & income for 2006 (not bad)

2007-03-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

ITEM	AMOUNT
Domain name registration	-9.00
Web hosting	-36.00
CD-Rs given away at lecture	-15.00
Poster printed for lecture	-20.00
Honorarium	+50.00
Paper for collages	-10.00
Banner ads (Google AdSense)	+2.40
TOTAL	-$37.60

Collages at "Thread", Print-outs

2007-01-25T21:27:00.000-08:00

"Thread" exhibition opens tomorrow at Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, featuring my robot stopper & thumbnail collages!

I've made some PDFs of my whole collection (chronological by date downloaded!) so that you can print out your own stickers:
captchas & thumbs.

(Or stumble through them here and here.) (Also check out Travis Hallenbeck's thumb collection.)

A quick recap

2007-01-25T14:58:00.000-08:00

My favorite links of the year can be seen in The Year In The Internet 2006... I think my web surfing taste has shifted slightly since last year? Other really great links on those lists.

14 wipeouts, a chart comparing 14 distinct MIDI adaptations of "wipeout" (though I'm still not sure who did the original!) Inspired in part by The Authoritative Doctor Soda Page

I'm way into this GettyImages video search for "artist looking at camera", and the general madness of stock footage

sped up bob dylan karaoke file

Bugs inside of computer screens playlist:

Been posting tons to Nasty Nets, which was just included in a Rhizome.org online exhibition, "Professional Surfer"... AWESOME!!

Hacking vrs. defaults

2007-01-10T13:48:00.000-08:00

Hacking	Defaults
Hacking a Nintendo cartridge to make images	Using MS Paint to make images
	12 point Times New Roman
Net.Art 1.0	???
Anxiety	Banality
"The Man is taking away our privacy... that's lame!"	"We willingly give up our own privacy (i.e. endlessly talking about ourselves on our Myspace profiles)... why?"
Empowering The People by subverting The Man's power	Being and critiquing The People by using the tools made by The Man
Rock & Roll attitude	Exuberant humility
Jodi's blogs	Tom Moody's blog
Sophisticated breaking of technology	Semi-naive, regular use of technology

(see also this comment thread on Tom Moody's blog)

Google Image Search for "katrina" on 9/4/05

2006-12-23T22:14:00.000-08:00

full resolution, others
search today

A sound investment

2006-12-18T16:34:00.000-08:00

[flash slideshow]

This is a web slideshow of a DJ's photos. He tries to document both his own equipment and the surrounding party. The source website has vanished from the Net.

The soundtrack is "the slowest jam ever".. I simply took a Whitney Houston MIDI file ("Waiting to Exhale") and cranked the tempo way down. I've posted it here before. (I'll let you know that the last 15% of the song is absolutely stunning after you've listened to the first 85%!!)

Also, recently on Nasty Nets I posted this comparison, which is a byproduct of this project (and inspired by something my buddy Mike Chang said about this slideshow in progress.)

Quick Captchas & Thumbs test collages

2006-12-12T01:41:00.000-08:00

Some hastily made collages -- like these, except now I am printing my own adorable little stickers!

Mostly the Thumbnails are from Google News' frontpage. My memory is fuzzy on what is going on in some of the pictures, but I believe that on the left we have some kind of X-Files-ish conspiracy where stem cell research caused the Iraq war (or at least something that looks like the Iraq war?). And on the right we have Kofi Annan confronting lightning and flipped-over cruise ships, whilst California wildfires and West Nile mosquitos make everything look like the Iraq war. Also, a nice gif of a deer and lots of other stuff whose origins I'm pretty fuzzy on.

My domain

2006-11-05T18:31:00.000-08:00

This is my setup in my bedroom, yeeahh.. Note the awesome painted paper sculpture by Jamie Chan pinned above my desk!!! BTW, I put up the source pics from my domain video right here.

And if you have time, please leave me a voice message, kthx*:

Get Your Own Voice Player Manage

* i love how anonymous and creepy it is..& people are doing awesome wierd crap.. i put it on theageofmammals.com frontpage and my "real" myspace, too :)

domain

2006-10-16T23:38:00.000-07:00

New music video with some default slideshow stylings... (are nerds bohemians?)
(the rest of my music vids..)

Nasty Nets Internet surfing club

2006-10-16T12:16:00.000-07:00

Oh boy am I excited to tell you about this!!: Nasty Nets internet surfing club! What's a surfing club? It's a hangout for my favorite surfers (and I), an extension of the collecting that's already been going on, on del.icio.us and elsewhere. Right now it's mostly a blog, but the idea is that it expands into more of a community -- preservation, creation, criticism.. I like putting stuff there because it's more like two-way sharing, and there's more of an impulse for discussion (blog comments take on a different nature.) So come check it out...

Surf club members (truly professional surfers): Travis Hallenbeck, Joel Holmberg, Marisa Olson, Michael Bell-Smith, Tom Moody, Brian Blomerth, John Michael Boling, Peter Baldes, Paul Slocum, and me

Faultlines, Rhizome.org exhibition

2006-08-10T18:22:00.000-07:00

I'm in a Rhizome.org exhibition, and all I made was this YouTube playlist...! Part of their ten year anniversary festival, with events, exhibitions, writings, etc. Cool!

(edit: apologies that there's been an overload of self promotion crap on this blog, I promise that it'll get unclogged soon...)

Uncut bonus footage (all alone in the computer lab)

2006-08-10T17:21:00.000-07:00


disc trays	screensavers

This is uncut footage from 2 of my 9 short music videos, direct from DV tape. Both were shot in the computer labs at school, which look pretty dull and lifeless - but in a charming way (?) .. The labs were in a temporary building for the department which had lots of loud fluorescent lights, cheap plastic floors, and windows that couldn't open.

Being the nerd I am, I'd be in these labs for hours and hours... and after folks cleared out, I'd move all the computers and monitors around and film them doing stupid things! The disc tray stuff was fun because I had to hit the eject button on one keyboard and then run really fast to hit it on the other one (the cables wouldn't reach.) With the screen savers, I'd set the idle/waiting time settings to 3 minutes on all the computers, smack all the keyboards along with the music, watch the clock for a bit, and then start filming right as the monitors all fade to screensavers in sync and on beat. I ruled the computer labs! (...unfortnately, I just graduated - so no more access to all that cool stuff...)

Technical note: I think I compressed the videos in Quicktime 7 formats so plz let me know if they don't work for you, and I'll never do it again :)

Video screening tomorrow night

2006-07-08T00:33:00.000-07:00

I am screening a video at Telic (in Chinatown, Los Angeles) tomorrow night, in conjunction with Pascual Sisto's video piece up there right now. Some other stuff is being screened, including a new-ish piece by Takeshi Murata. This is pretty exciting for me! I don't know what video Pascual has picked at this point, but we'll find out tommorow at about 7:30 p.m. (Also: Jamie & my painter-ly friends are having a one night show just 30 feet away at the exact same time, hurray! Their stuff looks really wonderful...)

New Myspace profiles

2006-06-25T17:09:00.000-07:00

I made a new Myspace profile for Concept Trucking (my 20th including band profiles!!!) involving the cute 3d laptop above ascending infinitely up to laptop heaven :*). The bricks go so fast they make me sick! Please go look at it (original sound effects.) I realized from my recent trip to New York that I don't see bricks in Los Angeles as much as East coasters do, so using all these brick patterns like I often do is sort of, uh, detatched from reality, or something?

I just remembered that I haven't formally mentioned this grusome profile or even this one (...do you remember those Walmart commercials with the whistling 3d smiley face flying around dropping all the prices?)

Finally, Last supper w/ soundtrack has found a better home on YTMND (1.57 out of 5 rating, woot)

Another Unknown Time

2006-06-14T23:26:00.000-07:00

Travis Hallenbeck's website, Another Unknown Time, is already my favorite WWW spot, and he's barely even posted much stuff yet!! (Though he fiddles things around on his frontpage from day to day if you keep checking back...) The new .MIDs that he's posted are really really simple & great, go listen... I like Drawbar Organ and classic robocop (.mid version)..make sure to loop them (in a program like quicktime player) for full effect.

Tiling icon marathon (new)

2006-06-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

Finally made the Icon marathon into a tiny little tiling, looping GIF!
...and another, and another...

Collages (robot stoppers & thumbnails)

2006-06-11T20:24:00.000-07:00

Kind of silly but I spent a long time replicating two HTML collages I've made (the Halt, Robot! and one that is coming soon...) by printing out the images, cutting & gluing them to this light blue paper. Reality, y'all. Made using robot stopping Captchas (from Myspace, PayPal, Ticketmaster, & some others) and Thumbnail images I've been collecting (mostly from Google News, some from YouTube.) These hung outside of my lecture last week.

More music vids & disk alchemy

2006-06-11T17:48:00.000-07:00

Some new music videos: Kids *updated*, the triangle (jam #1) by Mystical Ointment, office party
View all the music videos on YouTube.

Still making those stretched out music videos, no MTV cuts, just junk together. I'm excited that I finally got a chance to put in some material I've been dying to use, in particular this Iowa middle school dance where the kids are all hopping in unison, and this isolated Triangle graphic from an instructional video that's sort of boringly spooky or something.

Installed these 5 music videos (looping on a TV as part of a class show at school) alongside a new thing I've been fooling around with, these disks cut out of aluminum foil and packed in folded lined paper cases. Props to Marco Melanson, because I pretty much took the idea from him (though only subconsciously at first) -- he made some awesome paper records, and a LEGO player for them. There used to be pictures of the records on his Myspace. A while ago I asked him if I could buy one but they weren't for sale, doh.

BTW, I don't think the videos worked as well in reality as they do on the Internet. Still trying to figure this out.

Surfing the Internet in public 2

2006-06-03T14:46:00.000-07:00

This Wednesday, June 7th, I am surfing the web in public again, and this time I'm getting a little technical... showing my favorite GIFs and MIDIs! Also there will be brief tutorials on how these work. Generally I'll be talking about files as culture, specifically the evolution of music from physical CDs into overly-free and formless MP3s & why that really sucks (iTunes, etc.) I'm hoping the GIFs and MIDIs, especially in the context of Geocities/Myspace pages, will help us think critically about files/MP3s as formats, and how limitations can be really good things! I'll be world premiering some new original GIF & MIDI work, and maybe some other stuff.

ALSO, my roommate Mike is doing an artist's lecture as a vampire, and my friend Daniel will be performing some music. (Both of them will be mind blowing, they're both insanely talented.)

Wednesday, June 7, 5pm - 7pm
Kinross South, room #133 (UCLA Arts building)
11000 Kinross Ave, Los Angeles, CA

(Refreshments, yes)

444theory.com

2006-05-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

I programmed 444theory.com for Miltos Manetas... When you email in your "444 moments" (4:44 pm, 11:11 am, etc.), it automatically puts them on the public calendar for everyone to see. (Programming it became a little exhausting... two more weeks until I graduate and so many things left to do!)

Myspace Intro video playlist

2006-05-09T15:03:00.000-07:00

Searching for something else on YouTube, I ran into a billion 'Myspace intro videos' - people videotaping themselves addressing visitors to their page. It's really quite odd to see them separated from Myspace (they're on YouTube only so they can put them on their profiles, but you can still find them through searching.) I collected them into a playlist (or just use the controls above.) You'll get the idea from the first couple of videos.

I really don't want to make fun of these people, and there's really nothing shocking about them, they're incredibly normal people... But in some of them I sense this sort of awkwardness (?) that they have dealing with the Internet. These are very un-nerdy people making their own webpages, telling you to leave "picture comments," and pointing in the direction of where the "send message" button is on the page... I'm still trying to figure out what's going on here. Anyway, the videos are fun!

Lonely Los Angeles

2006-05-07T00:57:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post this old project before it gets too ancient. Pre-Google Maps, when online maps were small pixelly GIFs, I went exploring around on MapQuest collecting map shots here in Los Angeles that had very little info, very few street lines or words, etc., big open spaces. I like the way they look, and I like imagining what's inside these big empty fills... In a lot of cases there's semi-wilderness, I suppose (which is a strange to think of!)

Found my GIFs from 7th grade!

2006-05-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

Back in 1997, I was 13 and constantly hanging out on IRC with my buddies on channel #digitalplayground, always sending around GIF animations and other really horrible junk to everyone... LOL. I'd made a series of 7 crude black and white animations of stickmen getting maimed (see GIF above!), which I thought were pretty hilarious at the time. I just found these on an old hard drive (inspired by recent contact from #dp buddy foobaz .. BTW, my handle was "hello3k")

I'll spare you episodes 2-7... wellll, OK, here's #3. Man, IRC was a blast, need to get back on there...

The GIF show (cont.)

2006-05-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

Non-stop Icon Marathon!
(for the GIF show now up in SF)

New!!!!, Small tiling GIFs:
Marathon 1, 2, 3
5.7MB fuzzy quicktime version
Still image
other folks' awesome stuff!

make your own...link

The Animation Alphabet

2006-04-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

I recommend checking out The Animation Alphabet, made by 4th and 5th graders (source of the GIFs above.) There's something simple about the setup that's really quite perfect, and something about the slowness of the looping animations... amazing. Also check out the rest of the GIFs, featuring more Paint animations and some stop motion stuff, made by Mr. Wampole's students. (Especially the stop motion Mini Movies at the very bottom.) (Found via Squeaky From, which has cool links but seems to be down right now.)

Mrs. Alyce Jenks' Second Grade Web Pages also have some exciting simple GIF animations made by kids. I think the new versions of KidPix let you do animations? Not sure. More kid art here and here, and also see Travis Hallenbeck's amazing Paint and bitmap link collections.

The GIF show

2006-04-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

I'm in my first real show! With a whole bunch of awesome awesome people! This is really exciting... Marisa Olson (who's curating the show) put up a post with all the info, but I'll summarize: It opens Wednesday, May 3rd at RX Gallery in San Francisco. The other artists in the show are Cory Arcangel, Peter Baldes, Michael Bell-Smith, Jimpunk, Olia Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Lovid, Tom Moody, Paper Rad, Paul Slocum, and Matt Smear (aka 893/umeancompetitor). And it's all about GIFs! And Marisa made a zany Myspace profile for the show, YES!

Marisa says:

Everyone's showing GIFs, and some are also showing videos, works on paper, sound, and other cool related stuff. Together, their work shows the diversity of forms to be found in GIFs, and many of them comment on the broader social life of these image files.

Hence the Myspace page... GIFs grow, breed, and comingle sparklingly on Myspace.

Whoa, well put. Also, Tom Moody explains (in reference to this show and his upcoming solo show of GIFs):

Why GIFs? They're a relatively "open source" way to get ideas, in the form of moving images, out to broad audience. They are low or no cost to make, consume very little bandwidth, no one has to buy or download a proprietary player to play them. They have their own special charm, minimal in the way garage rock is minimal.

My video is called "Marathon" and will look like the image up there at the top of this entry, except those little dudes will be animated and running a non-stop icon marathon (in a never-ending hypnotic seamless loop.) It involves icons made using this popular website. If you're not farmiliar with these little guys, the idea is that you pick out a nose, eyes, hairstyle, etc., to make a little GIF face that resembles/represents you, and you can throw it up on your blog or Myspace or wherever. Here's one of me from a year or so ago:

These icons spread around like crazy on the net a bit ago. (More recently it was getting really popular to make full body doll icons of youself on this site. But, uh, warning: the site is really CPU-intensive and actually was what triggered my laptop hard drive to crash a month ago..whoa!!) Anyways, so excited to be in a show with all those awesome folks, and I hope I can make it to the opening (but since it's in the middle of the week and I have a midterm the next morning, argh, we'll see..)

3 new music videos

2006-04-18T22:17:00.000-07:00

Dogwanger jam by Mystical Ointment

Aquarium groove

Kids loop

I've started making music videos for my own music, which sounds like a sort of silly thing to devote energy to (is it?..are music videos still commercials even if it's your own tunes?..and they're too damn easy to make.) I've tried to make super simple videos using Mac's built-in iMovie program. Like really simple, very slow and boring. I have a budding interest in boring things, mundane things, slow things.

The slow zoom-ins of Skyscrapers shot from ground level in the Dogwanger video I find hillarious -- they're an automated default slideshow effect -- and the buildings just look so dumb to me, though they're trying so hard to impress me and intimidate me. The music is like Blade Runner meets Muzak but played really crapilly (all these songs are recorded using computer keyboard instead of music keyboard as live input..it's fun, haha.) I think the kids go well with the skyscrapers, but I can't figure out if they make the video subtly optimistic or completely depressing. The other two songs are new and don't have Myspace band profiles yet. I made the music and video simultaneously (moving back and forth between audio and visual) for both of these.

Paralleling my budding obsession with boringness is a blossoming (?!) obsession with loops, which is becoming really apparent in the music. Long stretches of music, unchanging, no climax, no intro or conclusion. Maybe I absorbed this from YTMND? heh.

New Trinkets (V + VI) !

2006-04-17T19:28:00.000-07:00

I finished two new Trinkets chapters, V and VI, check them out if you get a chance... V is the original Trinkets page from before my website ever went up, when I was super excited about LARPing, etc. VI has got a maddening slowed down Whitney Houston MIDI ("Waiting to Exhale" -> "Waiting to exhale... FOREVER!!"). I just turned the tempo way down on it, and copy/pasted different measures at random until it became about 20 minutes long: so it's pretty much slowest MIDI jam ever.. I think I enjoy listening to it but I might actually be hypnotized. VI is basically scenes from my upcoming instructional video about gradients, loops and filetypes (sort of!)

Also for RSS people I finally made an RSS feed for Trinkets, here. This might be a bad idea, I'm not sure... a lot of Trinkets posts might not jive with RSS readers, and I'll be crossposting here and there sporadically.

Halt, robot!

2006-04-14T15:07:00.000-07:00

[note: definitely won't look right in rss readers!!]

I freaking love these robot stopper guys, they're like the special task you must complete before you get free stuff! I started collecting them a while back, and I'm still trying to think of neat stuff to do with them... This is a gradient of ones from Myspace.

BTW, I currently have 18 myspace profiles (and matching Hotmail adresses)!!! It is becoming quite a pain to check all of them...

*related: collages

Abandoned print out

2006-04-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

Definitely my most prized posession: I found this printing "mistake" abandoned in the computer labs last year... Someone had printed out on the wrong side of photo paper and the ink went absolutely nuts. It's some really epic Anime-ish fan art, a character holding a red sword and looking all pissed, now exploding all melty and gooey coz it didn't dry correctly. The black drip in the center was wet and kept dripping down super-slowly for like 5 days after I got it (I hung it on the wall after I took it home.) This thing is 11 x 17 inches and looks amazing in person!!

Check out a high-res scan, or an even higher-res detail!

Dinos

2006-04-04T00:43:00.000-07:00

Rainbowed dinos of black n' white bitmaps from The Dinosaur Encycolpedia.. maybe more variations to come! (...as Mike would say, "that's not scientific.")

QVC phaze out gifs!!

2006-03-21T21:44:00.000-08:00

Bricks video

2006-03-20T16:04:00.000-08:00

New video with some nice scrolling bricks (6MB QuickTime). Though I borrowed a hi-tech camera from school, I ended up liking the 15 frames per second compressed video way better than full rez. I've realized that I genuinely enjoy spending time in front of blue screens. I think I want to do more with photographic repeating patterns like the bricks, cuz they're really hypnotic (it's a texture map for some 3d program I believe?) Loops and fill patterns...

Surfing the Internet in public

2006-03-19T18:25:00.000-08:00

I put up some documentation of the lecture/WWW celebration that I did a couple weeks ago! It was a blast...

Real Life update

2006-03-06T23:22:00.000-08:00

During Vidart's fake Prom, a falling discoball nailed me in the mouth and chipped my front tooth. Later, while sanding down my teeth to fix my injury, my dentist lost control of his tool and cut me right below my lip. Wee!

Internet Lecture/Discussion/Party

2006-02-28T19:08:00.000-08:00

(Event I'm doing next Tuesday:)

Surfing the Internet in public

Guthrie presents selections from his precious collection of World Wide Web awesomeness

I will be exhibiting my favorite home pages, home videos and home-made creations... Cake, Babies, Legos... And what does it all mean ???
I'll be handing out CD-ROM party favors, stuffed full of tidbits I've been collecting from around the Internet, including an excessive amount of pictures of home-made cake decorations, 14 distinct MIDI versions of "Wipeout," and other exciting stuff.
Also on display will be a (real) desktop covered in printed out pictures from files saved on my (computer) desktop.
Maybe: refreshments...

Tuesday, March 7th at 5:15pm
11000 Kinross Ave., South Building, Room #133
(next to the help desk, a.k.a. "the blue screen room")
Los Angeles, CA (UCLA Art building)

BTW, my computer crashed a couple days ago and I lost a lot of files...........

Internet Group Shot

2006-02-22T21:04:00.000-08:00

The whole Internet posing together for one giant picture! (Well, not quite, though I still want to make it longer.) My favorite pic is the one of the women's bridge club. Hover your mouse to make them hop.

Futurist Animated GIFs!

2006-02-20T22:20:00.000-08:00

For Jamie (who's writing a paper about Luigi Russolo's noise machines right now)... Also made a bigger version and in context 'jam session' version.

$$$ for lost website! [found]

2006-02-11T00:11:00.000-08:00

Sometime last week I discovered that this super cool website which had featured tons of scans of blank audio tapes had totally vanished. Deleted websites are heart breaking to me. I'd guess it's due to bandwidth problems, but perhaps it's something else? The site had become super popular on del.icio.us and elsewhere.

Perhaps I got a little carried away, but I've posted an ad on Ebay offering money for a copy of the website (preferably in mint condition.) And it's not a joke, I really want a copy of this website... I'm like some obsessed record collector, I need the real deal!!

In the mean time I've made a recreation of the site using Google's cache. Please contact me if you have any part of the original site, or any information about it. Thnx.

EDIT: Marisa had all the images!! They are alive + well...

ANOTHER EDIT: WOWWWW...I got TWO replies on eBay for it!!! (1, 2) (So, 3 total if you count Marisa)...I paid one person $12 for it (even though Marisa had already sent the images to me!), just so that I could tell people that I bought the website off eBay, haha...

LAST EDIT: Man I feel dumb, the site was online in another location all along... at least I'm the first one to link to it on del.icio.us, that's kinda cool.....heh

Soundtracks for famous paintings

2006-02-10T22:59:00.000-08:00

I made a soundtrack for Da Vinci's Last Supper and put it on Myspace. I tried making soundtracks for other paintings but this one is by far the funniest...checkit.. (Note the "Add friend" link at the top!!)

Myspace hacking tutorial

2006-02-08T20:41:00.000-08:00

I wrote out a really simple Myspace hacking tutorial that goes step by step how to blank out your own Myspace profile and pile images and sounds on top of it, like I did for my Top 8 project. It's very very simple and intended for a non-geek audience, like (some of [EDIT: most of]) my friends!

New website!!!

2006-02-03T17:08:00.000-08:00

I decided to get a domain and put my stuff there:

www.TheAgeOfMammals.com

The name selection process was grueling and sweaty, and I was super ticked that KissMeYouFool.com was already being squatted on. First of all, I re-compressed all my videos so that they load much much better. Also, I started on two new (continuous) projects:

Trinkets - Trinkets is a text-less blog for my growing collection of Photoshop junk, found/stolen web pics and short video loops. All this stuff revolves around my ongoing obsession with gradients, loops, interpolation. Compiled in growing issues. (More on this later.)

Record Label - I'm starting a ton of bands that will exist only on Myspace. (More on this later.)

Myspace "Top 8" Takeover!!

2006-01-16T22:31:00.000-08:00

I hate Myspace and the obsessive profile checking that it induces, so I've tried to stay as far away from it as I can, and I've been adamantly profile-less for a very long time........... But after Myspace implemented their "Top 8" system, where you get to rank your top 8 friends (from 1-8) to be displayed at the very front of your profile, super VIP style, I got really jealous that I wasn't in Jamie's Top 8 because I wasn't on Myspace :-(. So I decided to be a jerk and make 8 "fake" profiles so that I could take over her entire Top 8! It was a slow process as I made one profile after the other in my free time, and she had to weed out friends one by one until it was only me that remained! So check out her profile to see all 8 of them (in her friends list, on the right side.) There's Joey, Tom, Tom, Jeff, Tom, Ben, Jack and Tom.

I didn't create any of the pictures or sounds on the profiles, I just threw them together, and hotlinked to them. I snuck in some simple CSS code to plop the pictures on there and to white out the real profile. Eventually I will post how to do this because it is very very easy to do and should be done more often!!

BTW, very soon I think I'm going to have a new blog which will be much more exciting and less "yippity yap" than this one...

EDIT: Also check out the Myspace hacking tutorial to see how you can screw with your own profile!

Short music videos (collect them all)

2005-12-10T17:09:00.000-08:00

surfin movie/blue screen ocean

2005-11-04T13:30:00.000-08:00

My "Surfing Video" was made by layering two surfing DVD bonus features on top of eachother. I call these features "Surfing Porn." The first was gratuitous amounts of uncut surfing footage, and the second was a bunch of fantasy surfing locations minus any surfers (just some killer waves in pretty places.)

I keyed out the surfers from the first feature and plopped them onto the second (the fantasy waves.) This was remarkably, awesomely easy because the ocean behind the surfers is all blue, just like those goofy looking blue-screens used for Hollywood movies and karaoke videos. The process took about three mouse clicks, and works remarkably well considering the ocean was never intended to be used as a blue screen...

soundtrack = 4 simultatneous hendrix midis
high res version (88 mb) (+ letter boxing bars!!)

First steps!

2005-10-17T13:44:00.000-07:00

Parents love to post pictures, movies and information about their children on the Internet. To show them off and so on, I suppose. I swear that half of all personal homepages on the web are devoted to babies. That's why it's so freaking easy to find a ton of babies' first steps floating around... And I've picked my 17 favorites! They are as annoying as they are beautiful. The audio is especially cutesy and grotesque (thankful for you, I was having trouble extracting the sound out of a couple of the more annoying ones!!) Also, I've noticed three odd trends:

Parents using objects to lure their babies into walking (even taking objects away from babies!)
The endless loop!!: baby going back and forth between Mom and Dad sitting together on the floor
Parents apparently take a lot of pleasure in their babies falling down over and over again.

Midi Henrix x4

2005-10-09T22:37:00.000-07:00

Uhhh... I took 4 distinct MIDI interpretations of Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze that I found floating around the Internet, and threw them all together on one page, playing simultaneously. It gets a tad wacky! QuickTime gets overloaded + screws up often, they get all out of sync, and general computer slo-mo occurs... but I'm really pleased with the way that it sounds. I recommend screwing around with the individual timelines, or muting some of them. I particularly like the ending, and the xylophone in the last MIDI :-).

Teenage Mutant

2005-09-20T15:37:00.000-07:00

I added lyrics to a MIDI of the Peter Gunn theme (it's secret-agenty sounding...+ very recognizable) and made my computer sing it for me, check it out. ..I wrote the lyrics myself! I think it's kind of rockin in the beginning and then it just gets hypnotically dumb. My interest in MIDI was stroked kindly by seeing Paperrad/Extreme Animals recently, who basically play MIDI songs that sound like continuous videogame climaxes, whilst dancing around and playing real drums on top to make it come to life..neat. Exciting.

Rammstein Karaoke

2005-09-20T15:31:00.000-07:00

I added lyrics to a Du Hast MIDI file, so now you can sing along with Rammstein. I particularly enjoy this MIDI file because the vocals in the song are essentially one note over and over again, very boring, and pretty darn ridiculous in combination with the limitations of MIDI. .KAR files can be read by Quicktime inside the browser, or you can download them and play them in Quicktime player. They are freaking neat, here's some more files + info.

Swwwwimming movie!

2005-08-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

It's odd that upside down swimming doesn't look that much different from right side up swimming. *** I just tried to add a new clip but I screwed it up...so I'll do that later. Movie compression mystifies me... yes.

Google Image Search: Fame

2005-08-06T17:05:00.000-07:00

I'm really interested in the accidental fame/popularity Google image search can bestow upon a particular random image. More so than web search results, though I guess it applies there too, image search results can seem very random, and they seem to pop up amateur/un-corporate results a lot more often (which is pretty nice.) What ends up happening is everyone searching for a "tree" or a "book" to put in their art project, their report, their web page, or whatever, ends up looking at the exact same pictures in the exact same order (though their rankings do change slowly with time.) And coz we're lazy, we'll only look at the first couple of pages of results, anyway. And of those pics there's usually one or two which stand out as the best. So we all end up finding and using the exact same picture of a tree, or of books. It's quaint and faceless, similar to the spread of animated gifs on the early web. Usually (unless it's a clipart site or something, which it rarely is) the creator of these famous images hasn't put them online for the purpose of sharing them with you, which is pretty funny/great, too. These images have spread so far, been sampled so often, all without their author's approval or even awareness...

Two examples of this:

1) I used a bitmap image of a tree in a project I made, and months later I found a classmate using the exact same tree image for a website he was making. When I asked him about it, he said that he'd used it many times before, that its like an old stand-by or something. I just found a random blog through image search that uses the exact same tree image, and it says the picture was scanned from a science textbook. I'm sure its popped up in tons of other places because of its one-time high ranking. (Here's a couple more appearances: 1, 2.)

2) Two students in a web design class that I was helping teach ended up using this highly generic .gif of books independently -- on the exact same exercise (they both liked reading.) The .gif seems to be hosted in some random person's directory...I wonder where it came from and how it came to be ranked so highly? It's pretty funky lookin.

Nerdy Photoshop dream

2005-08-06T10:23:00.000-07:00

When you open up Adobe Photoshop, a little splash screen appears with a list of all the programmers' names, and I always have noticed the name "Seetharaman Narayanan" because it looks super long and incredibly difficult to pronounce. I have no idea who this dude is, but last night I had a dream where I met him and we walked around.

New tunes are:

2005-07-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

stolen Motown fury
drums with fingers
- fretboard waffling
- wockachucka
noodling with fingers
- wammy bar wimpy high pitched nonsense
- johnny cash/luther low guitar boogie noodles
catchy rythyms: impossible?...possible!
minimal
- bedroom aesthetics
- drumless
hastily recorded
un-thought-out lyrics
- occasionally intelligable
- nonsense, half-baked, childish (Destroyer)
- emphasis on sound of voice
  - cash: sincerity
  - malkmus: inscinscerity, falsettto
  - but UNcool

Could re-do originals, perhaps on-top of old recording:

Squeaky mouse wah (intro)
Kitchen spectre (orig. riff)
So long
Hercules mercedes (riff)
Them doctors (esp. chorus)
A shame

Could cover some goodies:

Jimi Hendrix - "Machine Gun"
Stevie Wonder

More...

First post

2005-07-16T16:16:00.000-07:00

Temporary space until I have real time to devote to this kind of junk. Which might not happen?