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"Request a “status update” about anyone. I will personally call him or her. No one has to know that you’re curious." New turbulence backed project. Smart tagline: "I'm not stalking you, I'm socializing". - Greg J. Smith

Great 60s-80s newwave, postpunk, eclectic-a music blog. - Greg J. Smith

The “Unit Training Film #1”, produced by Scott Ryser and Rachel Webber in 1980, was compiled from films that the band projected during their live performances. The films were satirical, instructional films critical of conformity and consumerism, compiled from found footage, home movies, and obsolete instructional shorts. - Greg J. Smith

This is the best blog name ever. Awesome alliteration! - Greg J. Smith

Joseph E. Brown, FASLA, discusses the front-end role of landscape planning, the shortcomings of academic pedagogy, the uphill challenges facing Obama’s presidency, and the urgency of post-carbon public works. This interview was conducted by Pierre Bélanger. - Greg J. Smith

If copyright had become the big threat for remix culture by the beginning of the decade, it would become clear that by its end that the defense and adoration of the archive had mutated. Fascination with the network metaphor has turned into an obsession; consider our (in)ability to wrestle down the concept of the ‘network culture’, a cottage industry of publication and intellectual labour that has acted on the formal problems facing humanities research just as much as the broad changes brought about by interconnectedness. Blending the histories and discourses of both the form and content of remix remains vital to our capacity for critique. - Greg J. Smith

Documentary on DJ Screw and company. All five parts are here. - Greg J. Smith

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves. - Greg J. Smith

GUI icon gallery. - Greg J. Smith

This is probably what hell is like. - Greg J. Smith

Long credits slowly roll on the movie screen, from bottom to top. First name, last name. First name, last name...It is the list of the names of all human beings. - Greg J. Smith

To read later - Greg J. Smith

What happens to your data when you die? Digital Remains is concerned with the role data plays when we remember deceased people. It assumes a world in which our data is stored on the network creating digital archives of generations of people. - Greg J. Smith

The-Blueprints.com is a website dedicated to collecting 3/4/5-view drawings, templates and blueprints for as many objects as possible. Ranging from humans to tanks and cars to mobile phones, the goal is to provide reference material for 3D modelers, scale modelers, replica builders etc. - Greg J. Smith

Joost Grootens studied architectural design at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam from 1990 to 1995. After completing his final project – an interactive cd-rom on the complexity of architectural representation – Grootens went on to create his own studio. Since 2000, he has almost exclusively designed books in the fields of architecture, urban space and art, specializing on atlas projects, designing both the maps and the books themselves. - Greg J. Smith

Panoramas of the Nile. Gorgeous. - Greg J. Smith

"Things we need for this to happen: 1. Free and easy to use typeface creation tools 2. Typefaces with licensed for this use (CC, public domain, lots of choices here) 3. Typefaces to be embedded in webpages" - Micro manifesto that inspired the launch of kernest - Greg J. Smith

I'm currently preparing "Readings in Digital Design", a history and theory unit that presents some key concepts in this nascent, multidisciplinary field (or meta-field). While developing the unit I've also been thinking about how to make the whole course "open" in the broadest sense - accessible, transparent, connective, collaborative. There's a tangle of technical and institutional issues here which I have no single solution to, so in the meantime I'll take a "small pieces loosely joined" approach - this post is the first of those small pieces - the draft reading list at the core of the new unit. - Greg J. Smith

"To a pair of uninitiated ears, minimal house or techno probably sounds like the bastard child of Steve Reich and Donna Summer. It is no accident that the majority of writing on this subject traces the roots of this style back to minimal or process musicians of 1960s New York1 by way of Detroit and Berlin as a ports of departure." 2006 short essay in which I try really hard to build a bridge between 60s minimal/conceptual art and late 90s minimal techno. - Greg J. Smith

"For me the intention behind this is simple: to highlight the lineage of hip-hop production and beat making from the turn of the millennium to the present day, and perhaps shed some light on the fairly quiet revolution that has been taking place under the surface of mainstream media in recent years." - a really, really incredible mix. Encyclopedic! - Greg J. Smith

A lot of people have asked me to recommend books on visual thinking, visual learning, the brain, business, etc., so I have compiled this list. I've added a brief note to each book so you can see why I think it's important. - Greg J. Smith

Although there are many different kinds of chase (or rescue) film scenes, the most frequent type of film chase is the car chase. It is almost always between a protagonist/hero (or criminal) and the police (or authority figures), with more than a few vehicles involved in the most spectacular examples. The fast-moving scenes of the car chase, typically found in action films, very often feature high-speed maneuvering, crashes, and point-of-view perspectives to enhance the action. - Greg J. Smith

The Ecological and Economical Traffic Light Concept [relogik.com] by Damjan Stankovic is a Red Dot Design 2009 Award winner and consists of a simple yet, potentially highly practical visualization concept for everyday traffic lights that could reduce pollution and promote safer driving. - Greg J. Smith

The seeming unreality of the Predator enterprise is also felt by the pilots. Some of them reportedly wear flight suits when they operate a drone’s remote controls. When their shifts end, of course, these cubicle warriors can drive home to have dinner with their families. - Greg J. Smith

These drawings are a methodical interpretation of the first two chapters of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia (Wikipedia link) by Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. - Greg J. Smith

Over a twelve hour period a software program mixes in real time forty-six images, pixel by pixel. The images show a spring melt along a frozen floodway channel in central Canada. The sequencing structure of the software model was created using data gathered from walking the 46 km long channel. The data gathered was: duration and distance of each walk, images from each kilometer, air temperature, and windchill. - Greg J. Smith

Packaging often takes a lot of work because sometimes the original source material just isn’t readily available. It’s really hard to remake something when you don’t have pictures of what it actually looked like. There was an episode in which we had to redo a Volkswagen ad from “Life” magazine. That was easy because Volkswagen ads are collectible. You go to Google and you type in “classic Volkswagen ad 1960” and you get pictures of them. The source material is there, so it’s easy. - Greg J. Smith

The Mundaneum was created in 1910 out of the initiative of two Belgian lawyers. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system they developed called the Universal Decimal Classification. - Greg J. Smith

Human Flesh Search (Chinese:人肉搜索) is a phenomenon of massive researching using Internet media such as blogs and forums. It is based on massive human collaboration, hence the name.[1] People conducting such research are commonly referred to collectively as "Human Flesh Search Engines". - Greg J. Smith

After two singles on Hyperdub, and a release on Soul Jazz, King Midas Sound's ‘Waiting For You’ is the debut album from Roger Robinson and Kevin Martin's new group. - Greg J. Smith

After two singles on Hyperdub, and a release on Soul Jazz, King Midas Sound's ‘Waiting For You’ is the debut album from Roger Robinson and Kevin Martin's new group. - Greg J. Smith