I’ve been going to the ‘This happened…’ events whenever I am lucky enough to get a ticket and they never fail to amaze and inspire. I was a little disappointed, however, to miss a few very intriguing presentations which were made at the new Utrecht This Happened. Thankfully, no more!

The new version of the This Happened website is now online, with videos of all the previous presentations available to watch. Such as this great talk from Werner Jainek of Cultured Code, on developing ‘Things‘. I look forward to seeing what else is in-store for the site, and hope that slides from more events are made available; I remember particularly enjoying Troika’s presentation (http://www.thishappened.org/talks/troika-london-6/) and the slides they showed on the development and construction of ‘Cloud‘, and would love another chance to look over the sides again.

photo by Mr Andrew Murray

The prototype for ‘Cloud’, which now lives in Terminal 5 Heathrow, is currently on display at the Design Museum on South-bank (http://www.designmuseum.org/exhibitions/2009/brit-insurance-designs-of-the-year)(until 14th June) as part of the Brit Insurance Design Awards 2009, definitely worth checking out (for more info on this exhibition, and many others, check out the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year).

I recently updated the firmware on my little Canon Ixus-70 with the CHDK Firmware. This 3rd party firmware provides the camera you install it on with a wide range of new and exciting features. Allowing you to force the shutter speed and ISO to ranges previously unsupported by the native Canon Firmware. CHDK also allows you to run your own scripts on your camera to perform weird and wonderful tasks, some (such as the intervalometer used in the test video above) are truly useful additions to an already handy and nifty little camera. Others… are less so, but interesting nonetheless.

The Best part about CHDK (besides the ability to now play some games on your camera, of course)? The new firmware lives on the SD card, meaning no risk of messing up your camera. If things start to go a bit wrong (user scripts allow you to run into some really neat new ways of crashing the camera and overflowing the memory!), simply turn the camera off and on again. You can set the CHDK firmware to either load auto-magically on boot-up (provided that the card is ‘locked’), or manually load it when you wish to use it. Loading the new firmware still allows you to use your camera as you normally would, it just adds new sets of menus full of goodness for you to explore and play with (very literally if you load up some of the games provided!).

If you have a Canon point and shoot camera and a card reader (which is required to install the firmware onto the card), I urge you to go and install this! Your camera will thank you.

“I asked my friends to grab their favorite things off their desk at work for a quick photo shoot project.” -Nick Campbell

After looking through more of Nick’s (awesome) photography on his flickr I couldn’t shake the feeling that his work seemed strangely familiar. It was whilst looking through more of his portraits that it hit me.

Nick Campbell directed my favourite ever video short!!

Produced by Colin Davis, edited by Josh Bodnar, starring Benny Monson, shot at a unnervingly beautiful 250fps, ‘Bubbles’ is a perfect blend of chilled Jazz and slo-mo frantic bubble popping. Part of the reason I like the video so much, aside from being a sucker for slo-mo footage and Benny’s manic expression, is the way it gives the impression of being shot underwater. The way all the movements of skin, hair, and clothes are slowed down to a crawl, there even seems a similarity between the way skin pales and eyes look ‘glazed-over’ when underwater… probably a mix of how the video is shot and my own imagination.

Check out more of Nick’s work at http://www.creamyorange.com/.

In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria’s Secret).

The article touches too briefly on the tension between reality and what ends up in the magazines and advertisements. As Errol Morris points out on his photography blog, it is often difficult to find truth in even the most vérité of photographs. Even so, the truth seems to be completely absent from Madonna’s recent photo spread in Vanity Fair that was retouched by Dangin, especially this one in which a 50-year-old Madonna looks like a recent college graduate who’s never lifted a weight in her life.

The uncanny valley comes into play here, which we usually think of in terms of robots, cartoon characters, and other pseudo anthropomorphic characters attempting and failing to look sufficiently human and therefore appearing creepy and scary. With an increasing amount of photo retouching, postproduction in film, plastic surgery, and increasingly effective makeup & skin care products, we’re being bombarded with a growing amount of imagery featuring people who don’t appear naturally human. People who appear often in media (film & tv stars, models, cable news anchors & reporters, miscellaneous celebrities, etc.) are creeping down into the uncanny valley to meet up with characters from The Polar Express. I don’t know about you but a middle-aged Madonna made to look 24 gives me the heebie-jeebies. Perhaps the familar uncanny valley graph needs revision:

Originally by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org on May 13, 2008, 1:14pm

Inspiration is drawn heavily from the 20th century historic propergander iconography; fusing these elements with fragmented ‘Seussian’ inspired comic forms; the artist constructs an alternate reality reactive to his unique, off-centred vision of the world around him.

A show that must be seen to get an insight into Mudwig’s visual state.

Mudwig Dans Solo Exhibition at New Cross Gallery. Opening 3rd April (18:30 – 22:00)

New Cross Gallery | 3 Lewisham Way | New Cross | London SE14 6PP

Originally by mjar from HOOKED……… on April 1, 2008, 7:37am

“Quartz Composer is a groundbreaking graphics development environment that allows you to explore the incredible power of the graphics stack of Mac OS X Tiger. With Quartz Composer, you can easily combine the capabilities of Cocoa, Quartz 2D, Core Image, OpenGL, and QuickTime.”

From Apple Developer Connection

A not-so-publicised fact about Tiger and the release of QuickTime 7 is that QuickTime Player can play .qtz files. Upon discovering this, I took the next logical step and discovered that the QuickTime Plugin on Tiger was no different. Since I was writing the file archive section of this site at the time, I put the two things together and am pleased to announce that Tiger users can now view inline previews in the File Archive. Now, if only I could get some file submissions, life would be good.

Update: It seems that QuickTime’s support is limited to files that don’t require user interaction (such as mouse tracking). The files will still display, but will not be interactive.

From Quartz Comps

Can pull RSS directly into the quartz comp (here) from the [tag]flickr[/tag] feed (is it possible to get advanced search results in xml?). Can then create generative art in quartz, and place this as a quicktime plugin into flash. Also possible to render out the final image if the user wishes (here), to then upload / save somewhere in a gallery etc.

Downside of this is it uses quartz core, mac only. Would definitely like this to be multi platform piece for easier accessibility, but does it have to be?