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Live Online Today: Layer Tennis!

Are you a live sports fan? Are you a graphic design geek? Well, for the three of you who fit both descriptions, grab a drink and get ready for a new event guaranteed* to rock you. Starting today at 3pm Eastern (that's noon Pacific or 7pm in London), you can witness the online debut of Layer Tennis. What's Layer Tennis, you ask? The official description states: We'll be playing matches using lots of different applications, from Adobe® Photoshop® to Adobe® Flash®, but the basic idea... READ ON

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A Moment of Silence for Marcel Marceau

Over the years, I feel like I've seen Marcel Marceau around a lot. On PBS, in movies (he had the only speaking role in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie, and also starred in Barbarella), and generally whenever the word mime is accompanied with a photo. Yet, it was only in reading about the 84 year old entertainer's death last night that I realized what a strange and wonderful life he led. Here are a few snippets pulled from other stories, on things I didn't know about Marcel Marceau: 1. He cracked... READ ON

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23 Album Covers that Changed Everything!

There are several reasons I loved working on the Saints and Sinners Issue. It's the only magazine I've ever seen with Madonna and Gandhi elbowing for cover space, it's the first issue we ever got the fantastic authors John Green and Michael Stusser to write for, and it had this piece by Chris Smith. It's just 23 quick notes on 23 important album covers, but it's one of my favorites. Enjoy! wearing their art on_their sleeves: 23 album covers that changed everything by Chris Smith Long before MTV,... READ ON

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Visualizing Movie Dialogue

Designer/programmer Eva Schindling has posted Cinematic Particles, an online applet that creates art based on the dialogue in popular movies. Cinematic Particles creates smoky, abstract images based on a mathematical analysis of the movie's dialogue. The user can run the process in realtime (launch the applet) and adjust the speed at which the movie dialogue is replayed, which influences the creation of the image. The dialogue (and its pacing) is taken from the subtitle files included with commercial... READ ON

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Visualizing Consumerism

Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan is showing a new series of images called Running the Numbers starting Saturday in LA. Running the Numbers features images based on specific quantities -- generally large numbers of consumer products we typically don't think about -- where the statistics are so large, we generally can't visualize their scale. Pictured below is a quick preview of my favorite, "Plastic Bags, 2007" which depicts 60,000 plastic bags -- according to Jordan, this is the number used in the... READ ON

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Ugly Jugs

Last week at the Presurfer I saw a video of Alabama potter Jerry Brown making a jug. It was interesting enough that I went to YouTube to grab the video, and found a whole series of videos of the same guy, each more fascinating than the one before. Especially this one: I was afraid of what would come up when I Googled "ugly jugs", but with safe search, I found just what I was looking for. Jugs with faces date back to antiquity, but became an American folk art tradition. The time and place... READ ON

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Errol Morris on Photographs and Truth

One of my favorite documentary directors, Errol Morris, has begun blogging for The New York Times. His first article is entitled Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire and explores the nature of photography, photographic context (captions, among other things), and truth. Here's a sample of his article: So here's a story. On the evening of May 7th, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was off the coast of Ireland en route to Liverpool from New York when it was torpedoed by a German U-Boat and sank. About 1,200 of... READ ON

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Paying photographic tribute to customers

Wallpapering one's place of business with headshots is not uncommon in LA. My acupuncturist does it, beloved coffee shops and dry cleaning places do it.Â And certainly it's not endemic to LA--not always headshots, but signed portraiture in general seems to lend a credibility and intrigue to, say, an Italian restaurant or donut shop competing with all the others down the strip. The Kermit-at-Sardi's scene in Muppets Take Manhattan proves the excellence and fun of this kind of wall display. I'm sure I've... READ ON

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De-Garfed: Modified Garfield Cartoons

Today I shall share one of my favorite little-known links: the De-Garfed Community on LiveJournal. The principle here is to take real Garfield cartoons and remove Garfield's thought bubbles. This simple game leads to a much weirder, deeper, and usually funnier cartoon strip. Here are some... READ ON

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Bear Naked

Our friends and The Morning News have done a lovely interview with Kent Rogowski, an artist who's taken a bunch of thrift store teddy bears, gutted them, then photographed them inside out. The images are uniquely strange, and kind of mesmerizing. I've posted some pics and a clip from the interview here, but you can see more of the interview and images at TheMorningNews. Link via Boingboing. "What I find most interesting is the different ways that adults and children look at the images. I... READ ON