the words don’t fit or the medium is the message

Photo by derfrankie • Instagram.

emergency compliment

A steady supply of emergency compliments to be used at times of great insecurity. They may come in handy sometimes. This one is for me. I always trip in front of everyone.

keep calm

I made these cards based on the now famous British World War poster “Keep Calm and Carry On”, which is in the public domain. You can read about the history here. Rip-offs have become something of a meme. Mail artist and brilliant typographer Keith Bates created the font, based on the original poster series.

keep calm and mail art

love respect and mail art

please do not ever feed trolls

 

 

The last one ‘please do not ever feed trolls’ may come in handy, when confronted with internet trolls appearing in internet forums. You are free to use it, whenever you feel the need.

rubber stamps and fonts by Keith Bates

Keith Bates – Rubber Stamp Mail Art. Keith Bates is a personal hero of mine. Not only is he a mail artist, but he makes beautiful fonts, including free ones, which I have been using. Check out the amazing type shop: http://www.k-type.com/

cat bounce

Do you crave some silly internet cats once in a while? Go to cat bounce for some instant cheer.

mr printable

Printable Quotes Posters | Mr Printables.

Mr Printable offers a lovely range of mostly free (!) printable materials for children, flash cards, alphabet posters, maps. games, coloring pages, posters, paper dolls, and a small printable world to make out of paper. Very nicely designed and some very original ideas. I like these two posters too.

phone camera and image search

Some things I love about digital culture:

1. Phone cameras are great. I use my phone camera more for taking pictures than talking to people. I am considering an upgrade, not because I need it, but because I heard the camera is even better. This funny picture with caption sums it up.

2. Google image search. I use it for lots of different purposes. I sometimes pluck images from the Internet, but forget to note down where they came from. Google image search helps me find the source. If I am lucky, though not in this case. The image has been reposted way over 50 times, so that it would take some serious detective work to find the original. I wish Google had a function where you can list results by publication date.

found objects

I have learned some tricks from “I work with Pages” – things that I tried to figure out for ages! And so I have been playing around with some free digital resources, which I have collected over time. Well, I may be no great artist, but it is fun.

a house of dust

A house of dust
on open ground
lit by natural light
inhabited by friends and enemies

 

A house of paper


among high mountains


using natural light


inhabited by fishermen and families

 

A house of leaves
by a river
using candles


inhabited by people speaking many languages wearing little or no clothes

…

Here are some stanzas of a poem I came across when looking for poetry which may inspire young children to write. The simple structure of the stanzas could be used as a model, offering endless possibilities for new poems.

Then, to my surprise I realized that this may well be the first computer-generated poem. Artist Alison Knowles (b.1933) and James Tenney used programming language and word lists for a poetry project  in 1967, creating a poem of the following structure:

a house of (list material) (list location) (list light source) (list inhabitants)
in which combinations of the variables were randomly generated.

Alison Knowles’s A House of Dust is an early example of computerized poetry that plays on the unlimited possibilities of the random juxtapositions of words. To create this work, Knowles produced four word lists that were then translated into a computer language and organized into quatrains according to a random matrix. Each of the four lists contains terms that describe the attributes of a house: its materials, location, lighting, and inhabitants. The computer program imposed a nonrational ordering of subjects and ideas, generating unexpectedly humorous phrasing and imagery, such as “A house of dust, in a hot climate, using all available lighting, inhabited by all races of men represented, wearing predominantly red clothing,” or “A house of broken dishes, on the sea, using natural light, inhabited by vegetarians.”

Printed on perforated tractor-feed paper common to dot matrix printers of the time, Knowles printed out numerous pages of these phrases in the form of a long scroll. She then created a book of sorts by tearing off a block of approximately twenty pages at a time, folding it in the manner of an accordion, and placing it in a plastic pouch. Hundreds of variations of houses are possible, as every version of the poem begins and ends with a different set of quatrains. Knowles’s collaboration with the computer highlights the underlying arbitrariness of language, demonstrating how words acquire different meanings through structural relationships and shifting contexts.

via: Reinhard Döhl Computertext zur Netzkunst. Vom Bleisatz zum Hypertext. More on it in English here on Calarts, here at Kemper Art Museum and here Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities.

A couple of years ago I found some of this green and white perforated paper with some kind of “computer art” among my dad’s things.  It gave me such a weird flashback. All over a sudden, I was transported back to those days when computers and photocopiers were new and people started experimenting with their affordances. Remember the many photocopied hands and faces or other stuff, like … cats? I am digressing. Way back then, the computer paper stood for everything that was ugly, in my eyes. I like the poem and so I am reconciled with the computer paper. Now its retro.

fantastic flying books

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore 

 

connecting the dots

Hey, I know, some people think Apple has turned into something of a religion, but these are good quotes. I have been using Apple products since more than 20 years – that is when a computer was more expensive than a new car and Apple Macs were produced for a tiny market. I remember the years before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, when lots of people were wondering if the company would survive at all, in a global market. Well it did. Thank you, Steve Jobs, for setting new standards in terms of marrying form and function.

Presentation by Effect Works

the thing about the internet

 

 

– not only that, I also could not find the source of the photograph.

aspirational

This was the summer reading for toddlers offered in my local store: children’s magazines with “free” toys: mock mp3-Player, iPhone and mobile phone. Selling early literacy clearly is tied to selling media technology. How to work with that once children start school – that is a question teachers will have to be concerned with.

 

charming poster ads

Here are some funny faux vintage ads from Maximidia Vintage Ads – Poster download.

teenage social media

Via Jana’s Blog post about nerds and more I found this image:

Apparently from: http://freepicturesforyou.net/4CHAN_vs_the_Internet.html

Brilliant. I might use it for a talk on digital media, which I am planning to give in a school this month.

fairy tales 2.0

You can create your own Google search stories now with the Google Search Stories Video Creator made by Korean designer Ji Lee. I just made this one.

initials

Lovely initials to use for your blog can be found on The Daily Drop Cap – an ongoing project by typographer and illustrator Jessica Hische.

digital storytelling

Parisian Love is a promotional video by Google. Made in the vein of Michael Wesch’s videos I cannot help liking it. It is is really well made.

ШФЯD ДИD IMДGЗ

Having a little fun with faux Cyrillic in the headline, from the world of stuff.

If its on the interweb it must be true

Museumsquartier by loungerie on Flickr

On July 7 20o9 the “Internet Research Group” from the University of Vienna presented YouTube Cinema with a programme called “Fake!” at the Museumsquartier in Vienna. Everybody had ten minutes to show and talk about  some favourites. It was a fun evening with some lively discussions. Here is our playlist:
YouTube Kino: Fake!

blogging and education

image by stylespion 

Here is a list of interesting quotes about blogging, which I compiled a few years ago and I re-discovered on a dead class blog, which I am going to delete now. While, of course these bit of information are not exactly hot news to most  of my discerning readers, they may be still useful for somebody who is new to blogging, or using blogs in an educational context. So I am posting them here.  Sorry, I have not got the time to directly link to surces right now, but the references are given at the end.

What is a weblog?
„Weblogs, or blogs as they are affectionately termed, are frequently updated websites, usually personal, with commentary and links. Link lists are as old as home pages, but a blog is far from a static link list or home page. A blog consists of many relatively short posts, usually time-stamped, and organised in reverse chronology so that a reader will always see the most recent post first. The first weblogs were seen as filters to the Internet; interesting links to sites the reader might not have seen, often with commentary from the blogger.“ (Mortensen/Walker 2002)

„A weblogger filters a mass of information, choosing the items that interest her or that are relevant to her chosen topic, commenting upon them, demonstrating connections between them and analysing them.“
(Mortensen/Walker 2002)

“Weblogs combine two oppositional principles: monologue and dialogue. A reaction to a statement is not only directed to the sender but also to unknown readers. Very often the weblogger gets feedback from unexpected sources: new relations and contexts emerge. This (assumed) undirected communication develops to an open and involving activity.” “Weblogs not only enable interaction with other webloggers, they offer a way to engage in a discursive exchange with the author’s self (intrapersonal conversation). A weblog becomes an active partner in communication, because it demands consistent criteria for what will be posted to a weblog (and how). This “indirect monologic dialog” of weblogs allows us to conduct communicative acts that otherwise would only be possible in very particular circumstances.” (Marcus O’Donnell 2005)

Reading
“Blogging is about, first, reading. But more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you: your culture, your community, your ideas. And it is about engaging with the content and with the authors of what you have read—reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting. If a student has nothing to blog about, it is not because he or she has nothing to write about or has a boring life. It is because the student has not yet stretched out to the larger world, has not yet learned to meaningfully engage in a community. For blogging in education to be a success, this first must be embraced and encouraged.” (Stephen Downes 2004)