My olde matey Tracky Birthday already "busted" some so called "rhymz" to a Atari composition of mine. Now a group of professional instrumentalists thought it is their turn and Tracky "drops" his "science" as well. I am delighted.
Technical innovations shape only a small part of computer and network culture. It doesn't matter much who invented the microprocessor, the mouse, TCP/IP or the World Wide Web; nor does it matter what ideas were behind these inventions. What matters is who uses them. Only when users start to express themselves with these technical innovations do they truly become relevant to culture at large.
Users' endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.
As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, DIY electronics, dirtstyle, typo-nihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement …
I am going to give a talk about Digital Folklore on November 24th 2009, 19:00 at the Berlin Technical Art School. It's about Users, Glitzers, 3D Primitives and many more things that brought soul to computers as we know them today. The series is called Drop Shadow Talks! This name alone should make you drop by.
Ye good olde Assoziations-Blaster will celebrate one last time on Wednesday, 2009-11-04, 19:30 for its tenth birthday. This project has seen a lot of German Internet Culture. Come to Stuttgart's City Library, entry fee for the presentation is 4 Euros, 3 Euros if you look like a student.
After this event, a new version of the Blaster will replace the rusty original bit by bit.
Have you heard? The artist duo UBERMORGEN published a book about all of their works!
Olia and me are fans of UBERMORGEN, so we decided to do something appropriate for internet folks and create fan art for their publication. It is a bitmap comic drawn pixel by pixel. The "dithering" was also done by hand, so you will see some special gray scales not available in any software!! One Logitech mouse ruined in the making. Typesetting done with "Small Fonts".
---> CLICK HERE!!!1
Other comics:
Tobi-X and me created the beautiful Ursula von der Leyen-Fanclub, including an amazing web avatar. The not-german-speaking members of the audience who haven't heard of this lady might find Tobi's announcement helpful. In the 90's this would have been called hacktivism!!
In Germany the mushroom craterellus cornucopioides is called Totentrompete, "corpse trumpet". In a package with dried trumpets Olia bought today, we found the following piece of paper:
Swine Fever is a classic Bookmarklet that i wrote in 1999. Bookmarklets were very short Javascript programs (not more than one line) that could be called on any web page by simply calling them from your browser's bookmarks. They can be seen as the first step in the direction of Browser-Addons, like they are popular today with Firefox.
On 2008-12-13, Tobias Leingruber will open his artistic Addon repository artzilla and asked me to reanimate Swine Fever, as it is apparently the godfather of artistic Firefox Addons. However, until now, Swine Fever didn't even run on Firefox. The last browsers tested were Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 5.0. Where you even born when these were popular??
Now witness the complete rewrite of this amazing software, finally compatible with the latest Firefox release!!
Originally Swine Fever was great for usage on typical 1990's websites: These were usually overloaded with loads of images, because designers at that time thought that webdesign meant to draw something in Photoshop and then cut it into loads of small puzzle pieces held together by a table structure. They tried to make pages look as if they did not consist of rectagular areas, but of smooth shapes, drop shadows and freeform lines. They tried to hide that any web page is in fact made from modular elements that can be used and addressed independently. Swine Fever exposed this modular structure and demasked the appearance of a complete, balanced shape: every single of these puzzle pieces would be replaced with the image of a pig, loaded from Pig Fertilisation Station of Weser Ems. (However i think the translation of "Schweinebesamung" to "pig fetilisation" is not really accurate.)
Today, table layouts have mostly been replaced by CSS layouts. Swine Fever will not have a great effect on freshly produced websites. For historic reasons, i did not change it to modify CSS declarartions. So it is best to use it on old pages, or apply it to find old pages with it.
In 2001, this pig fertilisation station had their page redesigned and removed the image of the pig. Luckily i was able to recover it from the cache of Alvar and since then it is hosted on my own server.
 Schweinchen |
Powered by schweinebesamung.de
To include this wonderful thing into Firefox, drag the link to your Bookmarks Toolbar.
Here is a hand-picked list of sites that look great with Swine Fever:
The newpaper TAZ covers Swine Fever on 2000-07-06 (German language).
On Friday 2008-11-21 Olia and me will appear at the conference What was old is new again at ZKM in Karlsruhe with our talk titled "Do you believe in the User". The event is revolves around Belief Systems and looks promising! The 8 Bit Movie is also being shown!
Request for Removal, the tool for automated Google Groups Suicide, was updated and now runs much better than before. Many thanks to Julian Wiersbitzki, Open Source Public Domain Power!
---> Fresh News as XML/RSS, old news are in the archive.
Last Modification: 2008-05-22 08:21:28 | contact: drx@a-blast.org | about this site
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