This week I was alarmed to discover that Gifs are for Boomers and generally frowned upon by gen-z for being lazy in a time of hyper-personalisation and custom content. Some sort of threshold has now been passed. Anyway, another short one this week.
DS062
Last week’s sketch was debilitatingly difficult and frustrating so it was hard to be motivated this week to do anything too complex or mechanical. As a consequence, this is a super simple sketch with nothing particularly complex going on. Procedural sand for the ground, downloaded fox skull rendered in a brass material then a volume with a noise texture animated moving across it to simulate wind. I suppose thematically it’s more about being lazy and quite exhausted by last week’s sketch.
The size of last week’s sketch also means I lost the video in a cloud syncing crisis but I actually don’t care. I have an idea for some new abstract style to try out this week. Quite looking forward to that.
Recents
I’ve done a couple of podcasts appearances recently that should be coming out soon. Obviously I’ll share when that happens. On Monday next week I’m doing a talk for the MFA Transdisciplinary Design folks at Parsons which should be fun. Something around imagination and expectation and hype I think.
Short Stuff
- Really good and thoughtful episode of Interdependence with Kyle McDonald with a nuanced breakdown of Ethereum energy costs. I think they misattribute the backlash on crypto to being about professional rivalry but it’s a much more balanced perspective. McDonald puts really well some of the issues with replacing publics and public funding with crypto and mistaking hypercapitalism for egalitarianism .
- You know what, best inventions of 2021 from Time. Not a bad list at all. Warning: There’s a lot.
- ‘Meta’ aka Facebook, have filed a bunch of patents for face tracking and sentiment analysis for the ‘metaverse.’ In case you were under any illusion that the genuine intent was to foster closer community ties, it seems mostly related to increasing the nuance and volume of targeted advertising. Which ever version of Web 3 we get; whether crypto or meta, it will be profoundly disappointing.
Super brief I know but at least it’s here. Love you.