DS039: Tried to a cloth simulation on a cloth simulation on a cloth simulation but you would never guess that it kept crashing. So I just froze it and pretended that was what I wanted all along. Still, got to figure out the difference between hash and blend for transparency in Eevee. Always learning.
Everything is happening at once. Sometimes people ask – as if it’s remarkable in any way – ‘how do you do it?’ and the truth is it may look very well held together but I’m only ten minutes away from a catastrophic collapse; of everything going out of balance; of dropping the ball on something that slips my mind which has a cascade effect on everything else. I spend time between things pacing back and forth in the living room trying to think of what could go wrong. And these weeks have been particularly frenetic, with a dozen things all running in parallel, all – by their own account – full-time commitments and all gleefully ignorant of each other.
I once described it as like running down hill with plastic bags full of stuff. You’re driven entirely by momentum and if you stop or think, you’ll trip and fall. And, to the plastic bag’s inertial frame, everything seems normal. It’s all teetering on the verge of chaos just awaiting a single misstep.
So yes, I know, it’s been three weeks since I wrote to you and that’s been the longest time for many years. And this is another stupidly quick one. I wrote a whole introspective bit which I deleted because I suspect you don’t read this for the introspection. I’m still coming out of the tunnel at the moment so I haven’t had time to sit down and think about any one thing in particular for a while, besides which I have two or three writing engagements I should be putting writing time into. However, as you might expect, three weeks has spawned a dragon’s trove of notes, tabs and half-considered thoughts so we shall just jump straight into the short stuff. However, I am keeping some in reserve as part of my Content Strategy™️.
Short stuff:
Alan Warburton’s RGBFAQ is on the Internet now for free. You can just stop reading now and go watch it, it’s amazing. I think I’ve expressed my admiration for it pretty well on all the websites.
Natalie Kane tells me this blog is broken and the layout is messed up but since she’s the only person who ever tells me that I’m hardly going to engage in a development project on the feedback of a user group of one person so can you tell me if it’s also broken for you?
Andrew Sempre has a great blog/newsletter that I just discovered out of his Feral Research outfit which this week includes the great line: ‘Social media as a cursed shittiness-amplifier: playing back to us.’ It’s like how I want this to be, and how blogs should be; a range of unconnected stuff that’s interesting.
Fred Scharmen found a cool rocket picture. I don’t know what else to say, that guy knows his space stuff. He’s doing this on Saturday and I’m going to be going, if you go you’ll see how much space onions he knows.
My colleague JP Hartnett wrote this great top-level summary of ontological design taking in the work of Arturo Escobar, Sasha Constanza-Chock and Tony Fry. It’s a really good introduction to contextualising the ‘totality of design as a kind of meta-discipline, better able to encompass the relational complexity of how it operates.’
Le Tour starts on Saturday. Look forward to that on the socials.
I have a podcast interview coming out soon and I expect I leant to much on the candid side of the brand rather than the pseudo-intellectual but also I’m not particularly interesting so at least I can be disarming in honesty. Anyway, it’s keeping me guessing about the reception, if there is any. I’m led to believe some people hate-read this blog so perhaps there’s some joy to be found in my idiocy for you good folks there. You know what actually there’s quite a few things out there I’ve done recently and coming up (including two, count them two, books) so I will update you on those next week.
Ok, I love you and I’m sorry I haven’t told you recently. Byeee.
DS038: More key framing. No simulations. Blender has had some new Boolean tools (suing one shape to cut another shape) but it’s still janky. Cutting this cone took my computer a good 45 minutes of churning over. It isn’t actually black and white, it’s just that there’s no colour in the scene. Which I guess is black and white.
Sun, light and not enough time to use it.
There have always been whole areas of the Internet where you just shouldn’t go; the comments on YouTube videos and some Reddit threads (I really like Reddit for finding interesting and weird stuff by the way but I keep it at arms length) but it seems like you’re now only two clicks away from someone with a bio like ‘crypto theologian’ on Irish microblog Twitter dot com. I read a sentence just now from one of these people (with hundreds of thousands of followers) ‘Wokeness is a mind virus optimized for propagation on the English internet‘ and just sort of stared at it while trying to untangle the thinking behind such a statement. It sat there, innocuous amidst a variety of bombastic predictions about markets and meek conspiracy theories and the assertion that ‘the market’ should moderate the ‘consensus on history.’ It’s all sort of mawkishly grotesque; like watching street mime and it’s all written to seduce people exactly like me.
It promises white men control, power, wealth and escape: In a talk to a San Francisco startup event, this person encouraged me to save, leave the city, conceal my identity, diversify my holdings. I may as well have been told to buy gold and bury it in a forest, such was the sentiment with which wealth and society was treated. It tells me that social justice is just identity politics playing out in the media; something being done to me against my will by ‘woke corporations’ for profit and promises that if I follow it, I won’t have to change, learn, make any concessions or confront my complicity.
It’s the very slightly less bad version of 4chan trolls but legitimised because they’ve read James C. Scott and get invited to speak at tech conferences. They use memes and laser eyes and are hooked on the inevitability of their vindication; this curiously masculine trait of just believing that if you can convince yourself that something is real, everyone else will believe you, and many men my age do. I don’t often encounter these people in real life and although I’m clearly bang on the demographic, I don’t have the qualities of a good mark; I’m not that interested in accruing wealth or in any way angry or bitter about the opportunities I’ve had in life.
Why have I written this? I don’t know. I suppose it’s just worth remembering that the Internet has created this place for angry white men to try and bait each other into their schemes for violence and hoarding and that probably accounts for most of it now. To be honest I also didn’t have much to say this week. I’m taking a coffee break (second breakfast) between a bunch of things and spent that time gawping at Twitter like a 2013 wastrel with nothing to do but refresh my menshies.
Claire Evans has written about Hic et Nunc, highlighting how it supports emerging artists in Brazil who might otherwise struggle to pursue their practice with lack of social nets and gallery support that we enjoy in Europe.
Ok, Giro’s back today. I love Bernal, was really excited to see him again after his struggled at the Tour last year so I really hope he wins. I’ve watched this rocket take over like twenty times; just the most amazing climb, overtaking everyone and putting in a ten second lead. Listen, don’t look at the hateful Irish microblog, everyone is very angry. I love you of course, but you know that, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth saying. Speak to you next week.
DS037: Keyframed animations are so much easier to do than anything involving a simulation. There was no particular challenge here other than having to model a load of stuff and then keyframe it. Can you tell what inspired it?
I was going to put this in Short Stuff at the bottom, but the rest of this post turned out to be quite deflating and critical and I wanted to put something buoyant up at the top. I’ve been crunching through a series of videos about Messier objects. The Messier catalogue is a collection of 110 astronomical objects which are notcomets compiled in the 1770s. Astronomers saw all these smudges of weird, annoying things through their telescopes in their search for comets or stars. They were largely disinterested in them and considered them nebulous to the hunt for comets – hence, nebulae.
Anyway, turns out a lot of them were deeply interesting because once telescopes got good enough they discovered they were things like other galaxies and, yes, nubulae. There was an episode where it was pointed out that our galaxy, and space more generally, is full of star-exhaust (imagine me saying this with a sort of ‘can you believe it’ aghast face). Literally! Like a sooty dust that clogs up the Milky Way and makes it hard to see. Without it, the night sky would be much, much brighter and we’d be able to see much further. Anyway, we can’t see it but we can hear it turns out. Sound 1, sight 0. Damn it.
You wouldn’t let us into your treehouse…
I really don’t want this blog to become a stream of NFT-bashing but it really is such a perverse and seemingly ass-backwards, burn-it-all-down sort of petty vengeful mode of change that I can’t help but stare at the grotesquery of it. I’m also just very, very sad about seeing interesting critical practitioners I’ve admired for years turn their feeds into a stream of hashtags, ‘drops’ and hype-baiting to make money. I want to understand why, I want to see what they see. So, I continue to seek out things that make the case for why it is genuinely a better way of working but they all tend to land on the same bitter recriminations of ‘mainstream’ or ‘bricks and mortar’ art or some way-off, vague cult-like hype about how the future will be this or that. Neither lines of reasoning tend to have much substance to them and seem to be pretty transparent bubble-inflation.
I read this because it was posted with a caption of something like ‘at last someone lays to bed the anti-NFT sentiment’ on a reputable site. Good! I thought, at last, help me get it. I want to get it! But hope turned to despair as it immediately fell into some of the classic paradoxical tropes of the arguments.
By the way, where was the outcry during the heyday of incessant art fair air travel, ie every year pre-pandemic since Art Cologne launched it all in 1967; and the destruction caused by single-use wooden shipping crates?
This is the bloodsucking monster argument again: Yes, the art world is a blood sucking monster, the solution is not to replace it with a different maybe less-bad blood-sucking monster that promises to be nicer in the future. By raising this argument you’re tacitly admitting that the criticisms are true. I was listening to a podcast (can’t remember which) where this was also positioned as; it’s like pleading in court that you should be let off an assault charge because manslaughter is worse and you didn’t do that. Remember the ‘if you hate capitalism so much, why do you have an iPhone’ retorts that came up around Occupy?
Also, lacing texts with your letter-to-the-editor gripes is never a good way to win people round. I could go through this argument by argument but I just don’t have the time for it all: ‘The art world isn’t keen on willfully adapting to change, especially when the upheaval entails a shift in the landscape of access and gatekeepers that control it.’ Isn’t this just new gatekeepers? All still based on social currency? This is another common paradox; that it’s about changing the financialisation and hyper-capitalism of the art world. But it always just seems to be about replicating the art world digitally with digitally-native collectors, galleries and speculation. It’s not any different, just a more unstable currency. It’s all more ‘You wouldn’t let us in your treehouse, so we built our own, rival treehouse‘ when what I want to read about NFT’s is ‘ you wouldn’t let us in your treehouse so we’re going to roam freely over the surrounding fields and valleys while you hide in there‘ which you know feels like the metaphorical appeal of working digitally. If you hate the art world so much (which is understandable) just ignore the art world. Many, many people continue to successfully ignore the art world all the time and still do interesting things. You can’t hunger for the fame and wealth you feel you’re owed at the same time as decrying a system which creates and replicates fame and wealth.
(Also, also, inviting Tracey Emin to exhibit somewhat undermines the credibility of a line of argument about challenging the art world.)
Ok, near the bottom there’s some interesting stuff. Yes, the possibility for new forms of access, audience and engagement are the same things that excite me about open source and creative commons work. Yes, the longevity of art as medium of cultural discourse could be changed if it’s not locked in galleries or collector’s beach houses at night. And, NFT’s themselves could become a metric of social sentiment that directly empowers political change. But just make those arguments. Even better; materialise those arguments in a way that people like me who are stupid and don’t have time to know enough about crypto can see and touch and imagine, don’t lead with the treehouses/blood-sucking monster. It’s music to the crypto bros and just inflames stupid markets.
Short Stuff
Anyway, here’s a better examination of some of these paradoxes by Geraldine Juárez: The Ghostchain. She goes into some more of the ideas of assetization and the acceleration of capital through this new market.
Jay has done some interesting analysis here about what’s driving the argument, looking at some of the sales data previously looked at on this blog (She uses Kim Parker’s work showing 1.8% of sales are achieving asking price which often just about covers the cost of upload.) The conclusion seems to be that it is still predominantly creator-driven.
You saw this. I know you did, I’ve had it advertised everywhere. It’s crazy. Amazing crazy.
Justin sent me the results of this Ipsos poll which shows that for the first time since 1999, more people in the UK are cautious and austere than not. I’m not sure calling people who don’t intend to save money or think of the future ‘hedonistic’ is entirely accurate – the government seems to believe or fantasise that once we’re through Covid we’ll have some sort of explosion of consumerism and culture but it seems very unlikely.
At the same time, Deutsche suggest an ‘Age of Disorder‘ marked by growing inequality, worsening international relations and shifting demographics. (I like that they use a two-thousand year time scale for their analysis. Gives it some depth.)
Ugh. What a time to be alive. Truly, an age of disorder. I wish I had some good news. Star exhaust is all I have. I love you, I miss you. I don’t really feel great about going inside pubs and will probably hold off for a while. Oh, wait! I got an amazing shirt yesterday. So cool. Can’t really wear it until it’s warmer ‘cos it’s short sleeved but I’m excited to take it on a test-run at some point. Ok, reiterating that I love you, this all sucks very, very much but you’re doing amazingly. Speak soon.