Geocities was finally shut down in 2009, but since it was such an important part of the early Web, the contents of many of those sites are still available via a massive six-hundred-and-forty-gigabyte archive posted on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.
I hope this means that in 10 years time we’ll be able to hold all of todays internet on a 100 dollar hard drive.
“ I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and then many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little, but if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far »
In November 2012 Samsung released the Galaxy Camera, a first attempt to incorporate the Android OS and a cellular antenna into a compact camera. Then Canon introduced the EOS 6D, a full-frame DSLR with Wi-Fi and sharing tools built in. “This connectivity will become the new normal,” says Richard Koci Hernandez, an Emmy-winning multimedia journalist, assistant professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, and mobile-photography maven. “I never bet against technology.”
(source)
The quality of your tools and your ability to continue to evolve them will allow you to suppress the need to hire for operational roles, allowing each front-line individual to do more, which simultaneously improving overall coordination (fewer people means coordination is easier) and keeps costs down. Today, the results of Facebook’s engineering leverage ratio means that there is one engineer for every 1.2 million users and despite our blistering user growth, the ratio is growing.
Emphasis mine. (source)
Photography, and our understanding of it, has spread from a center; it has, by infusion, penetrated our consciousness. Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
Do what you want. It is your art, after all. Me? I’ll grow with it.
Since its earliest days, photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training, who were disciplined and united by no academy or guild, who considered their medium variously as a science, an art, a trade, or an entertainment, and who were often unaware of each other’s work…Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention; many were the product of accident, improvisation, misunderstanding, and empirical experiment. But whether produced by art or by luck, each picture was part of a massive assault on our traditional habits of seeing.” -John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, 1966.
World Press Freedom Day, Redux
Additional imagery from Reporters Without Borders to go along with our earlier post.
Select to embiggen.
Oh dang, Supreme. You just got ethered by legendary artist Barbara Kruger, from whom you stole much of your steez. Sucks to be you!
Kruger just dropped the mic on these suckers.
A few months ago I was on this Jet Blue flight from New York to Burbank. And I like Jet Blue, not just because of the prices. They have this terminal at JFK that I think is really nice. I think it might be the nicest terminal in the country although if you want to see some good airports you’ve got to go to a major city in another part of the world like Europe or Asia. They’re amazing airports. They’re incredible and quiet. You’re not being assaulted by all this music. I don’t know when it was decided we all need a soundtrack everywhere we go. I was just in the bathroom upstairs and there was a soundtrack accompanying me at the urinal, I don’t understand. So I’m getting comfortable in my seat. I spent the extra $60 to »
The cinema is the great compensatory art, the one that natural-born artists who lack any particular technical skill, craft, or knowledge gravitate toward, because it’s the one where the equipment itself supplies most of the needed technique. The artists need only bring their being—because being is the cinema’s very stuff and subject. That’s why it’s wrong to call movies a visual medium; it’s a shorthand that I’ve indulged in, too, but there’s actually no such thing as a beautiful image. If a director happens to be endowed with a visual gift (such as Stanley Kubrick, who started as a photographer), so much the better, but what makes an image beautiful is that it’s infused with a beautiful soul. That’s why there’s no formula for recognizing or identifying a beautiful image; it’s not definable as a geometric or formal quality, but »
“Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.”
– Orson Welles
kottke: The CIA and abstract expressionism
From a 1995 article in The Independent, an account of how the CIA promoted and funded US and other Western artists during the Cold War, including abstract expressionists like Rothko and Pollock.
The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
The next key step came in 1950, when »
Reiner Riedler’s shots of original filmrolls from The Deutsche Kinemathek
Get it while it lasts, folks. The movies of the future will be all digital, all the time.
These are gorgeous. The Godfather reel in particular is just gorgeous.
awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:
Peter Sellers and Stanley Kubrick
“Mein Führer, I can walk!”
Love this movie.