Silicon Valley, 2010

ChartThrob 1.08

I've updated ChartThrob, my little tool for creating digital negatives. The latest edition has some subtle internal tweaks that should enhance its compatibility with Macs (and users who have radically different default Photoshop preferences than my own).

You can find a nice description of how to use ChartThrob in a complete alt-process workflow here on inkjetnegative.com. Props to Michael for creating that page!

Minneapolis

Hitched, Watsonville

P1050253, Brooklyn

For the streetphoto salon....

P1020045, Redwood City

P1000264, Tulips @ Home

Junkpiles

What a difference a day makes as I start assembling all the real components and trying to sort them out -- even doubling the size of the chassis the whole thing seems... smaller. And it's definitely slower. And I still haven't added the USB router or the second power supply for the linux portion. Or the lasers.

But really, I don't want to make Wall-E or Huey/Dewey/Louie or K-9 or Johnny-5. All those designs have a similar feel, I think, because they are dominated by components. This seems like a dead-end for the physical design, I'm moving back to my "expressive tentacle-like eyestalk" plan.

Imagine if animals were designed this way. Ugh. They all have similar components, but how different are even the various vertebrates and chordates, much less the wide variety of other creatures...

Did some computer vision tests this evening and it was taking eight seconds a pop to analyze images. Realtime, yay.

KID Stuff Update

Sadly, the Botzilla Name has been hijacked -- repeatedly -- so the name I'm using for this little project is KID (botzilla): Kevin's Illmatic Distraction. Or idiotic. Or intrepid. Or infantile. Indescribable. idk.

No lasers or grenade launchers yet but at least I finally got a little time clear to get this little platform working in a predictable way, with the controller managing DC motors rather than servos or steppers. Truthfully I'm not at all sure that something so typically mechanical is part of my goal. I'm now thinking about using flexible kevlar strips to push bits around, like twistable tendons on a flexible stalk. Motorized rubber bands?

My real interest in this is trying to get at the idea that embodiment, input, and and output are all the same. When someone turns to look at you, not only does that change their collection of immediate stimuli, but the way that they look also has an expressive effect that's transmitted. Should the sound and speed of a motor be considered an expressive part of a robot's presence (how else would people sell Harley Davidsons?)? The idea of separable inputs and outputs, as we have in formal systems like computers, seems to me to be an artificial construct, unlike the nature of being in the world.

Who Watches the Watchmakers?

It strikes me that designers themselves provide ample evidence that "Intelligent Design" is a fundamentally flawed idea.

"I.D." has at its core the same premise as Paley's "watchmaker thesis" as presented in his 1802 Natural Theology:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. (...) There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. (...) Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

An obvious question might be: was the watch left there deliberately? Already, the notion of finding the watch on th heath implies not a deliberate chain of cause and effect, but an accidental one. Even if it was left there with a specific intent, was that intent that Paley find it? Or by coming along with his mind keen on deciding on what things mean before looking at them, has Paley already mucked things up for the watch's actual owner?

But my point here isn't to shoot down Paley's easily-pierced balloon specifically. Rather, it's to point out that while engineering and technology has been incredibly influential, it seems as if that influence has almost never really gone according to design.

Twenty years before Paley's book, the Montgolfier brothers launched the first success of a long line of flying inventions. Spurred on with ideas about how to assault the seemingly-impregnable fortress of Gibraltar, their work went on a path that's easily traced from their sheep, duck, and rooster flights through the first human flight (with a military officer on board, Marquis François Laurent d'Arlandes), to the daily aerial firebombing of Asian and European cities a century and a half later. One could say, in fact, that everything went quite according to horrible plan.

Or... did it? More than two centuries later, Gibraltar remains under a British governor.

The watch found on Paley's imaginary walk -- did it perhaps incorporate that contemporary technological marvel, the lever escapement within a Abraham-Louis Bréguet-designed tourbillon? While impressive, and enough to merit Bréguet a commission from the French Navy (who used his clocks extensively in navigation), there's just one problem -- it doesn't work.

Oh yes a fine watch will tell the time. But the tourbillon, designed to counter the effects of shifting gravity (perfect for a naval vessel)? Ooops! In general, modern horologists not only say that not only is it unnecessary in modern timepieces (except to enhance sales), it probably never was, and that watches that lacked a tourbillon were never less accurate than those that did.

And as for a "master" designer? Even here what potential confluences do we have here between aviation and watches (much less the grand clockwork of the universe), except maybe in the coincidental affinity of Kim-Jong Il for Rolexes, even as his government's rockets put pressure on the doomsday clock?

Cheep!

I was at the hardware store earlier today buying some poly irrigation tubing -- while in line I noticed a small LED strip light that I bought to illuminate the underside of my desk (that is, the keyboard area, away from the monitor). 18", $18. Two watts. Expected lifetime: 20,000 hours.

It's fantastic that these sources are dropping in price and rising in quality so quickly. I've heard people grousing about the color balance but I'll tell you -- I haven't yet heard anyone complaining about them who didn't have a vested interest in selling something much more expensive.

Do Not Interpret

101, 4/16

Milpitas, Las Vegas

(Gearhead notes: jpeg from LX3 "Dynamic B&W" mode)

No Clear-Cut Blacks and Whites

For those who think that monochrome != contemporary, stop reading here.

After a long break we finally got a chance to head up for a lecture at PhotoAlliance during the weekend -- a special session featuring not one or two but four different photographer speakers, as part of the launch of the PhotoAlliance Our World Portfolio Review.

Of the four photographers showing work that night, all of them showed black and white imagery -- and all for different reasons:

Mark Klett showed both his own b&w photos as well as those he culled from history, embedded and impacted with modern color shots of the same places. One could see his work as using b&w for nostalgic reasons here; instead, he seems to be grasping at the idea of imaging practice that evolves and changes with humanity even as the western landscape's rocks and chasms remain.

Wayne Levin's Hawaiian undersea work is b&w, so he says, largely because the color available from underwater equipment, even digital, is just plain poor. As a diver I have to agree -- without flash, working close, there are no colors but shades of blue, even at moderate depths. Underwater work is a classic case of how color's "realism" can vary widely from the subjective experience -- while diving your eye becomes accustomed quickly to the low light and limited palette, while the camera -- even a digital camera -- does not. By styling in monochrome and controlling the contrast, Levin's photos are both more dramatic and true to their situation.

Camille Solyagua's photos do pursue a decided nostalgic bent, with works made in 19th-century museum archives and more modern ones with much the same feel, not unlike a natural history collection by Blossfeldt but with a very different intent, less focused on scientific cataloging and more on the objects -- not as scientific specimens but as cultural ones. She also has created numerous photograms using refracted light through liquids (less successful imo). Her comments about ending the use of film and silver-based paper indicate to me that she may have abandoned that direction for a while.

Arno Rafael Minkinnen chose black and white early in his career, around the time he first chose to work exclusively with the nude figure and for a similar reason: to make the work more permanent, to avoid making the photographs' intent be overwhelmed by fashion. 1985, 2004, 1978, 1848...? All the same tones, and all of them, in their various moments of capture, "as alive as anything."

Four artists, four different rationales -- it's tough to imagine how any of the B&W work that any of them showed could be remotely improved by the addition of color. Klett's ancestral saguaros or time series? Akule-school vortices? Dead rats? Some guy hiding behind a tree? In every case a "realistic" color application would have simply stamped-out both the mystery and meaning in these works.

Can color work engage us in similar ways? Perhaps. Is color needed? Obvious not. But I do wince every time I hear comments about photographs by reviewers, editors, and dealers who opine "sadly it's not in color" -- it pains me to think that their viewing eyes have developed such narrow mannerisms.