Earth Clock

http://www.poodwaddle.com/earthclock.swf

Paula Scher: Recent Paintings

Paula Scher, NYC Transit, 108 in x 60.5 in, acrylic on canvas, 2007.

Paula Scher, NYC Transit (detail).

Okay so I know I ripped on Paula for her HP templates, but I do love her paintings.

Did I mention I like maps?

From the Pentagram website: "An exhibition of new paintings by Paula Scher opens this Thursday, 8 November at the Maya Stendhal Gallery at 545 West 20th Street in New York City. Featured is work from her ongoing Maps series including the paintings India, Tsunami, Manhattan at Night, NYC Transit, Middle East and Paris. An exhibition catalogue has been published. The show remains on view through 26 January."

Chris Jordan: Intolerable Beauty

detail of Cans Seurat, 2007, 60x92"
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Chris Jordan is a photographer based in Seattle who's work has been influenced by photographers like Andreas Gursky. Jordan has definitely influenced my own work, as I was looking at him when I did my Darfur installation. All three of the series featured on his website are amazing, but he regrets that they are not nearly as impactful on the web as in person.

His earlier work is all photographed from existing found scenes- as is- pictured in his Intolerable Beauty, Portraits of American Mass Consumption. His newest work Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait (2006-2007) features digitally compiled photographs based on statistics of American (and world-wide) litter and consumption. He describes how he had one litter research organization send him 5,000 cigarettes which he dumped out on the floor, photographed, and digitally manipulated to create a massive image of the number of cigarettes discarded in one second all around the world.

I listened to a podcast interview with him and was intrigued to find out that his original interest was not consumerism, but color. He would find scenes like old paint cans in the dumpster in the back of an auto body shop and photograph them for the amazing color they produced. One particular image of a mass amount of trash he took and blew up spurred his interest in photographing things related to mass consumption. I think it's amazing how he could come from almost a strictly formal photographic curiosity, and end up doing something so heavily conscience driven.

http://www.chrisjordan.com/

We Feel Fine

Check out this amazing database of feelings (We Feel Fine) by Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar:

It's such an amazing and diverse way to gather and map out information. I would love to do a project like this someday.


Excerpt from the site:

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

"The feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on."

A Visual Representation of your hard drive

So my Macbook pro just told me that I'm running out of space and need to delete some stuff, and ended up stumbling upon this "Disk Inventory" application. It visually shows you through colored squares exactly how much space each file, folder, and application take up on your hard drive. You can just click and delete from here. So easy to use! I highly recommend it:

Disk Inventory Application