Our Space

I straight up DOVE into this article last night.  It's a fascinating story about "author" Quentin Rowan, who built a pretty formidable resume — poems published in The Paris Review, acclaimed spy novels, etc. -- solely off of plagiarizing. 

But he wasn't plagiarizing from just one source — he was assembling entire novels piecemeal from a huge variety of obscure sources.  Obviously, the great irony of the situation is that doing that and doing it well is actually much harder than just sitting down and bringing your own idea to life.

The whole case is interesting because it raises a lot of questions about the nature of creativity.  The notion of idea-recycling as a bad thing is pretty new, and it's not like there are vast amounts of art and writing that are completely, utterly original.  Most of being creative is being able to make connections among things and draw new life from those connections…and isn't that kind of what Rowan was doing?

The Plagarist's Tale

The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face

Great little peek at the Susan Kare's sketchbook (she's the designer who created the visual icons for Apple's graphical user interface).  I'm sad that the iPod is not pictured.

Click HERE to read full article. If you want to see more of Kare's work go to www.kare.com

A super-ambitious graphic designer is making a logo for each of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes. Right now, she's turning out one a day — meaning she's on track to complete the project in 27 years.

Will she finish?  Or will she go Sufjan Stevens and peter out after just a few?

 http://www.branding10000lakes.com/

Bluebrain’s latest release is not a traditional album — it can’t be listened to passively in one sitting or, for that matter, at just any location. Central Park (’Listen To The Light’) is a site-specific work of music that responds to the listeners location within the stretch of green of the same name in New York City. Available only as an iPhone and iPad app, the album will be released as a free download starting October 4th, 2011.

Central Park (’Listen To The Light’) is the second in a series of site-specific app-albums, following The National Mall, released last May, designed to experienced within the boundaries of the parks in New York and Washington DC respectively.

Both albums work by tracking a user’s location via the iPhones built-in GPS capabilities. Hundreds of zones within the landscape are tagged and alter the sound based on where the listener is located in proximity to them. Zones overlap and interact in dynamic ways that, while far from random, will yield a unique experience with each listen. 

So this is pretty much amazing — no two listens will ever be exactly the same.  BRB pitching a thinkpiece about participatory, multisensory, active listening to every music publication EVER.

http://forcefieldpr.com/site/2011/08/09/new-yorks-central-park-to-get-its-own-soundtrack-with-new-albumapp-from-bluebrain/

A surprising, useful, and inventive way to use space that could easily be written off as unusable:

"In Warsaw, Poland in the district of Wola lies a small crack of space between the buildings on 22 Chłodna Street and 74 Żelazna Street.  Jakub Szczęsny of Centrala, recognized the potential to create something unique within this narrow area, and derived a design of an art installation entitled Keret House. The house upon completion shall become the narrowest house inWarsaw, measuring an interior that will vary between 122 centimeters and 72 centimeters in its narrowest spot." READ MORE