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Phong Technology

Net Art project from Netro explores the holographic aesthetic with the computer graphics method Phong Shading and how it could apply to familiar fashionable products:

Phong Technology is a research project that investigates the visual possibilities of Phong shading in relation to virtual product experience.

Virtual product experience (VPE) has been around for years, everybody has already interacted with rotating 3D products and we have learned that the virtual feel and touch generates a curiosity that conveys product knowledge. Consumers simply pay more attention when they are allowed to interact with virtual products, further more it influences consumers’ intension to revisit the website.

Now with WebGL finally implemented in every common browser and libraries like three.js or babylon.js, we are facing a bunch of new possibilities to present products on websites. Phong Technology’s research is focused on virtual materials and especially hologram-like surfaces.

Aiweiwei

Simple app by Cosmical Liu recreates Ai Weiwei’s “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”, using the smartphones accelerometer to mess with the physics:

This week, the photo editing software Adobe Photoshop turned 25 years old. The program is an industry juggernaut — so famous that the word “Photoshop” has come to be synonymous with image manipulation.

But when the software started, says co-creator Thomas Knoll, it was a personal project. He and his brother John started working on the program in the late 1980s.

"It was originally a project that my brother and I were doing together for our own mutual use and enjoyment," Knoll tells NPR’s Arun Rath. "It was not intended until a couple months into the process that we would even try to make it into a commercial application."

Adobe Photoshop: Democratizing Photo Editing For 25 Years

"Several of the words that I use have such a range of meaning. I don’t want the language to inform. By giving it a context, you limit its ability to stretch. I want it to remain contextless so that it leads you anywhere."

—El Anatsui on the role of language in his work, as featured in an episode from the ART21 Exclusive series

WATCH: El Anatsui: Language & Symbols

IMAGES:

FIRST AND SECOND ROW: El Anatsui. Ozone Layer, detail, 2010. Installation view at The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama, Japan, 2011.

THIRD ROW: El Anatsui. Gli (Wall), 2010. Installation view at The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama, Japan, 2011.

FOURTH ROW: El Anatsui. Black Block (left) and Red Block (right), 2010. Installation view at The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama, Japan, 2011.

Genko-an Temple (Kyoto,JAPAN)

Nick Reding. Methland: The death and life of an American small town. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009. p. 42. (via readers-reading-readers)

My submission to Ann Hamilton's "common S E N S E" exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, UW, Seattle.

SubmissionFriday: 

 red blanket

by Gabriele Viertel

Visitors to the Grand Canyon National Park got to see this stunning sight. This weather phenomenon is called a total cloud inversion, and it happens when the air near the ground is cooler than the air above it, creating a sea of clouds. While typically a rare event, this is the second cloud inversion at the Grand Canyon in six weeks. Photos by M. Quinn, National Park Service.

Top photo: The South Rim’s “Battleship,” which truly looked like a ship today, cutting through the waves. 

Middle photo: A timelapse of the clouds rolling into the Grand Canyon from Hopi Point on the South Rim of the canyon.

Frozen Bubbles!

Sarah Garzoni: Breaching, 2010