Studio City East

Summer wrap up from top:

Delicate Steve on a boat

View my hotel room in San Francisco

Japanese Tea Garden - Golden Gate Park

Drones and the issues that accompany them have been showing up with increasing frequency.  The US Open was delayed because of a drone.  There was the Kentucky man that shot down the drone over his home.  The graffiti drone.  Various weaponized drones.   And of course Amazon's famous announcement of Prime Air, which with the ubiquity of their deliveries paired with drones immediately conjured images of future cities buzzing with low altitude air traffic.  Interestingly, searches around air rights have remained relatively flat in relation to drone searches (I tried a few variations on the search term, but all produced similar results).

With the rise in drone traffic, or more commonly radio controlled aircraft, Federal and state governments are taking measures to place restrictions on this technology.  In an unrelated case, the Supreme Court had previously ruled that property extended to at least 83 feet above the your home, and the FAA has claimed control over the airspace 500 feet above the ground.  As I have argued in the past, I think highly restrictive regulations on new technology are futile and counterproductive.  This is a case where the technology brings tangible benefits (efficient transportation, traffic management, public safety, search and rescue).  Building the necessary infrastructure and architecture to better support these new aircraft will not only reduce the issues caused by the technology, but also facilitate innovation and progress.

Luckily, Google and NASA have partnered with several other companies to develop the Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management.  These organizations see the benefits and economic opportunity.  Encouragingly, the FAA has also published a UAS (unmanned aircraft system) roadmap to "enable UAS integration into the National Airspace System."

There are obvious issues of safety, security, and privacy that absolutely should be addressed through legislation and court rulings, and the logistical concerns over managing these aircraft are totally valid.  However, I'm hopeful that after the first stage of defining the legal boundaries that drones can operate in, the technology can flourish with the right implementation and guidance.

Additional reading: https://www.faa.gov/uas/

As counterintuitive as this sounds, the MTA keeps claiming that removing the trash cans from subways is helping to reduce litter in the stations.  If they have the data to support these claims, that’s great, but anecdotally I’ve seen plenty of people toss trash onto the ground with or without trash cans being present.  This could be a plan to cut costs with less than credible data, which I would support if it means the money saved is reinvested in infrastructure improvements.

This article about the thermostat battles received a fair amount of attention, but not a lot of data to support the case. Maybe the attention confirms the bias?

Great information about the maple syrup cartel.

While the idea of launching a Kickstarter campaign without an idea is presented here as a joke, the premise is not unreasonable.  There are methods (keyword traffic, A/B testing for example) that are employed when you aren’t sure what you should be building.  Think of all of the pages that just have an email registration to notify you when whatever they are building is ready.  It’s actually not too far from what Quirky has been doing for the last few years.

While I’m waiting patiently for Bear Simulator, this fire lookout simulator looks intriguing.

Some of William Faulkner's best work explored the nature of time, and the complicated fluid relationship between the past and present.  He of course famously wrote “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”  The dynamic between the internet and the physical world operates in a similar way, but I am increasingly curious about the distinction between the two.  More specifically, I’ve been preoccupied with the art of the internet, and digital influences on different mediums of art.

For a great overview of the latter, I recommend Every Frame a Painting’s look at the depiction of texting and the internet in film.  It demonstrates how film has successfully adapted to some changes in technology and failed with others.  There are plenty of other examples of digital art using anything from algorithms to MS Paint.  Also, see the case of Emily Howell.

I took a stab at the former and previously wrote some thoughts here, a professional photographer plied his trade on video games (link), and there was a film set entirely within a computer desktop (link).  Obviously, there are the dominant memes and .gifs which could be seen as internet art, but it all feels a bit like using a movie camera to film a stage play when the possibilities offered are so much more.  The digital surface is only part of the internet.

Lindsay's photos from Lake Sebago in Harriman State Park

The photo above is from another blog I was using to explore the idea of screenshots being a form of photography of the internet.  My interest in the project came from walking between two separate exhibitions at the Met.  The first was After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age and the other was William Eggleston: At War with the Obvious.

As the digital space becomes a bigger part of the human experience, can virtual life be captured in an artistic way?  A sepia toned Craigslist ad, a high contrast splash page, or several programs layered in a certain pattern across the screen.  It may seem redundant or self-referential, like an inefficient web crawler or a terrible meme, but I think there is a way to coax something more out of the screenshots.  Out of this confluence of information, images, and sounds, that continues to grow and evolve.

On the other hand, the internet may just be the medium.  Although, some frames around paintings could be considered works of art, and I certainly wouldn't be the first person to acknowledge software as art.  But can coding reach the level of art, or would that be the same as equating the paint on the palette or the unexposed film to art?  This may be too much reductionism.  After all, I am talking about something that is in many ways alive, or at least could be soon.  Which would make screenshots early portraits.