vertiginous

»burned books project« by michael mandiberg

In the late seventeenth century, long before the age of Sherwin Williams and Pantone, a Dutch artist known as A. Boogert compiled Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, an eight-hundred-page compendium of paint and color.

Adrian Chen on why Tweetcred, a new tool designed to “assess credibility of content on Twitter,” falls short of its promise: http://nyr.kr/Swl7Le

Michael Clough – For Alvin Lucier (1969), zine, published by miniMA, UK, April 2014

A graphic emulation of the cumulative effect of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room by British musician, photographer and zine publisher Michael Clough. Another visual interpretation of the same piece was Mary Lucier’s own photo series I posted a while back.

Twitter Bot with Python Tutorial 

Life Before (and After) Page Numbers

Print media evolved into its present forms. 

In, say, 1469, there were no page numbers. This obvious and now necessary part of the book’s user interface simply did not exist. 

The earliest extant example of sequential numbering in a book (this time of ‘leaves’ rather than pages, per se) is the document you see at the top of this page, Sermo in festo praesentationis beatissimae Mariae virginis, which was printed in Cologne in 1470. The practice didn’t become standard, the wonderful I Love Typography tells us, for another half century. 

The page number is particularly interesting, I think, because it is a pointer, a kind of metadata that breaks apart a work into constituent parts. The existence of page numbers creates a set of miniature sub-publications to which someone can refer.

1) Go to Google Translate.

2) Put in a row of full stops ……………………………………………………

3) Select Japanese (as the output language).

Can a Twitter Bot Capture Chicago’s Essence?

When established in 1833, the Town of Chicago incorporated fewer than 200 people into its new borders. Within seven years—the city’s first decennial U.S. census—more than 4,000 people lived there; after another 10 almost 30,000 people did.

The city kept growing, both in size and population. In 1880, half a million people lived within its borders. In 1890, that number had doubled. At the turn of the century, 1.6 million people called themselves Chicagoans, and the city was the fifth largest in the world.

Something happened on the land we call Chicago that had happened nowhere else before. In the span of a lifetime, the city went from nascence to dominance—and since then, people have been trying to figure out what that new place is and what it can be.

A new Twitter account does the job rather stirringly. Created by Luke Seeman, a designer and developer at Chicago magazine, @whatschicago retweets tweets that begin with the phrase “Chicago is.”

“Cyberspace,” Bezos replied.

In the era of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, a book costs as much as a sandwich. Is that a good thing? George Packer reports: http://nyr.kr/1kwb0Rs

CAPTCHA Tweet

Turns twitter messages into CAPTCHA-like image, which can then be posted onto your timeline:

CAPTCHA Tweet* is an application which users can post tweets in a CAPTCHA form with. Since computers can hardly read it, humans can communicate behind their sight. CAPTCHA has originally been developed to distinguish computers from humans. It asks the user to type text from a distorted image. This is easy for a human but difficult for a computer. It sorts out computers by requiring them to complete a task which only humans can. CAPTCHA Tweet uses it as cryptography for secret communication between humans based on the fact that it is not legible to computers’ eyes. This work is an extension of our exploration of computer vision. We see CAPTCHA as a symbol of the relationship between human vision and computer vision and the intervention of computers in human life. CAPTCHA Tweet attempts to re-present this implication of CAPTCHA to the public sphere by applying it to the social network communication.