With the recent Mozilla/Metalab shakedown in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot about stealing vs. borrowing in terms of web design. Both happen, both can be good, and both are easy to define. Stealing without giving credit is a bad idea. Stealing as a starting point for further exploration gives us new ideas and built-in reference points to compare and assess. Perhaps evolution is a better word. Case in point: the bookmarklet pages for Tumblr and Posterous. I use and like both services, but prefer Posterous for my main blog because it allows me the freedom to control autoposting to other services. It doesn’t have the visual customization options that Tumblr does, but it has been improving rapidly. I believe that Tumblr did this “look up in your bookmark bar” arrow first, but here’s Posterous stealing and modifying the idea. Tumblr’s design is more successful because it comes off of the page with the drop shadow and actually points up to the bookmark bar. Posterous’s version stays on the page (and even disappears somewhat behind the “Manage” text) and points off to the left somewhere.  
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dinosaurparty:
Caught Sleeping- Boing Boing
Brandon Boyer on Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death. Totally awesome.
Wow, these book cover designs are gorgeous! (via jboxhorn)
 Rhizome is featuring Chris Lanier’s review of the Prospectives.09 exhibition in Reno, which included Gaming the Network Poetic. The exhibit came down last month, but I’ll be submitting GTNP to other venues in the near future. It’s a worthy read; here’s the bit about my piece: Joshua Fishburn’s Gaming the Network Poetic (2009) links five games in a rosary of G5s, the monitors arranged in a pentagon. The clean vector design of each of the games is very appealing; simple geometric shapes recur throughout the games, serving separate functions. In one game, you click to break a square apart into smaller squares; in another, you try to attach little hinges onto drifting triangles, so that they swing together to form squares. Five people are meant to play the games simultaneously, with the activity of one game influencing the others – I have to confess, some of the connections escaped me. Perhaps this was the one piece in the exhibition that, while it invited participation, didn’t really need it. The five G5s could rest alone in the empty gallery, talking obscurely among themselves about the subtle relations between squares, triangles, and other geometry.
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 Friends, especially those in Chicago, please check out Dialogue: Presented by IRUS art (an intercultural collaborative art work between artists in Iran and the U.S.) at Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago from January 29th through February 4th, with an opening reception on January 29th from 7-10 PM. This is an opportunity to see work that has so far only been shown in Denver, Colorado, as well as brand new works from new collaborating artists. Read what the Denver Post had to say about the exhibition in Denver. For more information about Co-Prosperity Sphere, including location, check out http://coprosperity.org For more information about Dialogue and IRUS art, check out http://irusart.org/
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I really wish I was down in Rio for 8-Bit Game People, which includes chiptunes performances as well as an exhibit of videogames. I’m showing Survive/Progress there, which was selected as one of the best games at FILE 2009 in São Paulo. After digging around a bit on the website, I found the full list of games (pictured below). Just about every other name on that list is someone I’ve referenced as inspirations in one talk or another, so it’s exciting to end up on it. 
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 I’m very excited to announce the opening of “39˚ 44′ 11″ N x 104˚ 59′ 21″ W”, an interactive installation included in Embrace! at the Denver Art Museum. I am one of the collaborators on a team led by Timothy Weaver that also includes David Fodel, Brigid McAuliffe, and Nick Meyers. The show officially opened on November 14th, 2009 and our work is installed in the FuseBox Gallery on the 4th floor. The Embrace! exhibit is all about engaging with the specific space of the Hamilton Building, designed by Daniel Liebeskind. The 39N x 104W (for short) interactive installation addresses the challenge by using ecological data (solar wind, terrestrial climate, and biological) specific to the location of the Fusebox space to “paint” the gallery with sound and images. The visitor to the space contributes to this process — a camera tracks his/her location which allows the images to move and temporarily paint the wall. The exhibition runs through April 4th, 2010, and features the work of 17 artists from around the world. It’s the boldest exhibit yet in this building and definitely worth a visit. Additional links:
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Below you’ll find a video with all five games from Gaming the Network Poetic running in the same video. Some may appear to be a little too fast — I used the “saveFrame” function in Processing to export individual frames so that I could capture in high resolution, but some games have less processing going on and thus were able to export more frames in the same amount of time, so I had to speed some of them up to fit in the same time slice. Regardless, it still gives a better idea of how the games affect each other than seeing only one at a time (which you can also see in the GTNP Vimeo Channel). Posted via web from Amusement Device | Comment »
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