I received the keyring in the post this morning and managed to open it up with a precision screwdriver.

(This photo was taken after I hooked it up to my laptop and put on my own bitmap image – the rest on the images were already stored on the device).

After revealing the backlight I found that the screen itself appears similar to an analogue photo slide.

The above photo was taken in between a slideshow transition.

The only issue with using this is the need to charge the lithium-ion battery via USB. I will have to test out the battery life from a full charge, and whether I can safely remove the backlight to save electricity.

E-ELT, the VLT and the Arc de Triomphe

A Laser Comb for Astronomy

The Inner Part of an Active Galactic Nucleus (Artist’s Impression)

On another note, I managed to come across The Designer’s Republic’s work for the limited edition version of Autechre’s 9th album – Quaristice (2008); a photo-etched steel slip case, plus gatefold wallet.

Sean Booth of Autechre discussed with Clash magazine his preference of digital vs. physical:

“It makes no odds to me. Actually, it does; I’d prefer (people) to download it than buy it physically. It fits our agenda much better that way. Our plan has never been to produce CDs – it’s always been about making music. If there’s a way of charging for it and getting the content to people, then we’ll adopt whichever is the most transparent. The actual product is the FLAC file – but I don’t object to those who want to own something that they can hold”

Beautiful piece of design – albeit impractical. This theme of limited edition physical is becoming more interesting and proving to be a fantastic way of generating money for the artist. As well as having the freedom to produce priceless physical object for the fan in collaboration with designers it diminishes the constraints of having to house the hardware holding the music, and mass production of the piece. Seeing this has encouraged me to look back on the sleeve designs I produced for my laser engraved records, to document them properly, and to think about perhaps pursuing this experimentation with music ‘packaging’ further.

I especially like these details near the bottom.

But today I tried an experiment and I was amazed to get such an accurate result. I have been watching a lecture by David Krakauer on YouTube (which is proving to be fantastic for my dissertation research), and he used a slide and stated a quote by the man pictured on it. I couldn’t quite make out the name of the man, whose name was mentioned by Krakauer, but I recognised his face fairly well.

So, I took a screenshot of the slide, opened it in MS Paint and stretched it a little as the image had morphed a little from the camera’s perspective. No colour or contrast editing involved.

I then uploaded the image to Google’s Image Search and voila -

This is an amazing piece of technology. After a little delving into the image results, I found mostly images which were similar in colour, but every now and then a bluish/purple version of the original image – most of them however were also flipped horizontally, so the system must have also altered my image to find a match. Very fascinating.

Is this going to replace our need to recognise? As with our needs to hand write, organise ourselves, make calculations (and so on) have almost become extinct thanks to computer systems?

Note: About 5 seconds later, Krakauer showed a slide with the magic word ‘Cartesian’ which I remember well from maths lessons. I guess my patience has become scarily thin. Probably thanks to Google in general.

Some words from their multimedia director and integrator Pam Rocks -

‘Working with an interactive system, it gives the musicians that freedom that has been lost in contemporary touring shows. Right now the musicians are restricted from time-code, and you have to stay synced all the time, and always play the song exactly the same every show, whereas with our interactive system it gave (Trent) a lot of leeway in that respect, and his musicians could improvise on stage a little bit and they could trigger the videos themselves with our system.’

Just from seeing this video has really inspired me to try and involve my work  with this sort of mixed media more – as it involves my 3 biggest loves – music, art and computers. I was really disappointed when they didn’t bring these visuals with them to the UK in 2009 (the logistics of bringing them over I suppose outweighed the need for them for 2 shows). I have been fascinated with this project for some time, so discovering this video was great! Now I’m off to teach myself some Processing…