1. Beautiful art from Casey Reas of the UCLA Arts Software Studio.
"I work with statements, variables, loops, conditionals, functions, objects, and arrays. The most accurate thing to say about my process is that it's different for each body of work. Sometimes it starts with research or a specific text and other times with sketches and drawings. Sometimes I just start writing code and I see where that leads. I do my best thinking with my eyes. I figure things out through cycles of creating and looking. In general, I start with how things work – how they behave and respond. The images emerge from the system, then later feeds back into it."
2. The Ring.
"What's interesting about hearing of The Ring in this focused way is how it becomes a part of Tolkien's criticism of technology. The Ring does what every mighty bit of tech can do to its owner/user: makes them feel powerful and righteous. Look what we can do with this thing! So much! So much good! We are good therefore whatever we do with this will be good! The contemporary idea of the tech startup is arguably the most seductive and powerful technology of the present moment, the One Ring of our times."
3. Fascinating Lucky Peach story about food and immigration, "Chinatowns" and "ethnoburbs."
"The food we found in these suburbs was not only more Chinese than “Chinese” food of the take-out sort—it was more Chinese than Chinatown food. We rarely drove to San Francisco’s Chinatown anymore; the things my parents craved couldn’t be found there. The urban Chinatown—with its tourists and souvenir lipstick holders and monochromatic chow mein—was no more familiar to my parents than the lazy sprawl of California’s suburbs. But the latter, where you could run into classmates from Taiwan or dorm mates from Illinois, afforded them more space to think about things—was this “home” now? What more could you want? For my father, years before, the reminder of his childhood in Taiwan had come in the form of an occasional youtiao. Now my parents could eat better than anyone back in Taiwan could, and they could finally try dishes they had only heard about as children. As they got further away from their origins, their sense of identity grew hazy. Food was their mooring."
4. A professor's "gender hack" assignment for students in his Gender and Technology class.
"The gender hack is a critical and creative project that attempts to transform, undo, subvert, or challenge some conventional aspect of gender and technology. The project can take many forms. It might be entirely digital (for example, a remixed video). It might be totally analog (for example, refashioning a gendered object into a gender-neutral object). It might be a combination of the two (for example, a shirt with embedded circuits, a Barbie doll transmogrified into a cyborg). Clothes and toys are especially rich artifacts to work on. One reason for this is that clothes and toys often function as boundary objects, operating simultaneously in multiple contexts and imbued with both personal and shared meaning."
"As we began to tackle the project, we knew we wanted to adapt our thinking from our mobile experience to try and elevate content layout and interaction on the web. We wanted to match the polish and performance of our native apps, but in a way that felt true to the browser. Early on, after testing numerous prototypes, we decided our web experience should scroll. Our mobile apps are known for their book-like pagination metaphor, something that feels intuitive on a touch screen, but for a variety of reasons, scrolling feels most natural on the web."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
devolute, though an old verb in fact, has been dormant for three centuries; it is unnecessary by the side of devolve.
The Credits: 1. electricobjects.com 2. kottke.org / @sippey 3. luckypeach.com 4. digitaldavidson.net 5. flipboard.com
A Barbie Doll Transmogrified Into a Cyborg