prosthetic knowledge

Vincent Van Gogh - Colourblind? 

Japanese scientist posts a theory on his Tumblr blog, asada0, tests an idea that came from a stimulated colourblind experience with the artist’s work:

The other day, I experienced the “Color Vision Experience Room” at the event of the Hokkaido Color Universal Design Organization (HCUDO), where I had invited to speak. The event’s main objective was to educate the public about the diversity of color vision which exists in our society. The event also sought to promote the idea that any time we make choices about colors, we should take this diversity into account.

The “Color Vision Experience Room” uses illumination filtered by an optical filter - providing a modified spectrum of light. In this room,  the person who has normal color vision sees color the same as the person who has protan or deutan color vision. These types of color deficiency mean that certain color combinations are difficult to differentiate. I was impressed by the effort and thought that had made this room a reality.

I was able to view various items in the room, and it turned out that experiencing modified color vision by the naked eye had a stronger impact than experiencing it on a computer display in simulation. This was a revelation to me.

There were prints of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings in the room. Under the filtered light, I found that these paintings looked different from the van Gogh which I had always seen. I love van Gogh’s paintings and have been fortunate to view a number of the originals in various art museums. This painter has a somewhat strange way to use color. Although the use of color is rich, lines of different colors run concurrently, or a point of different color suddenly appears. I’ve heard it conjectured that van Gogh had color vision deficiency.

However, in the van Gogh images seen in the color vision experience room, to me the incongruity of color and roughness of line had quietly disappeared. And each picture had changed into one of brilliance with very delicate lines and shades. This was truly wonderful experience.

It goes on to experiment and examine the idea, (above, the images on the right are the originals) and the author insists that this is purely a theory.

You can read more of the essay here

Googlegeist 

Tumblr blog / art project by Chadwick Gibson, exploring the line where digital art and Google image data merge.

More Here

Tumble Tree

For Tumblr users only … Great Bookmarklet tool to visualize and graph interactions from your individual posts, by dxinteractive (whose GIF above demonstrates it incredibly well):

Introducing Tumble Tree! ~ Check out this thing I made that lets you see how posts are reblogged across Tumblr. It works on the dashboard or on most permalink pages, and you can sproing the branches around, filter notes by comments, save the tree as a picture blah blah blah. I’ve been using and testing it for the last couple of weeks and it’s pretty handy.

Go to tumble-tree.tumblr.com to try it out and install it. I guarantee you probably won’t die!

P.S. Yes this is why I haven’t posted much in the last couple of weeks.

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks - Computed Fashion

A collection of items from this blog’s archive and around the web, including Nukeme’s Glitch Embroidery project, Kayla Mattes’ 90s Tech / Pop Culture fashion designs (before it recently became, well, fashionable), and more.

You can see the whole piece at Rhizome here

C64 YourSelf

Happy Birthday, the Commodore 64!

I’ve posted about this before, but, I think it is worth sharing again to celebrate one of the most important home computers ever …

An online browser-based image converter than turns a photo into Commodore 64-style graphics.

Very easy to use, just drag-and-drop an photo (png or jpg, 2mb max) into the web page and it will convert it - see the top image, the animated gif, for a demonstration (you may need to click on it to see it).

Many thanks to the volunteers above for sending a portrait of themselves: paris87, daph-knee, everybodykiller, noo-oods, migmuffins, kevinhale, veryvaluable, zensaint and chrisdejong

You can try this out for yourself here

Related: Commodore 64 turns 30: What do today’s kids make of it? via BBC News
Prosthetic Knowledge Commodore 64 tagged archive here and here

‘Curators’ Defend Their Ownership of the Term and Vilify the Plebeians of Tumblr 

Erica Schwiegershausen of The New York Observer got in touch and gave me the heads-up on a panel discussion about the term and profession of the ‘Curator’. It’s an interesting read:

In his introduction to the subject at hand, Mr. Altman noted that the word “curation” has come to be thrown around “more often than a ping pong ball at a fraternity house,” alluding somewhat disdainfully to a dissemination of “curation” to the masses, a phenomenon which he would later attribute to the Internet.  He questioned: “Is the new definition of curation, like, ‘I assemble things on my Tumblr and then I put them up for the world?’ Is that why we don’t want to be called curators?”

Ms. Popova—who, over the course of an hour managed to quote Tchaikovsky, Jack White, Jonah Lehrer and Cicero, among others—proceeded to invoke the latter, citing his belief that if a word didn’t exist it was because “it had permeated society so much and was so ubiquitous that the word was unnecessary.”

“I think that’s what’s beginning to happen with the word ‘curation,’” Ms. Popova continued. “We apply it so much that it’s become vacant of meaning.”

I’ll let you read how the panel collectively vilify Tumblr, but it wasn’t without it’s defender:

Mr. Altman became the only panelist to remove himself from the communal vilifying of Tumblr. “The Internet has obviously democratized the ability to be your own curator,” he acknowledged, conceding that though this comes with “a lot of annoying things,” you don’t need a PhD to be a philosopher. 

You can read the whole piece here

Any thoughts?

Rich Kids Of Instagram 

Tumblr blog featuring filtered photos of the young and wealthy in moments of their lifestyle (parties, private air transport etc …)

Tumblr blog here

rrrrrrrroll 

Tumblr blog comprising of unique gifs where the protagonist finds themselves rotating in various scenes.

More Here

My life has got to a point when short stand-out moments happen, and I’m thinking, how long before a GIF is made of it?

From the Euro 2012 Italy vs Germany match last night.

catastrofe:

gif night (heroes)

(via sansotto)

Tumblr-esque Fashion Goes K-Pop 

Jeremy Scott’s internet-inspired fashion collection (some accused of ripping off teenage fashion Tumblrs) makes an interesting migration, becoming the aesthetic for Korean pop girl group 2NE1.

Image sources - here - here - here