Digital Dadaism

In 1982, Agnes Denes planted and harvested two acres of wheat in a landfill in Battery Park, Manhattan.

Wheatfield - A Confrontation, by Agnes Denes

Flying toasters

Later today, Swedish television rebroadcasts Harold Pinter’s Nobel lecture from 2005.

This man in a wheelchair, alone in a studio with a blanket over his legs, weakened by cancer, was the strongest experience I’ve ever had in front of a TV set, when it was first aired in 2005.

I was watching football, an exciting and important game in Champions League, I believe it was. In the intermission I zapped around a bit, and was immediately caught by the very strong impression Pinter conveyed through the TV screen. I never returned to the second half of the game. Instead, I listened to this lone, frail man, speaking into the camera for 45 minutes.

The lecture can be seen here, bear in mind that it was performed in 2005, during the Iraq war, under Bush and Blair:

http://nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=620

Ernst Jandl was a fantastic poet, doing amazing things with language in general and the German language in particular (he was Austrian). Although I don’t fully understand the language, I love this stuff (from www.ernstjandl.com):

Die Zeit vergeht:

antipoden:

Actress Katrin Cartlidge explains the complex personality of Lars:

After a week on twitter I’m not convinced. I was hoping for more of knowledge sharing, more useful and interesting information and less on what people happen to be eating and such.

But I’ll give it some more time. A week is probably too short to get the grip on the essence of it and tweaking it to your liking.

Also, my own tweets this far doesn’t live up to any standard of usefulness or general interest, they are about me getting a haircut or watching football and such. So I’ll try to contribute more, and see what that may lead to. Since I never been good at small talk, IRL or online, that aspect of twitter is simply not for me.

Of the people I’m following right now, tony_fagerlund is the best example of using twitter the way I had imagined, mixing some personal stuff with primarily links and thoughts on stuff relevant to his profession and thereby to most of his followers, I would guess.

This image from pepsicozeitgeist.com illustrates the above – at the current SXSW festival and conference on film, music and interactive media, what do the participants choose to report to the rest of us through twitter? What they are eating:

Appcelerator Titanium fills the same purpose as AIR, it’s a “platform for building rich desktop applications using web technologies like HTML, CSS, Javascript as well as Flash and Silverlight”. And it’s open source.

For me personally, the open source aspect is not paramount in itself, but hopefully it can help in overcoming some of the shortcomings of AIR, like integration with other applications. 

An AIR app cannot launch other applications or execute command line commands. It’s understandable why Adobe would want to leave that out for security reasons. Titanium does neither, in its current only a couple of days old pre-release version, but hopefully such capabilities will be added. 

I like that applications created with Titanium are packaged as stand-alone executables, as opposed to the AIR model where the end user has to install the AIR framework before the app can be used.

Speaking of digital, this one I acctually did back in the 80’s by taking an analog photo of the TV screen, since I had no way to digitize TV or video back then:

Poor audio quality but great looking. Click this one, have patience and get to see 547 different looks: