Top Down/Bottom Up

• Jasper Morrison's Basel Chair. Supernormal, super gorgeous.
  
  
• Morrison's aforementioned chair reminded me (on a visceral level) of the iconic Thonet Chair. I had no idea that it was designed in 1859, as a flat pack (almost 100 years before IKEA existed), and has sold over 30 million to date. Michael Thonet was bentwood, before bentwood was even cool.
  
  
• Joris Laarman's Wirepod decorative power strip, the first in a series of Artecnica products called Wiremore, which will make electrical cables more, rather than less, visible. Interesting concept, even if more than a bit idealistic.
  
  
• I love this song off the first Wackies Sampler: Wayne Jarret "You and I"
  
  
• "Nah pop, no style." Uptown Top Ranking by Althea & Donna is such a tight tune. Ever tighter is watching these two classy ladies perform it live.
  
  
• Summer 2008 is the summer of mankles.
  
  
• Fuck the pig away.
  

• Brilliant new work from Aaron Koblin (& Takashi Kawashima): "Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.
  

• Allstreets by Ben Fry is, of course, a gorgeous visualization. However it's also a depressing documentation to the car-obsessed culture that America has fetishized since WWII.

  5/02/2008