Perhaps I shouldn't mock public art, but I paid for it and if this is the best entertainment value I can get for my tax dollar, then I should do what I can to enhance the experience.

Seattle recently built a complete light rail system from the airport to downtown. It's a lovely system, and I have some photos of it to show you later, but first I want to discuss the Tukwila Station, a huge thing of concrete, steel and glass that looms over the freeway like the home of some well-meaning but clueless Jedi overlord. It has three pieces of public art, and this one to the left amuses me first. You can see it through the glass when you drive past the station and I swear, it looks like nothing less than an uncomfortable scrotum.

This isn't so bad, as public art goes. But you know that post I made awhile back about how certain wavelengths of light give me headaches? See that blue crack running up the length of the lute? Yeah, that's a neon bulb, and it's exactly at that spot. I avoid the station at night if I can.

And finally, there's this thing: a ten-foot high, six-foot in diameter dangling tinkertoy or molecule, each node of which is cut off at some facing to reveal a polished steel flat panel with something "profound" written on it.

The thing is, the quotes are all about the city of Tukwila. Tukwila was probably a nice farming community fifty years ago, but since 1947 the city of Tukwila has been little more than support infrastructure for Seattle International Airport. There's also The Southcenter Shopping District, and aside from those two hubs there's just nothing "there" to Tukwila. It's a wholly artificial city that has become a municipal service arm for the sprawling service corridor around the airport and the low-rent flight-path apartment complexes that have sprung up nearby. It's hard to imagine a more dreary borough. Art about how wonderful it is now is ridiculous.

I remember when I arrived in Tukwila, too. I passed through it to get to where I wanted to go.

Tags: art, photography, seattle
Current Mood: giggly

Robot Women!

I know my audience. Sometimes too well.

Tags: art, nsfw, sighting
Current Mood: giggly

Okay, childish sniggering aside (see previous post), this statue is the one causing the most controversy in my home town. News crews have been out to film it (from the shoulders up), local tongues are wagging over it, local prudes are demanding it be removed saying, "If she were alive she'd be arrested!" and on and on and on.

My two cents: it's lovely. Nudity never harmed anyone. She looks like a woman in her mid to late 40's ought to look, pendulous breasts and anatomically correct crotch and all.

Apparently, she's "creepy." I suspect those who believe so have never seen a woman older and less photoshopped than Jannah Burnham. (p.s.: totally NSFW) And while I happen to like Jannah Burnham, I appreciate that most women are not going to look like they just walked out of a slightly pornographic fairy tale.

Tags: art, burien
Current Mood: creative

A few months ago, I described the new statues in our public square here in Burien, WA as "Lumpen Decepticon Zombie Art, and I still feel that way about them. They do kinda grow on you, not enough for me to want to keep them, but hey, at least I can take more pictures, ne, and try to get a feel for them.

Whoever made the female statue clearly has a feel for roboglueteus maximus, and I do mean maximus. Do we really think that robots will have the same integral design as humans? Do we hope so? The artist clearly does.

Tags: art, burien
Current Mood: giggly

My city has been undergoing a renaissance of sorts, rebuilding its public square and replacing its late 60's-era rambler City Hall with a modern, four-storey construction of glass with a back that faces the city's main retail drag, curving along the curb, and a front that faces the city's largest open parking lot. (The satellite view is apparently after the tear-down, but before reconstruction began.) Being a modern, left-coast city, it commissioned some public art to decorate their front entrance.

This monstrosity is what they got. Called "mother and child," this 10-meter tall pair of lumpen zombie Decepticons striding across the parking lot is just the sort of thing to discourage any parent from taking young children to the city hall. The "mother" statue is especially disturbing, with her Barbie proportions, rasta-like dreads and menacing claws.

The city has recently announced that the statue is "temporary." Huh. I wonder why they might want to put a deadline on just how long this eyesore has to stay in sight.

Tags: art, burien
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: NPR, Morning Edition

So, I spoke with my manager earlier this week. Isilon is growing and we're implementing a formal education reimbursement plan and all that goes with it. I have a very strong grasp of the entire stack of C/Python/Ruby/Perl/Appservers/Webservers/Databases on the server side side and HTML/DOM/ECMA(Javascript)/CSS on the client side. But I told him that I was never quite happy with my grasp of visual design. I can do it, but mostly without much inspiration. It's not something that comes naturally to me, and it takes a lot of practice to wake it up. He thought my graphic design sensibilities were fine for the industrial applications I wrote for Isilon (and F5, and Carbonwave, and all the contracts I did for CompuServe), but agreed that if I thought that was a skill I need to improve then, by all means, I should take a class and submit expenses and all that.

I am an idiot because today, while I was playing with my wacom pad, I figured out what layers are for.

I mean, if you're a graphic designer, let that sink in. I've been doing this for ten years and only today did I figure out just how useful layers could be. I've always done all my prototyping on paper and then just scribbled it into photoshop all at once.

Bleah. All that wasted time.

Tags: art, design
Current Mood: annoyed

Tags: art
Current Mood: amused

JWZ was one of the first people to originally mention the Orangina octopus somewhere where I could see it, although I didn't find the video until PZ Meyers pointed it out to me.

JWZ then issued a challenge to turn the squirting octopus scene into an LJ icon. I have, uh, attempted to rise to the challenge, and my contribution is visible there on the right. If you go to JWZ's LJ you'll see many worthy variations, although right now I'm holding out for dossy's as the best so far.

To make this, I first cut it out with mplayer:

mplayer -vo png -ss 00:52 -endpos 00:56

Then created a common map with netpbm:

for i in *.png ; do pngtopnm $i > $i.pnm ; done pnmcat -lr 0*.pnm | pnmcolormap 48 > map48.pnm

Then created a collection of cut, scaled, and remapped gifs (I determined the dimensions of my cut with GIMP):

for i in *.png ; do pngtopnm $i | pnmcut -l 93 -t 34 -w 243 -h 243 | \
  pnmscale -xy 100 100 | pnmremap -mapfile=map48.pnm | \
 ppmtogif > ../$i.gif ; echo $i ; done

And then assembled them together with gifsicle:

gifsicle -d 24 --loop=forever -D bg -O2 *.gif > anim.gif

I did some judicious removal of frames with rm (I could always rerun the script to regenerate them) and it took a little tweaking, but comes in at 38,410 bytes. Because there are so many dropped frames, I slowed it down a little, from 160ms to 240ms. I think the frame jerkiness suggests watching something in slo-mo, and tweaking the speed emphasizes that, so the experienced viewer won't be annoyed by the painfully low frame rate.

Tags: art
Current Mood: amused

So, I had an opportunity recently to spend an evening at the Seattle Art Museum. I'm afraid I'm only a little bit happier with the SAM than I am with the Olympic Sculpture Park, which I visited earlier this month. The new space is quite beautiful, and the lighting is much better, but I miss the majesty of the old marble steps with the Middle Eastern lions watching as you ascended into the space.

It is less crowded and they do have room for more. Unfortunately, I find their idea of "more" to be somewhat wanting. First, there's the huge art piece which consist of nine Ford Taurus's suspended from the ceiling with lit cables come out of them, called Inopportune: Stage One, which is free to anyone who walks into the lobby. Nifty, in a way, but hardly communicative: it looks like the sort of thing one takes on for the mere technical challenge. "Look, I can hang cars from the ceiling!" There's the piece Some/One, which is impressive for the amount of effort that goes into it, and it's nice to see it have enough floorspace.

There's a big new section on Pop Art, which is kinda fun if you're into that thing. It has Warhols, and the different galleries as you walk through them try to explain the evolution of modern art, with sections on impressionism, abstraction, surrealism. They've got a few Rothko's, which are important pieces for their day, but the Warhols just leave me cold. There's the flat anime-inspired Red Eyed Tribe by Chiho Aoshima (who's other work, A Divine Gas, I think is gorgeous and hilarious all at the same time), which was interesting but begs the question: is a photoshop-drawn mural that can be printed anywhere, anytime, really a fitting piece for a museum?

SAM really is a "thing you'll like if you like that sort of thing" place. I guess I wasn't muchly inspired by it. Then again, given the reasons I was there, I was distracted and not much in the mood to be inspired.

Tags: art, life
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Wolverine, Again?

Oh, my.... Spock! Totally and completely NSFW!

Tags: art, sighting
Current Mood: giggly