"These super-people are real, and they are on our side"

Interesting people with super-normal skills (or "powers").
For example, Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in 50 days! And he ran from NYC to San Fran in 75 days! Holy damn.

Kim Peek had eidetic memory. He had memorized 12,000 books perfectly. When he was offered a book on gambling to read, he refused, saying that using his powers for gambling would be "unethical". That really stumps me. I know that casinos ban gamblers who can count cards, a rare skill. That to me seems to be the unethical thing. You set up a game with some rules, making sure that overall the odds are all on your side, making lots of money. Then because one person has exceptional natural skill, you refuse his right to play! That's like banning somebody from playing basketball because they are too tall or can leap too high.

Then there's Wim Hof, who scoffs at winter.
He has been dubbed "Iceman," because the Dutch have no imagination. Hof's ability is so great that even when submerged in freezing water that would pretty much kill a normal human in a few minutes, his body temperature barely drops, and when he climbed Everest (in bicycle shorts, we really can't stress that enough), he said it was easy.

I think these and other examples lend a lot of credence to the idea that the Universe is not all that damn physical, but a sort of live hologram, created and controlled by some kind of Mind or Lifeforce outside of it (which we ourselves may ultimately be part of). In other words, anything can happen.

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And a guy who can split an air-gun pellet in half with a sword. The thing can't even be seen with the human eye!



(What is it with the Japanese and their super-noisy TV show? It's like they are so repressed in most of life's aspects, that when they do let loose, they go all overboard.)

Mette and drawing

Some of the photos/paintings in the last post reminded me of this one from the mid-nineties, one of the very first drawings I made on a computer:

I made it from a photo I took of my friend Mette:

It was taken indoors, hand-held, with a tiny pocket camera (which shot film), the outstanding Konica Big Mini (had a great lens). We made big prints from some of these shots, and I'm amazed at the quality we got, given those factors.
I was so careless about the technique because I'd imagined them only used as basis for drawings, but they turned out much better than expected, so I've used them for all kinds of things. Mette had a big print of this one framed on the wall where she lived with her parents, and she said people really liked it.

Living paintings

Bert found this really cool page of models which were skin-painted like various types of painting/drawing techniques, then photographed.

A toy amongst beasts

This could be expanded. If somebody were really clever and had the funding, I guess a small tree-climbing remote-controlled camera box could film abes in trees. It would have to be damn strong though, and able to hold on strong, those things have each the strength of ten men (I wonder how, they must have a different kind of muscles). And it should perhaps be camouflaged, and move very slowly, so they get used to it.

But what an engineering challenge! Even without any big animals around, making a good tree-climbing robot is a tall order. I doubt anybody has made anything like it yet.

Datamancer out

RIP, Richard Nagy, Datamancer, has died, seemingly in a car accident in California.
(Someone said recently: "Every year we postpone self-driven cars, thousands more die.")

Way too young.
I considered him a friend, and a working genius.
I was one of the few lucky enough to get one of his works while time was.

(I even made it work with an iPad!)


Update: I'm happy to see that he managed to sell the big project, The Clacker. I'd heard that the eBay auction didn't work. It would have been sad if he'd not been able to sell it after years of work.

"Funny moments"

 "You remind me of an old girlfriend of mine."

An Instagram Movie

This video is put together from pics found on Instagram.
I dunno... apart from a couple of things, like the rocket-shaped ice lolly being juxtaposed with the rocket, I don't see why it's so interesting. (The pro site I found it on were very enthusiastic indeed.)
OK, it's a fresh idea, and it's taken some labor, but I don't necessarily think these things alone will make something Good Art.
Am I just getting too old? Should I give up trying to understand "yoof culture"?

Expression

The most important aspect for art in connecting with an audience is expression. Not just what expression does it have, but perhaps even more importantly: how much.

This is not as obvious as it sounds. Many artists (in the widest possible sense) get so wrapped up in the technique, and in their own relationship with the work, that they forget about the audience. And as a consequence, many many works of art have barely any expression at all.

Chicken-cam

More intuitive or more logical?

Left-rigth brain test.

NovemberLight2 (updated)

(23 Nov: I added three pics.)

Update:

Taken with iPhone 5s. With HDR, which fought a valiant fight against the surprisingly contrasty light this afternoon.
Apple is to be commended for not overdoing the HDR (contrast correction by combining several exposures) so as to get the unrealistic images where a sky is about as dark as a black cliff. No, it just corrects to get a bit more detail in the shadow and highlights, good.

This fantastic light, along with the dramatic clouds and the autumn colors, makes this quiet burg look grand. (Carefully choses viewpoints and compositions don't hurt, of course.)

Update:
JP said:
On a cloudy day, the building and gate in the first photo would be foreboding. Excellent detail, depth of field and composition.

On this lovely day, I did not see it as foreboding. But:

Makroscope

Another solution to macro: the Zoerk Makroscope Type 1.

I've long wondered why we didn't hear of high quality close-up front lenses like this. (Basically just a loupe for the camera.) But of course for really high quality, you need aspherical lenses, which are expensive, but has become much less so in recent years, and this lens has two of them. And it will works with a lot of different lenses and cameras. (so long as the lens front is not too big.) The quality will remain at the quality your own lens has, this is a very good product. Of course, being that, it's not a cheapo thing either, around $400, plus a converter ring if your lens doesn't have to have a 52mm filter thread.

The photo below was taken by a simple Canon G3 "compact" camera, with the Makroscope. So it's also a road to makro without an exchangeable-lens camera.
(I hear it can also be combined with macro lenses to get even closer than one to one.)

Photo by Knut.