Friday | September 3rd, 2010
Still ness #67
Still ness beginning
The first time I inked the last panel of still ness 67 I really wasn’t happy with the way it turned out. It needed to be redrawn. So here I am testing different ways of drawing the face and I concentrating on the mouth.
Another music video project from Dick Whyte. This time a video for Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast, except its different.
Internet artist Cory Arcangel has compressed the song MP3 666 times now Dick has done the same to the video with 66 compressions to date, hopefully we’ll see more.
What I love about this video is the interstitial space these images occupy. They look almost abstract. Everything blends into each other its all muted. When you think about it the compression artefacts are slowly spreading and subsuming the original. Its the end of the tyranny of representation. You sort of know what’s going on but you can imagine anything.
Great stuff.
I’ve finished the last batch of Still ness inking, now onto pencilling the next page!
Friday September 3
For a special treat I will post some extras on Saturday
Also called “Harjutusi iseseisvaks eluks”, by Estonian animator Priit Pärn, 1980.
Weird and interesting, I think I’ve seen some of his work at a film festival ages ago.
Now this is exciting! I’ve been waiting to see footage of this since I heard they where going to make a TV series out of The Walking Dead comic. I can’t wait to see the show.
It may surprise some people that, despite perceptions to the contrary, wealth is no easy come, easy go phenomenon. Of course, there are exceptions, such as those who have heavily borrowed to create property empires. You will find a few have dropped off this year’s Rich List but others have joined. The country is not littered with abandoned mansions, repossessed yachts and collapsed businesses.
Private philanthropy – helped by permissive tax advantages – has largely continued. Tax changes in the budget to squeeze more from property owners will hurt corporates more than individuals. International wealth trends show the number of wealthy individuals continues to rise. The 2010 World Wealth Report says the number rose 17% to 10 million in 2009. Financial wealth increased 19% from 2008 levels to $US39 trillion after a drop of 24% in 2008. Among the super-rich, which includes many on the Rich List who do not have all their wealth tied up in a single business, the rebound was even greater at 21.5%.
The Wealth Report says the rich who had liquid assets adopted a standard strategy in a recession by favouring predictable returns and cashflow. They put more into bonds and into emerging markets in search of higher returns and geographic diversification. Equity holdings rose while cash holdings declined slightly. New Zealand was fortunate because it is economically integrated into the Asia Pacific region. The assets of this region’s wealthy surged 31% to $US9.7 trillion, more than erasing 2008 losses and surpassing the $US9.5 trillion in wealth held in Europe. This is a remarkable shift and will be a continuing source of further wealth as New Zealand businesses and investors gain a bigger share of the action.
Found and copied verbatim from New Zealand National Business Review Rich List 2010 Editorial.
Brilliant article on Kiwipolitico about the coarsening of American politics
In the US, a return to primordialism.
In retrospect, it seems obvious. Given the venomous attacks on Barack Obama in the 2008 election campaign, the move towards a “post-racial” society was never going to happen. Instead the reverse transpired, with race, religion and ethnicity now dominating US political debates in a measure not seen in years.
Not surprisingly the focus on primordialism obscures and mystifies the increasing gap between the US corporate elite and investment rich, on the one hand, and the salaried middle and working classes on the other. Cloaked in the language of individual “responsibility,” “free enterprise” and “freedom,” this is a return to the late 19th century-early 20th century era of ethnic divide- and-conquer anti-unionisation efforts played by the robber barons and their Pinkerton thugs, and which finds resonance in the anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic militia-style rhetoric of the present day.
Check it out.
Remix of John Cage’s 4’33″ using 68 YouTube videos of people performing the piece on a variety of instruments.
Dick’s Music video I found deeply moving. Art that typically has a pretentious high art narrative around it suddenly becomes democratic, anyone can make it. Anyone can engage with it.
I just think its awesome that all these people made this.
Dick a long time commenter (thanks Dick!) to this site has been making and collecting some really interesting internet art recently.
So I’ve been really keen to show case his art here and put the word out that everyone reading Drawingsilence should be checking it out.
Essay about being a NOC (Nerds of Colour).
Some of my favourite bits:
But then how do nerds of color like me fit in, and how do we deal with fellow nerds who don’t want to talk about things like race and class in comic books, video games, role playing games, and movies? I’ll be the first to admit, I got into all of that stuff for the escapism it allowed. It was invaluable to me, as a refugee from a war growing up in an economically poor urban area, to fantasize that I was someone else, somewhere else.
However, there was a discomfort about some of my own internalized issues. I always chose to ignore the weird feeling I got when I realized that, in my dreams, I was always, literally, a white knight. When I dreamt I was a superhero, I was a white dude with superpowers and the Mary Jane to my Peter Parker was always white
And you’d think that fellow nerds, regardless of race and gender, would understand given that our status as freaks and geeks and outcasts would give us some humility and common ground to stand on. Unfortunately, this is not often the case. Try bringing up issues of race, class, gender, and homophobia on a video game message board and see the vitriolic response you get, no matter how diplomatic you try to be. Bring up issues of representation and race to fans of Battlestar and Firefly and get told that you’re a killjoy or one of the “PC police” who doesn’t understand what their favorite show is trying to do.
origionally found here. Its good to see essays like this turning up on the internet especially in more mainstream places like Io9.
Yeah where are the comics?
I’ve been a bit preoccupied with things in the real world this past couple of weeks, hopefully it will improve.
…
To Stillness? I’ve been ill the last week, infact I still feel rubish, so I haven’t had a chance to get anything done. With luck I’ll post something on Friday July 30.
Did We win?
win what?
An Eisner for The Abstract Comics Anthology
in the Anthology Category!
No
For more info check out the post at Abstract Comics Blog.
that sent a thrill down my spine!
for those of you wondering WTF, I’m a bit of a fan of the manga.
If your really keen you can find more about it at wikipedia here.
From the Lost Highway soundtrack 1997, Movie directed by David Lynch
Currently, I’m obsessed with this song!
I’ve updated my blogroll to include my Friends sites and a heap of Abstract Comics sites, so scroll down and take a look.
Friends:
Allison Maplesden – visceral drawings.
Art Dick – Commenting machine Dick Whyte’s art blog.
Hotlinks – digial art blog.
How to Understand Everything and not Hate Yourself – Meredith Van Halen’s award winning webcomic.
Abstract & Experimental Comics addition:
many of them are contributors to the Abstract Comics Blog
?! Comics – by Aaron Zvi Felder
Blot Comics – by Andrei Molotiu
Codex Optica – by Paul Dwyer
Nina Roos
Site Rappel – Rosaire Appel’s site you can see posts of her awesome work here, here and here.
Great video aping 60s Marvel comics!
MF DOOM and Madlib are Madvillain, from the album Madvillainy. These guys are fantastic any of their work is worth checking out!
Debt: The First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber
Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.
Worth a read. I like how he looks at History from a slightly different perspective to one I at least usually see.
However tawdry their origins, the creation of new media of exchange – coinage appeared almost simultaneously in Greece, India, and China – appears to have had profound intellectual effects. Some have even gone so far as to argue that Greek philosophy was itself made possible by conceptual innovations introduced by coinage. The most remarkable pattern, though, is the emergence, in almost the exact times and places where one also sees the early spread of coinage, of what were to become modern world religions
One of the Conclusions:
he second point is to underline the absolutely crucial role of violence in defining the very terms by which we imagine both “society” and “markets” – in fact, many of our most elementary ideas of freedom. A world less entirely pervaded by violence would rapidly begin to develop other institutions. Finally, thinking about debt outside the twin intellectual straitjackets of state and market opens up exciting possibilities.
