“criticism”

Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity is a massive—350 works—showcase of cognitive art and a beautiful tour de force.

Pay for Performance—Death and Taxes—USA Air—Figurative system of human knowledge—Flickr User Model—Map of Scientific Paradigms—Time Graphs: Sunsets by time (also check Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner)—Visual Correlation for Situational Awareness (read the paper, it’s worth it)—Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structure, and Inside cobot’s head rank among my favorites, what about you?

Tufte’s Museum of Cognitive Art^ELZR is in the offing, I can smell it. La coyuntura es propicia.

Ironically, I must confess I sometimes preferred to reload the project’s homepage and quickly hit stop. The mosaic is beautiful and impressive, but also overwhelming. The thumbnails’ plain titles were more useful for the exploratory browsing I needed to digest the hugeness of it all.

vs.

I can’t believe it has been almost 20 megaseconds since I started this blog (so long already?) and I’ve never talked about them:

Well, if you must know they’re simple cookies I got quite obsessed with some years ago. An acquired taste^WP, they’re way too dry for the uninitiated but just perfect with constant (cold) sips of Arizona Lemon Tea, Bonafont Levite, or milk. They come in several flavors but for chocolate all of them are to be avoided like the plague. They’re advertised like energy biscuits (“bizcochitos de poder” for the in-crowd) and I say the label’s fitting, though in my opinion not so much for any energizing properties they may or may not have, but because they can quickly, cheaply ($1), and somewhat healthily fill your stomach and let you go on with your late night spree (remember Bere?).

A small bakery from my city^WP, La Integral, makes them, but I’ve had reports they now sell them (in your nearest OXXO) as far as Monterrey^WP (near the US border) and I like to think I had a tiny wee part in it. ;)

(I’m only linking to the products’ websites out of some sense of customer loyalty, the pages themselves are as lousy as you can get—really, truly, blatantly hideous.)

Now that I think of it, I’d seen similar contraptions before but this one is particularly elegant and interesting: you throw it in the air and it changes color! Pure witchcraft. And the forms—the forms!—are beautiful in that uniquely arresting way that only mathematics can give. It’s our generation’s geodesic dome^WP.

I remember one high school philosophy class where our fantastic teacher (James Kurtz) had nothing prepared but a smooth, solid piece of metal he had found inside his car engine. The assignment for the one-hour class was to write an essay on what we could infer from the alien civilization that created the artifact if we suddenly found it on its own on a faraway planet, with no cues whatsoever of its purpose. It was jolly good fun with a pretty nondescript ferrous blob, so I wonder what I’d have said had he brought this color-changing whatchamacallit.

To begin with, I guess it’s fair to assume such civilization had to know its math pat. Perhaps several alien PhDs went into the theory of this ball and its theoretical inspiration even carries the name of some great alien topologist^WP, à la Poincaré sphere^WP. I’d be willing to bet that they have computers, there’s no way they could have built this without CAD^WP. And the material itself, plastic, and the way it’s shaped, is nothing trivial—it shows some deep knowledge of chemistry, materials science^WP, and manufacturing techniques.

And had I known that the whole thing was available for the alien equivalent of one dollar in the alien equivalent of a flea-market, and that it had no application than to be amusing, well, I’d have gasped!

At any rate, don’t (don’t!) let my babbling discourage you, go buy one!

Design is art under constraints. But turning the tables is the hallmark of design’s greatest pieces. They make you think constraints are what they are so that it, the design piece, could be as good as it is.

It’s the “thank-god-we-have-ears-at-both-sides-of-our-head-to-support-our-eyeglasses!”-effect.

Google’s Music Search represents one important future of Google’s “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” mission: digesting the chaotic web and regurgitating it anew, catalog-like, simpler and more standardized (which has worrying implications, but is also a wonderful prospect, provided it’s just one more option). Yes, this is similar to what it actually does through search, but the difference is that this new Google-digested web is browsable, not just a black-box accessible piecemeal only through question & answers. Google wants to become the interface.

Overview and Detail. The pair keeps coming up whenever you start pondering on interfaces, interface patterns, interface & information design, and well (why won’t be grand?) space, time,^ELZR and thought itself. Achieving both—the ancient dream of simultaneity—is one of the deep purposes of any media creator, from writers^EE to interface designers, and though it may be a humble example, The Secret Lives of Numbers—an interface to the results of a crazy study of the search-engine popularity of every integer between 0 and 1 million¹—is a superb one.

Click to view a 3.15-Mb PDF critique of the interface (right-click and select Save Link As to download)

As for the credits:

If you believe in geniuses you’re in for a treat checking out the three URLs above—each of them’s one. Martin Watenberg in particular, has some of the most intriguing information visualizations I’ve ever seen.

¹ Though owing to limitations of internet bandwidth only data for the first 100,000 are provided online.

I loved the above composition. Perhaps it’s just that I took Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics^WP epiphany too seriously, but I feel there’s something deep about it. Space and time are one, do you see? The three small panels on top convey a quick sequence (and I can’t help but hear a zippo clicking open and the smallest of sighs), while the long panel invites us to rest on her at leisure. And we can go back, turn back time and see it all over again. Or stop it altogether and focus on the third panel with its bright flame. Or we can go backwards, make it into an infinitely regressive spiral. Or we can try and take it all in one visual gulp. Present is where you are. And all it takes is looking.

Space is time’s ultimate interface.

There’s also another superb quick-closeup, similar in structure, in Animatrix^WP ’s Final Flight of the Osiris^WP. It’s more joltingly impactful, to be sure, but that’s also its greatest shortcoming: it’s gone before you notice it. Our interfaces have evolved and our media player can let us see it slowly, frame by frame, but we can’t readily choose our frame. We can’t try and take it all and dream of synchronicity. That is, we can’t unless we space the frames.

There’s something deep about Riya, the new image search engine, that bugs me. It reminds me a lot of a group in my university that was developing a digital whiteboard back in 2002. It was a fascinating technology, and, these being the days of Minority Report^{WP, IMDB}, I was infatuated with the possibilities. The thing was expensive and bulky, but allowed for some really sweet, unprecedented interaction with the computer not that far from those of said movie.

Oh boy, I am Joseph Campell (toda proporcion guardada).

Techcrunch—which I discovered a few days ago and am liking more and more everyday—had a recent good introduction to PornoTube, a new YouTube^WP porn clone (that as you’d expect, contains explicit sexual material).

The streaming-video website is quite something—intuitive, well-designed, web-2.0-buzz-compliant, massive, and free—and Techcrunch makes several good points throughout its review, chief among which is this one: “For more technically saavy users, bittorent has long been a source of free pornography. But PornoTube, which is usable by anyone with a computer, could be disruptive.”

And disruptive it will be. Owing to support from its porn behemoth owner, the website appears to be staying atop of the expensive bandwith deluge it must be under. If it keeps doing so and survives prosecution and finds a way to be profitable, it would be yet another beacon of our media saturated future: a whole nother level of free, easy, abundant, instant gratification.