to reading the Feed piece by Julien Dibbell about Jorn Barger. One of the things mentioned are “Wunderkammer” – European curiosity cabinets. That’s kind of odd, because one of our designers, Gilles, is doing his PhD dissertation on ‘cabinets de curiosits’ – wunderkammer. Weird coincidence.
Archives for May 2000
So I was checking
the difference between Google and Alta Vista’s new Raging search engines by doing a search on “michael boyle montreal” and comparing the results. Google was much much better. It put my old but still nominally active personal page at the very top and caught all my hits from when I worked at CTHEORY and put them near the top too.
The best thing, though, was to see my listing in the library. I’d never seen that before – I’d forgotten that they put theses in the library.
Interesting
news about people’s online behaviour today. Wired News reports that people focus much more on text than graphics at online news sites.
It raises a lot of questions – but the preliminary one is “which online news sites really use lots of graphics?” I can only think of the single little photo (usually about 200×200 or so) that most sites put up. And an image like that doesn’t provide the detail that a well-printed newspaper photo has.
It also brings to mind McLuhan – is the web a hot or cool medium? TV was cool and movies were hot – it’s all about resolution and the infinitely higher resolution of film as opposed to NTSC-standard pixels. The imagination is even higher res, so radio was/is hot, not cool like TV. I tend to think the web has elements of both, and that’s what this study might point to.
If it changed, when?
I just visited Precocious a minute ago and boy does it look great. The thing is, though, I’m sure I’ve been by before,and that it looked different than that. Anyhow the deep reds and ochres remind me of my childhood in the early 70s. A kind of an earthy, sincere but passionate feel.
So, in honour
of the whole concept of “everything old is new again” I’m contemplating a new spring look, which is going to be somewhat reminiscent of some others out there but is in fact inspired by London’s fantastic Modern Painters magazine. Actually, because it’s getting so nice out I’m going to call it my summer look and get the jump on the hordes who will be showing off their warm-weather finery in a month or so.
