Coilhouse party! It’s happening! In New York! On Sunday, August 21st! Full announcement coming very shortly. For now, allow me to entertain you with a couple of book reviews snippets from Amazon.
RAND Corporation published “A Million Random Digits” in 1955, before it was easy for computers to generate random numbers. It was an important work in the field of statistics and cryptography. Amazon readers of today note:
“Such a terrific reference work! But with so many terrific random digits, it’s a shame they didn’t sort them, to make it easier to find the one you’re looking for.”
“The book is a promising reference concept, but the execution is somewhat sloppy. Whatever algorithm they used was not fully tested. The bulk of each page seems random enough. However at the lower left and lower right of alternate pages, the number is found to increment directly.”
“I took a class in statistics in college. I used this book to help me select random phone numbers for a poll I was conducting for my class project. (The most popular household cleanser in the greater Siouxland area is Bon Ami, by the way.) One of those phone calls was answered by the woman who is now my wife. We’ve been happily married for ten years! Thank you, RAND.”
“If you like this book, I highly recommend that you read it in the original binary. As with most translations, conversion from binary to decimal frequently causes a loss of information and, unfortunately, it’s the most significant digits that are lost in the conversion.”
I know everyone’s waiting with bated breath for more news about Coilhouse’s Black & White & Red All Over Ball in New York. We’d been working on the announcement all weekend, but with more art and performers still being confirmed, and some other details to iron out, we’ve decided to wait just one more day to spill the beans. In the meantime, check out these lovely new creations from Miyu Decay, the jewelry and adornments company of artist Stephanie Inagaki (previously on Coilhouse). Shot beautifully by Allan Amato, the images feature models Lacy Soto, Alexandra Matthews, Jill Evyn, and Yellow Strange. All these items can be purchased at Miyu Decay’s Etsy store.
Later this month, Stephanie and the other artists involved in this shoot will be throwing a very special fundraising event in LA in honor of James Ribiat, Stephanie’s fiancee, who died of a heart attack nearly two years ago. We met Stephanie and James when they became impromptu bartenders at the Coilhouse launch party three years ago, and James’ passing was a shock for everyone on the staff. Stephanie writes:
James always encouraged me to be creative, to continuously do better and was my biggest critic.
Our family established an arts endowment in his honor, which will be used to give scholarships to local students who want to pursue the arts. James was an ardent supporter, always donating to museums and the LA Philharmonic. We had received generous donations from friends to initially start up the endowment but it is necessary to raise more funds in order to give back to the community. An endowment works similarily like a savings account, where you can only take off of what the interest makes.
I am organizing a memorial benefit show to raise more funds. It will be held on Friday, August 26th from 7pm-12am at Sancho Gallery in Echo Park. I am in the process of hopefully attaining an Alcoholic Beverage Control One Day License as well because everyone knows booze brings in the most cash! The entrance fee will include one raffle ticket, which I think will be about $10. There will also be an option to buy more raffle tickets as well!
The event will feature performances by Daniel Ribiat of Cinema Strange and Colin Ambulance, as well as a raffle for artwork donations from Zoetica, Tas Limur, Yume Ninja, Paul Koudounaris, and many other artists. See the full details on at the event page here.
This is fashion blogger and singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu singing Pon Pon Pon, produced by Shibuya-kei duo Capsule. Lisa Frank on acid. Everybody dance! [via aerialdomo]
The campaign slogan was “Traditional Goes Digital,” and it included three images: Squaw, Brave and Chief. These were created for Australian printing company ColorChiefs in 2006, and recently resurfaced on the How to Be a Retronaut blog, to such wry comments as “Native American steampunk use ALL the parts of the 8088.” The images have also garnered some critique, both for their cultural appropriation and sexism. As blogger Ikwe recently wrote on Tumblr, “it’s not very creative to sexualize a native woman in this way but it’s packaged with a new futuristic sexy theme so it’s sooooo groundbreaking and chic. Oh yes, the ad also reminds us that we are moving forward from our primitive and savage ways. Meh.” Paging Dr. Adrienne!
Looking at this somewhat clueless ad campaign did lead me through an interesting Wikipedia tunnel. Come with me on a magical journey:
With the end of the war, the military abandoned the airbases and stopped dropping cargo. In response, charismatic individuals developed cults among remote Melanesian populations that promised to bestow on their followers deliveries of food, arms, Jeeps, etc. The cult leaders explained that the cargo would be gifts from their own ancestors, or other sources, as had occurred with the outsider armies. In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. Cult behaviors usually involved mimicking the day to day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles.[5] The islanders carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses.[citation needed] In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and cut new military-style landing strips out of the jungle, hoping to attract more airplanes. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.
A style of computer programming that is characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. Cargo cult programming is typically symptomatic of a programmer not understanding either a bug he or she was attempting to solve or the apparent solution (compare shotgun debugging, voodoo programming).[1] The term cargo cult programmer may also apply when an unskilled or novice computer programmer (or one not experienced with the problem at hand) copies some program code from one place and pastes it into another place, with little or no understanding of how the code works, or if it is required in its new position.
In computer programming, deep magic refers to techniques that are not widely known, and may be deliberately kept secret. The number of such techniques has arguably decreased in recent years, especially in the field of cryptography, many aspects of which are now open to public scrutiny. The Jargon File makes a distinction between deep magic, which refers to (code based on) esoteric theoretical knowledge; black magic, which refers to (code based on) techniques that appear to work but which lack a theoretical explanation; and heavy wizardry, which refers to (code based on) obscure or undocumented intricacies of particular hardware or software. All three terms can appear in source codecomments of the form:
This month, timeless alien beauty Tilda Swinton (the polyamorous, gender-defying star best known for starring as the hero/heroine of Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel of the same name) appeared in a photo shoot for W Magazine by Tim Walker inspired by David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. In the interview accompanying the shoot, Swinton cites both Bowie and her father as figures who influenced her style. “They are individuals with whom I share the same planetary DNA,” she says. Of her father’s uniforms, Swinton says: “from childhood, I remember more about his black patent, gold livery, scarlet-striped legs, and medal ribbons than I do of my mother’s evening dresses. I would rather be handsome, as he is, for an hour than pretty for a week.”
This is not the first time that Tilda Swinton has appeared in a David Bowie-inspired shoot. Previously, she emulated Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie in a 2009 shoot with Craig McDean.
I don’t know if I’ll ever understand Tilda Swinton being a Roman Polanski apologist, but these photos sure are stunning.
Today at 3 PM PST / 6 EST, in 20 minutes, join us at turntable.fm/Coilhouse for a birthday celebration for our dear co-editrix Meredith Yayanos.
If you’re not familiar with Turntable, here it is in a nutshell: “being 16 and on acid in a Hello Kitty store.” It’s a new listening service in which a cute avatar DJ version of you either spins music for your friends or boogies down to other DJs spinning. As Mer wrote on Tumblr,
Over the weekend, I created “a semi-official Turntable room for Coilhouse. The party’s been jumpin’ pretty much around the clock, ever since, thanks to the participation of all sorts of lovely people from all different parts of the world: Australia, Canada, England, the U.S.A., Brazil, Czech Republic, New Zealand, you name it. It’s proving to be a wonderful way to listen to music, spin tracks, lounge and chat in real time with far-flung friends, and friends-in-the-making. I have yet to experience a cozier, or more congenial notional space online.
To give you a sample of the kind of music you’ll hear in the room, check out the Space/Rocket/Cosmos/SciFi playlist. Over the course of 20 hours, the Coilhouse Turntable room’s roster of DJ’s cycled through all things space-related, from Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song” to Bikini Kill’s “Alien She”. Then, we went underwater with an aquatic adventure theme, from “God Walks on the Water” to “Aqua Boogie” to “Wave of Mutilation” (the UK Surf Mix, of course).
Today’s unofficial theme just may be “Birthday Suits”, though it’s Mer’s party and she can change the theme if she wants to.
The party starts in 20 minutes, at 3 PST / 6 EST, and lasts until 6 PST / 9 EST. See you all there!
In the 11-minute clip above, mind a group of over 30 animators and sound artists teamed up to create short pieces between 12 and 20 seconds with the aim to “explore the relationship between geometry and audio in unique ways.”
The result is a series of warped, surreal sound visualizations. Twitching biomechanical amoebae, self-assembling fractal cubes, watery UFOs, motile blinking rubbery art-gallery showpieces,
What happens when this traveling show comes to town? What’s the relationship between the well-dressed lady standing on the stairs and the man beside her? Do those carved gargoyles and angels ever talk? Are people who see this show ever really the same after the see it?
