directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Cindy Williams, Allen Garfield, Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Robert Duvall, Harrison Ford
“An inner rather than outer-directed film about the threat of electronic surveillance, conceived well before the Watergate affair broke. Acknowledged as the king of the buggers, Hackman’s surveillance expert is an intensely private man. Living alone in a scrupulously anonymous flat, paying functional visits to a mistress who plays no other part in his life, he is himself a machine; and the point Coppola makes is that this very private man only acquires something to be private about through the exercise of his skill as a voyeur. Projecting his own lonely isolation on to a conversation he painstakingly pieces together (mesmerising stuff as he obsessively plays the tapes over and over, adjusting sound levels until words begin to emerge from the crowd noises), he begins to imagine a story of terror and impending tragedy, and feels impelled to try to circumvent it. In a splendidly Hitchcockian denouement, a tragedy duly takes place, but not the one he foresaw; and he is left shattered not only by the realisation that his soul has been exposed, but by the conviction that someone must have planted a bug on him which he simply cannot find. A bleak and devastatingly brilliant film.”
“teamtichenor is a husband and wife team of artists. we harvested these natural objects from the park down the street from our new home. we then dried out the acorns and soaked them in a super saturated solution of crystal growing liquid. the crystal making process takes several days to form, and we never know exactly what we will get. these are fragile homegrown natural objects, they wont last forever but should be enjoyed before they return once again to the earth.”
Get the book, Crystal Morning, here, and the necklaces (awesome) here.
March 29, 2008 at 12:23 PM · Posted under Portfolio
Watson is a light box with two perceivable surfaces. While the first surface is purely luminous, the second surface is one of opacity and ornament, visible only by peering through a polarized loupe. The ornamental elements are designed so that different patterns emerge from their intentional rearrangement. In this way, those "peering" share a dynamic experience that is invisible to the rest of the visitors, who can, however, be brought into the interaction by peering themselves.
special thanks to george nune, michael newton and jim termeer
photography by james prinz
There’s a nice mini article by Jurgen Bey in the July 2007 issue of icon, describing the ideal design school environment.
I would like our studio at the RCA to be like a library of trial and error. The only difference would be that libraries are really well organised. Ours looks like a bit of a mess, but in many ways it’s not. There is stuff all over everyone’s desks and a lot of it looks completely random or useless but it all has a purpose, even if the student is not sure what it is yet. It’s a language of making connections – the language of rubbish.
The nice thing about rubbish is there are no hierarchies – the smallest thing might be just as important as the biggest. So we should cultivate it and develop systems that don’t kill the rubbish world.
March 09, 2008 at 02:43 PM · Posted under Diagrams
I know I’m still a nerd because the minutes that passed between Gary Gygax’s death and the appearance of the first gchat window announcing it to me was slightly less than the time it took me to find out about Heath Ledger. This says a lot, considering that I compensate for lapses in the knowledge of historical pop culture references (having missed out as a child and an adolescent) by being very seriously on top of mainstream celebrity gossip.
I have long sworn that my introduction to computers/text adventure/sierra/d&d at an early age was directly responsible for my discovery of corel draw/photoshop/the internet/web pages which has since led to becoming a designer of the conceptual/auto-didactic ilk. I never thought I was alone in this trajectory, but the article about Gary Gygax’s connection with contemporary electronic culture posted today in the New York Times is uncannily easy to relate to. Be sure to locate yourself on the accompanying diagram (brilliant) by Sam Potts.
