Gism Butter

Stumbled up it in this Craigslist listing. Yikes. Forced smile and all, thanks to Mr. Jimmy Nguyen.

Hands down winner, best YTMND Evar!

It should be noted for the record that “Predator” is the only non-documentary movie that features two United States governors. Jesse the Body Ventura, and Arnold the Nubbin’ Schwarzenegger. Also, I don’t know how I should feel about the fact that my dictionary knows how to spell Schwarzenegger.

A trip to the SF Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) this past Friday gave me a chance to finally enter that big freezer installation they put in a few months back. The top floor is dedicated to Olafur Eliasson’s work with space, light, and geometric forms. I find his work can typically be described by my favorite adjectives: simple and deep. A particular favorite of mine was the room where the elevators emptied into the top floor, and a half dozen sickly orange flourescent lights had been installed. The effect was overwhelming and striking: everything came out orange, and the light dried up your eyes.

But the refrigerated piece on the second floor is what sent V, myself and her brother Q reeling with philosophical discussion. In the end, I had to agree that it was, in fact, art. But I still feel somewhat polluted by the piece.

Said piece is “Your Mobile Expectations” and the whole overblown sheebang was sponsored by BMW. Now, traditionally, art does not have to offer function. Art is something new, something expressive, something never before done or seen. By those definitions, Your Mobile Expectations is certainly art.

But I feel that the piece is bad art. Very bad art. I don’t see anything in it that holds merit. Eliasson is an accomplished artist, no doubt, but the ice sculpture shown at the SF MOMA does nothing for me. I wouldn’t have liked it much if I hadn’t read all the stuff written on the walls outside the freezer. But after I read all of that, I downright hated the piece.

It all began when BMW gave Eliasson the chasis for one of its hydrogen powered super cars. Eliasson was asked to make art out of it. So he made a serated half-football, and covered it in icicles. In effect, it’s a big fat BMW ad. I understand Eliasson has to make a living, and that his ice art isn’t easy to work with, display or create outside of his native Iceland.

But the SF MOMA owes use a better piece of ice art. Eliasson’s cost are considerable for materials and the facilities for display, but to offset them with the BMW cash, for me, removes all the artistic value for the piece. Constraints on art are like standards for feces.

Especially if those constraints are around a product or a brand. Warhol’s soup cans would have had no meaning beyond advertising if the Campbell’s people had commissioned the works. Two galleries over, there is a Dali sculpture built around a red shoe. I’d have poo-poo’ed it if Dali’d been paid to make it. Likewise, the advertisements Dali did make are certainly wonderful to look at and wild to watch, but I think they’re some of his worst work, from a quality standpoint.

A well done video to illustrate some complicated geometric principles.

Observe: Arnold Speaks.

We always knew the market would be phenomenal. In the dozens of years since videogames were created, all us true believers have known that the world would change dramatically because of them. And here we are in 2007, with US $1.1 billion in game sales in October alone. This according to NPD’s gone-then-back-again numbers. That’s a year over year increase of 73 percent. Makes me want to laugh at the graphic shown above.

For the record, I think this graphic above is waaaaaaay conservative. I’d expect all of these numbers to be doubled by 2015. With interactive hardware obviously being the direction for the future–thanks to maxed out graphics capabilities and multi-thousand-man development teams– the industry will soon enter a period where significantly transcendent experiences will emerge and become the singular point of reference for all Americans. This type of thing occurred with the movies, back in the 20’s. Television in the 60’s and 70’s. Movies again in the 80’s.

It’s happened already in India with the Bollywood film industry. Imagine if there were some interactive experience where kids and adults went and played something like Vishnu’s World of Warcraft. Market potential, billable on hours-usage at cybercafes could make such a game the biggest ever.

Highly targeted cultural gaming will eventually emerge. It’s happened in America with Super Mario Brothers, though in my mind, that’s the prototype experience. I have no idea what form such a movie-replacing-game would take, but off-hand, I could imagine something like a battle-tech system with fully trickedut cockpits, billed at $3 an hour to play, only playable in that place. Or a simulated Dojo, where your opponents are projected on the walls in front of you and around you, and you perform fighting moves to best them. Best played with a bunch of friends in a karaoke-box type setting. Beer and pizza too.

Think Karaoke. Think Rock Band boothes at the mall where all the gear is availble to use. Or a massive exploratory dinner/murder mystery experience: everyone shows up, eats dinner, then they’re handed shotguns and told the zombies are climbing through the front windows. I’d certainly pay $20 to spend an hour in Zombie nightmare, provided the fake shotgun makes big booms and kicks like a mule.

Immersion. There’s sooooo much more coming, folks. We can’t even imagine the wild types of games we’ll be playing in 10 years.

I had no idea you could rig a Tesla coil to make music. But evidently, you can!

Hadn’t been over to YTMND in a long time, and to my pleasant surprise, the site has a great selection of new YTMND’s this week. I suppose I would be remiss, at this late hour, to not explain what a YTMND is. Essentially, it’s a coupling of moving pictures combined with humorous sounds. Originally, this little Internet fad was all about catch phrases, such as Sean Connery’s famous line in Finding Forrester: “You’re the Man Now Dog!”

Basically, each one is a joke, usually building on other jokes. It’s collaborative humor building. Though sometimes they can be sombre, such as the anti-Scientology stuff and ^_^.

This week, at the top of the popularity charts is the Shaq Zone. Notice that the balls are moving between Shaqs! This YTMND comes from the amazing blue ball machine (A must see!), which came from the Something Awful Goons.

Another good one I saw today was Rhino Massage.. Then there’s this ancient relic: How many megs of RAM Carmine? Finally, there is the epic Bumble Dean.

In a thrilling tribute to automation of content generation, Scott’s set up an RSS-based blog, which I assume, is made up of his daily routine sites. I’m flattered to see that this very blog is tied up in the roll. Cheer Laughing Squid, and here’s to the wonders of RSS and Google.