Maxistentialism

The Rachel’s Wave, 2011 by Matthew Cusick. Inlaid maps and acrylic on panel.

Floor by Do Ho Suh, 1997-2000:

Glass plates rest on thousands of multicolored miniature plastic figures who are crowded together with their heads and arms turned skyward. Together, they are holding the weight of the individual visitor who steps onto the floor.

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In my new apartment, there’s this central wall that’s clearly meant to hold a TV, and is the center of attention for the whole room. I don’t have a TV, and my bookshelf doesn’t fit on that wall, so I’ve been looking for something special to put there.

A few weeks ago, I was browsing the Shawnimals website and I found probably the most delightful thing I have ever seen, the Sack O’ Lumps. Each lump is made from the scrap fabric of Shawnimals’ Wee Ninjas and Moustachios, and each one has a unique face and body shape.

Shawn and Jen made me 100 custom Lumps for my apartment, and yesterday, I visited Shawnimals HQ to pick them up and then set them up in my apartment. What do you think?

“When you see those videos of triathletes that are finishing a race, but they’re a meter away from the finish line, and their body just shuts down and they shit their pants and vomit and they need that space blanket that they use on the shuttle to warm their bodies because their bodies are just shutting down? That’s how it felt like.”

Phil Fish on finishing Fez

Charybdis by WIlliam Pye

These glorious Mike Mitchell prints are mine now. You can get your own at Gallery1988.

A few weeks ago, I got frustrated working on a piece of pixel art in Photoshop. Photoshop has a lot of shortcomings when it comes to pixel-sensitive detail work; you have to customize all kinds of settings for snapping behavior, image interpolation, and grid size and repurpose tools designed for photo manipulation.

I reached out to my favorite working pixel artists, Neven Mrgan, David Lanham, Pranav Pramod, and Shaun Inman to ask what tools they use, and to my surprise, I heard back from all of them.

A summary of responses:

Almost everyone uses Photoshop but dislikes the experience. To quote Neven Mrgan, “There is, sadly, no other good option.”
People develop hacks and workarounds to make Photoshop accomodate fine pixel work. For example, Neven leaves his image interpolation setting on “nearest neighbor,” and uses the anti-alias checkbox in the transform options when needed.
Daniel Bogan (who arguably knows more about people’s stacks than anyone else on the internet) and Pranav Pramod mentioned Pixen, but Neven warned that Pixen has a bug that causes colors to shift around when you save, and recommended against it.

I also got a response from a developer named Cadin Batrack who showed me a beta of his pixel editor, Pickle. Pickle, now at v1.0, is a great tool for working on games - creating a new image sets up a tile, animation, or terrain (in the Flixel format) file for you. Pickle is dead simple to use, but it’s missing a few features that prevent me from using it instead of Photoshop (I’d like the option to work on a non-repeating canvas, and support for multiple layers). Pickle suffers from none of the color-shifting issues that affect Pixen, and I’d recommend it for creating simple game assets quickly and painlessly.

Personally, I’m kind of a fan of a web app called Piq (pictured). It’s sloppy, but it strikes the right balance between simplicity and features, and has a relatively intuitive UI. It even has a few handy and unexpected features that I use all the time: horizontal and vertical symmetry, and the ability to change the size of the grid on the fly.

I think there’s still a need for a great pixel editor, and the market is wide open. If anyone has a solution for working with pixel art that I didn’t mention here (or has a project they want me to check out), let me know.

EDIT: David Cole (!) adds, “Awesome post. Piq has some rad features (Only draw on blank canvas, Isometry mode). I use PS as I rely heavily on Smart Objects.”

36 Copyrighted Suns by Penelope Umbrico

“hear” by Daniel Danger

My submission for Chuck Anderson’s Imaginary Image Blog:

Imaginary Art Installation

The Museum of Contemporary Art sells me a 5’x5’ square of gallery space. I declare the space a sovereign nation and announce this with a full-page ad in the New York Times. Every week that I am not annexed by the United States government, I institute increasingly progressive financial policies, like a repeal of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and a tax on all trades of stocks and bonds.

Total cost: ~$100,000, plus inevitable legal fees.

250 men & women asked to draw how emotions felt in their bodies (via nickd).

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Geometry and probability by Anatolii Timofeevich Fomenko

“The image symbolizes the close relationship of geometry and probability theory in the field of stochasticity.”

Wired:

“Host” shows life from the perspective of an insect. The viewer is invited to join an audience of 200 live crickets (in little jars suspended on sticks) who are attending a scientific lecture on the sex life of insects. One screen shows a heavily pixelated talking-head and the other shows an image of an oscilloscope signal with a crackling soundtrack. This is a direct recording of the electrical activity in the aural nerve centre of a cricket listening to the sex lecture. The artist is Nigel Helyer.

Wired:

Blood Wars is an art-science installation that will pit white blood cells from two different people against each other in a “tournament” that aims to see which person has the strongest immune system. […]

In order to create the blood duel, [artist Kathy High] gets a phlebotomist to take blood samples from two different people. She then separates the white blood cells from the rest of the blood and stains them using different colours. They are then placed in a Petri dish and their interactions are filmed under a microscope using time-lapse microscopy. The cellular “winner” of each round will go onto fight another participant.

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