LostFocus

A weblog by Dominik Schwind

I have nothing to say, really.

Fuck off.

I love the internet.

By Dominik Schwind

Timoni West loves the internet.

State Of The Art Photography (Part Deux)

By Dominik Schwind

Some of you might have wondered, what this here was about.

What did the artiste want to say?

~

I went to see the State Of The Art Photography exhibition at the NRW Forum with a few friends yesterday, enticed by this pretty good photo on the poster:

All things considered, it was pretty disappointing.

There were a few gems – the poster photo by Alex Prager and his other pictures were pretty and the “Pissing Nazis” by Andreas Mühe worked both as good photography and as amusement – but besides that, the whole thing felt extremely mediocre. Give me a week or two and I could find a better selection of photographers that represent contemporary and “state of the art” photography just in my Tumblr feed and on Flickr.

~

In fact, that is pretty much how the whole exhibition seemed to me: someone who followed a few good and a lot of hipstery-mediocre people on Tumblr took the first couple of them, checked their work, printed some of it big and put it in an exhibition.

~

Now, I’m not necessarily dissing1 the NRW Forum or even the exhibition. Sad as it may seem, what is presented there might actually be the current State of the Art.

~

Just to make sure I’m not only bitching, here are some contemporary photographers whose works I enjoy, in no particular order and with just one quick look into my Tumblr and Flickr favorites:

And there are many more.

If you want to be all artsy2, there is one with pictures “taken in Google Street View”: 9 eyes

And hey, if you have iPads in an exhibition, you can always include Cinemagraphs.

To make the thing more contemporary and show the actual current state of photography, one could just as well grab a bunch of pictures with the Hipstamatic or Instagram tag from Flickr. Blown up to A1 size, most of them could at least fake to have some artistic value.3

  1. To say it in the parlance of our times. ↩
  2. And of course you want that. ↩
  3. Which is all that matters, right? ↩

1984 Dakar

By Dominik Schwind

I just watched all 90 minutes of that. Awesome.

Arular

By Dominik Schwind

(Yes, just testing the Spotify button. Also: I like M.I.A.’s older stuff just as much as the music she puts out lately.

Week 14

By Dominik Schwind

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

I took Jan Manuel’s FAgU shot on Monday:

and watched the first episode of the second “Game of Thrones” episode. Obviously I was fascinated.

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

I was pretty amused by the “outrage” that happened because the unwashed Android hordes were invading our hip Instagram lands. (Little did we know…)

And in the evening, it was Knutsens time – via Skype this time.

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

I ate cake but no schnitzel.

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

I ate schnitzel but no cake.

Friday, April 6th, 2012

It was Good Friday. I mostly slept. And watched Community. It was changlorious.

Saturday, April 7th, 2012

I ate Mettwurst and went out for a few drinks with friends.

Sunday, April 8th, 2012

Easter monday. I recovered and posted a tweet about my robots.

0x10c

By Dominik Schwind

Easy nerd test!

If you are excited about this game, you are a nerd.

The people over at Github are most definitely nerds.

ᔥ waxy.org/links

Chair adjustment personnel

By Dominik Schwind

Suddenly I felt my chair move. I looked around. Standing there was the Microsoft chair adjustment personnel, this nice woman who comes over once a month, fiddling with my seat settings to make sure it was posturepedically correct.

From this interview with Peter Molyneux.

An Invocation for Beginnings

By Dominik Schwind

“Only the cheese of accomplishment.”

About those Google Glasses

By Dominik Schwind

ᔥ kottke.org

The New Aesthetic

By Dominik Schwind

I somehow missed this the first time it came around, so here are just a couple of links. Fascinating stuff.

Intangibility and disaffection

By Dominik Schwind

Lately I’ve been thinking about what we, the people of the internet1 are doing.

To be more honest and more precise: I’ve been thinking about what I am doing – both professionally and with my life. My initial plans and ideas, how my life would progress were pretty much spot on for roughly the first 26 to 27 years. That’s not quite the case anymore and for quite a long while now I’ve been circling in a holding pattern.

While this is all nice and relevant to me, it’s not what I want to write about publicly.2

What I’ve been noticing is that we – and by we I mean me – don’t really produce anything tangible. We write code, we write texts, songs, we draw and paint – but in the end it’s all bits and bytes.
I had this epiphany last week when my sister and her boyfriend were visiting me. He’s a printer and of course my actually rather big hill of random stuff I ordered from Moo and MagCloud was something we talked about.

Turns out3 – I like to order some of my stuff printed out because if gives me at least some feeling that I actually created something.

The intangibility of my work and of the stuff I do as hobby projects is growing to be one of the root causes for my constant disaffection. The code I write at work, the code I write at home, my blog posts, my photos, my drawings4, the podcasts – everything basically ceases to exists as soon as I switch off the computer.5

So basically it is nothing. If I die6 and take my passwords with me, nothing will really be left for the world. The stuff I bought over the years and that I want to get rid of, anyway. A couple of printed photos. A bunch of accounts to online services that nobody can close down because nobody knows the passwords. And objectively this is a good thing: the world is already overflowing with crap from the living people, we don’t really need all the stuff from the dead, too. But for a person, it can be pretty disconcerting.

And I am obviously not the only person who feels that way.

Friends of mine who take pictures all the time print them out pretty regularly. When I visit Teymur‘s studio or Jan Manuel‘s home, they have prints of their pictures hanging there. They might have other reasons7 but the effect and the message at least to me is clear: They have their stuff digital, intangible, fleeting, and they’d like to have them in a way that is somehow more substantial.

Other people make real, proper books out of their digital work. Craig Mod compiled the creation of Flipboard for iPhone into a book, Tom Armitage did something similar with his bookmarks a few weeks earlier.

Now where does this leave us? How can we escape the circle of putting work into one endeavor after the other, which might get closed down as soon as it is ready to see the light or sold off or just declared to be done and put somewhere to slowly rot away? How can we create something of actual value that stands the tests of time?8
And if that’s not a possibility, how do we learn to be able to live with it?9

  1. I know. I’ve cringed, too, while writing it. ↩
  2. At least not yet. Sooner or later the over-sharing part of me will take over. You know. The one you all know from Twitter. ↩
  3. Turns out… ↩
  4. And don’t get me started on Draw Something where everything just lasts a few tiny seconds. ↩
  5. I know, not really. And yeah, there’s the phone and backups and whatnot. But for the sake of the argument, all of this is basically like Schrödinger’s cat. Or at least the pop culture version of it: as soon as the computer is switched off, I have no way of knowing whether it exists or even ever existed. ↩
  6. You can see how this post is slowly turning light and happy. ↩
  7. Maybe they really like their own work, which is something I can’t understand that well. Not in their case, theirs is good, but I never really managed to like what I create. But that’s a whole different topic. ↩
  8. Doesn’t have to be a lot of time. But it’s good to see stuff that has some solidity to it. ↩
  9. I know that many people don’t need to learn it. The “Let’s throw stuff at the wall constantly and see what sticks.” mentality is rampant out there. Call it “perpetual beta” or “lean startup pivot” all you like, in the end the result is the same. And sadly enough it’s usually mud or other soil-like substances that are more likely to stick to a wall. Solid stuff tends to fall off. ↩

Week 13

By Dominik Schwind

Monday, March 26th, 2012

Monday, being the start of the week, wasn’t too eventful, at least until the evening. A rather nice, relaxed Tradiotional Asia Dinner happened, this time at Raku Raku.
The food was delicious and the tv at the wall played some Korean version of Top of the Pops.

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

Because of that tv at Raku Raku I was listening to KPop all day long while working. This was not very helpful.
Also this happened:

Nichts sagt “Frühling” wie vier Nerds auf ‘ner Bank.

Nothing says “Spring” like four nerds on a bench.

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

This was probably the most stressful drive home after work ever. There’s always a lot of traffic on my commute and on that day I had to be home in time to take my sister and her boyfriend back to the airport.
I think I aged at least four years that evening.

After I survived that, I taped another episode of the Knutsens with Teymur. We were a day late and given that I just escaped death a couple of times, at least I was giddy and pumped up like a little kid.

Thursday, March 29th, 2012

This was the introvert-day that I wanted – went straight home after work, didn’t switch on any messenger and just caught up with a whole bunch of tv series and noticed that just by the quotable-jokes-per-minute ratio 30 Rock is one of the funniest sitcoms around.

Friday, March 30th, 2012

And this was the beginning of an introvert weekend that I did not particularly want.

Saturday, March 31st, 2012

Yeah, a Saturday. Mostly I watched my washing machine do its thing. Boy, there was a lot of laundry. A LOT.

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

The weather was pretty nice, so unlike Saturday I… who am I kidding? I was staying indoors all day, too. At least if you count the balcony as indoors – I used it for a while to sit in at least a bit of sun while reading.

Twitter personae

By Dominik Schwind

On Twitter I am mostly myself – or only a tiny bit more over-sharing and neurotic than the real me. And I guess most of my followers can at least guess that this is the case.1

I still often censor myself. Following many comedians on Twitter or listening to their podcasts started an urge in me to often tweet extremely offensive and/or personal stuff that does not actually represent me, but would be funny. For people with a certain kind of humor, but still funny.

So I am in a bit of a conundrum, really. Some of my followers are potential future bosses and/or2 romantic interests. And I am not too sure how well this kind of humor would go down with these people. Especially when it does not even go down well with me if I’m not in the mood for raunchy humor.

And now I have no idea what to do with my occacional outbursts of really terrible jokes™ – I’m not really willing to start a second3 twitter account for that. The people I do want to read my “funny” tweets are already following me. Which is pretty surprising in itself.
Maybe I should just post them here instead. It’s not like somebody is reading them here.

  1. While on the other hand I take everything anyone else twitters for face value. Hah. ↩
  2. Not really “and/or.” But who knows. I’d not say no to working under an awesome lady boss. ↩
  3. More like 12th, amiright? High five! ↩

April 1st.

By Dominik Schwind

Ha.

Haha.

Seriously, stop it.

Screenshots of Despair

By Dominik Schwind

I had one example, and there are many more. See also.