The Null Device

2002/8/15

You have probably seen Escher's Print Gallery; the drawing showing a viewer looking at a picture in a gallery, and the picture encompassing the entire scene. Some mathematicians at Universiteit Leiden have analysed this picture, "straightening" it out using specially written software, making a straight recursive picture (known to the Dutch as a "Droste picture", after recursively-designed cocoa packets in the Netherlands) of the Maltese cityscape in the picture, and using that to make other things, from doubly recursive versions of Print Gallery to doovy-looking animations which zoom in infinitely (when looped). (via Found)

0

How to make dub. Righteous! Mind you, some of the sound ideas apply equally well to other sorts of studio-based experimentation and What Is Music-esque weirdness.

Open a digital watch and take out the watch module including battery and display. Connect a two phase cable to the microphone connector of a tape deck. Then pierce a needle through each phase of the cable at its other end. Press the Record button on the tape recorder and set the counter to zero. Now you can start touching signal lines on the watch module with your two needles. You should be able to hear some pretty interesting oscillations. Write down the counter value when you hear something interresting and sample it afterwards (I tried this as a twelve year old with my first digital watch after the display broke. I was very amazed by the sounds I heard - But unfortunately forgot to record..)

(via The Fix)

dub howto music 0

Stencil bombing isn't just for south-of-the-Yarra commercialists. The following piece of political commentary was found in a car park in Fitzroy:

likeness of John Howard in a Confederate flag

john howard melbourne politics stencil art 0

An article on stencil bombing; the use of illicit spray-painting (with smoothly designed stencils) as an underground advertising tool; predominantly by trendy T-shirt labels in Prahran (you know, the ones that sell $80 T-shirts where the logo accounts for $79.50 of the price).

Tim Everist, who runs a Prahran-based T-shirt label called Schwipe, says "stencil bombing was effective and underground in the '90's, but then all the big companies started using this form of advertising".

guerilla marketing marketing stencil art 6

Toho, owners of the Godzilla trademark, threaten the DaveZilla weblog with legal action for alleged trademark infringement. Not a very solid case, but some suspect their strategy is to score an easy victory to establish a precedent and go after things like Mozilla. Anyway, in the spirit of solidarity against legalistic thuggery, this blog is temporarily renamed to NullZilla.

8

A Brazilian tortoise which lost the use of a leg after being hit by a stray bullet has been fitted with a pair of wheels, and is now happily rolling around. (via 1.0)

bionics bizarre prosthesis tortoises 3