MASS EFFECT

I bought a book the other day: "The Art of Mass Effect." As this is one of my top 5 games and a very real influence on The Assemblage, I thought I would put piclens to work and find some concept art that will help us paint our future world.



I should probably take a drawing class.

Gundams

Are awesome, I need to learn how to draw them. So many works have ripped off the idea: the matrix, power rangers, lego watever-the-hell -things. Large bipedal suits piloted by a human inside... Hell yes. Ultimate coolest thing possible. While these more traditional robo-heroes are interesting and WILL be featured in The Assemblage (USA) our main characters should be more believable (hah!). But I posit: if you had the technology to pull off a gundam, wouldn't human/mecha hybrid units be the way to go? Throw in some human-flesh-replacing nanobots for realism's sake and you have the idea behind our (three) heros: the gray border between man and machine, the chaos that emerges from synergy. Yes it has been done to death, everything has.

Why not? Robots are awesome.

I pulled this image off of deviantart, couldn't find a source to site. He's (she's?) just an idea, a marker in the direction that we need to go.

Oh and this is a gundam:

word.

alessonislearned

A Lesson is Learned has picked up its game recently. The strip started out mildly, but has developed into something pretty cool (Note: sticking to something pays off!). Jagged graphics, powerful coloring and carefully placed panels create an incredibly affective media:

The emotions that David Hellman and Dale Beran play with are powerful, they produce the most moving web-based single page graphic works I have ever encountered. It's fantastic. This particular comic's use of color to highlight moments in both time and emotion is pretty impressive; fight scenes in The Assemblage could use this tactic to highlight the three combatants' perspectives (view screens?).

Yes, our creative work has been titled "The Assemblage" and yes, we are going to try and throw in as much Mille Plateaux as possible. There will be fighting. A lot of it.

Anyway, Hellman/Beran started out pretty slow:
Picked up speed / learned about perspective blending and placement:
And now have a wonderfully developed style of their own. I would consider these guys (along with DresdenCodak) some of the greatest webcomic artists working today. Their creations indulge our senses visually and play with us emotionally at the same time. It's really the same effect, one brings about the other:
What if I Joomlaed their use of color in text bubbles/panels into my own stuff? Aren't they just copying Marvel (Deadpool does the same thing, or did for awhile). Opinions?

Photoshop

Apparently take more than a day to learn how to use. I also don't understand coda, or CSS. My Joomla page is a joke. We will be using this website until further notice. God damnit.

XKCD love

Our boy Munroe is getting some attention in the New York Times today, check out the article, they do him some service, but focus a bit too much (for my liking) on the programming aspects of his work. Yeah yeah, that's his shtick, but there is a deeper communication going on underneath the Unix jargon. So yeah check it out, and also take a look at these rad photos from Mars picked up by our buddy Pheonix.

www.doctorcosmos.com

So I am the official web editor for two different organizations... but I don't have my own site. So i went and bought doctorcosmos.com and prepared to make it a kickin version on this site with room for creative works to be posted along with more detailed message boards, etc.

Then I remembered that I do not know how to code. And I despaired.
then I remembered content management systems, which allow you to pull in components from other sites and put together a professional-grade site piecemeal.

I loaded Joomla onto the site, and that took over my life for awhile. Needed a program to upload/ edit/explain code: coda. Needed a really expensive way to edit images: photoshop. I wrote an essay on Joomla and the ways in which it effects authorship and creativity on the internet, heres an excerpt:

"Automating the tedious processes involved is not always a great idea, however. Van Gough was a “master” because he started with a blank canvas and created everything himself. Further abstraction and automation, while making user interaction easier and inciting communicative progression, further hides the discrete binary code (the actual happenings of the computer) from human understanding. Many users, myself included, will now be able to write professional-grade websites by looking up the few lines of necessary code. We will be able to understand what the CSS and HTML are doing, but only so far as it affects the finished product. Any questions or concerns can be submitted to the Joomla! community; with enough time and research most projects can be completed without any "mastery". Digital literacy is expanding, but the works are largely plagiarized. It will be up to the next generation of truly literate web designers to push coding methods to the next plateau. Once they have, it will be their responsibility to teach the rest of us how to copy/paste their work."

So I can't really take credit for it's creative design, but feel free to visit "my" site www.doctorcosmos.com. I guess I'll transfer all of these articles over there. Then again, I kindof like this layout better. It's standardized, simple and clean. But hey, gotta get that internet street-cred up with my own domain name you know?

What do you guys think, which layout is better!?!?! OMG INTERACTIVITY.

Dresden Codak

My favorite web comic site. Hands down. But only because I am so lame. Which is awesome.

Continental philosophy + futurism + robot ethics + geek culture/video games + anthropology / sociology + THE MOST BEAUTIFUL COMIC LAYOUT ON THE INTERNET = Dresden Codak.


Notice how the frames seem to blend together? Aaron Diaz (Dresden is a pseudonym) plays games with the viewer's gaze by taking advantage of perspective, suggestion, and the blank space between panels. The blank space?! Yes, the reader's mind fills in the gaps between one panel and the next. Set up a good beginning and a good end, and the middle is filled by imagery perhaps more powerful than that found in novels. Not convinced? Let's see what McCloud has to say about this one, as well as more examples of how layout can affect the reader.





By plotting out graphic sequences with care, Diaz leads the reader to create their own "closure" on a epic scale. The art is soft and detailed, allowing the eye to feast as it is subtly guided through the panels. Go here for more examples of Diaz's work.

Ray Kurzweil shout-outs aside, I am also a fan of Dresden's cast, which features "tiny carl jung" as a reoccurring character : "One of the fathers of modern tiny psychology. Famous for the development of tiny dream analysis, as well as the concepts of the tiny shadow half, tiny archetype, and tiny collective unconscious." (All of the other characters are Myers-Briggs labeled of course).

Diaz knows what he's doing. He's a genius. You know that something is worth reading when it constantly inspires readers to wikipedia niche philosophers. Every comic takes 1.5-3 weeks to come out; the quality shows, and you have to respect the guy for resisting the usual format of (consumerism-driven) tri-weekly updates. I'll leave you with something beautiful: