Vol 2 Issue 7
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Vol 2 Issue 7 |
An artist I stumbled upon
Kyle Mcdonald
He’s an artist who works with code. He uses the latest technology to create art that makes you laugh first to cover your discomfort, pause and then think.
I stumbled upon his work when I discovered the Apocalypse Early Warning System.
The premise of this ‘art’ is simple: About 20 minutes before the planet is about to go ‘Kaboom’ the filthy rich will pile into their private jets and fly away from the cities.
Kyle built a site that tracks these private jets in real time using publicly available data. If they are all parked in their hangars, we will all get to live another day. If most of them are in the air and flying away from cities, then it’s time to start praying.
Unless you have a private jet.
Some of his other work:
MyEpstein - An app and browser extension that checks whether people in your contact list appear in the publicly released Epstein files.
WhoPaysArtists- A place where artists can share stories about what they've been paid for, and by whom.
Check out the Early Warning System here
See more of his work here
An interesting article I read
The Bollywood Struggler
I woke up one morning wondering why, of all the cities in India, Bombay became its filmmaking capital.
My idle quest led me to a few articles that were mere speculation. The gist: The clothing mills and the port meant there were a lot of successful businessmen with money to invest in producing films. It also meant there were a lot of workers and labourers with money to spend on movie tickets.
I was about to give up when I landed on this article by Debashree Mukherjee. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University.
It focused on one aspect of Bollywood I had never really thought about: The Struggler.
“A critical experience of the film struggle is the practice of waiting. The Struggler shows us that waiting is not passivity; it is a specific kind of labour. The struggler waits for phone calls to be returned and for agents to bring good news. Meanwhile, she continues with other activities that prepare the ground for the future—taking better portraits for the portfolio, submitting CVs, exercising and training, doing the rounds of studios, and networking. Waiting, therefore, is an engaged mode of being in the world, constantly alert and ready for a different life.”
It reads a little pedantic, but she traces the industry's history and the struggler’s evolution beautifully. I also found the Missing Ads in the newspapers hilarious and sad at the same time.
After reading the article I realise that I identify as a Struggler :-)
Doing something everyday but constantly waiting for a signal that something better is about to happen.
Read the article here
A game I play often
Time by Dialed.gg
One of the Humans in the Loop put me on to this game.
Dialed is a web-based gaming site developed by a father and son. The site has multiple games, but each one has the same premise: it shows you something—a patch of colour, a sound, a shape—then asks you to recreate it from memory.
It then shows you the results side by side.
My favourite game is Time.
That’s it for this issue of Human in the Loop.
If you know the answer to why Bombay became the home to Bollywood let me know in the comments.
If any of the ideas in this issue remind you of something you have read please share it with me.