the hijinks of molly & tara

Okay, so you know how there are self-publishing printing-on-demand websites like Lulu, for books? 

Now there’s one for publishing magazines!  All you have to do is upload a PDF, and they’ll print it, ship it, and manage subscribers for you!  for free!

Do you understand what this means?  I am so very excited.  I love video and animation, but I seriously miss publication design so badly.  Just wait.  I will design magazines like there’s no tomorrow and one day you’ll look in your mailbox and say “oh!  why, what is this shiny new thing?”

-Molly

Now that “photoshopping” has become a commonly used term in pop culture vocabulary, even most non-digital artists can spot and laugh at a bad Photoshop job these days. But when the government is behind such an image, it becomes even more amusing and disturbing.

Evidently the Iranian government needs to hire some better photoshoppers… or better yet, STOP FIRING MISSILES. This image was printed on the front page of the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and many others before someone noticed there was a missile too many, and an identical cloud of smoke.

Oh, and did you think that the satellite photos on Google maps were surely sacred? Apparently not, as evidenced by this secret alien landing site in Holland.

It seems like everyone is manipulating reality these days, from shady foreign governments, to bitter relatives removing undesired family members from vacation photos.

Manipulating photographs has been going on long before the advent of Photoshop, but the degree to which people are digitally altered today is unsettling. Sure, as a photoshop artist, it’s very easy for me to change the color of your shirt, remove a few zits, smooth out those wrinkles, trim a few pounds… but should I? Where to draw the line between a few touch ups and a completely fabricated makeover? I would hope that most women understand the degree to which celebrities and supermodels are digitally beautified these days, but I know that’s not the case.

I guess the bottom line is: don’t trust any image you see, and either launch the proper amount of nuclear weapons or just don’t bother launching any at all.

For more about Photoshop topics, see:

the Dove “Evolution” ad, and it’s many parodies

Photoshop Disasters - blog about poorly done and often amusing photoshop jobs

You Suck at Photoshop - very entertaining serialized fictional video blog, masquerading as actually useful Photoshop tutorials

-Molly

Someday.

-Tara

Watching the Olympics last week, I saw a pretty well-made commercial touting a *new* anti-climate-change organization. Through snowballing hyperlinking I stumbled upon their website and joined their mailing list (what’s more do-gooder spam email anyhow? move over, moveon.org!) I was wary at first, figuring their backing came from some evil dirty energy organization or shady government initiative, but they seem more like a coalition of eco-awareness orgs finally united under a well-designed ad campaign…

You should join them, too!

www.wecansolveit.org

The advert:

-Tara

What’s better than a self-important, reflexive-thinking, creative, critical yet mundane, optimistic cyber-voice, you ask? How about two, if I do say so myself? I’m so happy Molly asked me to join this blog, because I’m fairly certain a blog of my own would be even less than half as interesting as this one. If we’re going to be adding to the barrage of solopsistic verbiage on the interwebz, let’s make it a collaborative, (interactive) addition at least, right? Right!

And I promise to post at least semi-regularly. If you want more posts, make more comments!

-Tara

I’ve been thinking about the dichotomy of connectivity, communication, and new media. How “web 2.0″, social networking, cell phones, email, etc are making communication across time and space exponentially faster and easier. And yet, we are often so plugged in that we sometimes don’t take time to interact in real ways with real people around us. I am not arrogantly scolding society, I am often guilty of this too. But I am always trying to think of creative ways to start conversations between strangers, like my 11 Shirts project. Also, this was part of the instigation for my friend Tara to start the Society for the Creative REalization of a Weirder You. This is from our manifesto:

Worried about personal connections in a society of increasing isolation, SCReWY aims to be the antithesis of apathy — to challenge the public to actively engage in changing and exploring reality.

SCReWY manifests interactive interventions by using internet video and new media technologies to connect cyberspace with real space. Orchestrating flash mobs, Happenings, community art, and collaborative performances, SCReWY aims to proactively instigate community expression

There are a million other sub-topics I could take on here: crowdsourcing, social bookmarking, activism on the internet, performance art and the web, and of course… facebook. I have probably done too much critical thinking about facebook for my own good. But these will probably all come up in future blog posts. For a start, see my two videos about Friendship on the internet, and Minifeed: a Story about Facebook.

-

In other news, my SCReWY-cofounder, friend, and long time collaborator Tara will be joining me on this blog! She’s also taking next year off of Hampshire, and she’ll be in London for most of the year, playing with her new baby niece and doing circus things. Hooray for Tara!

-Molly

Sometimes, I silently scold cars that pass me when I’m biking, in a Dave Eggers style imagined conversation.

- You don’t see what I see.

- I am in a hurry.

- The hot air balloons drifting over the cornfields at sunrise…

- I am tired.

- The horses, sheep, cows, winking as you glide by.

- …

- Endless farmland and gracious meadows, rolling green hills. Twisty tall trees, vines hanging down to create a tunnel of green. The birch groves, where, when the early morning sun hits just right, you can very nearly catch sight of where the elves live. On the bridge crossing the Connecticut, squinting a little and tilting your eyebrows just so, the bridge disappears and you are flying into the sunset on your bike, ET style, through the viney green canopies of Never Never Land.

- I am sorry.

- Just think about biking next time.

Also: 20 miles a day X 5 days a week X 10-ish weeks = 1,000 miles! Yeah!

And: Today I got caught in the rain on my way home. It wasn’t so bad at first, the only thing that’s hard about biking in the rain is when my glasses get clouded. But then it started getting really vigorous, and maybe hailing, so I took shelter under a little tunnel because I knew it would pass soon.

After a few minutes, the sun came out, but the rain was still coming down hard core. A rainbow appeared in a perfect arch over the path, lined with trees stretching off into to the horizon, and it was just about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

This is not my image, but I included it just so you could get a general idea. Sometime I’ll take my camera along and document the beauty myself.

- M