Space

To celebrate the success of the PlayTime event and continue Tim Wright’s mission to play golf on the moon (with David Bowie), XPT is offering a iPod Shuffle to the person who comes up with the best photographic simulation of a particular aspect of the the 30-year plan. By concretising events and situations in a series of manipulated images, we are making the whole project more real, more achievable. Simulation=Solution.

A few weeks on, I’m finally getting around to uploading my slides from my PlayTime presentation, Playing with Pictures (it’s a 20MB+ PDF file, exported from Keynote). I was intending to annotate these so that they’d make more sense to someone who weren’t at my session, but I’m not sure when, if ever, I’ll do this. This gist of it however was this: Photo manipulation has always had a bit of a bad name, and even today we’re still worried that adding, removing or modifying parts of a photographic image detract from photography’s perceived ability to show us the truth.

45 Years ago today, on April 12th 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space. On the same day, 25 years ago, John Young and Robert Crippen flew the first Space Shuttle flight to orbit. Today we celebrate!

About the only good thing to result from the theft of my bag just before Christmas was replacing my ageing original 1G iPod with a sleek new black 5G video iPod (whoever thought that glossy white ‘iBook’ look was a good idea?). Actually that’s not strictly true: I’ve effectively ‘upgraded’ many of my closest and most familiar possessions at the cost of many hours cancelling credit cards, talking to insurers and replacing missing Christmas gifts.