Warren Ellis's Blog, page 28

THREE PANELS OPEN: Greg Borenstein

 

Greg Borenstein is an artist and researcher in New York.

He can be found on Twitter too: @atduskgreg.

THREE PANELS OPEN is an open invitation.  Perhaps you’d like to do one.  A comic that is three panels in duration and 640px wide.  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid. However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  You can email the image towarrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.

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#morning yes i need a power up too

Bookmarks for 2013-02-21

SoundCtrl – Zankme: A New Spin on Digital Download Cards
"Zankme’s digital download card service allows musicians to upload music, videos, or photos and print custom download cards right with real-time customization.  Fans can redeem these cards, while artists can gather information on their fans including email addresses and location, helping them to pinpoint solid target markets for future tour plans."
(tags:marketing )
Time reversal findings may open doors to the future
"Imagine a cell phone charger that recharges your phone remotely without even knowing where it is; a device that targets and destroys tumors, wherever they are in the body; or a security field that can disable electronics, even a listening device hiding in a prosthetic toe, without knowing where it is."
(tags:time timetravel sci tech )

Download Wristbands, or: How To Give Books Away At Parties

Download wristbands.

What’s a download wristband?  Simple: imagine a sleek, customized download card you can wear around your wrist.  Each one comes with a unique code, redeemable on CDBaby.com for a free album or single download. Use download wristbands at your next concert. Instead of stamping wrists or using the venue’s wristbands, you can arrange for the door-person at your next show to put a download wristband on everyone who comes into the venue. Then your fans can take your music home with them after the show.

Now imagine that for digital books, of all kinds.  Imagine handing those out at a launch party or speaking gig or panel appearance or some such, or seeding them at a show or other event or gathering.

Somewhat more interesting and elegant than being given a scrap of paper.  A hell of a lot easier than shipping a few crates of books (especially if you’re a self-publisher or, of course, a digital-only publisher).

There’s something to be said for learning from the awful, twisting spasms of the music industry.

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#morning

Bookmarks for 2013-02-20

Parallel Campaigns | Notes on Metamodernism
"At the same time, Ulrich and Agathe begin their private attempt to live in the utopia of the ‘other state’ which they have designed. The development of the ‘other state’ is based on Ulrich’s study of the writings of mystics and on the idea which he refers to earlier as the ‘sense of possibility’ which implies that everything which exists could just as well be different, and so presents an opposite to the ‘sense of reality’."
(tags:pol alt )
CDC app lets you solve disease outbreaks at home
"The nation's public health agency has released a free app for the iPad called "Solve the Outbreak." It allows users to run through fictional outbreaks and make decisions: Do you quarantine the village? Talk to people who are sick?"
(tags:ios med )

Boiling Spacetime: How Time Works In The Graphic Novel

I’m friends with a futurist named Jamais Cascio, and he had occasion early in 2010 to meet a very eminent scientist and author. As these people do, they got to talking about The Future, and a scenario was described wherein Type III civilisations would have the technology to “boil spacetime,” creating or accessing a new universe for itself or even returning to the beginning of the universe in order to have all of time over again to live in.

Me and all our friends were running around yelling BOILING SPACETIME for several months.

Grant Morrison once described for me – and this is back around 1989 – his experience of discovering, while in the grip of severe entheogenic refreshment, that a comic is an entire spacetime continuum, capable of replay, non-linear access and chronological isolation.

Comics boil spacetime.

This is metatextual gibberish intended to prime your brain for what is next.

Time in comics is completely elastic.

Dialogue can slow down the experiencing of a page. (Frank Miller once said, possibly in EISNER/MILLER, that when he wants to slow the reader down he just starts the characters talking.) But your control of time begins with panelling and space.

Japanese comics read very fast because they have very few panels a page and those panels generally contain little visual information. Occidental comics are often too dense for the Japanese to enjoy. (I was told the same thing by my handlers when I was writing outlines for Japanese animated series.) There’s a thing I love in manga, though: every now and then, you’ll find a panel knocked out to bleed at (say) top, left and right. Leaving the framework of gutter and margins. And it creates a complete stillness, a frozen moment that you live in for a little longer.

There’s a scene in Bryan Talbot’s LUTHER ARKWRIGHT where the protagonist slows down the time perception of a group of men in order to kill them more efficiently. He breaks each page down into a couple of dozen panels, showing movement in staccato increments. The sequence is entirely silent, but because there are so many panels, with actual information in each, you experience the sequence almost as slowly as do the targetted men in the story.

I’ve seen comics that have run two different timestreams on the same page. Recursive comics. Pages containing flashbacks to three different timeframes as well as moving forward in the present while making complete sense. Chris Ware did a famous short comic in RAW that featured several different historical periods in the same room in the same page while maintaining a linear story flow. Kevin Huizenga will turn a suburban stroll into a multi-linear history tour and then tie all the lines back together without losing you for a moment.

The point being: you’re not locked to one minute per page, like a screenplay. You can make time run so fast that the reader thinks that your comic has been injected into their eyeball, or so slow and heavy that the reader feels like you’ve boiled a doorstop novel into some condensed informational substrate.

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