Artis­tic Con­so­la­tion - Craig Mul­hol­land, 2004

I’ll update this post with an extended ver­sion of my review for The List, after the issue comes out next week. Since Craig gave me a CD of slides of the show, I couldn’t resist jump­ing the gun by post­ing an image.

Update: And here’s the wee review - I haven’t had a chance to expand on it as promised.

Plas­tic Casino is a dense thing. To simply list the influ­ences and allu­sions Craig Mul­hol­land has drawn together at Sorcha Dallas and in a former sewing fac­tory space would take up most of the cur­rent issue [of The List].

In amongst the paint­ings, sculp­tures, murals and video works, though, there are recur­ring ele­ments that pro­vide a clue to the under­ly­ing struc­ture of the show.

First comes a pair of paint­ings - Grey Ecol­ogy and Cir­cuses & Bread - both depict­ing stubbed out cig­a­rettes. The ash­trays are ren­dered in a know­ingly ham-​fisted pho­to­re­al­ist style, the ash is Cubism-​by-​numbers, and fat Pop out­lines are thrown in for good mea­sure. Then there’s the artists’ palettes, painted over with hints of art his­tory, from Supre­ma­tist geo­met­rics to car­toon­ish speech bub­bles. Finally, an arrange­ment of blocks is reworked, for­mally link­ing dystopian cityscapes seen from above, archi­tec­tural maque­ttes and the agency of the human hand.

Add to that the pre­sen­ta­tion of paint­ings on squat plinths that prac­ti­cally ooze irony, and it begins to look as if Mul­hol­land is stick­ing up two fin­gers in the face of a cen­tury of art his­tory and saying, ‘Hey, Paint­ing! Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!’

There’s much else to think on besides, from nods to the uncon­ven­tional space’s status as a former sweat­shop to a queasy exam­i­na­tion of con­sumerism, but this show is about an artist engag­ing with his influ­ences, mixing allu­sion and cyn­i­cal appropriation.

There’s a fine line between hubris and chutz­pah, and Plas­tic Casino is just on the right side of it.

It’s a neat little util­ity, and pretty - Panic are past mas­ters at making appli­ca­tions that are as easy to use as they are good to look at - but, I thought, an utterly use­less one.

After run­ning it for a week or so, though, I’ve found it pretty handy.

On my 15” screen, the Menu Bar is incred­i­bly clut­tered, what with the built-​in bat­tery status, Air­port signal strength mon­i­tor, clock and script menu; plus third party Menu Bar items, from the Salling Clicker to Audio­scrob­bler to Menu­Me­ters.

Extract­ing some of these semi-​useful bits and bobs to my Desk­top in the form of Stat­too ‘capsules’ turns out to work won­der­fully well. If the Desk­top isn’t hidden by win­dows, I can, for exam­ple, see what’s play­ing in iTunes, or the next three appoint­ments in iCal at a glance; if it is, tap­ping a user-​configurable com­mand key com­bi­na­tion brings Stat­too to the front for a second, before it (very grace­fully) fades away.

Some reviews have iden­ti­fied Stattoo’s main com­pe­ti­tion as Kon­fab­u­la­tor. Panic devel­oper Steven Frank doesn’t see it that way, and I’m inclined to agree. For one thing, Kon­fab­u­la­tor is a frame­work for user-​contributed Wid­gets, which range from simple clocks to daft puzzle games, while Stat­too pro­vides a small selec­tion of gen­uinely useful tools hard-​coded into the appli­ca­tion. For another, Kon­fab­u­la­tor wid­gets tend to be inter­ac­tive - site and web search mod­ules are pop­u­lar - and it feels like an appli­ca­tion, whereas Stat­too simply dis­plays infor­ma­tion, and feels like a part of the OS (which might well be its down­fall - Apple aren’t exactly shy of aping util­i­ties that inte­grate so seam­lessly). Aside from these intrin­sic dif­fer­ences, for me there’s no com­pe­ti­tion, for one reason: on a small screen, Kon­fab­u­la­tor is incred­i­bly intru­sive; even Mini Wid­gets are huge hulk­ing things, and most Wid­gets share a rather OTT dayglo bub­blegum aesthetic.

All that said, Stat­too needs work: some cap­sules just don’t work - the one meant to dis­play recent emails seems to pick old mes­sages at random - and it has a ten­dency to freeze up from time to time. With that in mind, and much as I like this little app, I’m not sure Panic can jus­tify the $12.95 share­ware fee. At least, not with the cur­rent set of cap­sules - if a future, more stable, ver­sion adds a CPU meter, net­work traf­fic mon­i­tor and a dis­play of new mes­sages in Mail that actu­ally works, I’m pretty sure I’d pony up the cash.

For now I’ll take advan­tage of the gen­er­ous unlim­ited free trial. You should too!

Last week my house was struck by light­ning, and, with a rather excit­ing burst of blue electro-​gubbins that made my hair stand on end, my ADSL modem blew up. It was, as far as I know, the worst ADSL modem in the world ever: the dreaded Speed­touch USB sup­plied by BT as part of a sin­is­ter bid to test Mac users in much the same way Our Lord tested Job. So the light­ning strike was a boon.

Not having inter­net access to research the best replace­ment, I nipped to PC World and bought the first ADSL modem and com­bined wire­less router I could find that said Mac OS on the box, a D-Link DSL-G640T.

It is brilliant.

Set up is beyond simple: First, con­nect the box into your ADSL line, switch it on, and fire up Air­port. Then point your browser at its IP address, which gets you a simple web-​based inter­face to enter the user­name and pass­word for your ISP. That’s it.

Or, rather, that should’ve been it. I hit a snag at this point - I could ping the exter­nal IP address of the router, and con­nect to it and the other com­puter on the net­work, but had no joy when it came to access­ing the world out­side. This leads me to the real reason I’m shilling for D-Link: their tech­ni­cal support.

Usu­ally, when I ‘phone tech. sup­port, the person on the end of the line will run scream­ing at the men­tion of OS 10.3.3, even at the men­tion of Mac­in­tosh. Not so my man at D-Link, who, before I had a chance to explain the prob­lem in full, said, ‘OS X? You set it up with Safari, I bet. Try Inter­net Explorer.’ I did. It worked, and we had a brief but illu­mi­nat­ing chat about the short­com­ings of Safari’s javascript engine.

Today (and this is the real real reason I’m shilling for D-Link), I had to ‘phone again, because I was having trou­ble with port for­ward­ing. I serve up a little web­site from my old laptop, for when I’m out of the house, with my todo list, an archive of pieces I’ve writ­ten recently and the latest posts to Submit Response; but since I installed the DSL-G640T, it was nowhere to be seen, replaced by the router’s con­fig­u­ra­tion inter­face. When I called to find out how to fix this, D-Link’s sup­port person pointed out that I was being a bit of a thicko for not real­is­ing I couldn’t access the site from my local net­work by point­ing at the exter­nal IP address (news to me) and offered to check whether the port for­ward­ing was work­ing as intended.

I told him my IP address and, after a brief pause, he said, ‘Why are you mir­ror­ing the Submit Response weblog? Do you read it a lot?’

So there you have it. Who cares if the DSL-G640T is a great, easy to use prod­uct? Who cares if the company’s tech­ni­cal sup­port staff are help­ful and well-​informed? Not me, I just like them for giving my weblog­ging ego a colos­sal boost!

At last, some­thing to fill the gaping void in the comedy sched­ules left by Little Britain: I Am Not An Animal. Writ­ten and directed by Peter Bayn­ham (who has has a hand in almost every­thing funny on the tele­vi­sion since 1995) and voiced by Simon Pegg, Julia Davis and Steve Coogan, it tells the story of a troupe of talk­ing animals.

Bio-​engineered in a sin­is­ter vivi­sec­tion lab, the poor loves are doomed to live a life of loft-​apartment luxury, with Heat mag­a­zine as their cul­tural barom­e­ter and an end­less supply of Chi­anti fuelling dreams of vis­it­ing London. By the close of the open­ing episode, the gang have been freed by bungling animal rights vig­i­lantes, left to find their way in the world.

As you might expect from a long-​standing Chris Morris col­lab­o­ra­tor, the humour veers between sledge­ham­mer bum-​gags - two ‘My poo smells of sugar puffs’ scenes in one episode - and tickly little feather-​duster sub­tleties, as in the tit­u­lar nod to The Ele­phant Man.

The char­ac­ters are won­der­ful, too. There’s Philip, a pompous intel­lec­tual horse, with end­less gad­gets allow­ing him to live the humanoid life. And Mark - my fave - the closet case spar­row with designs on the pop charts and an obses­sion with shoe trees. And a slutty self-​styled femme fatale bull­dog bitch, Winona, who has a crush on ‘the actor Tim Robbins.’

God, it’s just fab­u­lous. View a short clip, right here.

Fes­ti­val founder Sergei Teterin showed selected sub­mis­sions from last year’s fes­ti­val. The best of these was a piece that con­sisted of some simple instruc­tions for set­ting up a default Win­dows screen­saver, which bounces text around the screen. By choos­ing the lowest res­o­lu­tion and largest text size, and set­ting the text to a single full stop, the screen­saver becomes a huge square that tries to bounce around the screen, but is too big to manage more than a few twitches. It doesn’t sound like much but this inven­tive ‘programming’ within the con­straints of the default screen­saver pack­age was neatly matched by the frus­trated, con­strained square on screen. Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t find the sub­mis­sion details on machin​ista.ru, so can’t give credit to the artist(s).

Also of note: IXI’s set of music per­for­mance tools with novel inter­faces. Lauki (screen­shot) is the best of these. It allows you to manip­u­late and trig­ger sam­ples by click­ing and drag­ging coloured boxes around, affect­ing the pitch and timbre of the sounds. Seri­ously addictive.

Last but not least, Sergei showed off his latest piece: Mincer. It’s a table-​top kitchen mincer mod­i­fied to serve as an input device. Wind­ing the mincer’s handle scrolls through images, turn­ing a laptop into a hand-​cranked pro­jec­tor. Fit­tingly enough, Sergei used it to screen excerpts from Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man With A Movie Camera, which promi­nently fea­tures the tit­u­lar bloke furi­ously crank­ing his camera. It went on a bit, to be honest, but the con­cept is an inter­est­ing one.

For those who haven’t been bitten by the Launch­bar bug, the util­ity allows you to launch appli­ca­tions, open files and dis­play con­tact infor­ma­tion from your Address Book, all with a couple of key­strokes. It even learns as you use it, quickly work­ing out what appli­ca­tion you want when you type a couple of let­ters, with an effi­ciency that is almost creepy.

Now, there’s com­pe­ti­tion in the form of Quick­sil­ver, a free appli­ca­tion that works in the same way as Launch­bar, but with greater flex­i­bil­ity, more fea­tures and a choice of dis­play options.

At first glance, this makes Quick­sil­ver seem unwieldy in com­par­i­son to the ele­gant sim­plic­ity of Launch­bar, which you can use out of the box, intu­itively. After a few days use, and a bit of tweak­ing, I think I’ll be pimp­ing the new kid on the block from now on.

Here, in no par­tic­u­lar order, are a few rea­sons why:

• iTunes inte­gra­tion

  This is just amaz­ing. Whack the com­mand key com­bi­na­tion you have set to invoke Quick­sil­ver, type browse or itunes and up pops a list­ing of all your iTunes playlists. You can then browse them by typing ini­tial let­ters, and hit return when you find a playlist you want to play, or move down a level to look for a par­tic­u­lar song. That sounds a little com­pli­cated writ­ten out, but in prac­tice, it means you can be play­ing a song within a split second. (The same applies to iPhoto Libraries too, if you use that to manage your photographs.)

• Window, Menu and Bezel views

  You can choose from three dis­play modes for Quick­sil­ver. The Window option is default, but makes the app feel more of a stand­alone thing, lack­ing the tightly inte­grated feel of the other options. For now, I’ve been switch­ing between Menu, which layers the Quick­sil­ver inter­face over your Menu Bar - a nice, neat option for those of us lack­ing screen space - and Bezel view. I’m lean­ing towards the latter, which is not unlike the cen­tered pop-​ups you see when chang­ing volume or bright­ness set­tings, or Liteswitch X’s inter­face for tab­bing through open appli­ca­tions. (Although the fact that many icons end up look­ing ugly and pixel­lated is putting me off a little)

• Clip­board Viewer, the Shelf, and Finder replace­ment

  Hit your Quick­sil­ver com­mand key com­bi­na­tion, then Command-L and you get a view of the last ten items you copied to the Clip­board. I don’t need to explain how handy this can be. The Shelf is a fea­ture I haven’t used much, because the slick­ness of the basic fea­tures almost render it unnec­es­sary, but with Quick­sil­ver run­ning, tap Option-Command-S and you get a little place to keep stuff: just drag what­ever you like there - files, fold­ers, apps, con­tacts - for easy retrieval. Lastly, I hate using the Track­pad on my laptop, and there’s no room on my messy desk for a mouse, so I like to do every­thing from the key­board. Quick­sil­ver makes brows­ing the Finder as quick as nav­i­gat­ing from the com­mand line, but with all the advan­tages of graph­i­cal cues. You can, say, type a for­ward slash to start brows­ing from the top level, and find what you’re after by typing ini­tial let­ters, or using the arrow keys, very quickly indeed.

• Launch­ing URLs

  I can’t quite put my finger on this, but I quickly dis­abled URL launch­ing in Launch­bar, find­ing that the thou­sands of book­marks avail­able clut­tered up results. With Quick­sil­ver, and its little window dis­play­ing lists of choices, find­ing what you’re after is an easier propo­si­tion, and it seems to learn more quickly than Launch­bar, fig­ur­ing out imme­di­ately that when I type s I want to launch Safari, and when I type sr, it’s this web­site I’m after. A subtle dif­fer­ence, maybe, but one of sev­eral deft touches that are per­suad­ing me to switch.

• It’s cute!

  When I invoke Quick­sil­ver, and type the first couple of let­ters of a friend’s name, up pops their pho­to­graph from Address Book. With a click or two of the right arrow key, I can launch their home­page, send them an email, or dis­play their ‘phone num­bers. It’s not more func­tional than Launch­bar, but it’s a nice little touch, and shows the atten­tion to detail the devel­op­ers have put into main­tain­ing the famil­iar look and feel of OS X.

So - and it almost pains me to say this - Quick­sil­ver is the new essen­tial OS X launch­ing util­ity, and Launch­bar is unlikely to keep its place among my Startup Items. I should say at this point that com­par­ing the two is, per­haps, unfair: Launch­bar is still the better simple launcher, but the extra fea­tures of Quick­sil­ver just about make up for the fact that the learn­ing curve is a couple of degrees steeper. And, where Launch­bar is as stable as can be, there are still a few bugs in the Quick­sil­ver beta, not least the annoy­ing window lay­er­ing quirks when using the Clip­board Viewer or Shelf.

The fact that it’s free and soon-​to-​be open source is not a clincher for me, as it might be for some. But, that said, having replaced Pho­to­shop with the Gimp and installed OpenOf­fice in place of Word some time ago, if I now ditch Launch­bar I’m fairly sure my com­puter will be com­pletely free of com­mer­cial soft­ware and share­ware, either stolen or paid for; exclu­sively run­ning bun­dled Apple appli­ca­tions, free­ware, dona­tion­ware and open source soft­ware instead.

Even for some­one who isn’t a raving open source evan­ge­list, this feels pretty good. The open source under­pin­nings of OS X aren’t just a boon in terms of making for a vastly improved oper­at­ing system. They allow those of us too fond of shiny, pretty things to move com­pletely to an open source plat­form - how­ever much we know it is, polit­i­cally, the right thing to do - a chance to claw back all the cash those cap­i­tal­ist pig-​dogs at Apple grub out of their users for hard­ware and soft­ware upgrades. Which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, A Good Thing.

Update: In a timely fash­ion, Quick­sil­ver now has pre­lim­i­nary doc­u­men­ta­tion, which reveals that it’s even more sophis­ti­cated than I thought, includ­ing fea­tures allow­ing you to move files around, manip­u­late them, even com­press them. Wow.

First, Nudge is a Con­tex­tual Menu that lets you give the Finder a kick up the arse when you sus­pect it’s dis­play­ing out of date infor­ma­tion. Handy.

Next, Ecto, the appli­ca­tion for­merly known as Kung-​Log, has reached ver­sion 1.0. It’s a desk­top weblog­ging client with some neat fea­tures, includ­ing full pre­view­ing of draft posts, inte­gra­tion with Address Book for man­ag­ing noti­fi­ca­tion lists and sup­port for every­thing but the kitchen sink when it comes to remotely con­trol­ling a Mov­able Type instal­la­tion. As I type this post in Ecto, I don’t think it’s worth a tenner, but by the end of the two-​week trial I sus­pect I’ll be rely­ing on it.

Finally, there’s Unison, a slick Usenet reader from Panic, the makers of Trans­mit, the fab­u­lous FTP client. With four brows­ing options (one each for view­ing mes­sages, files, images and music), stream­ing MP3 pre­views and a light­en­ing quick search it makes wading through the vast Usenet archives a doddle.

One does wonder where devel­op­ers get the names for their prod­ucts - ecto is Glas­g­we­gian slang for those little pills so pop­u­lar in the dis­cote­ques, and it’s hard not to think of the public ser­vice union when double-​clicking on Unison.