Nikio

I renamed my compact flash cards after great thinkers of our history. With time (and new cards) other names will follow; Dante, Leonardo, Euler, van Gogh...

Bolt - Entertaining.
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People - Less entertaining, but still OK.
The Oxford Murders - Quite entertaining. I never miss a chance to see an Elijah Wood movie (except LOTR).
Valkyrie - Tom Cruise as a German? Not really...
Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder - Better than previous two.
Slumdog Millionaire - OK cool, but a bit too much hype on this one
Passchendaele - Caroline Dhavernas made such a superb performance that even Paul Gross' unconvincing acing (to say the least) couldn't spoil.
The Day the Earth Stood Still - Not nearely as bad as one might think. Of course this kind of movies have more holes in their plot than Swiss cheese, but we are not watching them for the sake of dramatic consistency, are we? It is just fun to watch some fireworks from time to time, right?
Caprica - Pilot - Wow! A bit less mystical than Battlestar Galactica, but definitely GREAT!
Cry of the Owl - Just couldnt watch more than 35 minutes of it... Despite Caroline Dhavernas. :S
Transformers - Dunno... kinda fun to watch! If you don't expect much more than action eye-candy from Michael Bay movies, you'll get a fun ride!
Impact - It is not that I watch this kind of stuff for the sake of realism, but this was a bit too much anyway.
The Young Victoria - Enjoyable, especially from the cinematic point of view.
Push - This movie tries badly to look artistic, and it almost makes it... It has Asian environment, high-grain shots, hand shots, low saturation shots... But it also fails on many levels; like predictable script, ending battle, a bit stupid dialogues...

Kornati Trekking from Nikio on Vimeo.

You can enjoy it in 720p HDTV!

People tend to assert certain names to certain things and find relations among them. Usually we call those names categories. For example; you may have heard of classical music, rap, pop, rock... or landscape photography, portraiture, fashion, sports... or parts of the brain like cortex, cerebellum, thalamus...

This is all OK, but the problem is, that most of the people take those categories too seriously or too literally. There is no distinct border between classical or rock music because those two categories of the same category of art (again, category) share many similarities and even common grounds. Of course, they have some differences, but where would you draw the line??? These labels are here not because they would represent some real categories, they are here just to help us communicate and they serve well as long as we keep in mind that things are a lot more organic and complex in reality.

The same goes for every other kind of category; categories in art, categories in tools even categories in different types of personalities, modes of thinking, creativity processes and so on!

Even experts (especially psychologists have this tendency) like to have things sorted out in drawers; keep a name for every thing that occurs. But the life is complex and organic; people can't just fit in a drawer because much like rock and classical music, there is no distinct line between musical or graphical kind of creativity. Again; these words are here just to help us understand each other and do not represent real (=physical) differences in direct and literal terms as many would have liked. This would have given a lot of consolation for many who would like to think that they have figured the world out. But they haven't. In fact they are often using fancy words to cover up their infantile understanding.



Perhaps it has to do with survival; people who have their experiences sorted out are in better position to survive (tigers are dangerous, olives are good, apples are healthy...), but in modern society we should know better than that. We should understand that the underlying nature of the world is a lot more astonishing than we could even begin to understand and that the words we come up with to describe it may represent only a selected few of its surface properties.

So yes; use "categories" but only to the extent where you are still aware of the fact that this are just words, made up by humans and do not necessarily reflect the actual nature of things.


Image by striatic

For the last two months I have been visiting Idrija on saturdays to teach perspective drawing and some basic graphic at their highschool. I must admit it was (and still is) a wonderful experience. People are very nice and the town is beautiful. Today I decided to stay a bit and hang around for there was some kind of eco-event going on (promoting recycling, green energy...) with demonstration of dog education program.



More photos


PS: Im working on an uncalibrated monitor, so...

There are 4 main levels on which you can master navigation in your city.

1. BEGINNER: By foot
The easiest way to go around your city is by foot. It is also the easiest way to remember the space, buildings, sites and connections among it.

2. ADVANCED: By bus
You can get from A to B by foot, but how will you manage to get there with a bus or subway? Learning the complex net of different busses and combinations of it is the next step.

3. MASTER: By car
Now from A to B can be easy, simple and fast by foot, but it can be very far by car because the city has many one-way streets which are difficult to master. Once you learn how to navigate with a car, you master the city completely.

4. ULTIMATE PWN: By Wi-Fi
Frakk foot, bus or car - if you know where is free Wi-Fi connection, you can gather all that info right there.

More lulz...

PS: why did my.opera change photo displaying settings from 640 pix wide to even smaller resolution of 620 pix on the blog page?

Some time ago I wrote about what resolution in media might be. Only later I remembered a xkcd comic in which the charachter contemplates how wide our options are and how we yet choose to live only a few of "day-types" over and over again. Imagine how it would be like if you could live every day anew, with different tasks and different people.

Something like that is happening to me last 10-14 days and it will go on for an other 5. I have no steady routine, each day is really something special. That is not to say it is spontaneous and improvised, on contrary, my activities are well planed, but still days are very different in comparison to eachother. And they are packed with work work work... From 7AM to 10PM. I could say that right this moment I live a very high-resolution life A lot of data in short amount of time.

One might think this is cool, and it is. But it is also very fatiguing. I learned that repetition is what keeps us fresh for the new stuff (to some extent). It quite hard to live like this for a longer period of time. I can't wait to slip back into a warm old daily routine. At least for a while, to get some mental rest.

So, what was I up to? I can give you a few things, there is lot's more, but I don't want to bore you

One of the things was a new creativity conference, organized by UMMI. It was really really cool. I opened the conference with a Keynote lecture of my own (video will follow), and then I was blown away by lectures of dr. Zadel, dr. Juriševič, Korado Korlevič and many others. This is me during the lecture (photo by Mojca Kukanja Gabrijelčič):


G33Ks might notice a familiar face on my t-shirt Moar photos.

This year I also went on Kras marathon for which I designed the main poster and some postcards. The postcards were designed with photos from Flickr via Creative Commons licence. It is soo cool to have that kind of colaboration across the world. This is a postcart for 4 events that will happen this year. Photos are contributed by Cobalt_sun, ((brian)), Randy Son Of Robert and Samo Onič, who is not on Flickr.

The poster:



That is me with my design. Again - sharp geeky eyes might recognize bent corners on my number tag. This weekend Battlestar Galactica hit its final run and such an important event must be celebrated with every possible detail. I dedicated my 8.4 km run to this series finale.
Moar photos!

So, as mentioned - Battlestar Galactica Series Finale happens only once in a lifetime, therefore it deserves a special party, full of geeks, pizzas (we even ordered one with BSG caption on it), computers and elaborated debates about things that exist only in our imagination(s). But it was great. I'm not giving you any spoilers though...


And finally - after many years I visited MTM tournamend in Rhythmic Gymnastics. Many years ago, RG club Narodni Dom was my first client. At that time I couldn't believe that someone is paying me to take photos You can imagine it was very nice to visit some old friends again. Of course I also took some photographs at the competition. For the first time digital (at least in gymnastics). I must admit I am very rusty for taking photos of jumps and pirouettes...
Instead of large galery, here's a slide show! (yes, it is 720p HDTV... view it full screen)

It seems like years since my last valuable posting (if it had any value anyways...). It is not that I have any kind of writers block or anything, it's just that I don't have much time or that I'm uncertain about things that I want to write about. It's like I don't have all the details figured out yet.

But there is one thing that I've been thinking about lately and I find it very important within the media theory. And that is the question of resolution. I would define it as the amount of information per physical measure of it's medium. Huh... let me explain.

Basically what I mean is that if you have a high-resolution image would mean that every pixel is well used and that there are no parts of an image where information is lost. For example; if you resize 600x400 image to 6000x4000 pix, you actually loose resolution because now you have the same amount of information with a lot more pixels used. So a goal of every photographer would be to have as high resolution photos as possible (not in the terms of actual pixel count but in the terms of how efficiently are they used). This is why we need very sharp lenses. But this is not limited to technical terms. An image that contains parts that don't support the "whole story" of it is just as well a low resolutioin image. It wasted it's space on unnecessary elements and therefore the ratio between space that is used well and the whole space is very low. This is the kind of resolution I want to focus on.

This roule would apply to any kind of media. A high-resolution speech is a speech where every word counts. There is not bullshit in it - take one word out and everything colapses. A high-resolution storyline would produce a movie where every sceene servs the function of the general narrative, perhaps even on more levels (not just to support one aspect of the story, but many aspect or even sub-plots). A high-resolution chess game contains moves that serve more than one function at the time (attack, defense and perhaps material gain). I could go on with this, but I hope you see the point...

So why is that important you might ask? I think it is very important because every "piece of medium" is a limited resource. A newspaper can contain only this many of pages, so it is very important how we use them. And even a single page can cover only this much of space, again, let's use it wisely. The same goes for a photograph (only this many of pixels), music (only this many of bars), dance (only this many of moves)...

Thanks for reading.

This is what I've seen in the last 6 months or so...

Who Killed the Electric Car? - Interesting
The Last Hangman - Amazing British movie...
Kung Fu Panda - We are getting spoiled by these 3d animations, aren't we?
Mamma Mia - I have seen better musicals...
Fireflies in the Garden - Patient viewers will be rewarded with great acting and realistic storyline.
The Visitor - A lovely movie that puts a human face to the whole imigratioin issue. Must see!
Burn after reading - About stupid people! Great performance by Brad Pitt!
Blindness - Really really good atmoshpere. Almost like in Children of men, but in a way - better. I'm reading the book now.
Man on Wire - Beautiful documentary on a man who followed his crazy dream!
Revolutionary Road - This ain't no Titanic...
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - This one will give you nightmares. In a way I regret watching it. And it is too damn long... Two and a half hours???
City of Ember - Cool. Reminds me on Logan's run, but this one is a lot more watchable (especially for kids). I kinda liked it. It's simple and honest.
W. - Not bad! Not bad at all! It is a quite decent film not a mockery.
12 - A Russian masterpiece.
Ballet Shoes - Charming little British flick... Happy ending and all that... It will serve you well if you had a hard day and you're not in the mood for anything more demanding.
Bin-jip - This movie could hardly be any more beautiful. Very asian, very contemplative...
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa - A lot of fun! I must say I like the side characters ( and ) even better than the main ones.
The Fall - Very impressive scenography. Really really cool.
Grand Torino - Much has been said. It's simply a stunning movie.
Yes Man - Entertaining. Zooey Deschanel never looked cuter.