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Forget the random pictures of babies and puppies, alarming status updates from family members and political rants. On My-ArtMap, you will be immersed in art. It’s as simple as that. The site, which is targeted at an international audience, is available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Chinese. You can create a username and password for the site, or login using Facebook Connect. It is also available as an iPhone app.
My-ArtMap is a social network exclusively for the art and art market. Like the Art World, it is populated by art professionals, including auction houses, galleries, museums and art collectors. The site just exited beta, shortly after acquiring many new members from Spain, Italy and Germany. It is heavily focused on Europe, at least for the time being.
Read the complete article at ReadWriteWeb.
YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.
Imagine musical trees made of vinyl, year-rings functioning as grooves of audio information. Record labels would go out into the black woods and harvest tall black stalks of acetate, hauling these trees back—CD-R leaves and vines of magnetic tape dragging in the dirt—to shave off cross sections and punch holes in the middle. The first shaving is a test pressing. It’s given a listen and judged. Some are beautiful, and it’s obvious at first listen that nature has grown important, lasting music. They’re then sent to a mill, where the trees are sliced to specifications, packaged, and shipped to record stores.
OK, now flip the situation; instead of changing the trees, change the record player. This is what Bartholomäus Traubeck did with his “Years” project: he made a record player that plays cross-sections of trees, analyzing their year rings and reproducing/interpreting the information as gorgeous piano music. The idea is simple and poetic; the process, not so much. Our sister site, Motherboard, talked to Bart earlier this week.
Motherboard: Do different kinds of trees make different music?
Read the interview at The Creators Project.
Smartphones could soon detect cancer and other diseases, enabling cost-effective, on-the-spot medical testing outside the confines of a traditional medical lab.
Scientists at Korea Advanced Institute of Science of Technology “confirmed” Monday today’s ultra-sensitive touchscreens can detect biomolecular material as well as traditional medical testing equipment. The German science journal “Angewandte Chemie” published the results of KAIST’s research.
Capacitive touchscreens work by sensing the electronic charges from a user’s body on the screen’s surface. Biochemical materials, such as DNA and proteins, carry similar electrical charges.
The KAIST researchers’ experiments showed touchscreens can recognize both the existence and the concentration of DNA molecules placed on them, an early foray into using touchscreens on smartphones and tablets to perform medical tests.
Read the complete article at Forbes.
Read the accompanying article at Mashable.
Character Options, the company behind many licensed toys including the Doctor Who and Wembley Stadium Character Building brick sets, Angry Birds catapult and Android plush, is to bring WowWee’s AppGear to the UK, a new range of augmented reality games for Android, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
The first wave will be original properties, but once established, the firm plans to release a series of AppGear titles using its Doctor Who license. That means you will eventually be able to battle Daleks in the park or the Weeping Angels in the confines of your own bedroom.
Read the complete article at Pocket-Lint.
Online luxury retailer Net-a-Porter is heralding the launch of a new collection Wednesday with five augmented reality-enhanced shopping events across the globe.
Crowds have gathered at window locations in Paris, New York, London, Berlin and Sydney for the chance to witness the spectacle and nab some free merchandise from the collection, which was designed by Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld and announced on stage at Le Web in Paris.
Read the entire article at Mashable.
I split my time these days between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill, and last week was a very good week to be in Washington. In the fall, I witnessed the beginnings of a unique revolt over proposed legislation that would have dramatically changed the Internet’s business landscape. Last week, that revolt achieved a stunning victory, sending Congress into a tailspin of retreat from bills that seemed certain, only months ago, to pass with little notice or resistance.
The two bills were the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, or #PIPA and #SOPA as they became known on Twitter, where millions of Tweets condemned them and their supporters in and out of Congress. Heavily backed by D.C. favorites including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the music and motion picture industries, the legislation was superficially aimed at combating the scourge of foreign websites selling unlicensed or counterfeit American goods to U.S. consumers outside the legal reach of criminal and civil enforcement.
But to Internet users, the proposed legislation and the process by which it was steamrolled through a supine Congress took on mythic attributes. By the end of last week the firefight had morphed into a battle of old economy vs. new, of business as usual in Washington vs. the organized chaos of online life, of K Street lobbyists vs. ordinary users.
Read the complete article at Forbes.
It’s probably unfair to blame social media specifically, but I think it’s safe to say that the 24/7 media barrage of soundbites we face every day could be taking its toll. Twitter users need to make their point in 140 characters or less, USA Today, Fox News and others have shortened stories to be quickly digested and even media outlets like CNN rely on the pretty faces of their news anchors to keep our attention. As a result any substantive conversation lasting over five minutes is met with glazed eyes and shuffling feet. “Didn’t my iPhone just ring?”
Verizon’s “Can you hear me now?” campaign should probably be replaced with, “Are you paying attention to me now?”
I’ll be the first to admit that if we really want the ears, eyes and attention of our audience we need to make sure that our message is relevant (and interesting). This is particularly true in the workplace. How many times have you sat in a meeting where three or four of the people attending open up their laptop, tap away on their iPad or distractedly thumb through emails or text messages on their smart phones? Although the problem may sometimes be the meeting, even in the midst of important discussions, I’ve watched colleagues allow themselves to be distracted by email and other work they perceive is more important—only to find out later that it wasn’t.
Read the complete article at Forbes.
When it comes to including interactive features in books, “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” may be your best rule of thumb. Wolfram Research, Inc., co-founder and author of “The Elements” Theodore Gray will address the finer points of interactive features in his keynote address, “Meaningful Interactivity In A Mobile World,” at the upcoming Tools of Change for Publishing conference.
In the following interview, Gray offers some insight into the interactivity issue. He says, “Interactivity for its own sake is a bad thing: It should always be serving communication.” Gray also says that static ebooks haven’t fundamentally changed the dynamics of publishing, but that super-enhanced ebooks are staking out new territory.
Where do you draw the line between meaningful and gimmicky interactivity?
Theodore Gray: It’s all about communication. If an interactive feature helps communicate an idea, helps the reader understand a complicated concept, or in some way makes the material easier to navigate, search, organize, or visualize, then it’s probably a good feature. If it’s just cool but tends to distract from the material, then maybe it’s a good idea for a game but not as an interactive element in a book.
Very much the same principle applies to film editing, where one must always be willing to throw out one’s favorite scene because, however cool it is, it does not contribute to the story. In fact, the more cool and amazing a scene or feature is, the more on guard you have to be that perhaps the only reason you like it is because it’s cool, not because it has earned a proper place in the film or book you’re working on.
It’s hard to be more specific because every situation is so different, but in general, I believe in the principles of minimalism expounded by the likes of Edward Tufte and Apple. If you’ve got pixels on the screen occupied by something that is not directly contributing to communication, then they had better be prepared to justify their existence in front of a skeptical committee. Not that you can never have pure adornment, you’d just better have a really good reason for it.
Are there times when interactivity is detrimental and should be avoided?
Read the rest of the interview at O’Reilly Radar.
What if artists could create life-sized monuments that would normally take six months to a year or longer to build, in a matter of hours, and do so at a fraction of the cost? What if museums were able to create digital backups of all of the masterpieces in their collections so they could produce exact replicas should pieces be badly damaged or stolen? The folks at Additive Workshop are using 3-D scanning and printing to do just that, and it could forever change the way we look at art.
“Additive Workshop bridges the gap between the real world and the virtual world,” says Mark Ghiglieri, CEO of Additive Workshop. “Our technology allows us to bring pieces of art into the world in an infinite number of ways, and that is why our business is exploding. Everyone from museums to movie studios needs our help to create incredible works of art in a short amount of time.”
Traditionally, creating 3-D art has meant hundreds of hours of sculpting, creating a piece from scratch using wood, clay, and other materials. Given their labor intensiveness, an artist might only be able to produce 4-5 projects in a given year. If they want to create an exact replica, they would have to start over from scratch.
Read the complete article at Fast Company.
Image source: The Atlantic Wire
Written by Yong Kim
Kim Jung Il is dead. Sadam and Kadafi have been overthrown and executed. The model of the old-school dictator seems to be dying. Unfortunately, there’s a new dictator in town. Well, not really new, but its presence has never been more prevalent or obvious. This dictator is not just one person or regime. The neo-dictator is comprised of countless organizations, with its power being shifted and redistributed per agenda, so this dictator can’t ever really be killed off. Like any good tyrant, the neo-dictator is motivated by lust for money and power (the quench for which can never be sated). Naturally the neo-dictator’s most powerful tool is the law, laws like SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), which are designed so content providers and their bed fellows could hold onto their outdated and dying business models. Perhaps it’s just a tactic to slow down technological advancement while they catch up.
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Image source: Creators Project
Written by Yong Kim
Erik Kessels’ installation shows what 24 hours of photos on Flickr looks like in physical form. The installation got me thinking about the exorbitant amount of pictures we take today. I’ve never been a big picture taker, that was until I got a digital camera. I have a little over a hundred physical pictures I’ve collected over my lifetime, but I have thousands in digital form, most of which I accumulated in a span of 3-4 years, starting about 7 years ago. My physical pictures I view once in a while, with a definite level of fondness, sometimes wishing I had taken more pictures. I took those pictures to commemorate specific events: nieces’ birthdays, the first time I went camping with my nieces, my last weekend in San Antonio before I moved back to LA, my college graduation, nieces’ high school graduations, dad’s 60th birthday, the last party I attended in Boston before I moved back to LA, pictures from my cross-country trips, when the family dog was just a puppy, and so on. Most of my digital pictures, however, are rather insignificant.
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Image source: psfk
Written by Yong Kim
While watching an episode of Sundance’s show Love Lust, “Love Lust & Street Eats,” it hit me that we truly are living in the era of remix. On the surface this episode was about the history of street food in America, from its humble beginning of simple foods like hot dogs and blue collar roots to the revolution into the current, nationwide food truck explosion and acceptance by gourmets and foodies. The theory informing this episode, however, is remix theory. The history of street food in America not only shows the level of remix that’s currently taking place (down to its marketing and the cuisine itself), but that the era of remix has been building up momentum for quite some time, beyond the arts and academia.
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Image source: PCWorld
Written by Yong Kim
Last week I attended a live filming of a podcast run by standup comedian, Steven E. Kimbrough (AKA Podbrother: podbrother.com), called “Read 3D Access.” He used the phrase “future-proofing your content.” I don’t know if he coined the phrase or not, but it was the first time I’d ever heard it. He said (and I’m paraphrasing here), using 3D only makes sense, that it’s a way to future-proof your content.
The Podbrother’s podcasts are always shot in front of a live audience, to add to the energy of the guests. The one I attended had guests ranging from fight choreographer John Kreng and actress Christina DeRosa to the team of Francesco Rotunno and Alessandra Vinotto and film director Abraham Makowka. Francesco Rotunno and Alessandra Vinotto directed the first Italian music video in 3D: “Wild Dogs Run,” by Hollowblue and Sukie Smith.
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Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.
Everything is a Remix is a four part web-film series directed and produced by Kirby Ferguson. It has been about a year since the first segment (above) was released. Since then, Ferguson has released parts two and three. The fourth and final installment is scheduled to be released this Fall of 2011, and I look forward to viewing it.
When I viewed part one, I really liked it, and thought that the title, while it may sound polemical to some degree (in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way), somewhat falls along the lines of how I view and have been discussing Remix as a form of discourse during the past few years. However, once I viewed the other two segments, I realized that the way some of the material is presented begins to water down the very foundation of the term “remix.”
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Image source: TechCrunch
Written by Yong Kim
Everyone seems to be at an uproar about Facebook’s latest feature, Timeline. Some people hate it with a passion; others seem to be indifferent or just mildly enthusiastic; while a few people have grown to love it, like Pete Cashmore of Mashable. Despite his fondness for Timeline, even Cashmore wrote an advisory article on the use of Timeline, explaining that “even the most technical among us should be aware that sharing everything is not always wise, and…selecting the right privacy settings can protect you against any mistakes. (quote source: Mashable). If you have concerns about Timeline, especially if you’re not sure how it functions, Cashmore’s article is worth a read.
I don’t care much about Timeline itself. I’m indifferent about it, to be honest. Like most of Facebook’s features, I will use it to my advantage and learn to accept aspects of it I don’t like. In the bigger scheme of things, however, I see Timeline as yet another move by Zuckerberg* and others (which includes Google and people like Robert Scoble and David Kirkpatrick) to control people online, to force people toward their agenda of online transparency.
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Note: This post is not about the rumor that Facebook is going to start charging for accounts.
Image capture source: Unthink.com
Written by Yong Kim
Facebook made some changes recently to their layout and added some new features. There are aspects to the changes that I like; and others I don’t. As usual, people griped. Also as usual, others provided some perspective, the most common sentiments being: it’s free and no one’s forcing you to use Facebook.
Let’s address the obvious first: Facebook is NOT free. We don’t pay for it with money, but we do give something to Facebook for its “free” service, something much more valuable than money: the copyrights to our profiles, which are comprised of our personal information. The service is “free” because everything we do (every comment, every single click, everything we share) gets logged, then datamined to produce metadata, which is then sold. There is a reason Facebook is worth billions of dollars. All of that information about us, the information about ourselves we so gladly provided and the data about our activities, is owned by Facebook, not us. If you want ownership of your information, then perhaps you should join Unthink.com, whose front page contains the catchphrase “emancipate yourself.”
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Image: 883 Manga series from the scanlation site OneManga.com.
Total number of pages: 1,074,790
Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass, 2010.
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ImagePlot is a free software tool that visualizes collections of images and video of any size. (The largest set we tried so was: 1,074,790 one megabyte images).
Written by Yong Kim
Google Gravity comes from the imagination of Ricardo Cabello, whose Google+ profile shows his occupation as “Pressing buttons” and employment as “Mr Doob.” His actual occupation is designer/developer. His site, Mr Doob, contains a variety of interactive new media projects, one of which is Google Gravity.
Back in March, in our own feature, No Man’s Land, I wrote about Google Sloppy, a lazy and inaccurate counterpart to Google, a humanistic version that yawns, makes mistakes and has malfunctioning parts. The search results I got from interacting with Google Sloppy didn’t yield any proper results, meaning Google Sloppy searched for something other than what I’d entered. When I searched for “Charlie Sheen Winning,” I got the results for “charlie shee nwinning.”
Unlike Google Sloppy, Google Gravity yields the correct results (i.e. the results you’d get from Google). As the name suggests, every link on Google’s home page–including the search field and links that are normally at the top of the screen–drops to the bottom when you enter the site. All subsequent searches get piled on top until you have a collage of search results. If someone doesn’t like the arrangement of the links, then she can move them around at any time, including the search field. As you can see from the screen capture above, I got my search field upside down, which was an accident, and couldn’t get right side up once the search results piled up.
Image: detail of video montage grid of “Hitler’s angry reaction to the iPad.” One of several remixes on Hitler’s Downfall. Larger images of this montage and others with proper explanation are included below.
Post-doctoral Research by Eduardo Navas
Key terms: Remix, Cultural Analytics, Memes, YouTube, Hitler Parodies, Film
As part of my post doctoral research for The Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, I am using cultural analytics techniques to analyze YouTube video remixes. My research is done in collaboration with the Software Studies Lab at the University of California, San Diego. A big thank you to CRCA atCalit2 for providing a space for daily work during my stays in San Diego.
This is part 3 of a series of posts in which I introduce three case studies of YouTube video remixes. My first case study is the Charleston Style remixes. The second case study is Radiohead’s Lotus Flower remixes.
Read the complete article and view more remix videos at Software Studies.