Work with Bj?rk, make your friends jealous
Nowadays it’s all about you. Which is a good thing, because Bj?rk is hosting a contest to find someone to create a music video for her new track “Innocence,” off her latest album, Volta, due out next month. Listen to the (great) song here.
The rules of the contest are simple: Submit the video by August and Bj?rk will choose the winner, and then the two will tweak it together. So, you, yes you ? boot up that FinalCut and get to it.
And if you’re in New York City this week, check out her shows through Sunday at Radio City, the United Palace Theater and the Apollo.
(Via Cool Hunter)
More than meets the eye
For the next round of the endless Optimus Prime v. Megatron battle, the two are taking it to the streets, in the form of footwear.
The Japanese toy company Tomy has created two new sneakers ? one that transforms into Prime and the other into Megatron. This is just in time for the event every geeky boy across the country is waiting for: the release of the Transformers movie July 4.
And just for fun, here’s a link to the trailer.
(Via Boing Boing)
Reading is FUNdamental
Not too long ago a literate friend of mine invited me to post a profile on Goodreads.com, a site that allows you to share book recommendations with friends. And though my profile is a work in progress, UrbanJunkies London reminded me today of its existence, and I figured it’s always good to plug something that directs people’s eyes away from American Idol (though we will miss the ponyhawk).
Users can rate books and write reviews. It’s kind of like having a del.icio.us account, only instead of sharing your favorite Web sites, you’re sharing some of your favorite books. Now you’ll never be without a good reading recommendation.
Small footprints
Jay Shafer, a designer who specializes in sustainable architecture and urban planning, believes in living simply. So since 1997, he has lived in and built houses that are just under 100 square feet, focusing on energy efficiency, warmth and space conservation.
His Tumbleweed Tiny House Company offers homes that range in size from 70 to 850 square feet, and in price from $20,000 to $90,000. They can be used for anything, including a summer getaway to a studio space in your backyard.
On the Tumbleweed site, Shafer also provides a bunch of links to resources about tiny living spaces. First on the list is a site for the book Little House on a Small Planet, which has this picture. See, all you really need to be happy in life is a cozy space and a well-fluffed down comforter.
(Via Boing Boing)
Partying with pixels
Tonight’s IC event, “Virtual Worlds: Real Connections” was basically just one big Second Life wine-and-cheese party. Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT, and James Gee, a professor at the Univesity of Wisconsin?Madison, were the night’s main guests. Unfortunately, Jenkins missed his flight. But Gee was great ? more on him later.
The event was held in the physics lab, and students and faculty demonstrated the game on eight projection screens around the room. The space is perfect for this kind of thing. The designer, Michael Rogers, said the lab has a pretty great soundsystem, too, and one night he projected The Matrix on all eight screens and blasted the volume. That got me thinking, and, at the risk of sounding totally geeky, this lab would be perfect for a Halo party.
Photographer Jeff Morganteen and I just wanted to get some pictures and mingle, but somehow I ended up being one of these student demonstrators. The lovely April Korpi, who works in Park, lent me the use of her avatar, and for about an hour, I wandered the NBC island, which is just a virtual replica of Rockefeller Center.
While playing, I spoke with Joan Falkenberg Getman, the senior strategist for Learning Technologies at Cornell, and Gee. Gee told me he’s been playing World of Warcraft since it came out, and there’s a group of about eight faculty members and a bunch of students out at UW-Madison that play it all the time.
We talked a bit about PMOGs (which, you may recall, I talked about last week), and he raised an interesting point: That PMOGs are really just “awareness” tools ? they alert you to your Internet use, and point out what and how often you are using. PMOGs make you aware of the Internet structures you work within every day. So why not track your e-mail use and, as with some PMOGs, get points in a game for it? You’re going to be e-mailing all day anyway, might as well make it fun.
What was really great about the evening was the enthusiasm about the potential for using these online networks as educational tools. Professors from Cornell and IC, with little knowledge about Second Life, were willing to take 10 minutes to learn about it and even give the avatars a try. One of the Cornell business professors is now figuring out how to set up business classes that would teach accounting, stats and so on in a game that mixes Second Life and, what he called, “World of Bizcraft.”
Party pictures after the jump. Read more
When will it end?
The virtual world never ceases to amaze Brink. That College Ave. guy (recently returned from a three-week hiatus) sent me this heads up: Artists are bringing your virtual selves back into the real world.
Fabjectory creates scultptures of avatars, including your Nintendo Mii ($50 for a 3-inch piece, $100 for a 5-inch piece); your Second Life avatar ($99 to $200); or your SketchUp creations ($50 to $150).
So basically, you create your virtual self, which may or may not look like you (some people prefer to have tails and wings in-world). Then you pay Fabjectory a (pretty hefty) commission to bring a virtual-specific creation into the physical world.
Fabjectory might be on to something here. But it doesn’t have to end there. I for one would like to see residents in Second Life set up an in-world business that makes virtual replicas of the physical replicas of residents’ original virtual selves (which may or may not look like them).
So, wait, which one is the real you?
Jazz hands!
So the weather is really crappy outside, it’s Monday, and did I mention the weather is really crappy outside? There’s snow on the ground and it’s freaking April!
All the more reason for you to watch this music video and create a little joy in your life. Yesterday, New York Times pop critic and Death-Cab-For-Cutie stalker Jon Pareles wrote about Leslie Feist, the 31-year-old indie darling, and her latest video for “1234,” a little pick-me-up of a song off her latest album, The Reminder, set to be released May 1.
Even beyond the simple, catchy rhythm and chorus, what really lull you into a smile are the dancing (Fame-esque) and the bright costuming (American Apparel-esque). There’s also lots of clapping and cheering throughout the piece.
After watching it again, the snow doesn’t seem so bad anymore.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
From the High Line in Chelsea to Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, New York’s in the midst of a citywide reinvention. And to put that process into perspective, The Architectural League of New York is featuring an exhibition worth taking a weekend afternoon to check out.
New New York: Fast Forward, the fifth in a series of exhibitions examining these changes, will be on display through May 5 at The Urban Center, Madison Ave. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a huge, gallery-sized aerial photograph focusing on what the city will look like in the future. There are more than 500 building projects already in progress or being planned, changing the way we see and think about New York.
The League also looks into three projects more specifically: the High Line District, which is turning the former railroad into a spot for luxury housing; the Bronx River Greenway, a 23-mile path to be used for bicyclists, pedestrians and people living along the river; and Spring Creek Housing in Brooklyn, which hopes to provide more than 800 affordable homes on a 45-acre plot.
Along with the map and the case studies, you can watch a series of videotaped interviews featuring a range of New York architects, from David Benjamin to Wendy Evans Joseph to Hugh Hardy.
A muthafo’ing P-M-O-G
Passively multiplayer online games, or PMOGs, were a hot topic at March’s South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas. And the guy leading the panel discussions was Justin Hall, who explains the concept behind the social networking sites best:
Passively Multiplayer Online Games is a proposal to create play around our data. Playing with our data will help us learn to understand and manipulate our trails, and give us a greater sense of how we spend our time. And what if we could cooperate and compete during this time we spend on the computer? Not just arranging ideas over email, but sharing tasks and racing to complete something. It would be like we were playing a multiplayer video game!
Let’s use the PMOG bud.com, Hall’s site, as an example (check out other PMOGs here). You create a profile and fill out a survey about your Internet habits. The program then tracks where you surf. This may seem like a goldmine for marketers, but Hall doesn’t have plans to sell the information ? his intentions are purely academic.
You can also talk on discussion boards and participate in “quests,” which are just little games that teach you about a topic. For instance, someone in my video games seminar created a “pants quest,” so he provided links to Web sites where you could buy pants. Silly, but amusing.
Depending on your habits, the site categorizes you as a player: you can be a seer, a destroyer, a pathmaker, a hoarder. I’m guessing this plays into the player types defined by Richard Bartle (and later expanded on by Nick Yee) a little while back: achiever, explorer, socializer and killer.
With regular ol’ MUDs, I’m a killer ? clearly. As for PMOGs, I’m a hoarder, with a little bit of seer. A hoarder is apparently someone “concerned with amassing embedded objects along the network roads, but not building the roads themselves.” I’m guessing these “objects” are information? The description goes on to say hoarders frequently check out social networking, video and music-sharing sites. And a seer “reads art zines and sports scores, shop online, and use social networking sites.” Not far from the truth.
The best part about these user profiles is you can access graphs that chart the types of sites they’re checking out and how often. This, of course, means joining these networks makes it that much harder for you to hide your porn addiction.
With a little help from friends
For the past two years, four friends from the New England School of Photography in Boston have been building The Exposure Project, a group of photogs looking to reach out to other emerging artists within the photography and art community.
After graduation, Ben Alper, Anastasia Cazabon, Adam Marcinek and Eric Watts were getting frustrated with the gallery system. Marcinek said it’s tough to break in without having a recognizable name or years of experience.
?Galleries are becoming more and more business-like,” Marcinek said. “They are going to show what they can sell. It?s a fact of life.?
So the members of the group took matters into their own hands, organizing exhibitions, posting work on their Web site and publishing a book every six months. The book ? the first of which came out in November ? will be made up of their work, as well as a featured artist’s work. The next one is scheduled for release at the end of May.
Marcinek said the artwork they feature is not limited to one style.
“We want to show a broad range of work. There?s no right or wrong. We?re not looking for a certain style or look. It could be portraits, it could be anything ? as long as we all dig it, essentially.”
They have the right idea: build a community of artists in which everyone is responsible for the other. The project also provides a comfortable space for critique with friends. And, hey, it’s tough being an artist, so having a strong group of like-minded folks is just what you need to grow as an artist and get your work out there.
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