“The Wilderness Downtown” is not a phrase that you’d readily use to describe Kenton Lane in Newcastle, the street where I grew up – the most exciting thing that happened there being an occasional crash at the traffic lights. However it is given a different slant in this video for the latest Arcade Fire release which brings to the mainstream a lot of experiments using interactive media, geo-locative data and re-interpretations of the pop-video format. As an aside, we are told that this is the year of ‘geo-location‘ and the death of the ‘web‘ (as distinct from the internet). Beware false prophets*? Endism anyone**?
*or possibly opportunists using the well trodden “x is dead” tactic.
** “At the center of their argument is the observation that popular thinking about technology today is ruled by a kind of relentless “endism,” which forecasts the death of everything from mass media to the nation-state, government to politics, universities to regions, even distance itself.”
Test Lab this evening at V2 in Rotterdam, with demonstrations of 4 projects from artists who’ve been working there over the summer. I’m interested to see how the mix between demonstration/exhibition/talk format works. The Lab will be streamed live on V2 website, if it’s a good stream I definitely recommend watching as I suspect the projects will be both progressive and antagonistic. Review to follow!
The film above by Chris Marker, could be taken as an interesting design research proposition, and way of visualising scenarios. ‘Future Artifacts’ (to which this film could possibly tenuously be said to belong) are a useful way of trying to ‘evidence’ the impact of design decisions, particularly across larger and more complex projects that involve networks, services and interactions.
John Underkoffler speaks effortlessly on UI (User Interface) for computation. He believes advances in UI have been neglected in the quest for bigger memory and faster processing. Watch out Wii.
Perhaps I have witnessed a real life manifestation of the effects of THE INTERNET. Has ‘power-browsing’ (mentioned previously in Neil’s Schizoid Reader posts) now escaped from the screen and trying to strangle your ability to engage, even when you are looking at work on your feet? Benjamin was worried that cinema might result in apathy amongst viewers, as they surrendered themselves to the screen, so what now? Are our search-engine based expectations resulting in apathy unless something is as easy to engage with as a the first link on a browser?
There is a huge amount of reading to be had on these topics, if you can set your mind to a read whole article. Micheal Punt and Robert Pepperal acknowledge in their book The Postdigital Membrane that people rarely read non-ficton in a linear fashion. “We do not expect that the whole book will be essential reading for all readers, nor to we expect the chapters to be read in sequence (Who does that these days anyway, who ever did?)”
I’d really like to get anyone interested together to talk about this, as my ‘mind map’ style blog post feels a little futile, or maybe my Google Generation tendencies prevent me from engaging enough to write a proper article. Discuss.
Just picking up on Neil’s Augmented Reality theme.
Sorry foggy. You can create your own hero here. This promo is for the Swedish Broadcaster RadioJånst to encourage the internet generation to pay their licence fee. You can view it full screen here.
Joshua Davis interview by Hillman Curtis posted here. For more of Joshua Davis’s work you can visit his site here. Josh has also been working on Hype with Brendan Dawes, a means to make experimenting with code in Actionscript a little more accessible. You can dowload the Hype plugin from the HYPE site here. If you really want to get into this you can also attend a day workshop in Paris in June where Joshua Davis will be presenting at OFFF conference and a 2 day workshop a few days later in Barcelona.
Just putting this, very much under construction, project out there to hopefully get some more invitations to other archives. If you have lots of videos, or suggestions of collections, please let me know.
On the subject of good grids, Vince Khoi’s new grid for Wordpress is a breathe of fresh air in their ‘theme’ library. Vince is the Design Director for the NewYorkTimes.com
Basic Maths employs clear tagging, categories and multi-functional archiving – creating a more intuitive ‘contents page’. The short code function to reveal his base columns is a nice little typographic touch.
The blog of Jonathan Barnbrook led me to this video (top), by Tom Foulsham. Which reminded me of those machines that draw out morse code (below).
Morse code was front of mind because I’ve been reading this amazing book about the Victorian Internet, and in the process also found out that the construction and implementation of the first (successful) transatlantic electronic communication cable was overseen by William Thomson in 1866, transmitting Morse Code from Britain to North America. Thomson later became Lord Kelvin (or Baron of Kelvin), and had a type of temperature named after him, and it’s edifying to know that the process of posting this to the blog, which then automatically tweets on twizcom etc etc has in part its origins somewhere around University Avenue, Glasgow.
Back to Barnbrook, and completing the radiography/telegraphy circle of tenuous connections, Barnbrook created these TV commercials for Radio Scotland back in the late 90’s (I think), my favourite of which is called Foggie Bummer and is shown below. And has nothing at all to do with Paul Fotheringham, you’ll be pleased to hear.
Time Inc recently posted a demo of an upcoming version of Sports Illustrated. This supports rumours that a mac tablet will be due early in 2010 to compete with netbooks and Kindle. Also promotes touch screen technology in main stream technologies beyond the iPhone.
Book and Web of the week are on holiday for the summer, reading books and looking at websites, ready to return, super-charged, in September 2010—
Full Book/Web Archive
The views expressed on the Visual Communication blog are at the very most those of the authors, and possibly not even that. Any similarities to hyperlinks either live or dead are purely coincidental.
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