unmediated

Ajax3D's mission is to foster the development of web-based 3D applications and online virtual worlds using Ajax and X3D-based open technologies.

Argues that tools for copyright infringement (MySpace/YouTube/etc.) are so prevalent because the copyright owners don't license their wares freely. If you can't get a license, you might as well pirate.

At [last week's] Senate reconfirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, California Democrat Barbara Boxer expressed outrage that the FCC had suppressed a two-year-old study showing that locally owned stations produce more local news than those owned by media giants.

StopBigMedia.com has obtained a copy of the draft report – and it’s a blockbuster.

Titled “Do Local Owners Do More Localism? Some Evidence from Local Broadcast News,” the study shows locally owned stations produced five-and-a-half minutes more local news in a half-hour newscast than their consolidated competitors — meaning 33 more hours of local news per year.

Digium - The Asterisk Telephony Company

Ok, this is a big deal. The next version of Asterisk supports GoogleTalk!

From the Press Release:
Asterisk 1.4 is the first major release of Asterisk since the release of Asterisk 1.2 in November 2005. With over 20 new functionality additions including IPFAX compatibility, unified messaging capabilities and Jabber/Jingle/GoogleTalk protocol compatibilities, Asterisk 1.4 features overall quality and performance improvements, as well as increased scalability and interoperability.

The top margin provides access to broadcast channels, while the bottom margin offers direct access to scenes with the current programme. The left margin shows previously recorded and bookmarked shows and on-demand programming, while the right margin shows recommendations based on what the viewer is currently watching.

"Motionbox, the personal video sharing service today added Deep Tagging, giving consumers the ability to tag selected portions inside of a video, jump to the best parts, and instantly share them with others.

Drupal 5.0 user management on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.

Drupal is doing some interesting experiment: they’re using Flickr to discuss usability improvements…

"Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world."

At least three of TR's young innovators are working in the area of Interactive Media:
Jane McGonigal for her work on ARGs.
Paul Rademacher for his google map mashups,
and
Joshua Schacter was awarded "Innovator of the Year" for del.icio.us.

As the network neutrality debate has gone on and on, there are some aspects that are very troubling. The tech world is notorious for having what's basically a libertarian/free market approach to the world -- and applying that to the network neutrality debate gives plenty of good and convincing reasons why letting Congress regulate on this now will create problems down the road. Those are some of the reasons why I agree that legislation right now would be a dangerous move (especially as some of the laws are written). It's tough (if not impossible) for Congress to understand how this technology will evolve -- and trying to regulate it could stifle perfectly reasonable uses. At the same time, even if the laws seem reasonable, the companies in the space will likely figure out loopholes or other ways to use the regulations to their advantage. However, at the same time, it's really troublesome to see the telcos mostly ignoring that very reasonable line of argument, preferring to trot out made up horror stories and outright lies to try to make their point. It certainly raises questions about what they're trying to hide. If you're right, you should be able to make your point without resorting to disingenuous arguments.

Meanwhile, what's interesting to note is how uncomfortable some of the supporters of network neutrality legislation have appeared, noting that they usually fall into the libertarian/no-regulation-please camp, but support regulation in this case (even if they claim the regulation is designed to make the market more open). However, in the last few days, there's been a growing push to explore whether or not the free market has failed when it comes to US broadband policy. Broadband expert Dave Burstein notes that all of the world leaders in broadband have come from highly regulated environments, leading folks like Kevin Werbach to ask "Why does unregulated competition in telecom work so well in theory, but so poorly in practice?" It certainly deserves at least some head-scratching.

As it stands now, there are two potential answers that I see. The first, is that an unregulated telecom/broadband market is fundamentally not competitive. As we've emphasized ad nauseum, the real issue in the network neutrality debate is the lack of real competition in the space -- which is still a problem no matter what some people claim. This could be because broadband is a natural monopoly, like the highway system, where it simply does not make sense for there to be competition between different infrastructure projects. It's wasteful and, in some cases, damaging. Instead, it makes more sense to set a single platform, and push for competition within the infrastructure. This is exactly what has happened in France, and has helped build a thriving competitive broadband market there.

A second answer, however, may be that this is a race we shouldn't call yet. We have not hit the finish line yet, and there certainly is the potential that the infrastructure choices made within regulated environments may prove to be a legacy albatross down the road. For an example of this, just look at the race for HDTV from 15 to 20 years ago. There was a huge worry in the US that we were falling behind Japan and Europe in this technology, where their regulated approach allowed them to take a quick headstart, and achieve certain technology milestones that looked great and worried policy makers in the US. However, in the long run, the regulated approach proved problematic and inflexible, causing a lot of problems that the US avoided. To be honest, I'm still not convinced which scenario is the most fitting for US broadband policy, and can make arguments supporting either one. Hopefully, we'll get some interesting discussions going based on this, but it does seem useful to raise the level of discussion to actual disagreement points such as this one, rather than the ridiculous "this is the end of the internet as we know it" level both official "sides" in the network neutrality debate have taken.

YouTube superstar lonelygirl15, the mystery chick who posts confessional videos and has long been suspected of being part of some big media company's stealth campaign, might actually be an independent filmmakers' project, according to the post from the LonelyGirl15 website's "creators."

NBC has launched a new site (in beta) called ItsYourShowTV.com that encourages users to submit original video for cash prizes. A series of weekly challenges keeps the content focused, such as “try to teach your grandparents to use modern technology and make a brilliant short while you’re at it.” Weekly winners — as determined by users — take home $1,000, and the big purse is $100,000 for the best overall clip. Also, the site allows you to download “tools” such as video, music and sound effects to use in your editing. “We know you like to mix it up so we’re giving out some ingredients,” reads the site. “Now we’re gonna sit back and watch the madness.” Of course, there’s a TV component. Some of the winning clips will be aired on NBC with Carson Daly hosting, yet the format is “currently in development.” The project is shared with Carson Daly Productions. Press release…

PRESS RELEASE — NBC and Carson Daly are partnering with viewers to forge a new business model in “It’s Your Show” — a rewarding interactive project that encourages viewers to submit their own storytelling video. Users will also be able to enhance their videos with a selection of clips and tools provided by the producers on www.itsyourshowtv.com (accessible through www.NBC.com) beginning today.

The venture gives viewers the opportunity to win money for what they are already doing for free on other sites. Unlike other sites however, viewers will be asked to respond to creative challenges ranging from making their own short horror film to making a television sitcom about their families.

The announcement was made today by Kevin Reilly, President NBC Entertainment.

“We want to give people a chance to show us what the next level of user generated content can look like when given the tools and the opportunity,” said Reilly. “Our next phase of this project will be to integrate the best and worst of this content into a program broadcast on NBC.”

Daly, who currently hosts his own late night talk show for NBC Universal and has
recently been credited as a key figure in new media’s rapidly changing environment,
will back the project along with his Carson Daly Productions. He encourages viewers to take advantage of the chance to make a creative statement for a mass audience and become a part of the “It’s Your Show” community.

“This model of ‘It’s Your Show,’ with directed challenges, raises the bar and creates a measure and a real competition. The Internet has become a vast platform for identifying emerging artists. I hope to expose this talent on a much larger, focused scale, ” said Daly adding, ” Connecting large scale entertainment, user generated content and the indie spirit plays into the core strengths of Carson Daly Productions.”

“We’re really looking forward to seeing the next level of user generated content,” said Adam Cohen, Executive Producer, Super Delicious. “Since we first started seeing this type of content on the web, it has evolved and become more interesting and unique.
We’re excited to see how far users can take it.”

The effort launches with the staggered September rollout of four specific “creative challenges” on the home page, each with a different expiration date for submissions lasting approximately one week in succession. A weekly countdown ticker will let applicants know how much time is left for their submissions. As one challenge expires, one or more may be added along with additional toolkit materials.

Each week, after being screened by a panel of project producers, twenty videos may be chosen and will be posted for subsequent voting by online users. The user whose video earns the most votes for each challenge will win a $1,000 cash prize. Each week’s top online entry is then posted as the main icon on the archived contest page and can be automatically entered into the contest for an ultimate $100,000 grand prize. That winner’s video could also be aired on NBC.

In addition, other creative participants can submit their videos even after the weekly $1,000 prizes have been decided to keep the competition fresh and to try to out-do the challenge winner. Those applicants and anyone who enters the contest would still be considered for the $100,000 cash prize — and could provide additional material for an eventual NBC program.

A television component of “It’s Your Show” is currently in development with Daly set to host, and plans are to air a selection of the submitted videos on NBC in the near future.

Tools given to participants on the website will eventually include vintage clips from classic movies, scenes from current television series, news footage from historical and topical current events as well as a variety of music and audio tracks and graphical elements to create videos. Participants will be able to create their video projects using their own original content and they can borrow more footage provided on the site to flesh out their story.

Prospective candidates can find more information by logging onto www.itsyourshowtv.com or www.nbc.com.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has responded to all the criticism with a post on his blog. “We really messed this one up,” he writes. “Somehow we missed this point with (News Feed) and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it.” So Zuckerberg says the Facebook team has been “coding nonstop for two days” to build better privacy controls that allow users wide control to decide what information makes the News Feed. “This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you,” he writes. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s a big learning experience for any social network or predominately user-generated content site: listen and collaborate with your users BEFORE you launch new stuff. (Thanks for the tip Dave!)

T-Mobile USA, the fourth-largest mobile phone company in the United States, is preparing to launch a service this month that will allow people talking on their cell phones to seamlessly switch between T-mobile's cellular network and their home Wi-Fi networks.

Covering HTML coding, digital photography, new media reporting, Web hosting and more, J-Learning.org is designed to help individuals, civic groups and school groups jumpstart their own community media projects.

Amazon late yesterday launched their Unbox Video Store, which allows users to buy or rent TV episodes, films, and other video content. Film downloads will cost you between $7.99 and $14.99, with television shows running $1.99 per episode. Film rentals will cost you $3.99. The videos can be downloaded to two PCs and mobile devices, but cannot be burned to DVD - a caveat that will likely cost the outfit customers. Another problem is that neither Mac nor iPod users have been invited to the party - this show is Windows XP only.

The National Center for Education Statistics has just released a new report on the school-home digital divide. It's been a while since the US government has released a report about the digital divide, let alone use the term "digital divide," so it's interesting to see them paint such a stark picture of the technology gap that exists between well-to-do and underprivileged students. On the plus side, the research suggests that Internet access in school is indeed equitable, with little difference among students in terms of gender, race, disability. The same thing applies to the income and education levels of their parents - low-income children with poorly educated parents are just about as likely to use the Internet in school as high-income peers with well-educated parents.

Unfortunately, this equity vanishes the moment you leave the schoolhouse gate. I blogged about the statistics in detail over at PBS learning.now, so here are some of the highlights:

At home, 78% of white students have Internet access, which isn’t enormously different than the percentage with access at school. In comparison, only 46% of African American students, 48% of Latinos and 43% of Native Americans had access at home; Asian-Americans and mixed ethnicity students fared better at 74% apiece. Regarding disability, 68% of non-disabled students and 55% of disabled students had home access.

Parental education and income levels also reveal a stark divide at home. While a whopping 88% kids whose parents achieved a graduate-level of education had home Net access, the same was true of only 55% of kids whose parents completed high school - and only 35% of kids whose parents didn’t. If parents speak just Spanish at home, only 32% of kids had home Internet access, compared with 69% of kids whose parents spoke English. Lastly, 88% of kids whose parents earned more than $75,000 a year had home access, compared to just 37% of kids whose parents earned less than $20,000 a year.

ruck by the fact that the report uses the term "digital divide" so freely - more than a dozen times in the whole report. By using phrases like “There is a ‘digital divide,’” the report seems to go against the last five years of federal government officials not using the term. Does it signal a sea change? My guess is probably not. Perhaps the Secretary of Education may pepper it into a speech but that'll probably be the end of it, unless the media and the blogosphere rally around the report's findings and make a big deal about it. -andy

MAC address spoofing on wireless networks could come to an end with a new security technique that would allow network administrators to see a unique WiFi fingerprints for each device, reports Ars Technica.

Dr. Jeyanthi Hall, a researcher at Carleton University analyzed (pdf) the radio frequency (RF) signal of 15 devices and discovered that each and every device has its own unique signal. Even devices from the same manufacturer are unique due to variations during the manufacturing process. The signals were so clearly different from one another that she had a 95 percent detection rate with zero false positives during her testing.

MAC addresses are a unique, alphanumeric identifier assigned to each individual network card. Network administrators use these identifiers to distinguish between individual machines on a network and ultimately limit network access to approved machines.

However, savvy users quickly realized that they could easily spoof MAC addresses from other machines on their own devices to pose as someone else on the network. Although limiting network access to specific MAC addresses is very common, it is not considered the best form of network security for this reason.

Ars Technica says most admins now utilize user authentication and proxying in order to identify users rather than easily spoofed MAC addresses. However, if wireless hardware were to utilize this technology and combine it with MAC addresses, unique device identification could pick up steam once again, says Ars Technica.

Sony has announced at IBC the new HVR-V1E camcorder. The V1E utilizes three true progressive scan CMOS chips to deliver either 1080/50i or 1080/25p HDV video onto MiniDV tape. Let me say that again...that's 25p at the full 1920x1080 resolution. This is a very interesting development, I don't think anyone saw this one coming.

"The HVR-V1E has newly incorporated the "3 (three) ClearVid CMOS Sensor" imaging technology. Coupled with Sony's Enhanced Imaging Processor™ (EIP), these sensors provide high sensitivity, low noise and a wide dynamic range to achieve high-quality images. The ClearVid CMOS Sensor also eradicates picture smear and has 4 times high speed scanning capability enabling "Smooth Slow Rec" function.

The Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* Lens features Extra-low Dispersion (ED) Glass and a 20x optical zoom lens with F2.8 at the tele-photo end for greater light sensitivity and long-range image acquisition for maximum shooting flexibility. A Digital Extender feature also enables the tele-photo focal length to be extended by around 1.5 times to a maximum of 1100mm at 35mm conversion.

The HVR-V1E has a range of advanced professional features, including:
*A timecode preset function
*A TC Link to synchronize time codes between multiple cameras
*Two XLR microphone inputs for independent sound recording
*A Camera Profile feature to adjust the camera settings of multiple cameras for multi-camera operations."

(Via DVXuser)

Coming out august 2006 (last month).. Will have to order.

90% of men answered "no" and 90% of women answered "yes" to the question "do you think that women are discriminated against in the free software community?"

Adrian Holovaty has cornered the geek-journalist market. Today, he picks up on 9 Ways for Newspapers to Improve Their Websites and identifies the oppotunties that journalists are missing.

Fundamental shifts need to happen for newspaper companies to remain essential sources of information for their communities…[W]hat I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of [a story]..
when I’ve tried to explain the error of storing everything as a news article, journalists don’t immediately understand why it is bad. To them, a publishing system is just a means to an end: getting information out to the public…The goal isn’t to have clean data — it’s to publish data quickly, with bonus points for a nice user interface. But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible.

Jay Small adds that real change won’t happen until the “legacy media” dam breaks:

none of those tipping points will be reached until (a) consumer audiences and (b) advertising dollars abandon the legacy media en masse. We’re seeing interactive audience growth, and ad spending growth, but it’s only chipping away at the legacy media. The dam is holding for now. And that’s slowing the pace of needed changes such as what Holovaty suggests.

A crucial aspect of peer to peer theory, the attempt to produce a theory that aims to understand peer to peer processes, and also a key differentiator between the more liberal and the more radical interpretations, is whether peer producton, the common production through communities, as evidenced in free software, linux and wikipedia, can be expanded to the physical sphere, and additionally, whether that expansion can be enclosed in the money economy.

My own take at the P2P Foundation is of the more expansive school of thought, we think that peer to peer has the potential, and even likelyhood, of becoming the new core of the next political economy, the one that will arise to save us from the very success of capitalism, and its corollary: the destruction and depletion of the biosphere.

Today, as if often said, we treat physical resources as if they were infinite, and the market does not bear most of these costs of negative externalization, and we artificially attempt to make infinite non-rival (even anti-rival) resources, scarce. A P2P-based society would simply reverse that trend, it would treat scarce resources as being scarce, and would free the natural abundance of a free culture. The key, in terms of human identity and desire, is to have a successfull shift from the accumulation of physical assets and resources, to the accumalation of immaterial ‘assets’.

If we ask ourselves, through what strategies and trends could we see an expansion of peer production to the material sphere, I usually give two answers, one is the ‘distribution of everything’. To the degree we succeed in expanding the distributed format, in intellect, productive capital, financial capital, we expand the space where peer production can thrive. Additionally, if we can envisage a process whereby the design phase of industrial production is separated from its physical production space, there is no limit to the use of open source methodologies in the design phase. We can easily imagine for example, the design of a car that would be vastly superior to the car designs by corporations. But the question remains on how to finance its physical construction. But we already see companies in the software industry, who successfully link their market-based aims and behaviour, with a dependence on a intellectual commons and an open source community, fruitfully building a ecology from which all parties profit. It’s a model that can be expanded to other sectors of the economy.

All of this above is a summary of my views so far, and a preparation for my review of an important contribution by Martin Springer, which is the subject of the next entry.

How can new media be used to improve the world we live in? Since the introduction of the Digital Communities category in 2004, Prix Ars Electronica has been dealing more intensively with the socially relevant implementation of artistic and technological innovations.

[Thank you Antoni Abad !! for submitting this item]

Barcelona Accessible illustrates how 40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city's streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelona on the internet.

The result is a map of Barcelona’s inaccessibility for those confined to wheelchairs, a cartographic representation of the parts of town that are closed to people with handicaps. In this way, 3,578 architectural barriers and stumbling blocks have been documented on canal*ACCESSIBLE since December 2005

Josh Wolf, the young California video blogger and freelance journalist who was imprisoned August 1 for refusing to turn over videos of a political protest to a federal grand jury, has just been freed on bail by a federal appeals court, exactly one month later.

Wolf has left the Dublin prison facility, but he hasn't left the community he found there. Yesterday, before once again thanking those who have supported him while he was inside, he wound up his statement before the press:

I’m sure that many of you are curious about my experiences being imprisoned in Dublin; I have been very fortunate and much of my time incarcerated was actually quite positive. While locked up, I met many fellow prisoners who are truly stellar individuals and a observed a community which is actually one of the healthiest that I have ever lived in. To my friends in Unit J2, thanks for everything and I wish you all the best of luck.

In an effort to help get the stories of those incarcerated out into the world, I have started to develop a not-for-profit organization which will be known, for now, as prisonblogs.net – the project is dedicated to giving a voice to the voiceless, and is something that I am very excited about. Expect more details about this initiative in the coming weeks.

For more on the story of Wolf's release, see the San Francisco Chronicle and his own website.

Originally from jameswagner.com reBlogged on Sep 2, 2006, 5:21PM

Earlier this week, when we wrote about yet another weak strategy that newspaper industry-types were discussing as a plan to "fight back" against the internet, a few people complained in the comments that we only seem to focus on the negative side of what newspapers do, and never highlight the positives or come up with any suggestions on our own. Part of this may be because it just seems like so few newspapers seem to be doing much right. However, it's also not entirely true. In the past, we've discussed ways that newspapers can better customize and also why newspapers should recognize that their role has shifted from being just an information deliverer, to being an enabling party that helps its own readers spread the news -- something sites like Digg have shown many people want to do. Techmeme has pointed us to another interesting idea, this time suggested by Adrian Holovaty, who has worked for many years on the digital side of various newspapers. Rather than coming up with vague statements about blogs, tags or whatever the latest buzzword is, Holovaty points out how newspapers need to fundamentally shift how they think about the data they create. That is, they need to recognize that it's data they produce. Rather than focus on each "story" as a blackbox, they should be willing to break it up into chunks of useful metadata. That is, each story is likely to have certain consistent attributes, and making sure the newspaper database understands those attributes allows the newspaper to become a data source, rather than just a collection of news articles. This doesn't mean to get rid of the story itself, but at least make sure the database recognizes the different data attributes.

This is a very powerful idea, that may bring to mind Tim Berners-Lee's idea of the semantic web, where there's a lot more metadata for computers to understand. Of course, the big stumbling block for the semantic web over the years is often that it involves setting up too rigid a structure, eliminating much of what made the web so useful in the first place. It forces people to make choices and to assign specific labels or categories when they might just want to put the full content out there. In fact, Holovaty acknowledges some of this, when he complains that too many in the newspaper industry just see the content management system as the fastest means possible of delivering their story. They just want to be able to dump the story in and have it published. However, as Holovaty has also seen, some are beginning to see the light -- and with the consistency of certain types of news stories, there's really very little need for the "flexibility" that often holds back attempts at the semantic web. Just last month, for example, we pointed out that Thomson Financial is trying to automate the process of writing certain stories, such as on earnings releases. That takes the same concept from a different angle, easing the labor side, but at the same time inherently recognizing the metadata involved.

While some journalists may protest this attempt to "chunkify" their stories, there's nothing in this process that needs to take anything away from their traditional journalism. The story is still filed and is still important. What the additional data (or the classification/categorization of that data) does is open up a goldmine of additional information and services a newspaper can provide. Rather than just focusing on the qualitative angle, the data is exposed and can be used in a variety of ways -- many of which may not be obvious at first, but will come to light later. Holovaty uses an example of being able to break up a ton of useful weather forecast data, and easily combine it with a system for keeping track of little league games (where weather info is important). That's just a small example, but making news data, rather than stories, useful has plenty of other benefits that could revitalize the news business. As an example of how such things could be useful, I was going to point to the ChicagoCrime website that maps where crimes have occurred in Chicago -- and in looking it up, only now realized that it was actually created by Holovaty as well (no wonder). So the good news is that there are some really good ideas out there for improving the value of traditional news organizations. It's just a matter of getting more in the industry to embrace them.

Open source (BSD licensed) Mac OS X administration app and web service inspector for Amazon's S3 remote storage service, by Olivier Gutknecht.

Samsung has just announced the devleopment of an intelligent mobile display driver IC (DDI), which enables the displays on handheld devices to deliver clearer images in broad daylight. Mass production of the DDI device shoud begin at year end.

Until now, most mobile devices were near impossible to see in broad daylight, this new trend hopes to solve the problem.

[PC Exposure via digg]

Apart from the ShiftSpace presentation, the other Pixelspaces talk i really enjoyed was by James Powderly and Evan Roth (US) from Graffiti Research Lab. They developed the project at eyebeam in New York.

I didn't get this project at all before ars electronica. I kind of read about it here and there and thought "mmmh! throwing luminous thingies at buildings? So what?" But i discovered during their talk that there's more behind G.R.L. and i liked what i heard. A lot (though i wasn't really convinced by the "let's throw some luminous thingies at the tram" performance.)
My notes from their talk:

Roth explained that his fellowship at Eyebeam was based on a previous work: his thesis project at Parsons, the Graffiti Analysis system which makes visible the unseen movements of graffiti artists in the creation of a tag.

Powderly worked for a robotic company in New York and was until then thus only used to working on “leaving marks on the rocks on Mars.”

Their works has a lot to do with the hacking mentality. They don’t define themselves as graffiti artists but rather as graffiti engineers, a bit in the style of Q, the gadget guy who devised accessories for James Bond. Their work is an extension of the graffiti and aims to provide graffiti writers, street artists and protesters with new tools in order to help them take back public space and challenge corporate culture. All their work is OS, that was one of the requirements to work at Eyebeam.

They gave us an overview of the works they found most inspiring:

Zoetropes, by the Toyshop Collective, repurposed bicycle wheels animated and inspired by the zoetrope, a XIXth century device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures.

Darius Jones, a graffiti artist from Brooklyn, whose work is characterized by a perversion in the use of existing systems. He clearly has a certain eye for creating romance in unexpected places, making the city fall in love with itself. Street signs falling in love; images of the signage brought into 3D space, at street level; surveillance cameras surveilling themselves, etc.

Mark Jenkins, based in Washington DC, used mostly tape as its material. He leaves his tape kids all over the city as gifts to the world.

Such pieces are very temporal, they stay there only a few hours and their traces live on on the web. He ended up using LED Throwies as well (see his Jesus). His “embedded” works are a big success as well. For example his Homeless Guy makes us look back at ourselves and at how we interact with each other.

Banksy, “the exterior paint specialist”.

Both Banksy and Jenkins have taken over surveillance cameras.
“Boring”: Banksy used a fire extinguisher to paint the letters on the wall of a building because he didn’t think much of its architecture. He emptied the extinguisher and filled it with red paint.

They showed also images of Banksy's works in zoos. The artist is known for sneaking into the penguin enclosure at London Zoo and painting 'We're bored of fish- We wanna go home'.

Hacks in museum (some of the pieces he hung in some museum are now listed as part of the permanent collection. “Vandalized oil painting”. GRL showed some of Banksys's films. He tags up for a very interesting reasons. Apparently policemen wear caps that hide their eyebrows. Apparently eyebrows are such an expressive part of our face that it’s best to leave them in the shadow. But it means that policemen cannot easily see what’s up.

These artists have online equivalents: the Velvet Strike Team who conceptualized during the beginning of Bush's "War on Terrorism" a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game "Counter-Strike".

A walk series of stencils.

Graffiti artists use the web a lot to document their work. Which can lead to some problems as some of them have been arrested via their MySpace page, some have even been busted out of their MySpace page.

Now how does the work of Graffiti Research Lab fit into this?

They want to provide graffiti artists with the tools that would allow them to compete with corporate advertisers. Powderly even added that the most interesting things done using the throwies or the Night Writer have been done by others with the help of GRL sometimes (as with the Throwie Talkie, a Throwie hacked to blink graffiti messages in morse code, an idea of Pat & Ward Cunningham) but often without it. A search about throwies on google shows that it's not about GRL anymore.

Jose Luis de Vicente asked them about their concern for the sustainability of the Throwies (each of them is equipped with a tiny battery). GRL seemed to be very concerned with the problem. They developed a solar-powered throwie but as it's 7 times more expensive than the "regular" one, it wouldn't be affordable enough for artists. Usually throwies do not stay in the environment as people like to throw them then they want to take them back home as a souvenir. But here again comes the problem of recycling: do we know if these people recycle the batteries correctly?

GRL gave a second talk during the Forum I – Interactive Art presentations. You can download the podcast.
Many images found on wooster collective and visual resistance.

After much work Peter and I finally released an update to Mefeedia.  Many thanks to Mike (for hounding us to fix stuff) and Anne (for keeping us grounded)

What’s new?

• Collections (here is one of mine, here’s another…they are fun)
  
• Recommendations
• Friends
• New individual video watch page
• Random Video (very cool)
• RSS feeds on almost everything!
• Many tweaks to the UI

Anyone with a computer and an internet connection will be able to produce broadcast quality clips or programmes based on existing licensed video footage. That is the promise of a new idea from a company called Witty Future Entertainment and they have applied for a patent on the concept.

(Via boingboing)

Aaron Swartz heard Jimmy Wales speak at our Stanford class on Literacy of Cooperation (here's the video) and wondered about his claims that more than half the edits were done by fewer than one percent of the contributors. Swartz rented some computer cluster time, downloaded a sample of the 60 billion Wikipedia edits, and analyzed the results:

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they've come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.

by Eric Schneider, Bluetooth SIG marketing director for Asia/Pacific and Japan (via the Kuala Lumpur Star and Asia News Network), 4 September: "Remember how strange it looked the first time you saw people walking down the street alone, apparently talking to themselves? We now know they aren't crazy but are wearing nearly invisible Bluetooth cellphone headsets. Today, you might also see people bopping or singing to music that you don't hear, coming from music players you don't see. They're probably using multipoint, or multi-use, Bluetooth headsets that connect wirelessly to their music players as well as their handphones. It's a sign of the times that such gadgets have gained acceptance nearly everywhere now. According to IMS Research, the number of Bluetooth units shipped in late 2003 totalled one million. Now, 10 million Bluetooth units are shipped every week and three new Bluetooth enabled products are qualified every day. At the end of last year, more than 500 million products [will] have installed Bluetooth solutions in total... ABI Research indicates the Bluetooth market will grow at a compound annual rate of over 40 per cent between 2004 and 2010, with equipment shipments expected to top the one billion mark by next year..." [story continues on our website]

A Social, User-Centric Space

There were two great talks at the Pixelspaces panel. One of them was by Dan Phiffer (US) and Mushon Zer-Aviv (IL) who presented ShiftSpace, a project they developed at the ITP in New York (honorary mention in the PrixArs competition). I've got no image for it because my camera broke :-(

The first question they asked themselves was “Is there a public space on the web?” Then they demonstrated that the web is not really a public space.
First example they gave to illustrate their point was Christophe Bruno’s online work: The Google Adwords Happening. He tried to answer the question: “how do you make money from net.art?” that had popped up on the rhizome mailinglist. He decided that he’d start by losing money. So he bought some advertisement slots on google. They were not related to the key word he had bought the space for and were not mentioning any URL.

Many people saw his work. But after some time, he received a letter from Google saying something like “We think that you can do your work better, here’s a few tips: put the keyword on the title; add a clear description of your website and of course, please add the URL of your website. Bruno ignored the letter and left the ads as they were. He got another letter from google threatening him of taking down his adverts if he didn’t conform to the rules. The ads went off and Bruno’s attempt to create public art on the web with the pages of Google ended there. His example shows that google is a very private space.

Just like shopping malls...

Defenition of public space from wikipedia: “A public space or a public place is a place where anyone has a right to come without being excluded because of economic or social conditions, although this may not always be the case. One of the earliest examples of public spaces are commons. For example, no fees or paid tickets are required for entry, nor are the entrants discriminated based on background. Non-government-owned malls are examples of private space with the appearance of public space.”

A personal anecdote from Dan: in California there’s a fairly famous website run by a guy called Rob Cockerham who makes pranks: cockeyed.com. He wrote a text on his website asking his readers to follow him in a shopping mall, stalk him as he shops and walks, take pictures of him and behave like papparazzi. But two picture takers were warned by a security guard that unless their cameras were put away they’d be escorted out. When they asked: But isn’t the mall a public space? They were told that, no, in fact a mall is a private property. Shopping malls are like the web, they have the appearance of a public space but they are private.

What is Shiftspace?

If you google “falun gong” on google.com you’ll get a different result than on google.cn because Falun Dafa is censored in China. ShiftSpace adds a note on the Chinese google results that says “Please note that these results have been censored. The un-censored top results should be falundafa.org.”

The artists then showed how they annotated the ars electronica website, hacking its motif. Another example showed a banner on myspace that said that it was Ruppert Murdoch’s space (he bought Myspace), so is it still “your” space?

How does ShiftSpace work?

You browse the net as usual and when a thingy note pops up, you’re informed that the website has ShiftSpace annotations on it. You can filter the notes. For example, decide to see only the notes written by your friends; you can notify ShiftSpace when a note is in fact Spam. The developers also got inspired by the digg system and ShiftSpace allows tho shift up or down a note, according to its interest.
Brief history of the Metaweb.

In 1999 Thirdvoice.com allowed web users to add annotations on a webpage. In 2001, Third Voice had to close. Many lawsuits against them.
In 2004, Greasemonkey let hackers inject code into a page to update it or add new features to the website.
If we compare Shiftspace, Greasemonkey and 3rd Voice, we get:
- Third Voice was a social system; it allowed just one application, was user-centric, it was a proprietary code;
- Grease Monkey wasn’t social, it allowed for various applications, there was no aggregation and it was Open code;
- ShiftSpace is social, it allows for various applications, is user-centric, has an aggregation interface and his code is open.

The tool is very approachable and it allows for people who are not familiar with the code to join the fun.

Now Shiftspace needs your help. How can you participate?

Use the platform and file in bug reports; help develop the core platform. The development heads are IF APIs; Data management; social network and reputation systems; privacy.
Join the mailing list on community.shiftspace.org.
On Tuesday, everyone is invited to the Installation Party at the electrolobby, Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv will install ShiftSpace on your machine. It takes 30 seconds.

Demo video.
Paparazzi image from Dan's flickr page.
Related: Sascha has done a great interview of Christophe Bruno, Google Will Eat Itself. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art]

hands-on guidelines

"This essay is about participation in online collaborations and the potentials of extreme sharing networks in the unregulated commons. Current debates focus too much on what social tools can do and not enough on the people who use them. Motivations of the multitudes who add content to online environments matter a great deal. What follows here are hands-on guidelines and an outline of preconditions for online participation. Terms like: involvement, turn taking, network, feedback, or distributed creativity (1) are frequently applied to characterise this kind of social and cultural interaction. Today, people do not merely browse the web. Instead they give away information, expertise, and advice without monetary compensation. They submit texts, code, music, images, and video files in settings that allow for such contributions. They also re-mix each other’s content. Thousands voluntarily participate in open encyclopedias, social bookmarking sites, friend-of-a-friend networks, media art projects and blogs or wikis. This exemplifies the growing interest in technologies of cooperation. Swarms of users/producers form extreme sharing networks, supporting their goal to lead fullfilled and engaged lives.

This broad cultural context of increased content provision facilitated by the World Wide Web is the precondition for the emerging paradigm of the artist as cultural context provider, who is not chiefly concerned with contributing content to her own projects. Instead, she establishes configurations into which she invites others. She blurs the lines between the artist, theorist, and curator. However, it is surprising how little emphasis has been placed on the subtle motivations for taking part in participatory projects." From THE PARTICIPATORY CHALLENGE by Trebor Scholz [from: Krysa, J., ed. (2006) DATA Browser 03. Curating immateriality. The work of the curator in the age of network systems. Autonomedia: New York.] Trebor Scholz 2006 Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.

Geography and Social interaction in Virtual Reality

"Abstract: This paper examines the interrelation between the geographical and social aspects of virtual worlds. We examine the main geographical features of Activeworlds, a multi-user virtual environment available over the Internet. Activeworlds is not only one of the most popular virtual environments, it is also the only publicly accessible one in which users can build themselves, and thus shape their geographical and social environment. We examine, among other features, transportation, mobility, and property appropriation in this virtual worlds system. Further, we describe some of the influences, both from urban planning and science fiction, on the geography of Activeworlds. We also examine the social relations that arise from these geographical conditions, including the ‘rough and ready’ mentality of this ‘cyberspace frontier’. Finally, we consider the implications of this virtual worlds system for theories of the emerging geographical and social relations in virtual environments." From Activeworlds: Geography and Social Interaction in Virtual Reality by Ralph Schroeder, Avon Huxor, and Andy Smith.

"1.0 Introduction: The idea behind ‘30 Days in ActiveWorlds’ was to fully document the development of a virtual environment from beginning to end, as a plot of virgin virtual land which, it was hoped, would develop into a community and a fully-fledged new virtual world. The aim was not to create a dialogue of life in the virtual environment, such as the well-documented “My Tiny Life” by Julian Dibbell [1] or “The Cybergypsies” by Indra Sinha [2], yet the events that unfolded over the 30 Day period led to just such a documentation, and with it my conclusions about not only community and design in a virtual environment, but also views on the increasingly blurred boundaries between what is real and what is virtual." From 30 Days in ActiveWorlds – Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World by Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith; Social Life of Avatars, Chapter 8, Ralph Shroder (Editor), Springer-Verlag UK. [via Digitally Distributed Environments]

Open Source Flash Server:
" Red5 is a server that not only streams content to the Flash plugin, but it can push calls and information to the Flash client! It can also receive video/audio/data from a flash client and either save or rebroadcast that content."

• Free Speech Internet Television   - Massive Archive of Alternative video which can be watched on the Net.
• Alder Image - A personal exhibit of Joshua Banton’s video work, along with information about the work and the artist.
• Andrew Demirjian, video artist - Stills and descriptions of the video artists work.
• Androgyne, Mon Amour - A dance/music video by composer Barry Truax based on homoerotic poetry by Tennessee Williams, as performed by bassist Robert Black and dancer Walter Kubanek, in a celebration of gay love.
• Bianco-Valente - Art production, images, texts, videos, biography, bibliography and project information.
• The Blind Eye - Dedicated to videos designed to deflect attention from the screen, for relief from TV and Internet addiction.
• Britshorts - A collection of downloadable alternative shorts produced within the UK and Europe. Also accepts submissions from film makers.
• Busybox - Offers original video shorts, panoramic photography and assorted creations.
• Carolyn Speranza - Biography and archive of her video installations.
• Catherine Ross artist - The portfolio of New York based artist Catherine Ross, who works in video and drawing.
• Center for AudioVisual Research - CAVR constructs previously unavailible experiences via the re-structuring of our media landscape.
• [More….]

Click-through for dozens more artists and arts organizations related to video…

Originally from artificialeyes.tv reblog at September 4, 2006, 22:31, published by Marisa S. Olson

David Meade send a post to the videoblogging mailing list: he has managed to put his mefeedia queue rss feed in SecondLife, so you can see videoblogs in SecondLife. It’s hard to explain but easy to see: the videos play really surprisingly great. You can move around in the room, the video keeps playing, it all works great. Here’s a screenshot:

NPR revealed plans yesterday to launch a digital music service during the first half of 2007. They won’t be selling downloads. According to NPR COO Ken stern, the site will be “a unique place for people to discover, learn and have a community around music.” With already 52 podcasts available on iTunes, NPR hopes the new service will dramatically expanded their reach online.

A new set-top box from Amino is designed to allow users to browse video from the internet on their television, aimed at making internet video available to a wider consumer audience.

Christian Westbrook of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) has made what sounds like a cool text-to-speech translator that works within the virtual world of Second Life. Each participant in a converation chooses a voice and a language that they’d like their chat translated into, and the device speaks the translation in real time. Listen to a sample on Christian’s blog, linked above. I haven’t been able to rendezvous with Christian to check this out, so I’m not sure whether the voice component works behind SL or streams in-world, but it’s a nice idea. Who knows, perhaps soon you’ll be able to listen to 3pointD while you go about your virtual business.

Second Life, Technology, voice

Forbes.com has, appropriately enough, filed a video report about the Pioneer Theater's "Vloggers Unite!" series: Internet Video's Big Debut One New York theater takes web movies from the computer screen to the silver screen.

Check out This Iranian American Life, a documentary project by NYU ITP student Paris Marashi. I've already learned new things about Iranian culture... check out [not so] fast food, Offerings for the souls of those who have passed, and Hitching rides in Tehran.

The Access Grid® is an ensemble of resources including multimedia large-format displays, presentation and interactive environments, and interfaces to Grid middleware and to visualization environments.

Good info on streaming, includes embedding, encoding and so on...

Maemo is the application development platform for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

This is a call from the French based Audio in art research group "Locus Sonus" to participate in their streamed soundscapes open web- mike project.

Open Source - QuickTime for Java software and more.

simple brilliant and good for everyone involved (including Mr. Murdoch)

pdf, good overview material

Hot from my workshop at Webvisions yesterday, here is my 103-slide magnum opus on Mobile Design.

• Designing for Mobile: Bringing Design Down to Size PDF (3.6Mb)

My workshop focused on the mobile ecosystem, some of the basic fundamentals as well as dispel myths and jargon common to the mobile industry. As this information can be incredibly hard to come by outside of the mobile industry, it seemed like a good place to start.

Lifehacker picks six ways to find reusable media:

You need an image for that brochure you're designing, and you need it now. Put your hands in the air and step away from the cheesy clipart, mister. Thanks to organizations like Creative Commons, licenses like the GNU Free Documentation License, and the public domain, there are tons of photos, songs, movies and documents freely available for you to download and republish without fear of the copyright police.

CC's search interface is resource #1.

>If there were such objects, the gameplay itself could also have this meta-level, where players are actively looking for objects and interfaces in the environment to bring into the play and transforming them into gaming devices.

Combining the ease and fun of unix package management with the ubiquity of OS X!

Humans live in much larger groups than other primates. Language may have evolved as a form of grooming to allow us to live with so many people.

Editor and Publisher published a Winning Online Manifesto by Tom Mohr, director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University.

Newspaper industry leaders are frogs in a pot. The water’s starting to boil, and it’s time to jump. Only 19 percent of 18-34 year olds read a daily newspaper; 44 percent of them go to a web news portal. Broadband penetration has reached 57%. The blogosphere is doubling every 5 ½ months. Search provides instant access to the world’s information. User-generated content has turned the authority model of institutional media on its head. Peer-to-peer networks, tag clouds and reputation engines are fundamentally changing how people engage with content and communications.

Safa Rashtchy, Senior Internet Analyst for Piper Jaffray, has advanced the notion that these shifts in consumer behavior have precipitated a nascent shift in the marketing mix. He sees search at the center of a new marketing mix. Acknowledging a debt to his framework, I would expand the “center” somewhat to include all intention-based advertising (search, lead-generation advertising, and e-commerce).

Increasingly, smart advertisers are placing their first dollars in intention-based advertising. That’s because these ad dollars target consumers who demonstrate through their actions an expressed interest in the product or service being advertised. While traditional media are not completely replaced by intention-based advertising, they suffer lost market share.

These changes have begun to restructure consumer consumption habits and advertiser behaviors. Circulation has declined 12% since 2000, and the rate of decline is increasing. 3,500 newsroom professionals have lost their jobs, about 7% of the industry total, since 2000.

It is not beyond the pale for the $49 billion (2005) newspaper ad business ($47 billion of which was print) to begin to see accelerating declines in print ad revenue over the next five years. My rough projection is for 2010 print revenue to be just under $3 billion below its 2005 level. This loss must be offset by online. The $4 billion incremental revenue from a network ensures sub-two percent revenue growth from 2006 – 2010. Not robust, perhaps, but certainly much better than the alternative.

This migration path is difficult. The benefits of today’s actions will be seen in two to three years. It’s important to start now.

I have concluded that depends on an industry-wide understanding of seven key points:

• Local newspapers will not be the innovation source for top online products.

• "Local” is not, in itself, defensible online.

• The big money is not in newspaper websites, but in gaining access to top-tier product via partnerships with vertical online leaders.

• Moving newspaper websites onto common platforms will deliver improvements in quality, cost reduction, traffic and revenue.

• When networked, newspapers bring critical assets to the table that strengthen their competitive position vs. online-only players.

• The window of opportunity is closing; failure to act will compromise the future of the business.

• Ultimately, the key is leadership at the highest levels.

Jeff Jarvis says, "Journalism will become more collaborative — because it can, thanks to new tools; because it must, thanks to new business realities; and because it should, to build a new and respectful relationship with the public. So our challenge is to find the ways to help this happen. Jarvis says Saving journalism (and killing the press) is manditory in the age of Craig Newmark.

NewAssignment.net is a new approach to networked journalism. And who better to get the ball rolling than Jay Rosen:

The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up. There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead.

Free Mobile Blog Software for mobile blogging, is available using Melodeo, Shozu, SplashBlog, VoiceIndigo, YouTube and Spodradio. Journalism resources are available at Columbia Journalism Review, CRJ Daily, Paid Content, Online Journalism Review, Poynter, Transom, This American Life, and The Media Giraffe Conference.

Related DailyWireless stories include; CBS Goes Wireless, CBS Bluetooth Posters, Audio Book Sharing, Google Traffic on Cell, Advance to the Rear and Midnight in the Garden.

The quirky weekly “Consumed” column in the NYTimes Sunday magazine this week focuses on Ian Bogost / Persuasive Games’ Disaffected!, as well as Molleindustria’s McDonald’s Videogame, both blogged previously on GTxA (1 2). From the article:

Skepticism about, and mockery of, the claims of commercial persuasion has a long history. And “Disaffected!” shows how the sophistication, goals and tactics of both admakers and anti-admakers have escalated in tandem. It can also be seen as an example of what Sonia Katyal, a Fordham University law professor, calls “semiotic disobedience” in an article to be published this fall in the Washington University Law Review.

DVGuru's got the linkage to a cool Instructables technique for doing animation simply, and on the cheap using a dry erase board and a webcam. The parts list is short, and it couldn't be simpler to do. Check it out.

The Elmo SUV-Cam Micro Video Camera System is a tiny camera that captures MPEG-4 at 704x480 resolution to a SD card and is water proof to around 12ft deep. Will set you back around $750 bones. Nifty. The extreme sports applications alone are virtually endless.

(Via DVGuru)

Photo © copyright Fabio Prati.

My PiC has yet another great post on identifying who you should be “targeting” when you’re building a startup, product, community or all three.

The Pinko approach demands that you become a member of your community to truly understand their needs and the world from their perspective. In fact, this is the only way for you to really be able to genuinely respond to their feedback and criticism, otherwise you’re always approximating what presume they’re saying…

When I was at Spread Firefox and planning out our adoption strategy, I followed very similar principles (though I didn’t have a catchy framework like “Pinko” at the time). By seeing the existing community as made up of concentric circles of enthusiastics and early adopters, my goal was to create a black hole suction of sorts deeper into the inner core community:

My theory was that the more folks we could bring into the inner rings of the Mozilla community, the more devoted they’d become and the lower the incremental effort we’d need to exert to pull in more outliers, like their friends, coworkers and family members.

Tara’s argument very much mirrors this approach. By focusing your effort and outreach on a core constituency, just like in a presidential campaign (read: Howard Dean), you’ll be enticing folks with a truly valuable service that those same folks can then turn around and preach about with more convincing passion, integrity and self-interest than you could… the very reason that the Spread Firefox campaign was so successful; it relied on concentric circles of true-believers to spread the word. For its part it only had to focus on continuing to build a great product and delivery community infrastructure to support its core constituency.

So when it comes to community barn-raising and product development, keeping your design and development efforts geared to a tightly knit core of enthusiasts is the best way to create the first drop that will ripple out to the wider audiences that your VCs are constantly (and damagingly) telling you to go after. There’s simply no better way to effectively and organically build out to a wider audience than taking the concentric circles approach.

Tags: concentric circles, pinko marketing, spread firefox

Folks are buzzing about Google’s new time wasting playable Image Labeler. Philipp Lenssen says:

More than a game, for Google this is a way to tag images using human brain power… to improve their image search results. Two people finding the same tag can serve as validation the tag makes sense. I suppose for Google it’s not important that two people find the same keywords at the same time – they can simply let people tag the images and then add any threshold they want (like “4 people must have chosen this tag for it to become a confirmed tag”).

Both Search Engine Watch and TechCrunch made the connection to research conducted by Luis von Ahn at my alma matter that was first blogged about as early as December last year (written up in the Pittsbrugh Post Gazette in August 2005).

According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch, the Google technology is indeed based on von Ahn’s work:

Yes, Image Labeler is based on my ESP Game, which Google licensed. I’m not employed by Google, however, since I’m a full-time faculty member at Carnegie Mellon.

In my experience, I found the images were often too small to make out clearly, whereas in similar systems like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, you get much higher resolution photos.

Interestingly, Riya uses a similar but closed system of human tagging to populate its object search. It’s unclear how such a system scales for web wide results unless something like Google or Amazon’s tool find enough widespread pick-up and open up an API to the tagged images.

Interview with the creator of del.icio.us

Originally posted by fagette from del.icio.us/fagette, ReBlogged by Paddy Johnson on Sep 3, 2006 at 01:19 PM

A Book Event with Joline Blais, Alex Galloway, and Jon Ippolito

at the New Museum Store
556 West 22nd Street, New York City

Friday, September 8, 2006 -- 6:30-8:30pm

A brief dialogue between the authors will touch on such questions as the
place of art in larger society, the history of community design as an
artistic practice, and the role of games in digital culture. The
conversation will be followed by refreshments and a reception for the
authors.

featuring:

"Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture"
by Alexander R. Galloway
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/G/galloway_gaming.html

"At the Edge of Art"
by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito
Thames & Hudson, 2006
http://www.thamesandhudson.com/en/1/9780500238226.mxs

via Rhizome:

Rhizome and the New Museum are pleased to present "Art, Play, and
Community," which will celebrate the release of Joline Blais and Jon
Ippolito's "At the Edge of Art" and Alex Galloway's "Gaming." Both
ground-breaking books explore new media art as an expanded field, that
interacts and enliven disciples from design to art to video games to
science.

According to "At the Edge of Art" by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito,
art's recent eruption in fields as diverse as artificial life, computer games,
and community activism reveals a seismic shift in the role it plays in
society. No longer content to sit on a pedestal or auction block, these
works infiltrate stock markets, sway court cases, and network bedrooms.
Alex Galloway's "Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture" takes an in-
depth look at one of these 'edges' to probe the cultural history and activity
of videogames, laying the foundation for critique that recognizes their
distinct mechanisms and politics.

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art, ReBlogged by Paddy Johnson on Sep 4, 2006 at 12:26 PM