Yesterday was the last day at my full-time job at Method, and today I’m starting a two-week workshop at Eyebeam. Interactivos? was initiated two years ago by the Medialab-Prado, which describes the event as “a hybrid between a production workshop, a seminar and a showcase.” Eyebeam has selected nine projects to be realized over the two-week workshop, through collaboration between the artists, Eyebeam fellows and a group of volunteer artists, engineers, musicians, programmers, designers, and hackers selected as collaborators. Eyebeam’s main space will be transformed into a production lab for the next two weeks, and then subsequently into an exhibition space for the projects completed there. The entire process is open to the public, so if you’re in NYC, feel free to stop by anytime over the next two weeks. On July 12 there will be an opening for the work we’re creating, which will then run through August 9.
Last night Eyebeam hosted an Upgrade! event to launch the Interactivos? workshop, whose theme, “Better than the real thing,” investigates the blurry line between the real and the fake. Appropriately enough, Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men presented documentation of some of their latest performance-hoax-interventions.
I don’t know yet which project I’ll be assigned to assist on, but I’ll post the details when I find out later today. I’m sure there will be some kind of project site or blog, which I will point to, but I hope to document much of the process here as well. Stay tuned!
www.etherealself.com - Requires a web cam. Originally from Rhizome.
I’ve been DVR-ing Frontline recently and had forgotten how consistently good it is. Their two-part series on AIDS (originally aired in 2006 on the 25th anniversary of the first such diagnosed case) is fascinating and conveys all of the intertwined aspects of the disease (medical/biological, historical, political, social, etc.) without losing site of the big picture.
This segment on Darfur provides a good overview of the genocide there and why it’s continuing to happen (Short answer: China).
Another two-part series, Bush’s War, is an exhaustive account of the lead-up to the Iraq war and how it has been fought. Haven’t watched this one yet, but several friends have recommended it.
The Frontline archive has complete broadcasts available for online viewing going as far back as 2002. Definitely a welcome diversion from the rest of the punditry and spin that passes for television journalism these days.
Boredom Research’s prototype for RealSnailMail uses actual living snails (Helix Aspersa, for the snail-savvy) equipped with RFID tags that enable them to be assigned messages from hardware located within their enclosure. Once a message is sent through the RealSnailMail web interface, it is stored on a “server” until one of the snails happens to pass close enough to activate the RFID antenna. “Once collected your message is lugged around on the back of a snail until such time as it happens by the dispatch centre and is finally forwarded to its recipient.”
RealSnailMail is described as a “’slow art’ project [intended] to make us think about the ubiquity of electronic communications and questions of speed, and, more broadly, question our thinking about communication.” I just sent a message to Jeff; will update when/if I hear anything back.
Also, there are profiles for each of the snails.
Steven Johnson’s Outside.in just launched Radar, a tool that aggregates content based on it’s proximity to you.
Tell us where you are, and Radar shows you what’s happening around you, at increasing levels of zoom: the 1000-foot scale, the neighborhood scale, the city scale, and “Everywhere Else” in the U.S…. Right now, we’re tracking blog posts, news stories, outside.in discussions, and Twitter tweats, and organizing them all both around specific places and topics.
Great concept, but seems like it might be better suited to delivery over a mobile device (sure that is probably in the works).
More generally, I love what Outside.in is aiming for in terms of location-based content tagging and using web-based social tools to strengthen local community-building. Maybe I need to spend more time using the site to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how it works, but it just doesn’t feel fully-baked yet. The different types of content (blog posts, news stories, users) and categorization/navigation schemes (places, tags, etc.) don’t quite integrate in a way that’s immediately intuitive for me. I think this is mostly an information architecture/UI-design issue, because the pieces all fit together conceptually. Will be interesting to see how the design/architecture of the site evolves.