This is just cool

via Arthurmag, via Jordan:

Here we are, about two weeks from the release of Al Columbia’s first book in almost a decade.  Pim & Francie is already receiving advance praise from folks like Spike Jonze…Al’s always working on something new and amazing, whether it’s music, filmmaking, comics, or in this case, painting.  Al showed me a photo of this new painting he was working on and I became immersed in the labyrinth of frayed facade and haunting beauty.

(click for full view)

Red Bull Soapbox Derby, Atlanta 09

I believe I was just writing some ridiculous post on racing only a week ago, and already there’s a racing event outside my house? Clearly I have a lot of sway with the powers that be.  I believe we should also have an epic science fiction and fantasy convention in this city. Maybe someone will hear me and make that happen, like, next week.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Derby itself, aside from some free cans of Red Bull. I wasn’t even planning to go, but on my way to Caribou at 10th and Piedmont for coffee I was sucked in with the rest of the crowd and ferried down 10th along Piedmont Park—where blonde girls in sunglasses and tight white tops did gymnastics and doled out cans of Red Bull. (No sugar-free, apparently, to the dismay of one grizzled old granddad who looked profoundly disappointed when he heard this.) A party bus, with lounge seating set up outside to promote Red Bull & Cola, swamped with people looking for handouts.  Daft Punk and Peter, Bjorn + Jon remixes blasting through the speakers lofted on twenty-foot poles. Lawn chairs lining the edge of the park.  And the huge stage platform where the cars would launch from.

And of course, there are the racers and the cars themselves.  Traffic slowed to a standstill around the pits, where competing teams dressed up to suit the theme of their uh, non-auto-mobile. An Oompa-Loompa team driving the tunnel boat from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,  an Avengers team dressed up as Marvel heroes, a zombie team driving a brain on wheels, a couple Greco-Roman chariots, a coffin on wheels representing the Clermont, some mad scientists driving a shopping cart(?), a Barbie-mobile… the whole cultural gamut, pretty well-represented.  Hopefully there will be some pictures posted later to represent the dedication and general awesomeness of these teams.

From what I saw, they’ve really pulled this off well- to the benefit of Atlanta and Red Bull.  So, mission accomplished, Red Bull marketing peoples. You’re making me reconsider my immediate skepticism of any corporate-sponsored event. And you taste so good.

Race you!

As a kid, I used to love to race people during recess.  In spite of my awesome speed, whenever we played “Top Gun” – our favorite racing game – I was always the cargo plane. Children can be so cruel in their clique politics.

But anyway, my unappreciated awesomeness as a kid is an issue for another post. I’m talking about racing. There is something very exhilarating about such a direct sort of competition that doesn’t require any rules, any equipment, nothing except two people and a destination.  First one there wins.

But grown-ups don’t race.  Why is this?  Is it because it’s seen as childish?  Does that sort of weirdly direct personal competition freak people out? Americans today generally just aren’t that athletic, but when they are it’s usually in the context of an organized sport or a row of ellipticals at the gym.  This makes me sort of sad.

Granted, there are huge road races – we just had one in Atlanta last month.  But these are huge organized events with sponsors and pre-determined routes, registration fees and strict regulations. What I’m wistful for is that impromptu “hey, I’ll race you to the car” or “I bet I can beat you to the other side of the block”.  It’s dumb, it’s fun, and what’s wrong with that?

I think what’s wrong with this idea is that it’s too simple.  We want to go, “why?” or “and then what?”  So to this end, I’m thinking we should make it more complicated and structure it into more of a game.  I got this idea after signing up for FourSquare a few days ago and sort of falling in love. (I’m the mayor of the Equitable building starbucks! Free coffee pls.)

You’ll remember the post on augmented reality a while back featuring the video of the NY subway stations AR app on the iPhone 3gS.  It pulled waypoint information from google maps to overlay it on your camera screen along with estimated distance.  And it looked amazing.

Well, it’s extremely easy to add waypoints into google maps.  So why not make a race app? Here’s how it would work. You can either set a destination on the fly in the wild or set up a route online.  Then get to your starting point and hit go – and you’ll get your target destination overlaid on the display as well as estimated distance and estimated time of arrival, calculated by tracking how fast the GPS has you moving.  Better, it could even track the location of other players so you could “see” their location even outside of your field of vision. 

This is more attuned to a sprawling back-and-forth city-wide race than a simple point-a to point-b sprint.  But doesn’t it sound fun?  There are certainly some issues you’d need to work out.  Whipping out your phone and glancing at the screen while running is probably a pretty good way to drop it, or crack your skull against a lamppost. It might be better suited to a team-based game in cars, with a navigator and a driver—although that sort of removes the active, physical element to it which was the whole point. But these are little details.

I think there’s a lot of opportunities out there for augmented reality apps to provide some useful, entertaining service.  It’s not just for marketers! Although after a race, if the winner got a coupon for a local cafe or a free week pass to a gym… well, I think it could be monetized pretty intelligently. Hopefully we’ll see more apps like this in the future … and fewer giant floating red bull cans.  And even if AR doesn’t take off… well, you can still just get a friend and race them down the block the old-fashioned way.

Is there anything you’d like to see added? Any features you think would make this cooler? Or do you think this is a retarded idea that would never work? Say it loud + proud in the comments.

Movie Time: Funny Games

When I first saw the trailer for Michael Haneke’s Funny Games with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth I swore that I would never, ever in my life see this film.  It looked too terrible, too gleefully aware of what it was and what it was doing, and so smugly self-satisfied at being a piece of torture porn.  Sometime later last year I ended up reading Dana Stevens’ review over at Slate and in spite of a pretty mixed rating it seemed like the movie was doing some pretty weird stuff that invited a viewing.

Then this Friday I found myself bored and at blockbuster, and… well.

It’s brutal and awful and torturous and vile and deeply upsetting and everything I thought it would be.  I just wasn’t expecting the movie to be so beautifully shot, or so well edited.  It’s amazingly effective and I ended up really liking it in spite of how much it made me suffer. A lot has been made of the movie’s most transgressive acts against the viewer and the format of film as we know it – the breaking of the fourth wall, a rewind sequence that leaves you feeling like you’ve been punched in the gut.  After the first direct address—which is so uncannily upsetting I might have momentarily lost my mind—the trick gets less and less powerful.  As it becomes more and more obvious that the movie is really just a giant “FUCK YOU” to everyone and the culture of violence that we belong to/embrace/perpetuate/reward, the tension diminishes because it’s obvious that Haneke’s not going to change his mind. And the movie stops being fun when you can figure out how it’s going to end.

Anyway, forget all the crap I just wrote. This is definitely a film to watch if you want a challenge.  It is pretty heavy-handed at times, but it’s also beautifully produced and it just works very well as a thriller.  And it also has its more head-scratching moments for reflection later – like a long conversation between the psychotic duo regarding the malleable nature of reality and fiction at the end of the film.

P.S. Funny Games also prominently features a pretty bitching thrash metal song by Naked City throughout.  Which I’ve included here for your aural displeasure. Do whatever the opposite of enjoying is!

Naked City – Bonehead

The New & Improved Dynamic Self

I’ve been retooling my personal portfolio site this past week.  Any designer will tell you that portfolio sites are a cruel, unforgiving monster.  Almost always, as soon as you finish all the work of concepting, coding, and design, you look back at the finish piece and feel disappointed.  Because that site just isn’t you, and just can’t do a good enough job of representing you.  And almost always, you’re too tired to care at this point – so that’s what goes online.  And it haunts you every time someone asks for a link to your site, because in your heart you know if it’s not good enough for you then it certainly isn’t good enough to share with the rest of the world – and certainly not fit for sharing with potential employers who literally wear pants made out of money and would like to possibly give you some.

So designing a portfolio site is exhausting work.  And I’m not going to share it until it’s done, which hopefully won’t be too terribly long from now.  But I can share some ideas I have about it, and the crazy thoughts that have come along with it.

I want my new portfolio site to be an absolute celebration of dynamic content.  I want the traditional elements of a portfolio to be there, the biography, the resume, all well presented.  But I also want to make it fun and interesting.  I want it prove that I’m intelligent and sort of well-rounded or at least not completely retarded outside the scope of my work. (Not that my portfolio would lead you to believe I’m some sort of creative savant, or anything.)  And the way to do that today is twofold: First, you supply interesting content of your own – blogs, photographs, side projects, video, microposts, etc.  And second, you show that you’re engaged with the rest of the world.  You show other people’s content that you really like, because that will always say more about who you are and especially who you want to be and have the potential to be than what you’ve created to this point.

Plus, and maybe this is just me, I always think other people’s lives are more interesting than my own.

Obviously there’s a danger there in overwhelming your own work with that of other people, and I think it’s a concept that works for some portfolios better than others.  Personally, I’m trying not to box myself to a design career, and I’m thinking a lot of about social media, viral marketing, and augmented reality.  So I’m trying to show a little interdisciplinary flair here, and hopefully it’ll work out.

Okay, now here is where this post gets interesting.

Assume you want to own your online profile entirely.  You want your site to be a portrait of authenticity, a portal to yourself.  So you want your twitter, blog, flickr, last.fm, etc all lined up in a row so there’s no mistaking who Matthew is.  This stuff is all cool, but pretty basic.  Why not try something more unique, more interesting?  Previously you’d need to dabble around in webapp API toolboxes and, man, I am just not ready for that level of development shenanigans.  But it’s becoming increasingly easier to tether data from multiple applications together and produce unique (and extremely cool) applications of your own.  Yahoo! Pipes, which I discovered today, has suddenly made this a lot easier.

So what’s to stop you from linking your latitude/longitude via iPhone gps to a flickr widget that will constantly display new images from your exact current location? Why wouldn’t you create a robot to  trawl the internet to search for pictures of anorexic midget clown porn (that got your attention) to automate your new photoblog? Who is going to walk up to you and say, “No, Matthew, you cannot create a “The Path of Matthew” page that displays, historically, exactly where you have been for the past year as a moving icon on Google maps?

No one is going to stop you.  The only thing stopping you is utility.  How useful would these machinations be? We’re approaching a time where anyone with basic web design skills can assemble an app that does truly stunning things, and all you need is an imagination.  So get in while the getting is good.  Make something cool before someone else does it first, and then share the coolest things other people have done with the rest of the world. That’s how you make your portfolio something to be proud of.

An Apple is Born (and tiny dudes in your head)

via Creativebits, a fascinating interview with Rob Janoff, original designer of the Apple logo.  Here’s a taste:

CB: What does the bite in the apple represents? Is it a reference to a computing term byte? Is it a reference to the biblical event when Eve bit into the forbidden fruit? Is the fruit itself referencing the discovery of gravity by Newton when an apple fell on his head while sitting under the tree?

RJ: Well, I’m probably the least religious person, so Adam and Eve didn’t have anything to do with it. The bite of knowledge sounds fabulous, but that’s not it. And, there is a whole lot of other lure about it. Turing the famous supposed father of computer science who committed suicide in the early 50’s was british and was accused of being homosexual, which he was. He was facing a jail sentence so he committed suicide to avoid all that. So, I heard one of the legends being that the colored logo was an homage to him. People think I did the colored stripes because of the gay flag. And, that was something really thought for a long time. The other really cool part was that apparently he killed himself with a cyanide laced apple. And, then I found out Alan Turing’s favorite childhood story was Snow White where she falls asleep forever for eating a poisoned apple to be woken up by the handsome prince. Anyway, when I explain the real reason why I did the bite it’s kind of a let down. But I’ll tell you. I designed it with a bite for scale, so people get that it was an apple not a cherry. Also it was kind of iconic about taking a bite out of an apple. Something that everyone can experience. It goes across cultures. If anybody ever had an apple he probably bitten into it and that’s what you get. It was after I designed it, that my creative director told me: “Well you know, there is a computer term called byte”. And I was like: “You’re kidding!” So, it was like perfect, but it was coincidental that it was also a computer term. At the time I had to be told everything about basic computer terms.

It makes me so happy to know that even the designers of the most iconic logos still do some of their best work on accident.  It’s fantastic that even when we don’t know why we do the things we do, there’s a part of our brain chugging along in secret, determined to make us look good.  Each of us has a tiny think tank in our heads in a little cold war situation room with glow-in-the-dark paint all over the walls and a dozen crazy impulses battling to make the best of every situation.  To know that you always have backup in your own head for any creative challenge: that’s reassuring.

Check out the whole article.  Rob Janoff comes off as such a nice, cool guy, and you won’t be disappointed.

Excuse us, we’re not ourselves

via Christine Huang at PSFK:

The channels, gadgets, websites and apps to help us be and/or feel ’social’ (with a real person or just the idea of one) are only getting smarter and more diverse. Our everyday lives find many of us immersed in entirely virtual communication and socialization, based on a simulacrum of real life or an entirely fantastical one. We are avatars talking to avatars, on our own terms, at our convenience.

Except that’s not entirely true.  Because when the scope of communication transcends the normal human bounds of space and time—when your avatar is online constantly and you, being merely human, need to sleep/bathe/etc—communication is no longer a matter of convenience.  It’s a matter of necessity.  So if you’re not there, which you is that person really talking to?  And can you entirely trust your other self to behave while you’re away?

Christine addresses a couple of interesting stories in her post – the 2d otaku love affairs in japan (and here in the states too, to be honest) and a recent study equating feelings of belongingness gained from watching TV to the same feelings that come from real human interaction.  She concludes:

Our relationships with objects, characters and avatars is always at a distance – we are interacting with the representation of something, rather than the thing itself. This arrangement results in a unique type of relationship – one that should be considered differently than a real-life interpersonal one.

What if the reason we’re growing to identify more with fictional characters is that we ourselves are becoming fictional characters? Everyone’s got their own narrative and meta-narrative. Everyone’s persona is to some extent externalized, our connections and roots as human beings stored and managed online.  It’s accepted now that people are their own brands and need to manage their appearances accordingly.  Your digital self – arguably your most important persona – is way more malleable of an identity construct than any we’ve ever dealt with in the past.  It’s so easy to rewrite who you are.  It follows that it should also be easier than ever to imagine yourself in any situation with your favorite characters… because you’re just as imaginary as they are.

We’re soon going to look back on the days of mid-life and quarter-life crises with a sigh and a patronizing smirk.  The future is one long stretch of identity crises.  And even when you finally die, your other yous will remain.

The great ben & jerry’s twitter heist

So as I was unwinding from a busy day of laundry and other household chores, I was followed by @benandjerrys.   This is ordinarily something I’d ignore or block – but this time something was different.  This time, something wasn’t right.  Can you guess what it is?

Oh no! They let an intern run their twitter! My first thought was that Ben and Jerry’s twitter had been hacked – plenty of news stories with a similar lede have been published recently – but with further research it turns up that B&J were sadly just too glacially slow to claim their brandspace on Twitter.  (B&J has multiple feeds for each of its most popular flavors, instead).  In fact, an untraceable, sinister shadow organization of militant anti-GMO organo-terrorists some devoted kossacks and self-appointed “Freaks, Uppity Women, and Politicos” at OBrag.org have had the space parked since at least June 11th, according to Google’s cache.  Or so I’m inferring from the evidence at hand.

It was at some point in this last month – I’d love to know when – that the owners deployed their defamation package.

Following 272 with 19 followers, @benandjerrys doesn’t hold a candle to the official B&J flavor pages, and ranks far below them on google even when specifically searching for the domain. But this is bound to become a bigger deal if the owners of the fake account continue to friend at a fast pace and garner publicity for their little pet project.  I’m not well versed on the legal aspects at play here but I’m not sure it’s fair game to be falsely representing yourself as an organization, even if it’s satire.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Can Ben and Jerry’s stomach a fake twitter page that bears the obvious intent to malign its brand? What should they do, and what will they do? Will Twitter intervene? Does it even matter, if the page isn’t ranking on google anyway, since fewer people navigate by direct addresses these days anyway?

Regardless, it could end up being a pretty good example of guerrilla counter-marketing, if the follow-through is executed well.  As for the anti-corn syrup campaign, I’m all for it, but I also think it’s a little naive to transfer all the problems of our nation’s agri-industrial complex onto one ingredient—especially when pure, natural sugar isn’t so great for you anyway.  But that’s a story for another post, when I’m feeling more Pollan-esque.

Salt, The Caryatids, Books

Books, books, I buy too many books.  I have a strange relationship with books where I appreciate them so much as objects that I am often content to merely own them.  Sure I’d like to read them, but there are so many and I really struggle to maintain the patience required to read every night. Plus, when you consider the logical end of obtaining so many books, it’s not rewarding.  Jeff and Ann Vandermeer have to have huge book sell-offs annually in order to not die under the crushing pressure of paper and ink.  Owning books is sadly a losing proposition in the long run.

But I mean to say that the book I have stalled out on, Salt, is great, but I maybe only read 100 pages of it before life interfered and threw my pattern off.  Like Mad Men (at least for me), Salt is the sort of thing you have a hard time getting back into if you take a break, specifically because nothing ever really happens.  Sorry, Mad Men, your period detail is amazing but please can Don Draper do something interesting?

I say this because you should read Salt, by Mark Kurlansky—bestselling author of (wait for it) Cod: A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World.  I’m something of a neophyte in the non-fiction world, and practically everything I’ve read is about food in some way or another.  But in spite of my poor attention span I can recommend this book because, uh, it’s fascinating.  It’s not just sodium chloride, table salt—it’s all sort of chemical salts, including, for instance, gunpowder.  People used to kill each other to get a little salt, and now people kill themselves by consuming too much salt.  I can’t say much more about it other than that a whole chapter describes olives, my favorite food, so I love it, but I’ll just leave with Kurlansky’s opening line, which just accentuates the romantic aura this surprisingly non-dorky book entertains:

“The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.”

But I am trudging forward with another book I started a few months back – Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids.  Hey look, that’s the cover right up there.  I had heard some pretty rave things about this when it first came out, but a cursory glance at Amazon makes it appear like people mostly want to shit on it.  Which I sort of understand, even if I don’t agree. Some of the main critiques levied against it are that there’s a lack of characterization, a lack of plot, it’s too preachy, and that perspective shifts around too frequently to get a handle on what Sterling is even trying to say.  Well, slow down, mister, I’m only one hundred pages in.  But it definitely possesses the distinct reek of a work produced by a technofetishist. In this way, it reminds me of Charles Stross’ Accelerando, which was bursting with cool ideas but swept plot under the rug, or most of what I’ve read from Cory Doctorow.

I love this stuff.  It’s popcorn, but it’s smart popcorn, and it’s undeniably a product of our specific era in a way other sci-fi isn’t.  Near-future sci-fi has never been as close to the present day as it is now, and god, I could come up with a better way to say it but there it is.  I actually got back into The Caryatids after thinking all week about augmented reality, and I wasn’t really surprised when it turns out to potentially be a major plot point in the story.

Like I said, I’m only 100 pages in, thus far.  But with the disclosure that I love some good technoporn (and what nerd doesn’t?), you have another recommendation based on the strength of Sterling’s ideas here (and some pretty entertaining dialogue) and his surprisingly rewarding refusal to have people blow shit up to make things more exciting.  Yeah, that’s right – there haven’t been any explosions yet.  So you decide.

Visual Complexity

Since I started thinking so much about augmented reality, I’ve got information design on the brain.  Data visualization is a natural counterpart.  Visual Complexity is a [four year old - sorry, i'm your grandpa, how do i work this thing] site that gathers impressively designed visualizations of complex information for your geeky delight.  It’s produced by Manuel Lima, who went graduated from the program for Design + Technology at Parsons, in NYC.

(Evidently Helvetica just resolves well in all your standard-issue future interfaces) I’ll know more about it once I pick up some of these interesting books.  In an equally cool-looking but perhaps slightly less useful display of info visualization, Random Walk has compiled images that attempt to interpret randomness in graphical form.  Here, take a peek:

The project RANDOM WALK simulates randomness in visualizations, which are easy to understand. In this way, it delivers insight into a phenomenon, which has so far remained unexplained.

WHAT DOES RANDOMNESS LOOK LIKE?
RANDOM WALK asks this question and presents experiments in mathematics and physics, showing the mysterious interaction of chaos and order in randomness.

For extra Data Viz fun, check out this (also antique) Smashing Magazine article.