BigShinyThing

Lovely design collective Timorous Beasties have been going since 1990. This is their most famous work - the Glasgow Toile, a contemporary urban street scene with a drug addict shooting up, a lad in tracksuit peeing against a tree, etc. produced in the style of early 1800s Toile de Jouy wallpaper. Kind of like a 20th Century ‘Gin Alley’.

"I love the idea of an upper middle-class fabric depicting the underbelly of urban chaos," explains co founder Paul Simmons:

We’re also satirising the incredibly conservative textiles world. You only have to have a print of an evil-looking bird and everyone freaks out. And we want to portray the Glasgow the tourist board ignore.

If you fancy ignoring the ironies of a £78 lampshade depicting a homeless person, SCP has a range of furniture and wallpaper featuring the Timorous Beasties Toiles.

the site ‘explains’:

“Google Relateness calculates how related two words are by doing three searches. Two words have a “relatedness coefficient” of 2 if they appear together twice as often as you would expect with a total of 2,073,418,204 pages”

The study, based on January telephone interviews with 1,855 participants, found that 10 percent of consumers watched video-on-demand via cable or satellite in the prior 30days; 11 percent accessed news online; and 37 million consumers listened to Web radio

Andy Duncan, chief executive of Britain’s Channel 4, said recently: “We are moving from a push system, where the broadcaster (or studios) decided what you could watch and when, to a pull system where viewers choose what to view, how, and where and when.”

Or as Bill Gates would have it, at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos:

“Satellite is toast”

Full story here

Full story is here

Link to Flickr

An agnostic reponse to the need to apologise: in 1980 a New Yorker named Allan Bridge set up a telephone line that he called “The Apology Line”"

The full story and transcripts from phone calls made to it are here

Fans will be able to buy clips of 12 car reviews over the internet

From Monday, viewers of motoring show Fifth Gear can pay £1.50 for “DVD quality” downloads of car reviews

The full story is here

‘Bullet time’ is the time freeze special effect pioneered in the Matrix films. Although the Wachowski brothers won the Oscar, the effect was in fact invented by Michel Gondry for a 1996 Smirnoff cinema commercial.

For those bored with bullet time, there is a new frantic, juddering effect as seen in the current Mercedes commercial and, more spookily, in this short film by French artist Vadim Bernard.

A lovely evocation of what it’s like to have a panic attack …

The Guardian reports:

A young internet entrepreneur from London is launching a legal battle against Apple Computer to try to overturn a ruling on the ownership of a website address. Benjamin Cohen, 22, is applying to the high court for a judicial review of his dispute with Apple over the address itunes.co.uk. Mr Cohen registered the name in November 2000

The full story is here

Last time round he was railing against the MTV generation. this time it’s a little more pertinent… Take Back TV bills itself as:

A celebration for INdTV, a new TV network that will empower viewers to help create the TV they want to watch

Take back TV

Full story here

“When Los Angeles architect Anthony Poon, 41, hears people in his office start to talk about the latest episode of The O.C. or American Idol, he tells them to pipe down. He likes to record the shows and watch them in a batch later on, and he doesn’t want anything spoiled”

Full report here.

The other day a colleague overheard some teenagers on his bus talking some kind of secret language -one that just didn’t seem to make any sense but which involved a lot of repeated sounds.

During my childhood, the secret language was eggy peggy which disguised words by putting ‘eggy’ before each vowel -there’s a nice little guide to it and other secret languages here.

Cockney rhyming slang is probably the most famous example but the archaic gay language polari is also making a comeback.

See also: the very wonderful Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have done a translation of the whole of the King James bible as part of their longstanding campaign to resurrect polari.

Sample text:

1 In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the nanti lucoddy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.
3 And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle.
4 And Gloria vardad the sparkle, that it was bona: and Gloria divided the sparkle from the munge.
5 And Gloria screeched the sparkle Day, and the munge he screeched nochy. And the bijou nochy and the morning were the una day.

Morrissey is also very fond of the language - for example the album title ‘Bona Drag’ (nice clothes) and of course ‘Piccadilly Polari’

An animated one second film … 24 frames in one second of film … the film consists of 12 giant frames (5ft x 9ft paintings) … each frame will be filmed twice to create the 24 frames in one second of animation. Each frame had its own director and was painted by hundreds of people during an all-night event

Once the film has been shown the frames will be sold off for charity

The film is being funded by hundreds of thousands of producers from the very famous to anyone who can donate a dollar or more to be included in the credits

Extract from the site:

The 1 Second Film hopes to bring a conceptual film to as many people as possible. But this 1st second is just the begining- Ultimately, we hope to bring the entire world together, one second at a time, through a series of epic animated SEQUELS that will eventualy culminate in THE 11,111 SECOND FILM.

Sony has become the latest blue chip advertiser to sign an advertising deal with bloggers. Sony has signed a deal with Gawker Media for exclusive sponsorship rights to LifeHacker, a just launched blog about personal gadgets.

For a reported $25,000 a month, Sony also gets placements on Gizmodo, which attracts 1.3 million techies a month

Gawker Media are savvy lot - the blog blurb reads:

“Gawker Media – Gawker and ten other weblog titles – brings a young and influential audience to brand advertisers. Click here to find out more about sponsorship opportunities.”

Read the full article here

New York, Adweek

‘Fat Actress’ Online Video Shows Ad Promise

Online video could provide compelling advertising opportunities, according to a new study examining Showtime’s Fat Actress streaming video promotion on Yahoo.

Interpublic Group media planning agency Initiative and ComScore Networks measured the multi-platform
launch of Fat Actress, which Showtime aired via streaming video on Yahoo as well as on its pay cable channel. The Showtime airing of the program on March 7 received a .62 household rating, which translates int 942,000 viewers.

The Yahoo streaming video, which could be accessed when the viewer chose, reached another 16,000 viewers. Including those who viewed individual scenes, 197,000 saw the pilot or streaming content related to the show. Including multiple views of the video, the number of visitors hit nearly 390,000 in the first two days.

The findings put the Web’s portion of total viewership of Fat Actress at 16 percent, Initiative said, providing a glimpse of the potential of online video as an ad vehicle, although the program did not carry ads on Yahoo.

“It’s a window into changing consumer behavior” said Stacey Lynn Koerner, executive vice president and
director of global research integration at New York-based Initiative. “Traditional media is not the only game in town.”

Yahoo has hired former ABC Entertainment chairman Lloyd Braunto head its media unit. Rivals MSN and AOL
are also pouring resources into online video. MSN, which has dozens of ad-supported videos on its site, has added an online video category to its online advertising awards. Meanwhile, AOL plans to simulcast the premiere of Project Greenlight, a Bravo documentary airing March 15, as well as clips throughout the season.

Christo and Jean-Claude’s installation in Central Park, The Gates, was responsible for a surge in visitors to New York during a traditionally slow travel month, generating three times the spending that City Hall expected: some $254m

‘The Gates’ attracted over 4m visitors to Central Park during the two weeks it was up, a tremendous gain over the 750,000 people who usually visit in that period. Hotel occupancy rates were near 90%, compared with 70% at the same time last year. Elsewhere, international tourists increased 74%, spiking attendance in local restaurants and museums. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a roof garden overlooking Central Park, had a 90% jump in visitors.) Even Broadway felt the impact: ticket sales increased 17% during the first week of ‘The Gates’. Carriage drivers usually stable their horses in winter, but this February they were hardly ever without passengers.

‘The Gates’ didn’t even cost the city anything to install since Christo and Jeanne-Claude funded the $21m project themselves. Some 1,100 workers were paid to install, maintain, secure and remove the piece, with everything dissembled by March 15th.

…while sometimes I take off my headphones and enjoy the cool breeze playing on my ears, far more often my ‘phones are all that keep me from murdering civilians.

The Washington Post muses on the self-imposed isolation of the ipod listener

In its present and original incarnation, as a computer program, Longplayer has been playing since it began in the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London E14. It is also playing in the planetarium at the Bibliotheca Alexandria, Alexandria, Egypt, the Powerhouse, Brisbane, Australia and in Rufford Park, near Nottingham, England. Plans are in an advanced stage for other listening posts around the world.

Longplayer can also be heard globally via a live stream on the Internet and has been produced in collaboration with arts curators Artangel.

See also the 10,000 year clock Clock of the long now .