BigShinyThing

Flash Mobbing was a craze from a couple of years back where crowds mobilised by text messages and emails met up up pre-appointed places to start pillow fights and other hilarious japes. Ford in collaboration with Sony Pictures Digital are using the same model to promote their Flash Fusion Concerts, the details of which are kept secret until the last minute.

So is the usual corporate hi-jacking of an underground trend? Yes and no. The events are hugely successful and no one seems to be ‘officially’ selling out. As the Financial Times begrudgingly notes, “The artists themselves - The Roots, Fat Joe, The Wallflowers - are clearly happy enough to perform for Our Ford and the fans seem thrilled at the idea of attending a musical sales pitch if it means they get free tickets.”

His ideas appear whimsical but pragmatic - a truly human response to the horrors of our times. For instance, in response to 9/11 he proposed that the Twin Towers be rebuilt but with plane-shaped holes at the top enabling future attacks to fly through leaving the building unscathed.

Dedomenici’s proposal explains:

I have formulated a plan to resolve the potential economic conflict of building an Oklahoma-style memorial garden at ground zero - the most expensive piece of real estate on earth.

I propose that the twin towers are recontructed exactly as before - except for two airliner-shaped holes passing through the towers at the original points of impact. Within these spaces would be situated two memorial gardens.

To prevent the possibility of a simliar attack to that of September 11, all US planes would be fitted with tamper-proof technology so that if an aircraft was ever flown dangerously close to the towers again, it would automatically pass through one of the holes.

Dedomenici has also packed himself into a suitcase and been left outside Helsinki Central Railway Station for several minutes without being exploded by the security service.

Most recently, he built a 1980s style nuclear fall out shelter in one of the rooms of the Great Eastern Hotel in London. The luxury bath covered with cling film to prevent contaminated air seeping in is pictured. Dedomenici slept in his bunker for the 14 days of the ‘Stay’ art project, of which it formed a part, and wrote, “The installation toys with the aesthetic of the trashed hotel room, and should be oddly nostalgic, given the current era of asymmetrical warfare.”

Stay ran from 1st and 14th July and featured 14 artists’ interpretations of the hotel space. It coincided with the 7th July terrorist attacks on London.

More details about the artist and his projects are on his website.

Hotel Fox opened in Copenhagen in April of this year. VW and the management of Brochner Hotels invited 21 young artists to totally revamp a former 3 star hotel. Completed in a record 4 months, the hotel has 61 rooms, each with its own unique look. While the artists were busy, a competition recruited the hotel’s chefs and management staff.

The project is truly international with artists from London, Denmark, Berlin, South America, Australia, Paris, Russia, New York .. the list goes on. In addition to the hotel,there is Club Fox - a live cooking theatre (!), and Studio Fox, where eight VW Foxes are being used to create ‘mobile works of art’.

VW has further ambitions. The company’s first university, the AutoUni, is being built in its hometown of Wolfsburg and is set to open in spring 2006.

More about the 150-odd events running outside this summer are available on the Watch This Space 2005 site. The Addictive TV VJ event was part of the Optronica festival (featured in What Goes On 20th to 24th July 2005).

The Addictive TV site says:

Voting them number one in their 2004 Worldwide VJ poll, DJ Magazine said of London based Addictive TV, “If there ever was a truly ground-breaking bunch of guys in the VJ world, it’s certainly this lot.”

The group of VJs, DJs and producers have been championing the art of the VJ and pushing it into mainstream media for a decade now; performing, producing TV shows such as their seminal DJ:VJ music series Mixmasters for ITV1 in the UK and releasing DVDs (Addictive TV set-up what’s acknowledged as the first VJ-oriented DVD label back in 1999), releases have included Audiovisualize, the Mixmasters compilation series and DVD cult classic Transambient.

Teaming up with the UK’s The National Theatre to launch the Watch This Space outdoor strand, Optronica presented Addictive TV performing their AV show The Eye of the Pilot live on the fly-tower of the National Theatre building. With giant projections visible across the River Thames and an original soundtrack from Addictive TV featuring live guitar from Alejandro de Valera, the aerial travelogue remixes the incredible 8mm colour archive of French airline pilot Raymond Lamy, filmed during his global travels back in the 1950s.

The following night at the Optronica club night, Addictive TV performed a special short live AV set, where The Streets meet Elvis and The Italian Job gets completely remixed.

The images shown are about the height of a double decker bus and were projected onto the side of the National Theatre facing Embankment.

See also previous posts:

• Popular culture bites back: street artists attack ad agency ‘graffiti’.
• Hackney resists gentrification

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Until you realise that Gaydar has 2.1 million subcribers in the UK alone, it’s a global site and that Gaydarers already hook up with fellow gaydarers on their travels. Suddenly, it’s an inspired idea. Brandrepublic (subscription required) reports that the company behind Gaydar Radio and Gaydar.co.uk is launching Gaydartravel.com with a £1m marketing budget. QSoft Consulting, owner of the group, said research conducted by Gaydar Radio showed that a quarter of Gaydar’s audience were interested in purchasing global travel packages online.

The survey’s respondents took an average of 2.5 holidays a year, with city breaks and beach holidays topping the list. Gaydartravel.com will offer tailored packages to destinations including the UK, South Africa, Europe, the US and Australia.

Darren Cooper, Gaydartravel travel manager, said: “With many of the mainstream travel companies now actively chasing the gay and lesbian market, we are in a great position to negotiate better deals for our customers.”

Ah, the big questions of life — ‘Why are we here’, ‘Is there a Higher Power’, and most importantly for those of us working in media: ‘What is the future of TV’. But what is ‘TV’? Is it that thing you lug home from Currys? Or is it something experiential ? If TV once meant Sunday 7pm+living room+sofa+family+ugly-box-in-corner, does flatscreen+bed+timeshifted Sky+ count? What about HDTV-quality video+surround sound all downloaded over the Internet and watched via an Xbox? ‘TV’ is a porous, mutable concept. By the time we’re finished asking what it is, it will have become something else (c.f. ‘the record album‘). Perhaps at the moment there are simply too many possible futures of TV to even sensibly ask the question.

So let’s ignore TV for a bit, and think about the future of something a little more tangible — channels. Whatever TV is, channels have long been a part of it. Just as brands retain value as waypoints through a landscape of atomised experience, channels (and channel brands) help us navigate our way through increasingly diverse content.

Since the dawn of TV, channels have been made and maintained for us. We’ve tuned in or out, or (heresy!) turned off, dependant on schedules, mood and time of day. Since Sky+, the PVR-gifted amongst us have been enabled to create our own, personalised channel-of-me through timeshifting linked to EPGs: the revolution is upon us.

But step back a bit, and that revolution looks already a little stale: my PVR-driven channels-of-me are only available at my house. Crave the brilliance of my content selection? You have to come on over. Contrast with the promiscuous accessibility of the ‘channel’s emerging in other media: syndicated blogs as newsfeeds of personally cherry-picked news and views, networked iTunes playlists as ‘radio stations’ in offices. Maybe TV — even time-shifted TV — needs to get up out of the sofa and live it up a bit in the world of social networks and smart mobs. Forget channel-of-me, isn’t it time for channels-of-we? Shouldn’t the future of channels be a bit more sociable?

And you know what? We aren’t going to care about the delivery mechanism — content from online, conventional studios, the BBC archives can all fight it out for our attention. Is it TV? Who cares! While the pedants worry about the ‘death of the album’, post-’pod, the rest of us tune into iTunes or Napster and create the soundtracks of our own lives. The future of TV? Who cares! Liberate content: dice, splice and link it up to make channels wherever, whenever we want, for an audience of one or for one million. Lets forget about TV for a bit. Let’s play with channels. Let’s have some fun.

Manchester based artist Hilary Jack has set up a website of images of plastic bags caught in trees. As the project developed, she started to stick her own bags in trees with little signs as well as inviting people to submit photos. She writes on the site:

Two winters ago I noticed an unmarked turquoise carrier bag trapped in a leafless tree in a city centre street, startling and vibrant against an otherwise colourless, urban, winter landscape. The image stuck with me, and I decided to make it into a public work of art.

As well as demonstrating the peculiar madnesses that the net seems to bring out in people, the project is also socially minded. Jack adds, “Urban trees and shrubbery planted at the whim of an architect or urban planner become a magnet for detritus, turquoise bags being the most visible. As a reminder of our consumer culture the bags hang there, taking years to decay, and acting as an absurd memorial to our excesses.”

Maybe she should include that lovely scene from the 1999 film American Beauty, the video footage of a plastic bag blowing in the wind.

Wired reports on how Popcast which officially launched its broadcasting tool, player and channel guide this month, provides a full set of free tools for DIY video geeks to create full-screen, HD-quality programs. People download the player to watch programs, and can subscribe to their favorite shows.

There are already hundreds of vloggers out there creating their own videos and broadcasting film clips, news segments and slice-of-life shorts. Founder Rob Lord claims that Popcast provides a more sophisticated set of tools for video producers and consistent viewing experience. Each channel is distributed through a “swarm” of viewers who share the content between them, an “optimized derivative of BitTorrent,” Lord says. In addition to this private swarming network, a Flash-based presentation system makes it easy for the viewer to navigate the player, and for creators to use the producer tool. The full story is in this month’s Wired.

See also previous posts about Podcasting - creating and distributing radio programmes over the net.

The most popular websites are being made into films telling the backstories of users.

EBay’s TV series has already suggested that websites have got this brand-sponsored programming thing down. Now a movie about Craigslist threatens to launch the community posting website on the world.

Sample Craigslist post:

HUGE 2BR apt features:
*OAK HARDWOOD FLOORING
*SOARING CEILINGS
*EXPOSED BRICK
*TRACK LIGHTING
*FIREPLACE
*BRAND NEW KITCHEN w/DISHWASHER
*2 SPARKLING FRESHLY TILED BATHS
*XXX TEENAGE SLUTS RIGHT OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR

Eight million people post something every month on Craigslist, or CL as it’s affectionately known to users. Like eBay, the site has even developed its own language - a search for ‘generous’, for example, might throw up someone willing to pay for sex , while a ’skiing partner’ might refer to either a source for cocaine or a new drug buddy.

A listings site for anything and anyone, Craiglist has long been fodder for freakspotting on the net. Now the movie-going public can enjoy the same guilty pleasure.

‘24 Hours on Craigslist’ traces the backstories of some 80 people who posted on Craiglist in the San Francisco Bay Area on Monday, August 4 2003. Says the director Michael Ferris Gibson, “It’s kind of an improvisational film. People trying to do nasty things with each other in the middle of the night - I think it captures the spirit of it for just this one day.”

The BBC have also recently picked up on the Craigslist phenomena, suggesting that it could potentially become as big as eBay and other internet giants.

Yet another cunning survival strategy (see previous post re BBC makes archive available online) for the public service broadcaster in the digital age. The Backstage.bbc.co.uk project has already received more than 50 ideas for ways in which the BBC’s content can be mixed up with stuff on the web to create new tools. Online companies, such as Google and Yahoo, have also recognised the value of being more open by releasing content tool kits for developers to create applications with.

The backstage project opened its doors to developers in May, but officially launched at Open Tech on 23rd July.

Here’s one submission taken from the Backstage.bbc.co.uk site. Oddly enough a lot of the ideas are based on combining Google Maps and transportation in the UK …. :

Prototypes

myCommute by Andrew Bowden

Inspired by my commute which involves tube and two different train operators, myCommute allows you to pick ‘n’ mix your public transport tube operators, to a single page covering those companies. There’s also an RSS option.

At the minute you select per company/line but in the future, searching by location could be added in as well.

The full story is on the BBC website.

The Guardian reports that Chloe are planning to sue high street chain Kookai over their copies of the brand’s £1000plus handbags. This could signal the end of ‘cheap chic’ where chains such as Topshop and Matalan have made a killing ripping off the catwalk. Chloe, which is owned by the Richemont Group, alleges that Kookai’s Stitch Pocket Bag is far too similiar to its Silverado bag. The high street imitation costs £35, less than a 30th of the Chloe £1,086 bag.

The move signals that the designer houses are calling to a halt the ‘cheap chic’ imitations which have been a staple of the high street for some years now. Top Shop, Matalan and George at Asda are just some of the brands which specialise in churning out so-called ‘fast fashion’ - cheap copies of catwalk looks. Ralph Toledano, president and managing director of Chloe, said:

We realised that the only way was to be tough. We spend huge sums on research and development. It had to be a real war. I have no sympathy for them.

Kookai have refused to comment on the case.

In January last year, the head of the body governing French fashion, Didier Grumbach, suggested holding fashion shows in secret to end the plundering. He said then that the situation was becoming

…really embarrassing. Not only do they deliver faster but it is 10 times cheaper and eventually nobody knows who invented the product any more because the copycat delivers ahead of the innovator.

However, the fashion industry rarely attributes its own sources of inspiration - more than often not the street itself. Numerous vintage shops report of designers rifling through their stock looking for next season’s ‘big thing’. Marc by Marc Jacobs, currently one of the most desirable labels out there, often features looks inspired by the 1960s and 1970s. So where does it end?

It was taken by the British photographer Tim Hetherington two weeks after the wave hit for a project entitled ‘Still Standing’. The houses in the background stand almost two miles from the sea, on the outskirts of the town of Banda Aceh, northern Sumatra.

This image is featured in the latest edition of Ei8ht Photojournalism magazine. All the photographs are available to view on their site.

This week’s Hot Stars mag (free with OK) is a case in point. On the cover it ‘reports’:

Fears for thin Kate: London friends of Kate Moss have voiced their fears for the supermodel after her weight appears to have plummeted in recent weeks. Kate, 31, is looking thinner than ever and has also developed spots on her face. The style queen also seems to have lost interest in her appearance, and was snapped with messy hair and wearing the same clothes on consecutive days [shock horror].

However, by page 38 the same outfit is a good look: “As seen on: Geri Halliwell, Fergie and Kate Moss, whose pins all look perfect in cute and sassy shorts.”

And by page 48 readers are being encouraged to ape Moss’s fitness regime:

Swinging [I don't think that the double-entendre is intended]. Who does it? Kate Moss. Benefits? You may feel like a bit of a lemon, but who cares when you’re having fun and fighting the flab at the same time? And if Kate can do it, then so can we!

These people are messing with our minds!

The ‘Makeover Madness’ shoot, featuring the orginal supermodel Linda Evangelista, fetishises surgery for vanity with shots of models bruised and bloodied. There will the usual cries of misogyny (the shoot veers nicely into Helmut Newton territory) but if so, they are misplaced. This shoot questions our need to mutilate ourselves for the sake of a prescribed beauty myth: a straight nose, pouting lips, an unlined face.

It’s also a great bit of surgical porno — if you like that kind of thing.

Dear Napster. I love you. I really do. Since you came into my life it’s like music has been playing constantly. A new soundtrack to my life. That fits my mood. Not for me the solo pleasures of the iPod. Oh no. I need my own in-home disco. Each day brings a new playlist into my life. No Madonna or Husker Du but hey, you can’t have everything.

So why why why is your advertising so horrible? You have one of the original anarchic, iconic internet identities. Your evil little imp logo is an emblem of how the internet has changed the world. But since you went legit it’s all gone horribly wrong.

I love you despite your laddish demeanour. Like the boyfriend who transmogrifies into an embarrassing beer monster when he’s down the pub with his mates. But if you want our relationship to last you have to stop. You’re older now. Wiser. Stop demeaning yourself and your talent with this pathetic attempt to join the club of Lynx and Pot Noodle — it won’t work (not least because you’ve missed the irony of those brands).

Get yourself a decent advertising agency. One that tells you that you don’t need to advertise in this way. That it’s beneath you. That your brand is all you need. And they will come.

Love and kisses,

BST

The technology will enable produce distributors to tattoo fruit and veg with their names, identifying numbers, country of origin and other information to help speed distribution. It also forms part of the produce industry’s efforts to track and identify all the food that goes into American shopping baskets.

Since 9/11, the industry has been encouraged to develop ‘track and trace’ technology to allow protection of the food supply at various stages of distribution. Next year, federal regulations will require all imported produce to be labeled with the country of origin. Wal-Mart already requires all pallets delivered to its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to be fitted with radio frequency identification tags, so that they can be tracked by satellite.

In 2002, Durand-Wayland, a fruit grower and distributor based in Georgia, bought the patent for a process that etches the price look-up number and any other information the retailer or customer might want to know directly onto the fruit of the skin. Greg Drouillard, who originally patented laser coding for produce and who now works for Durand-Wayland, said the process permanently tattoos each piece of fruit, removing only the outer pigment to reveal a contrasting layer underneath and make the tattoo readable, even scanable.

According to Fred Durand III, president of Durand-Wayland, “With the right scanning technology, the produce could even be bar-coded with lots of information: where it comes from, who grew it, who picked it, even how many calories it has per serving … You could have a green pepper that was completely covered with coding. Or you could sell advertising space.”

If you find the idea of your vegetables looking like something out of The Matrix alarming, consider this: consumers in Japan are already using their mobile phones to scan barcodes giving them all the information they need about the food they buy, including its origins and the pesticides used. See previous post, ‘Check the Label’.

Courtesy of Gawker.

Tivo has always looked at ways to exploit the behavioural information its PVRs glean from consumers. In the past it has signed deals with both media trackers Nielsen (back in 2000) and with Comcast. It has also trialled small click through corporate logos which remain on screen whilst consumers fast forward through the ad break. Now it has created new services enabling viewers to send their personal information directly to advertisers, choosing which products and services they are interested in.

Aping the kind of service already offered by some interactive ads, Tivo will also allow viewers to choose to watch a long-form version of certain TV commercials if they wish, by jumping from the traditional 30 second spot to one or two minute ads.

GM will be the first car manufacturer to use a new tagging system allowing viewers instant access to promotional footage and to request information on brands including Chevrolet and Saturn.

The WB Television Network - which makes hit TV shows such as ‘Charmed’ and ‘Smallville’ - will use the new technology to screen promotions for upcoming shows. The promotional ads will allow users to press the green ‘thumbs up’ button on the Tivo remote, to programme it to record a single episode or the full season of a show. This gives its shows the jump on others in the broadcast schedule.

David Courtney, TiVo’s chief financial officer and executive vice president, said the technology “presents a real opportunity for advertisers to enhance the effectiveness of traditional TV advertising.” It also applies what consumers have learnt from their PVRs - that they can have what media they want when they want it. TiVo’s initiatives have shown that this brave new media world can include advertising on demand as well.

The Detroit Free Press has the whole story.

Mediaweek (US) reports, “In a national survey of 1,000 DVR users divided equally by sex, 48 percent of married women say the decision to purchase a DVR was their own, while 55 percent of the wives claim they understood how to interface with their unit’s myriad features better than their husbands.

The study, which was commissioned by Lifetime, offered “dramatic and counterintuitive results,” said Tim Brooks, the network’s senior vp of research. Of key interest to advertisers is the discovery that women are more likely to stop fast forwarding through commercials if a brand or product captures their attention.

While 99 percent of women say they use their DVRs to zap through commercial spots, 76 percent reported that they stopped for ads that are entertaining or relevant to their own interests. Women are also more likely to pause for TV and movie promos.

The full story is in this week’s edition of Mediaweek.

The California-based company owns MySpace.com, the fifth most viewed web domain in the US, as well as some 30 other websites. In its most recent quarterly results, Intermix Media reported revenues of $24.1m and a net loss of $409,000.

MySpace.com offers users chat rooms, blogs, photos, music sharing and other social networking features. This encourages the much desired ’stickiness’ (users hanging around for longer and coming back for more) that Murdoch believes can enhance his media empire. The announcement follows the creation last week of Fox Interactive Media, an internet division that will manage the group’s online sites and develop new business.

Murdoch’s move is part of what the Financial Times terms a new “rush to buy internet companies” (subscription required), driven by growth in internet advertising revenues. Online advertising is estimated to have reached nearly $10bn last year but with growth prospects of close to 30 percent this year and more than 20 percent in 2006. Traditional advertising and, in particular newspapers, are expecting low single digit ad revenue growth at best.

Unlike last time around, this is no spectre of a boom - at least that’s what everyone is hoping. According to Michael Nathanson, global media analyst at Sanford Bernstein, “The internet is not a fantasy any more. It is becoming a really important part of business.”