BigShinyThing

We’ve written about the Pecha Kucha phenomenon but not had chance to experience the concept in action. This Sunday we went along to the ‘world’s biggest Pecha Kucha’ at Sadler’s Wells in Islingston as part of the London Architectural Biennale. Sadly, we weren’t that impressed. Klein Dytham Architects were there and did their bit — explaining how they came up with the concept (Pecha Kucha means ‘chatter’ in Japanese) and talking about about their Very Cool Indeed projects. It all flowed along rather nicely despite it being the nth time they must have presented. But then the concept faltered somewhat.

We think that Pecha Kucha works for a number of reasons. One, it forces presenters to be economic with language when describing ideas. Two, it gives people who don’t access to traditional platforms an opportunity to get up and talk about their stuff. Three, it is presented in an intimate and informal setting. And this is why last night didn’t really work. We know what Alison Jackson, Nigel Coates, Thomas Heatherwick at al do plus they are all — to varying degrees — famous already. Plus a 1,500 plus seater theatre is not really an intimate setting — at times, we felt like we were at a motivational seminar. The presence of a Bentley/Vitra sponsored VIP area didn’t help either… not exactly grassroots is it?

Then there was the fact that director/photographer Alison Jackson was allowed to totally cop out and just show a 6 minute clip from her television series which we could have watched on Channel 4 a couple of weeks ago anyway.

Only our favourite visionary architect Nigel Coates seem to really Get It. He took the opportunity — bravely — to talk about the inspirations behind his creative thinking. He talked chattily and engagingly about his love for numerous books — including the wonderful Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream — and pots and how stuff his friends give him can inspire him too.

After that, I’m afraid, we upped and left.

‘Original stencil pioneer’ Blek Le Rat has come to collect his dues. A documentary about the French street artist and his work is currently touring and includes a slide show of his work from 1981 to 2005. It would seem that Banksy’s a mere toddler compared to this street art veteran — hence his quote on the front of the DVD.

The DVD is available to buy on 100 Proof’s site and snippets of the footage are, of course, on YouTube. Any requests for interviews/usage should be directed at the director, Kingadz@gmail.com.

As part of the trial, users can watch sports, TV shows, cartoons and classic films such as Dressed to Kill and The Night of the Living Dead with reasonably subtle banner ads along the top of the screen. Google Video had previously offered access to film and television content for a small fee, but its entry into the free-to-air market may be the watershed moment in the explosion of video on the web.

Whilst YouTube continues to tussle with broadcasters over copyright [say hello vintage Bill Hicks content, wave goodbye ...] and its own shaky quality issues, Google is now offering high quality and legitimately distributed TV content which is paid for by advertisers not viewers. Somewhat ironically, Google Video’s current advertiser list includes Netflix, the DVD rental service.

Various broadcasters have experimented with distributing their content online but with a very Web 1.0 mindset. For example, Channel 4 in the UK have been offering premium content such as episodes of Desperate Housewives for a small fee. Our verdict? We couldn’t be bothered and 99p per view makes the whole experience feel a little tawdry — what value content? A much more rewarding experience was The Apprentice, the entire last season, viewable for free and on demand on the BBC website. Falling neatly between these two extremes, we think that yet again Google has grabbed a bit of the future/now.

Source: The Independent.

UPDATE: according to Mediaguardian today (27/06/06) NBC has come to its senses somewhat and has signed a deal with YouTube to share promotional clips with the site. The agreement marks a U-turn by NBC, which in February forced YouTube to remove various programme clips from its website and threatened legal action over copyright infringement. As part of the deal, NBC is also running a competition via YouTube allowing fans of the US version of The Office to create their own promotional videos [yawn]. YouTube will create a separate online channel for NBC video clips.Today’s deal also formalises the arrangement whereby YouTube will take down content belonging to NBC that is uploaded by users, if requested. Good luck with that. As we’ve pointed out before, there are a lot more users than lawyers out there ….

The results are readable via Cory’s site.

Now ideas really can come from anywhere. Idiki has been developed by Freaknet, a group based in Casania. The site uses the Wiki model to expose ideas so that anybody can try to improve and extend them. Idiki is obviously an acronym for ‘idea wiki’ but it’s also a basque word that means ‘to make public’. How neat. The process is potentially quite brutal for ideas — opening them up to the rigours of mass collaborative editing — but Idiki is also based on the principle that ideas can’t be owned. Not now, anyway.

It also needs you to feed it.

Via our current bible for digital art and hacktivism, Neural magazine.

This week’s exemplary example is BrainMirror, an interactive experience where the image of the user’s brain appears mixed with his/her mirror image, then uses natural head movement as an interface to explore volumetric visuals of the human brain.

BrainMirror was designed and built by a Swedish-Hungarian team of 3 independent artists and technologist with the intention of creating an interface that works without learning for all age groups, and fosters communal interaction, interaction among the different visitors. Footage of the BrainMirror in action and extensive explanations of how it all works are available on their site.

If you want to experience the real thing, there are 2 BrainMirrors on display at the moment, one in Norrkoping in Sweden and the other in Budapest, Hungary, at the Ludwig museum for
contemporary art, within a show about electromagnetism, until the end of August.

Paul Notzold’s lovely app works by:

…using ‘always on’ technology, cell phones with SMS messaging allow an audience to interact with large speech bubbles projected onto a flat surface, like the facade of a building. The bubbles are positioned near windows and doors to encourage an audience to create the conversations happening inside. The audience receives a flyer with the number and simple instructions. A participant sends a text message to the provided phone number and it is then displayed inside the speech bubble. Multiple bubbles may be used and the audience can direct their input to a specific bubble.

Here at BigShinyThing we are constantly amazed by how much kids and artists on the street totally get how to convey the wondrousness of tech and yet the Big Mobile Providers (hello O2 and 3, just for starters) just so patently don’t. Compare and contrast this simple idea for text in public spaces with O2’s current UK marketing effort featuring an animated, travelling bubble…

TXTual link via Wooster Collective.

Worldmapper is an evolving collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. A collaborative project between researchers at the Universities of Sheffield and Michigan, Worldmapper starkly illustrates the various inequalities of our modern world. For example, toy exports (top) vs. toy imports (bottom). More maps — such as those covering death, disease, violence and exploitation are being produced for the site. Expect to see them in The Economist or Independent very soon.

Maps reproduced with kind permission of the Worldmapper team. © Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

MySpace mashup SingleStat.us is no more. The site enabled users to find out when another MySpacer’s relationship status changed (feeling like you’re not getting enough attention from the freaks? Change status to ’single’ and stand back!) — a classic third-party hacker addition to an existing service. According to TechCrunch, MySpace lawyers have ‘cease and desist’ed the site’s owners, and claim that the system caused MySpace ’substantial and irreparable harm’ due to the ‘undue burden’ it placed on their systems.

All of which flies a bit in the face of MySpace’s claims to membership of the Web 2.0 elite — unlike many contemporary sites, MySpace has yet to publish an open API, which would give wannabe mashers-up of the system a documented, manageable interface into MySpace’s internal workings — in the light of which it’s hardly surprising, given MySpace’s success, to see people developing their own ‘unofficial’ techniques for MySpace hacks and tweaks, as SingleStat.us had done.

When BigShinyThing raised the ‘missing API’ question with MySpace at the recent Mashup* session in London, their reply was that MySpace is ‘worried about the security implications of open source’. As open source is an entirely different class of thing to an open API, we suspect their representative was simply a bit confused about this whole ‘how the Internet works’ thing. Nevermind.

Maybe they’ll get there, or maybe they’ll keep locking out the people who care enough about their product to extend it, and who see enough unexpressed potential in it to build profitable symbiotic systems around what it does. If that’s the case, good luck to them when a serious competitor comes along, which, unlike MySpace itself, actually encourages some modern mashup fun at its periphery. Stay tuned.

It would appear that misguided snobbery is alive and well in the ranks of the family business that makes one of the world’s most expensive champagnes. Maybe the brand’s new managing director Frederic Rouzaud assumed he was amongst friends when he moaned to The Economist about how a brand should deal with ‘unwelcome attention’. When asked what he thought of the brand’s adoption by the rap fraternity he was quoted as replying:

That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business

Sadly for him, this remark was picked up by the BBC and a week later came to the attention of rap megastar Jay-Z. Then, unsurprisingly, all hell broke loose. The rapper said he would pull Cristal from his small chain of popular sports lounges — where bottles of Cristal sell for $450 (€357) and $600 (€476) — as well as from his personal flutes.

“It has come to my attention that the managing director of Cristal, Frederic Rouzaud views the ‘hip-hop’ culture as ‘unwelcome attention,”‘ Jay-Z said in a statement released last Wednesday.

I view his comments as racist and will no longer support any of his products through any of my various brands including The 40/40 Club nor in my personal life.

Jay-Z plans to replace Cristal — which a club spokesman said it could never stock enough of — with Krug and Dom Perignon at the Manhattan and Atlantic City locations of his 40/40 Club. (There are plans for clubs in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong, according to the club’s Web site.)

Good going, Cristal.

We dutifully went along to see the art and design graduate shows around Brick Lane this year. A standout work was this installation by Natalie Simpson for her BA Hons Fine Art degree which puts a personal slant on urban decay. We’ll let Natalie explain…

For a number of years I have been preoccupied with urban and decrepit places, which to me always retain a mood. I have also spent a lot of time photographing and filming the anonymous person in these places.

For my end of year show I had decided that I wanted the work to be more intimite (sic) to me, and began constructing people that are missing from my life, those loved and lost. I began referencing photographs that I already had in my possession of these people. Some of these photographs had to be scanned into the computer to construct a positive and negative image that I could then recreate using found materials. The quality of the image was sometimes lost during this process but I found that the diminishing condition of clarity represented perfectly the fragmentation of my memories of them.

It was important to me that the cut out images were then allocated to areas that reminded me of my loved ones, as if I was reconstructing my memories and replacing them where they belong.

To contact Natalie about her work, either email her directly: nataliedolly@yahoo.co.uk, or email us: anne-fay@bigshinything.com.

UPDATE: Natalie has now made the films of her work in situ available on YouTube.

Back in the days when Madonna had a sense of humour, grunge grandparents Sonic Youth did the fantastic art-rock-tribute/concept record The Whitey Album as Ciccone Youth. It’s Madonna with feedback. Sample track: “Get Into the Groove(y)” with Thurston droning all over Madonna’s pop vocals and a skiffley version of Burnin’ Up.

Why is this interesting? Well, for a start it has significant implications for advertisers — after all, you can’t advertise in Windows, can you (although we suspect that Microsoft’s ‘Live’ offerings in the next version of Windows will be edging closer to that)? As ZDNet points out:

What better application could you think of to embed ads into than one that people use for budgeting and price comparisons?

Google will be watching carefully who uses Spreadsheet and what they use it for. Once the company has proved the application and gathered enough usage data, then it’ll launch an AdWords option for Spreadsheet and start to test its viability as a vehicle for contextual ads.

Then there was the rather prescient letter in The Economist a while back by a Mr Alan Tobey:

Google seems to be following the same line Ronald Reagan took with the Russians in the 1980s (“Is Google the new Microsoft?”, May 13th). Reagan speeded up the break-up of the Soviet Union by forcing it to spend beyond its means on weaponry to defend against perceived, but actually unreal, threats such as the Star Wars programme.

In much the same way, Google is throwing up many cheap-but-flashy initiatives that force Microsoft to spend huge sums in order to contain perceived, but probably illusory, market threats. Can we not anticipate the same outcome: the break-up of software’s acknowledged evil empire and the emergence of its captive technologies into the world of fair competition?

Let’s see.

The Beach Boys perform Never Learn Not To Love. .

Footage courtesy of Bedazzled — where else?

This fantastic short from the studio of Charles and Ray Eames back in 1977 teaches a lesson to modern ‘creative companies’ — it’s the real deal in terms of inspiration, ‘pushing the envelope’, whatever… Anyone fancy doing the Google Earth/Visible Human remake?

Via Protein Feed.

This is a guest list only event so please email us if you would like to come along. Addictive will be presenting at 6.30pm.

United’s address:
The Griffin Building, 83 Clerkenwell Road [Google Map]. Telephone 020 7915 7575.

Note that Addictive are opening for the Chemical Brothers this weekend…

Under the aegis of Illustrious, a business he’s started with Erasure’s Vince Clarke, Ware is exploring new territories of sonic experience. The public face of Illustrious is large-scale public audiovisual installations with an emphasis on 3D sound, lighting effects and performances. Behind the scenes, Ware is busy lecturing, working with researchers and artistic collaborators, and drumming up sponsorship.

BigShinyThing caught up with Martyn in his studio to ask him a few questions about his unique vision for 3D sound and multisensory art.

BST: At a time when the iconic experience of music is on-the-move, via headphones, from a pocket full of instantly-available low-quality mp3 downloads: why Illustrious: big, site-specific and public?

MARTYN WARE: Because we’re stupid and anti-fashion! We believe very much in the experiential — in immersing people in happenings. What we’re doing reminds me of the excitement of forming The Human League: exploring in the undiscovered ‘country of sound’.

We’ve always attempted to do something interesting to us, creating a new oeuvre. It’s always in your soul to do something different — the thrill of the unexpected. We want people to feel ‘you had to be there’ to understand it. The Rock vernacular is a bit tired and clichéd — there are some fantastic shows around with good sound, but not so many that offer anything other than an experience for the feet.

With The Human League and Heaven 17, you really did start an oeuvre: you invented electronic pop music! Do you feel that what you’re doing now is blazing a trail that others will follow?

The same people who were enthused then are the people who are enthused now — albeit a different generation. With dance music, as soon as you go down the DJ route, anyone with intelligence sooner or later wants to create their own content. Big name DJs who have made lots of money go on to make their own music, try and make their own sounds — and then find that their own stuff is more interesting than the stuff they were reproducing.

Do you feel that you have ’seen the promised land’ with 3D sound? Do you see your role as evangelism?

That’s all I ever do — I am John the Evangelist! Merging immersive art with sound is what I’m about. If more people are exposed to it they will dig it as well — I’m not the only one. It just makes sense to me. People intuitively like immersive experience — I’m into designing and changing people’s perception of what they are doing.

I love generative art and I love art that takes into account the content. Personally I think the whole VJ thing is puerile, just cutting up content to match a beat. The sort of thing we’re looking at involves multiple levels of art and entertainment: a hybrid of theatre and happenings. We’re also working on a hybrid of theatre and cinema: combining recent technologies to create brand new forms of experience. One of the things we are working on at the moment — a piece to perform at Gateshead called Near Life Experience (hopefully in January 2007 if the funding comes through) — features immersive 3D sound, a 30-piece choir in normal clothing concealed in the audience, members of the royal ballet, state of the art lighting design…

What’s your next public project?

Our next big project is the world’s largest public 3D sound field at ‘Sound Oasis’, an installation in Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. It’s a 24-hour piece by 12 different sound artists rendered in 3D. The whole thing is predicated on using the sounds of Mexico City, modulating reality. Maryanne Amacher is performing the piece which won her won the Ars Electronica digital music prize at Linz last year. Chris Watson is involved, UltraRed…

And with Designers Republic (also from Sheffield!) we’re doing the British Pavilion at the Architectural Biennale in Venice later this year.

In previous interviews, you have been upfront about your desire for sponsors and collaborators from the commercial and artistic worlds. Who would be your ideal collaborator? The perfect sponsor?

[laughs] Sponsors? Anyone who has giant amounts of money (just being honest!) We have some very interesting research collaborators and ideas — and it would be really useful to have access to some sort of state funding but we don’t seem to have that in this country. It seems more open in the US — they have a more honest relationship with sponsors, easy tax deductions and so on. We’ve had massive support from — and I can’t thank them enough — Bowers and Wilkins, who provide all our speakers and amps.

Collaborators? We’re interested in collaborators who can see the relevance of immersive sound to their business or art. We want to work with talented people with an open mind with skills that interlock but don’t necessarily overlap. Frankly, we’re not so interested in musicians — we’re more interested in performance artists and immersive artists of all kinds, architects and so on.

We did a lecture at The Royal Institution recently where we had sound-based toys in the foyer, and then at Cybersonica we met some nice folk who we’ll be doing more ‘future of sound’ stuff with, and we’ll have their sonic art in the foyers for future lectures. It’s all about engagement. We don’t really want to hold onto all the intellectual property of what we’re doing. I’m a big admirer of the Open Source way of doing things — there’s something very British about the idea of making something that maybe doesn’t quite work all the time and being brave enough to get up on stage with it, a bit edge-of-your-seat. We’re like Victorian explorers coming back with rhinos and things from our adventures — I travel a lot and like to bring people and knowledge back to share.

The challenge is just not to take the easy route. We all get tempted to take the easy one — compared to when we started out in the 80s, time is more limited and there’s less money available for making things and less money to be made by selling them in the long term.

There was less time pressure ‘then’: we would spend three months designing a new synth and making sounds in interesting ways — now I could create an LP’s worth of material in a week. It wouldn’t be anywhere as good as the old stuff but it would be interesting and that’s the problem.

With modern technology people — particularly people from the laptop fraternity — can get to a high level very quickly but with little substance. The challenge is for people to go from a facile route into a more difficult territory. That’s not the fault of the manufacturers or plug-in makers — they are just trying to make your life easier but inevitably that makes the product worse.

Is anyone still doing it ‘hard and interesting’ way? Is there anyone particular you admire for the way they make music?

It depends on whether it is derived from artisanship — look at someone like Vince [Clarke] who writes his songs on guitar then transcribes them as kind of contrapuntal monophonic layers…

There’s no-one who instantly springs to mind. There’s the electro-acoustic scene which I find interesting: the degradation of traditional music is interesting in itself. I’m working on a new BEF album where I limit myself to three virtual synths and no singers but famous actresses/actors to sing the words of familiar songs — the kind of sound we had on the track Morale… You’ve lost that Loving Feeling [on The Human League’s Reproduction].

What about the MySpace generation?

Today I was down at Brixton at our surround studio and one of the engineers was on MySpace. Looking at his page, Herbie Hancock is one of his ‘friends’ and he said they met on MySpace and talk all the time online. I mean that’s amazing — you’ve never met him, and you’re talking with Herbie Hancock (who must be amazingly busy) because you’re both interested in the same things! What struck me was the egalitarianism of it. I love it — MySpace is just one example. I like last.fm and Pandora — all these generative, modulating systems.

Your work is technically demanding for installation, but growing numbers of people have access to surround sound at home — do you have any plans for a ‘home version’ of any of your immersive works?

We work closely with DTS. We can produce binaural recordings with our tech but I’m not convinced that it works so well. In terms of delivering the 3D sound experience it just depends on where the speakers are — a cube of speakers for example would work. For that end we’re about to get into business with [conceptualist and producer] Charlie Morrow. He’s designed a kind of stand with one speaker on the floor, one high up on thin tubing which folds over for traveling. If you have four around a room then there’s your domestic set up. We can create 3D sound from 2D existing material which works spectacularly well — great for DJs in a club environment.

The big problem is content. Most record companies don’t even want to provide surround sound. For some reason lots of LPs have been mixed in 5.1 but the master tapes are just sitting on shelves, never released. I was thinking about starting a company to license the rights to these unused surround recordings and create a new label. But I don’t really want to be a record label: that model doesn’t appeal to me at all. Actually, people at the labels are keen, but everyone’s waiting for someone else to break the format if you know what I mean.

Listening to a stereo — actually sitting down to listen to music — doesn’t seem to happen to me anymore: I’m either in my surround studio, or at a PC with really tiny, crap speakers — it’s more likely that you watch TV, the Internet… The notion of listening to music conventionally sounds tedious now — there are so many other things to do.

I’m mixing the new album in surround and it will be available in 5.1. I don’t particularly like stereo anymore to be honest — it’s boring. Actually surround sound bores me — I’ve been doing 3D for 5 years now!

(Big thanks to Martyn, and to Lisa at Cybersonica for facilitating the interview)