BigShinyThing

For the past few months, the river-facing façade of Tate Modern on Bankside has featured ‘street art’ works by Blu from Bologna, Italy; the artist collective Faile from New York, USA; JR from Paris, France; Nunca and Os Gêmeos, both from São Paulo, Brazil and Sixeart from Barcelona, Spain.

But what goes up, must come down, and today was the day for cleaning specialists Grafitti Busters to bring in their cherry pickers and hoses to strip it all away. Strangely, Tate hadn’t worked up the same frenzy of PR around this event as they did for the launch, but we were there to record the moment anyways. First to go was JR’s signature blow-up of a black guy wielding a weapon video camera. We arrived a bit later, to catch them tentatively starting to strip down Faile’s comic-book Native American superhero (above): give it a couple of days and all will be pre-post-modern business as usual at the Tate.

Get down there early tomorrow if you want to catch that familiar London street-scene — high-pressure art removal — on the grandest scale.

More pix on Flickr.

[Photo ©2008 Darrell Berry]

Video artists Addictive TV were back in town on the weekend, after a marathon session of live Olympic mashups in Europe. Braving the London weather on Friday night, they played to a crowd so enthusiastic that at least one of them had to be dragged half-naked off the roof.

This was Addictive’s third annual outdoor gig at the South Bank, which has become a highlight of the BST summer calendar. This year was even more fun for us, as they invited us along to document the evening photographically. Our photos are up on Flickr.

As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve had a bit of a redesign here at BigShinyThing. Gone is the calendar (but not forgotten, see below), and we welcome in its place a BST lifestream, which aggregates all the other stuff we do online. We hope you find this enhanced view of our world interesting: we’ve been banging on for years about the value of continual peripheral awareness in social media, and now we’re putting that belief into practice.

Why? Coz we think you might be interested in our other things and themes, many of which don’t make it onto this site as fully worked-up posts.

Why now? We’ve been using social bookmarking sites such as Delicious.com for years, store all our photos on Flickr, and bore even ourselves with our plethora of RSS feeds. But useful though they are, all those bookmarks and sites have seemed, well, solitary: experientially more collaborative than actively social.

Way back in 1994, we bemoaned the “isolating hyperlibraries of the ‘Net”. A hundred million people out there, where are they hiding?, we cried. It’s taken the addition of Twitter — the CB radio of the Internet — to interframe with personal narrative all that posting, tagging and bookmarking goodness.

So hello, world.

We might make a few other changes soon, but for now, our main RSS feed will still feature only BST articles, as before. If you want to sub’ the ‘stream (dude!), then grab it on FriendFeed.

To make space for our new stream, we’ve removed the calendar from the site. The diary data is being migrated from our system to Yahoo’s Upcoming service. If you’ve been subscribed to the old calendar system via iCal, redirect your software here.

That’s about it. Feedback and bug reports welcomed. Happy streaming.

Evidently someone in The Guardian‘s art department has some classic vinyl at home: compare the cover for yesterday’s Guardian Weekend (above) with the sleeve art from hard rock band Mama Lion’s 1972 album Preserve Wildlife (below):

Points to The Guardian for revisiting the timeless theme of long-haired, slightly-disheveled blondes suckling cute baby animals, but our vote goes to the original shot of Mama Lion’s lead singer Lynn Carey and the kitty cat.

If you’ve never heard Mama Lion, hunt them down for some Joplin-esque, bluesy rock. Carey also turned in a storming vocal performance as the singing voice of character Kelly McNamara (played by actress Dolly Read) in Russ Meyer’s cult film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

[Thanks to Helen Noir for introducing us to the music of Lynn Carey and Mama Lion]

UPDATE: More album-art suckling identified by our readers. See the comments, below…

This digital actress has more facial expressions than most Hollywood stars (yes, Nicole Kidman, we mean you). Maybe the enhanced digital threat will prompt a botox backlash?

(See also: The Uncanny Valley)

Via Gawker.

The New York Times has a piece today on the furr-nomenon that is Cute Overload. The site has been an online antidote for our troubled times for a few years now (never underestimate the healing power of a baby panda!) and it’s good to see it monetising some of that appeal with a sell-out calendar. However, the article fails to mention Cute Overload’s vernacular of cute which we think is a core element of its success. Meg — who founded the site and does most of the writing — has constructed an almost Tolkien-esque language which regular readers will be able to decipher but which casual visitors may well struggle to understand. There is even a glossary to help readers out. For example, a post of a tiny kitten has the accompanying text:

TEEEEENY Caturday paw danglage

Puh-lease. Too, too moshe:

black and white?
miniscules and striped?
ear flappage and paw danglage?

This language is the glue of a ‘club of cute’ which drives the site’s popularity and makes for a hugely entertaining read. A similar tactic was once deployed by Perez Hilton before he vanilla-ed out for the sake of ad dollars (for example, the gleeful insult ‘whoreanus’ has been dropped). Celebrity snarking site GoFugYourself, however, continues to address its audience as a teenage confidante. To whit, a comment on a photo of Alice Dellal (no, me neither) which reads:

This is one of those photos that I would put in a 2008 time capsule, so that in 30 years people will go, “Ripped nylons as pants? Are you f’ing KIDDING ME?” And I’ll be like, “I KNOW, it didn’t make any sense THEN, EITHER, and yet it HAPPENED.”

Creating new languages and forms of expression, and giving import to supposedly trivial matters such as dress sense and the cuteness of furry things are just a few of the myriad ways in which bloggers are creating a new media. And this stuff really *talks* to us in a way that traditional media never has. It talks to us as fans, as politicos, as gossips, as snarks… as ourselves. And, of course, it’s a two way conversation.

Anyways… we’re off to buy our calendar. Later!

Picture of Iggi to compensate for never having made it onto the shiny lights of either Cute Overload or Stuffonmycat despite numerous attempts.

The key bits:

A sizable minority of Americans find themselves at the intersection of these two longstanding trends in news consumption. Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources. Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment – Net-Newsers – who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources.

Net-Newsers are the youngest of the news user segments (median age: 35). They are affluent and even better educated than the News Integrators: More than eight-in-ten have at least attended college. Net-Newsers not only rely primarily on the internet for news, they are leading the way in using new web features and other technologies. Nearly twice as many regularly watch news clips on the internet as regularly watch nightly network news broadcasts (30% vs. 18%).

Net-Newsers do rely on some well known traditional media outlets. They are at least as likely as Integrators and Traditionalists to read magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and somewhat more likely to get news from the BBC.

So, in short, good news for those traditional operators — like CNN and the BBC — who have invested in developing their offerings into video and TV reporting. Also good news for heavy hitters such as The New Yorker – suggesting that good print journalism does, in fact, have a future.

There are also some worrying trends:

In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has increased substantially over the past decade. About a third of those younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from 25% in 1998.

Believability ratings for national news organizations remain very low. If anything, believability ratings for major online news outlets – including news aggregators such as Google News and AOL News – are lower than for major print, cable and broadcast outlets.

Anyone interested in the media (hello?) can read the full report at Pew’s main site.

Whilst researching something completely different, I came across an interview with Leigh Bowery in Campaign magazine, of all places. The context was a Pepe Jeans commercial that Leigh was featuring in: apparently when the client was around the director Tony Kaye told the performance superstar to ‘hide in a cupboard’. Unsurprisingly, the devastatingly original Leigh had some choice words to say about the ad world, including the following gem:

I am quite pleased that advertisers use dated ideas and concepts because good ideas should never be used immediately.

Good advice for ad-appropriated club kids, designers, artists, whatevers. I couldn’t find the commercial (anyone?) so here’s the Raw Sewage clip from ‘The Legend of Leigh Bowery’.

Hot on the dangerously high heels of the ‘hemline index’, comes another economic indicator from the fashion world. A recent issue of the FT‘s How to Spend It glossie features a shoot in an alien-looking location. Fashionistas are even more notorious than ad folk when it comes to jetting off to the Maldives ‘for the light’, but this shoot is different. This fashionably sparse landscape doesn’t come courtesy of some desert or even Lanzarote. Instead, the photo credits include “Bryant Homes, new homes development, Oxfordshire” who are clearly diversifying in the absence of any houses to build. Times is hard.

Jonny Woo curates a ‘hotlist’ of East End performers and makes special mention of Ryan Styles, Jeanette and – you read it here first – Underconstruction’s Lisa Lee.

The Underconstruction crew perform as part of TimeOut‘s On the Up festival at the Vortex in Dalston, 2nd August.