08.31.05
Posted in Social Media at 12:35 pm by
Gorillaz is an awesome concept – since rock bands are manufactured anyway, drop the pretence and go all the way. Neil Gaiman (Sandman, other infinitely cool works) has has an interview with the people behind Gorillaz:
One of the delights of Gorillaz is that it grabs ideas from everywhere. What’s the motivation for that?
ALBARN: More and more, cultural groups are cross-pollinating, and we’re getting much more interesting art as a result. Being in Blur has allowed me to travel and hear the music that’s being made all over the world. On one song on Demon Days, you can hear that I pulled in some reggae elements and added a touch of Latin music. Then at the end, a Glen Campbell-style orchestra comes in.
HEWLETT: The coolest thing is that kids are catching the references we put in the music and the visuals, and then they’re going out to learn about the original pieces of culture we were inspired by. The payoff is that the next generation of artists and writers might say, “I learned a lot from listening to the Gorillaz when I was 15.”
ALBARN: If I hadn’t spent all those years learning how to play instruments, I’d be using a sampler to put all these pieces together. Instead, I use a songwriting method that’s a lot like sampling without actually digitally sampling. Gorillaz is how I take everything I hear and filter it. It’s been really helpful having Danger Mouse onboard for that aspect of it. He’s an exceptional American. [Laughs.]
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Posted in Social Media at 12:03 pm by
Remixing just isn’t for music. Take a popular logo, find the powerful parts of it, put in your own bits, and you’ve got something new with powerful emotional residue from before. Wired has an interview with two of the most popular Logo remixers – Shepard Fairey and Rick Klotz.
WIRED: What’s the point of your remixes?
KLOTZ: It comes from the same impulse that drives hip hop producers to use samples in their music. It’s about taking something you like and putting your own twist on it. If I take a logo and make a shirt out of it, I’m saying, Hey, this graphic that you see all the time is pretty cool looking if you draw out the right elements.
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Posted in Social Media at 11:59 am by
I came across an older piece that gets really deep into the meaning of mashup – both its immediate and long term cultural rammifications. It’s a bit of an ivory tower intellectual wanking piece (is a 1000 word essay on the difference between mix and mash really meaningful) but there are some gems:
because the mashup, like the screw and other forms of remixing, blurs consumption and production, it takes on a critical, if usually playful, resonance with regards to status quo notions of ownership. this may be one reason that words like “appropriation” get tagged, often in an unusually positive way, to the products and processes of mashing. the sense is that an artist’s appropriation of commerical (i.e., copyrighted) culture serves as commentary as well as art. as far as this goes, the musical mashup (especially in the form of an mp3 circulating online) represents a great copyfight-shaped hole in the dyke of IP, and it seems like a downhill battle from here. just a matter of time before some of these mashup-making kids become case-closing judges. as technology ushered in the age of authorship, technology will also usher us into a new understanding of the way culture is produced, perhaps one that returns us to the more “communal” norms that obtained before relatively recently, when it was recognized that creation flowed from the public commons of ideas.
and this on the power of mashups:
for many people, mashups are apolitical. they’re just plain fun. most mashups truck in irony and/or nostalgia–the pleasant swirl of memories and associations triggered by the juxtaposition of two well-known songs. even in such cases, though, there are political resonances. when we take christina aguilera more seriously over a strokes riddim, or eminem less over a britney beat, or appreciate the overlap between 50’s “i’m into having sex, i ain’t into making love” and trent’s “i want to fuck you like an animal,” we are made to reconsider things that we may not have really considered in the first place.
the proliferation of mashups (and mashup producers) represents a massive and mass-mediated demonstration for the cultural, legal, and technological freedom to do what we have always done as artists, as cultural agents, as human beings. so, despite the sheen of hipster surfaces in all of this, there are deeper implications in our consumption, production, and endorsement of mash(up) culture. although still frequently anonymous (due to tenacious lawyers firing off cease-and-desist missives), the people who make, download, and circulate mashups articulate a certain kind of cultural politics: one that imagines cultural expression not only as reflecting contemporary social relations but informing them.
Good reading and an exact example of just what we’re trying to identify and celebrate with mutednoise.com.
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Posted in Social Media at 11:46 am by
Instant messenger apps just promise to keep getting cooler. Hot on the heels of the Google Talk launch comes word that Microsoft has bought a Voice Over IP company (VOIP).
Microsoft has its eyes set on something more like Net phone company Skype’s service, however. A key part of Teleo’s technology is focused on making calls from a computer to an ordinary telephone, a feature that company executives said would start finding its way into MSN Messenger before the end of 2005.
This is really exciting news for several reasons. Chief for me, however, is how I plan to use it with podcasts. I don’t have much free time during the day to keep up with my favorite shows. I do, however, have an hour total in which I’m commuting to and from work. Before I leave I could load up all my newest podcasts into a playlist, call my cellphone, and hit play. Then as I travel to work I get all the latest news and info. Using cheap and good text to speech software it would also be possible to listen to the latest rss feeds while on the go.
It will all be a question of what PC to Phone calls will cost. If MSN bundles the feature with IM for free as a means of gaining market share… whoopee! However, interfacing with rapidly antiquidated telcos can be expensive.
Google, your move.
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08.30.05
Posted in Social Media at 4:10 pm by
I’m speechless:
For the first time, the Windows operating system will wall off some audio and video processes almost completely from users and outside programmers, in hopes of making them harder for hackers to reach. The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer’s connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren’t in place.
I’ll say it now: Unless things change Microsoft Windows Vista will be the slowest adopted and most criticized release of an OS ever; so much so that Microsoft is threatening its long term viability. These are not features for users; they are methods of maintaining monopolistic control. That is not a course of action that can be continued unchecked indefinately.
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Posted in Social Media at 4:01 pm by
It was previously believed that the RIAA’s lawsuits against alleged P2P users were self sustaining. The idea was that people wouldn’t be able to defend themselves in court and so they would settle. The settlement money would be enough for the scare tactics to continue. New commentary by a lawyer defending one of the accused, however, points out that the economics are about to be turned on their head:
Patricia Santangelo’s defense shifts those economics. By defending herself in court, Santangelo is causing the RIAA to fork over for attorneys to argue (albeit ineptly) that she should be forced to pay up to $150,000 per act of infringement that she is alleged to have committed.
How can Santangelo afford to defend herself? She has an attorney who believes that she is innocent, and that when she is found innocent that she will be able to recoup his fees from the RIAA.
This attorney (Ray Beckerman of Beldock Levine & Hoffman) believes that he can do this for lots of RIAA defendants. If he and other attorneys make good on this, kiss the RIAA’s profitable legal shakedown goodbye: once the long-term suicide of suing customers becomes unprofitable in the short term as well, no way are the shareholders in these corporations let them go on.
So the defense believes that they can get cases resolved on account of being frivolous – thus making the RIAA pay the cost. Excellent. Good luck and God speed gentlemen.
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Posted in Social Media at 3:41 pm by
Ever want to build Lego models of incredible complexity but never had the bricks? Now, using the Lego Digital Designer, you can. The app installs on your machine and gives a host of building options.
Not only that but if you build a model that just too good to pass up you can upload your design to the lego community site. Other people can grab your design, remix it, and come up with a different variation perfect for them. And, perhaps coolest of all, once your design is perfect you can order it straight from Lego – they find, package, and ship the parts necessary for your model.
Very cool.
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08.29.05
Posted in Social Media at 8:50 am by
A film short online asks ‘What if God was a DJ’ with hilarious results. The ‘SPIN’ flick is a excellently done 11:59. My only complaint is that its done entirely in Flash so I can’t download myself a copy. 
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Posted in Social Media at 8:46 am by
What do you get when you combine a first-person shooter classic with the game that sold a million light guns? Why Duck Doom, of course.
Duck Doom Deluxe [download] pits Doom’s angry space marine against Duck Hunt’s flock of cartoon quackers. Players are outfitted with Doom’s instruments of carnage, gaining a new weapon every 3 rounds until all 6 are available.
Another set of ‘old’ games kept alive by a fresh remix. Now if the gameplay was just a little more promising. 
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Posted in Social Media at 8:43 am by
I’m loving this Flash based comic strip creator. It starts with the realization that most comic strips are just recycled poses and runs with it. Clicking through the gallery exposes quite a bit of foreign or juvenille humor but in the right hands this could be an excellent creation tool.
Neat fun for that five minute break in your day.
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