Last Thursday, I pulled up to the Ukrainian Cultural Center at 7:01pm, and just as expected, I saw a woman in white waiting outside. My boyfriend, Ricardo, rolled down the window. “Is this for the…?” he asked, as we still had no idea exactly what this was going to be. The woman in white took a step forward. She seemed uncertain how to respond.

“We’re coming!! Wait for us!” I said and she smiled. Yes, she realized, we were here for the viral marketing campaign. We turned the corner and looked for parking in front of Scoops. I couldn’t have been more excited.

Brit Marling, the star and co-writer of of last year’s Another Earth and Fox/Searchlight’s soon to be released The Sound of My Voice, is proving to be a powerful cinematic voice. Another Earth is a hauntingly beautiful sci-fi film about a bright young 17-year-old girl in Conneticut whose life is irrevocably altered on the night a new planet that looks identical to Earth appears in the night sky. It’s a thoughtful and subdued film that takes a great sci-fi concept and explores the emotional possibilities of it with Bradbury-esque poetics.

So I was excited when I heard the first twelve minutes of Marling’s new film, The Sound of My Voice were streaming online. I was even more excited when I discovered the film had an interactive component: every couple of minutes, some detail– a line of dialog, a prop, a bar of soap– prompts an annotation to appear on the screen. Each one takes you to a different relevant concept on YouTube, Wikipedia, Tumblr– sources ripped from the fabric of cyberspace, and some delicately placed there by the filmmakers. Not only was this a fun experience, it also excited me about the future of narrative filmmaking. Sorry, Oscars: the movie theater will always have its place in the way we consume visual narrative, but the watching shit online has its merits too.

For instance, instead of a linear experience where you enter a movie theater, watch a movie, and then go home: you can watch the first twelve minutes online, and then go join the cult from the movie. The sixth annotation at in “The Sound of My Voice” takes you to a YouTube video uploaded by the cult from the movie (which has no name – their YouTube account is 4twentyseven2012, the release date of The Sound of My Voice). It stars the woman in white, who I met outside the Ukrainian Cultural Center:

Annotation #8 takes you the cult’s website, www.4272012.com. The site features a vaguely ominous video about the cult called “The Future Is Now,” and an invitation to join their meetings every Thursday at 7pm, at the Ukrainian Cultural Center on Melrose Ave, a five minute drive from my house. So of course I went to check it out!

Ricardo, a fellow named Scott Little from North Hollywood who showed up, and I were the only ones who ventured out last week, and we were rewarded by an hour’s worth of mysterious banter with “Mel,” the woman in white (Scott later discovered the personal website of the actress who played Mel: Christy Meyers, who you may have seen on All My Children). We did an amazing eye contact exercise where we stared at each other for a few minutes, and then she told us about hydroponic apples and the pain we all carry around, while searching for enlightenment or whatever.

It was awesome! Internet-based mysteries tied into independent films about cults are my favorite things! When Scott showed up, he asked “Mel” about the movie, and she reacted with confusion. A P.A. stepped out from a door and told “Mel” to pick up her phone, and someone on the other line gave her new instructions. I told Scott we should just play along with the narrative without breaking the 4th wall, and see where it goes.

We didn’t learn much about the inner workings of the cult, but Mel invited us back next week to learn more– even implying that we could graduate to different “levels” of knowledge. I plan on returning this week to find out more! Duh! I’m hoping to get to at least OT III by the end of this game. I invite everyone to come out with me and hang out with Mel. It’s like a murder mystery weekend! Where do I sign up to join Brit Marling’s cult??

Melancholy GIF masterpieces from Laura Brothers. Brothers is just one of the many stellar artists exhibiting technology-inspired work in Synchronicity’s new show, Man, Such As We Know Him, Is A Computer.

Synchronicity, run by Chris Gere and Future Shipwreck’s own Katie Vonderheide, is one of L.A.’s most reliably awesome art galleries. Sadly, they’ve been in limbo for a few months now thanks to jackass East Hollywood landlords raising rents– so this show will be taking place at Mastodon Mesa‘s space in the Pacific Design Center.

Spencer Longo has taken on the task of transforming the gallery’s interior with an all-encompassing cyberdelic installation. Come check it out tomorrow night, January 20th– and get sucked into the net! The show includes work from Rafael Rozendaal, Peter Burr, and Owleyes and a boatload of other rad people. Don’t miss it!

Art, in one very limited sense, is an economy of symbols and materials. In today’s bustling digital marketplace of aesthetics and ideas, Andrew Laumann’s work is like your favorite neighborhood corner store, perpetually well-stocked with Millennial fantasies of absolute power with no responsibility. Punks rocket through a boundless void or drop from trees like overripe fruit, totally prosaic shit like chain-link fences and CD-R cases become symbols of infinity. How to spend this energy? How to use this junk? What kind of feeling can it get us?

The labor of an artist is always bound up in desire, but the wants and needs reflected in Laumann’s paintings, prints, sculptures, and collages seem strangely achievable: getting high, walking through a forest, collecting tokens of good-times-past, refusing to think about death. Yet art is none of these things and while it might make you feel nostalgic or pleasantly fucked-up in an analogous way it’s not about to replace the grand human ventures of exploration and conquest. Laumann’s work is so sublimely satisfying because we want more than the-thing-itself, we want to see it from every angle, experience it from every vantage point, and generally confound that sneaking suspicion that we’ve already done every fun thing that there is to do in this world. Give us little monuments and letters to god and tell us it will always be this great forever.

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In Internet Therapy, Dump.fm creator Ryder Ripps surreptitiously records a session with his 68-year-old therapist. The ensuing discussion touches on Ripps’ anxieties over living life online and creating intangible products for a limited virtual audience. The therapist awkwardly tries to turn the problem over in his mind, but in the end a wide gulf between his terrestrial world and Ripps’ deeply entrenched cyber existence proves insurmountable.

This piece, presented on the always-awesome DIS Magazine, really strikes a chord with me. I’ve often thought to seek guidance for the uncharted territory of living with the Internet, but to whom should I address these questions? Maybe a peer to peer support group of internet addicts is the answer! Who’s with me? Anyone?

Tobias Madison‘s carefully composed installation pieces transport you to a quiet and mysterious place, where the alienation of technology and the warmth of nature entangle. Giant swirling, digital abstractions invite you into a pastel void, before houseplants pull you back into a realm of familiarity— only to reveal the splatters of paint upon their leaves that render them eerie floral taxidermies. Bamboo shoots soak, sinister, in tanks of gorgeously opaque Vitamin Water. Compact discs melt down the depthless darkness of a scanner’s surface, a prescient dream of optical media’s slow motion death scene. It’s strangely sorrowful, the morbid mood Madison’s colorful constructions exude… and yet something pulls me toward these spaces. I want to sit in these stark surroundings for hours, maybe days.

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Turbo Props, an installation at the Institute of Social Hypocrisy in Paris. Curated by Oliver Laric and featuring a prop video game console, tropical plants splatter-painted by Tobias Madison, and a printable monument to the late, dearly missed “.yu” domain extension by Aleksandra Domanovic, among other fine art pieces. The ISH makes a point of noting that they “asked Oliver Laric if he could spend one night with his installation. He agreed.”

A couple years ago my friend Billy hit a deer driving back to Eugene on one of Oregon’s winding two-lane highways. Always an opportunist, Billy put the doe carcass in his pick-up and took it home, where he skinned and gutted the animal in the side yard between his house and the sorority next door. He made venison chili, but the head was left over, and for months he kept the last evidence of his crime wrapped in a plastic bag in the communal freezer.

This is everyone’s favorite story about Billy; it takes a truly audacious person to turn a tragedy into dinner. And roadkill reclamation has a way of satisfying our morbid curiosity with death and collision—without the ethical implications of rubbernecking at car wrecks or attending human funerals a la Harold and Maude.

The California Roadkill Observation System provides another ethical framework for gawking at roadkill. In the name of science, university researchers and volunteers out of my home town, Davis, California, have been fanatically photographing steamrolled animals in and around the Central Valley. The research will apparently be used to design better highways in the future that would decrease the real-life, recurring episodes of Car vs. Wild (as in the Discovery show, the man and his invention usually prevail over “the wild.” Though everyone loseWeight Exercises when a deer goes through a windshield.)

In its current manifestation, however, the Observation System is most useful as an access point to hundreds of categorized images of dead animals splayed heroically across the state highways. While there are certainly an abundance of gross-out roadkill photo albums online (enough to be spoofed in Nigel Grimmer‘s Roadkill Family Album), this one is uniquely thorough and unapologetic. Better roadside landscaping may be the reason behind the images, but the camera is clearly focused on the animal–the carnage often lining up with the rule of thirds. Which leads the online viewer to wonder: Why is it necessary for the data in this research project to be publicly accessible? When I compulsively visit the “Mammal (large)” section of the “Roadkill Photo Gallery,” will it actually influence whether or not I run over more of my large animal friends in the future?

The photos are stark obituaries for the deceased fauna. In human obituaries, one reads about the mundane hobbies of the dead and wonders in private how it all ended. In roadkill photos, the death scene is our only access to the animal’s life, while everything that came before remains a mystery.

“Both deer had been dead about one week, the first one probably an older kill and the 2nd within one week,” says one entry. “What was curious was that they went all the way down to the lake before dying near each other. Normally deer would avoid another dead deer.”

More photos after the jump; you can’t look but you can’t look away.

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When Dan and I approached Jason Villegas about doing an interview, his website was in a sincerely sad state. Jason felt frustrated with the site and hadn’t had time to manually update it in months. The archaic design was distracting from the amazing work it was intended to promote, so I decided to try out the new website builder my bud Matt Rubin helped bring into the world. Using Virb, it only took a matter of minutes before we whipped up a truly handsome platform for Jason to share his artwork. Plus, now it’s super easy for him to go in and add new images whenever he needs to!

Virb is clean, flexible, and couldn’t be more intuitive. Like Tumblr and Vimeo, it has an uncluttered interface– but it also provides enough control to customize your site to your heart’s content. If you have some artwork of your own to share with the world (or know someone who does), I highly recommend checking out Virb. It’s almost 2011. Two thousand eleven! You deserve a real website.

Look at some screenshots of the back-end after the jump, and don’t forget to enter the Jason Villegas giveaway!! Only two days left to take home Lil’ Stink Eye!

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Heavyweight world champion video artist Ryan Trecartin has teamed up with the brilliantly innovative founder of Tumblr, David Karp, to invent an extraordinary new way of using language and cognition through online video. The fruit of their collaboration has just been unleashed on the Internet today, and it’s called Riverofthe.net.

The site combines the random nature of systems like Chatroulette and Stumbleupon with the creative conventions of YouTube and Vimeo, allowing anyone to anonymously upload a video clip up to 10 seconds in length, describe it in three tags, and then “throw it into the river for public viewing.” The interface-free front page of Riverofthe.net simply starts with a random video clip and then follows it with every other clip that shares that tag (displayed in the lower left corner). The only way to control what you’re seeing is to choose a new tag or add more content to the River. Essentially, the whole project is an endless film that is constantly evolving, never played in the same sequential order, and authored by everyone.

It sounds complicated, but actually it’s quite intuitive. I’m honestly flabbergasted at the plethora of possibilities this platform presents– but the best part is, it’s SO FUN! I hope everyone I know starts contributing to the River, shaping it into a massively layered and altogether unimaginable art piece. Art Fag City has a great interview with Ryan Trecartin where he explains the concepts behind the site in more detail. I’m posting a long-ish excerpt after the jump and strongly recommending that you go baptize yourself in the River.

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Matt Furie: everything he does is awesome. I’ve yet to be disappointed once by the incredible things Mr. Furie creates, and his contributions to the new issue of Giant Robot are no exception. The cover story features a seven-page interview, awesome illustrations of broccoli basketball players and Beelzebub bassists, and best of all: a CD-ROM of Return of the Quack, a video game with artwork by Furie. If you’re unable to get your hands on a copy of Giant Robot 67 right away, I’d suggest playing the free bonus level from Return of the Quack online, to hold you over.

Giant Robot 67 also includes a great interview with Jillian Tamaki, an investigation into Japan’s obsession with tricked-out big rig trucks, and Michelle Borok‘s gorgeous travelogue from her journey through Mongolia. It’s chock full of radness!

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