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Estate: “Nuclear City”

Pat Vamos‘ music video for Estate‘s “Nuclear City” pieces together a frightening vision of retro-futuristic cyber-murder with the help of clips from:

Paper Man
The Failing of Raymond
Incident at Channel Z
Brain Waves
U.F.O.
Bionic Showdown
C.O.N.D.O.R.
some Japanese documentary on body pulses
& more

Interview: Steph D.

[ Ed. Note: I’m elated to share this interview with you, and double elated to exhibit 12 brand new GIFs from Steph D. as part of Private Investigation at Mastodon Mesa! Stop by on Thursday, September 23rd and see them up close, in a digital frame purchased at Best Buy! ]

Stephanie Davidson is the Don Draper of GIFs. No: she’s more like an auteur. 20 years from now, when James Cameron shatters box office records with the first feature-length GIF, historians will take note that Steph D. was the pioneer in bringing integrity and artistry to the format, and the Academy will present her with an honorary Oscar for her lifetime achievements in GIFmaking.

But it’s not just the medium, it’s the message: beyond the (hypothetically) visionary nature of Steph’s work in a technical sense, there’s also a substantial emotional impact permeating her pixels. Draw the rhythm of a beating heart on an axis of humor and terror and you start to get the picture. She can take something covertly frightening and use comedy to both negate and reinforce the horror of its existence—Pope Ratzinger, press-on nails, corporate aesthetics and spray-tanning, for instance. Now, the enfant terrible of Canadian new media graciously sheds some light on Maya 3D rendering, The Cheesecake Factory and 50 Cent’s tweets:

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Grain & Gram

Successful blogging relies on a set of conventions that limit its own potential. Frequent posting keeps readers interested but tends to discourage in-depth analysis. Cross-platform compatibility restricts layout design to single-column vertical scrolls. Font options are scant, low-resolution images reign and non-linear flairs are frowned upon.

All that is slowly changing, and web journalism is starting to look more like, well, journalism. These cautious baby steps towards a prettier Internet are arriving through the advent of Apple’s “apps,” which allow designers to work within the fixed canvas of an iPad screen, as well as boutique websites that shun daily RSS traffic and search engine optimization in favor of paced-out content that’s as well written as it is visually appealing. The transition is not without its pitfalls– emulating a newspaper layout can easily veer into the realm of tacky 1994 CD-ROM design. Grain & Gram is one of the few sites getting it right.

It’s a brand new “gentleman’s journal,” built around beautiful photo essays that focus on one man, his work, and his personal style. Combining elements of blogs like Backyard Bill and The Selby with the rare class of fashion magazines like Fantastic Man, Grain & Gram is a promising new entity both as a style blog and as a design inspriation. Breaking the rules and transcending them in the process, its in-depth portraits of contemporary men are supplanted with intimate interviews, side-column tangents, and gorgeous video content, like the clip below from their feature on scruffy motorcycle-riding printmaker Nick Sambrato.

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Jon Rafman x Bad at Sports

Kool-Aid Man in Second Life completely blows my mind. It’s a project in which artist Jon Rafman– using the aforementioned anthropomorphized drink pitcher as his avatar– regularly leads guided tours throughout the awe-inspiring, deeply unsettling, and often hilarious multiverse of Second Life. The sheer WTFery of that virtual realm is so vast and elusive, you’ll have to see it to believe it.

Second Life served as the setting for art podcast Bad at Sports’ recent interview with Rafman/Kool-Aid Man, where the artist’s rumbling autotuned voice muses on a series of fascinating existential subjects as we float through the technicolor backdrop of “the ultimate tourist destination… turbo-charged Las Vegas and Dubai combined. Where every possibility and combination of landscape and architecture can exist.”

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Tiny Vices iPhone App

Since its early days as minimalist HTML directory, awesome online photo gallery Tiny Vices has provided access to a goldmine of rad photographers’ portfolios without superfluous frills distracting from the viewing experience. Now they’ve got a brand new iPhone app that appears to continue that tradition of elegant simplicity, and it’s totally free!

This is exactly the type of content that makes me want an iPhone. Bah! If only Apple wasn’t so frighteningly totalitarian… and if only I wasn’t trapped in a T-Mobile contract. Should I finally swallow my scruples sell my soul to Steve Jobs?

Michael C. Hsiung’s Merman iPhone Case

Michael C. Hsiung Merman iPhone Case

Future Shipwreck superfriend Michael C. Hsiung set off salivary glands at Mastodon Mesa recently with his glorious laser-etched wood carvings, tantalizing fans while keeping the one-of-a-kind pieces off the market. Now we can all own a stunning (and practical!) Hsiung-designed Merman carving, thanks to Grove, a Portland-based design collective that makes eco-friendly bamboo iPhone cases.

Don’t miss the other tasteful cases in Grove’s artist series, featuring work by artists like Leandro Castelao, Nando Costa and Stubborn Sideburn:

Grove iPhone Cases

The Secret Sender 6000

I wanted a Secret Sender 6000 so bad, growing up. It wouldn’t have done me any good– no one else I knew had one. My infared pulses about farts, homework and angry librarians would have faded into the atmosphere every time, cementing the alienation of my lonely, pre-cyber youth. But what if I wasn’t alone? What if all my classmates were wielding Secret Senders, sending out insurrectionary missives 28 characters at a time (and you thought Twitter was constricting)? We could have built an underground telecommunication system connecting elementary school classrooms across the globe– a decentralized peer-to-peer network liberating students from the authority of their parents and teachers!

Released in 1994, the Secret Sender strove to capture the zeitgeist of excitement surrounding the limitless possibilities of the Internet, and then simplify that idea to a level that a child could understand. The Casio JD-6000, as it was formally known, was probably developed as a proto-PDA and then marketed to children in hopes that they would be too stupid realize its uselessness. The commercial promised the kind of grade school anarchy I mentioned above– a device that would subvert the commands of adults and turn a docile library into a revolutionary dance party. With an $80 price tag, however, procuring the tools that would lead to our emancipation was something entirely out of our reach: our digital rebellion was contingent upon the wallets of our parents. The Secret Sender was a device that symbolized rebellion encased within powerlessness. Tellingly, the girl in the commercial uses it to turn on MTV.

The New York Times reported this week on iPhone-related mistrials. There’s an epidemic, apparently, of jurors accessing the Internet from their phones to look up prejudicial information, text confidential trial tidbits, and tweet jury-room secrets. The Secret Sender’s fantasy of easy disobedience within the educational system has begotten the reality of total structurelessness within the system of criminal justice. Did Casio Cool not think of the ramifications?! Need I mention the havoc and disarray that supposedly secret texts have wrought across the cultural landscape? Kwame Kilpatrick? Chris Brown? Nonetheless, our telecommunication dream come true is not a total dystopia: secret messages are finally being used for the spontaneous outbreak of benign, faux-subversive fun that Casio promised us, in the form of flash mobs. Pillow fight!! Pass it on.

Pixelated Nostalgia

Jesse Spears, whose job title runs something like “Draw-er of boxy cars, boobs, and sassy ladies/Vice-President of Development: Semi-Sarcastic Sentiment Division,” joined me and my fellow former child star/Mean magazine editor Mya Stark in “Little Osaka” (Sawtelle Blvd., between Olympic and Santa Monica) the other night for a delicious dinner at the Giant Robot restaurant, GR Eats. I’ve had a few different things there, and I think my favorite is the shrimp curry. Also, the veggie meatballs are like nothing else on Earth. Not to mention the mixed fries that have yams and dried banana slices in them (and I usually hate bananas!)– but I digress– I’m getting off track here.

After dinner we were wandering around Sawtelle, searching for a stationary store, when I looked up and noticed a big glowing sign on the second floor of a nondescript Japanese-style shopping center. “Pixel Memory Studio,” it read, and I couldn’t help hoping it was some sort of stealth marketing campaign/alternate reality game tie-in for a new Michel Gondry film. Actually, it was something almost as good: a Purikura shop.

But Pixel Memory Studio goes beyond the simple simulacrum of Purikura’s visual diabetes by offering a variety of Japanese video games and flashy accessories for girls to decorate themselves with: tiny dogs and shoes dangling from necklaces, lip plumper, snap-on eyelashes, cell phone charms, and creepy-snazzy artificial fingernails. Mya ended up going home with a pricey pair of bejeweled nails on her hands, with plastic bows portruding from their slick acrylic surfaces. “I’m gonna go for an evil queen look,” she gloated, before panicking at the loss of her motor skills. “Use your knuckles,” Jesse reccomended.

Solar Panel Radness!

In the wake of Al Gore’s Oscar win, the importance of environmental consciousness underwent a swift transformation in the arena of public opinion. Suddenly, “going green” had changed from a lame punchline about aging hippies to the hot new trend, quickly emerging as a marketing tool to sell everything from Saturday Night Football to Walmart. I initially feared environmental consciousness would soon be ushered out the door it had flown in, relegated to the trash heap of forgotten cultural movements like pet rocks and Beanie Babies. But the trend seems to be sticking, and there have actually been a lot of positive things to come out of this newly imbued American sense of social responsibility. For instance, convenient and (relatively) affordable applications of solar energy:


The rolled up sheet of flexible solar energy to the left is a Brunton SolarRoll, which for $479 provides 14 watts of energy– enough to re-charge most laptops in a couple of hours, and of course cell phones, digital cameras, iPods and all the rest of those fun portable toys. Also, it’s waterproof– so you can shove it in your pack and take it to the great outdoors, or blog while you’re living on a mountaintop in a tree house (assuming said treehouse is Wi-Fi enabled).

The handsome backpack to the right is a Voltaic Solar Bag. At the low price of $199, it comes with 11 different adapters for easy connection to handheld electronics. Supplying you with 4 watts of solar juice, you’ll never need to come home and charge a phone again. And it’s only 2.9 lbs, including the battery and solar panels! Anyone want to get me this totally unnecessary, but absolutely rad bag for Christmas?

+ Via Boing Boing Gadgets

The Information Conservatives

When Wikipedia started, I guess I had some sort of misconceived notion that it would become a compendium for all human knowledge. And while it started to look that way for a while, there’s a problem in that dream that is just now coming into focus, after more than two million articles have been created and most of the “essentials” have been covered. Wikipedia is not the postmodern Library of Alexandria it has the potential to be, because (according to some) Wikipedia Is Not An Indiscriminate Collection of Information.

In order to be included in Wikipedia, an article must have an attribute called notabilty. But who decides what is notable? There are currently 1,360 unpaid community administrators who are given the authority to control the fate of new Wikipedia entries, as the only ones with the power to delete entire pages. They determine if a page is worthy for inclusion based on Wikipedia’s notability policy:

The topic of an article should be notable, or “worthy of notice”. This concept is distinct from “fame”, “importance”, or “popularity”. A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.

So essentially, on Wikipedia nothing is eligible for inclusion until it has received enough coverage from reputable outside sources. Sure, Paris Hilton is notable– she’s been analyzed from every angle on every level of culture– but what about a butcher shop in South Africa called Mzoli’s Meats?

What is more worthy of remembering? Paris Hilton, or this South African butcher shop?

That question seems simple enough, but has sparked a huge debate covered by news outlets from the LA Times to the English paper The Telegraph. Apparently, there are two factions of administrators, diametrically opposed on the issue of notability. From The LA Times:

Inclusionists believe that because Wikipedia is not bound by the same physical limits as a paper encyclopedia, it shouldn’t have the same conceptual limits either. If there’s room for an article on unreleased Kylie Minogue singles — and a group of people who might find it useful– why not include it?

Deletionists, meanwhile, believe that because not all articles are created equal, judicious pruning increases the overall quality of Wikipedia’s information and strengthens its reputation. An encyclopedia, they say, is not just a dumping ground for facts.

What could these “Deletionists” see in the aforementioned conceptual limitations of traditional encyclopedias? What could be wrong with hosting all the information in the world on one easily accessible, searchable server? Isn’t that the vision of so many sci-fi fantasies– a world where our robot pals could answer any question in the bounds of human knowledge instantaneously, with implied access to a centralized database containing all information?

Check out The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, a blog devoted to rescuing information before it’s eradicated from Wikipedia. And for a first-hand look at the douchebag reasoning behind Deletionist attitudes, check out this Cracked.com article entitled “The 8 Most Needlessly Detailed Wikipedia Entries“. Note that since that article’s publication, several of the articles it heckles have been purged from Wikipedia– literally tens of thousands of words expunged because someone thinks it’s funny that there might be a demand– however slight– for plot descriptions of “7th Heaven” episodes!

Even this stain on human history deserves to be remembered in minute detail.

Information is never needless! As the chart in this video explains, knowledge is power! But beyond that obvious assertion, we must come to realize that trivia is important, and beautiful. To quote two kindergarten philosophies in one paragraph, there are no stupid questions. Everything is important as long as any person, regardless of their significance, has the desire to know about it. Minutia is glorious!

Divorced of the self, we are all merely information stored in other people’s brains– neurons filed away in an unknown cranial cabinet until death or senility renders those life-long memories moot. We never truly die until we cease to exist as information. Gravestones are less for presenting corpse coordinates and more for saving the names inscribed upon them from the same grisly fate that has claimed their owners. Hence, information is the same as life. Deletionism is genocide.

I am a believer in the viability of Borges’ life-sized map of the world. Why not?

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