Where is Mama(小蝌蚪找妈妈), is a short Chinese animated film produced by Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1960 under the artistic guidance of Te Wei. The narrated film describes the adventures and misadventures of a group of tadpoles in search of their mother. It is one of Te Wei’s first attempts to break away from Western style animation and aim for a painterly style influenced by Qi Baishi and more in keeping with native Chinese aesthetic sensibilities. Because of its simple story line and repetitive script it is ideal for children who are beginning their study of the Chinese language.

Shanghai Dance Delight X W+K Shanghai from momorobo on Vimeo.

We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the end “we” own it!

By establishing this autocannibalistic model we deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model.

After this process we hand over the common ownership of “our” Google Shares to the GTTP Ltd. [Google To The People Public Company] which distributes them back to the users (clickers) / public.

 

Excerpt from

Entering the Machine and Leaving It Again: Poetics of Software in
Contemporary Art by Florian Cramer:

“A very recent example is “Google will eat itself” http://www.gwei.org [slide] by ubermorgen.com and Alessandro Ludovico. ubermorgen.com consists of former etoy member Hans Bernhard and Liz Haas, Alessandro Ludovico is well known in Italy as the founder and editor of Neural magazine. “Google will eat itself” is simple to explain: it is a website that runs ads via the Google “AdSense” program, i.e. embedded commercial text advertising provided by Google, but bought from other companies. Google pays website owners a small fee for every click on an ad link; “gwei.org” uses this money to buy Google shares. The idea is that Google will pay the site to get bought up by it. Ideally, gwei.org should make so much money from Google ad payments that it can buy up all Google shares. To accelerate this process, “Google will eat itself” imploys some hidden dirty programming hacks that trigger automatic clicks on the advertising so that any user who visits the site will click multiple Google ads at once.

It is not only one company eating up another, but also a piece of software eating up another software. Google is one of the first world companies that is a piece of online software, with search requests as its input, and a double output of search results and money to the shareholders. This collapsing of software program and corporation get turned against itself by gwei.org. It is the net.art of an Internet that is no longer an open field of experimentation, but a corporate space. The dark-humorous actionism of the piece manifests yet another resolution of the conflict that had originally voiced by Moles and Debord, technical formalism versus agency.”

http://gwei.org/

http://web.tagus.ist.utl.pt/~pedro.duarte/fuldans.htm

After decades of corporate identity being reduced to logos, Metahaven has undertaken a larger project to explore identity in politics and culture, online and across borders. This expansive monograph is its own project — the transformation of a design practice into a research laboratory and think tank. An important book.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3037781696/designobserver-20/

http://www.deathswitch.com/

Cover of Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media
Humorous and surprising, smart and provocative, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (MIT Press, 2010) jumps from opposing viewpoints to opposing personalities, from one arts trajectory to another. The entire book is a dialectic exercise: none of its problems or theories are solved or concluded, but are rather complicated through revelations around their origins, arguments and appropriations. Overall, the book adopts the collaborative style and hyperlinked approach of the media and practice it purports to rethink. In other words, it is not just the content of the book that asks us to rethink curating, but the reading itself; by the end, we are forced to digest and internalize the consistently problematized behaviors of the “media formerly known as new.”

Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham, co-editors of the CRUMB site and list (the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss), have co-authored the book via email and on a Wiki, and assert outright that it is not a “theory book”; its structure instead “reflects the CRUMB approach to research, which discusses and analyzes the process of how things are done” (12). The sheer number of examples, citations, and first-person accounts in this nearly 350-page volume make it so that every time the trajectory coheres into a singular point or argument, it is then broken up again, into a constellation of ideas that make us rethink, again. We are issued challenge after challenge to our assumptions about media, our understandings of curatorial practice, and our opinions about the spaces in which we exhibit art. It is only after an exhaustive study of seemingly irreconcilable philosophies, practices and venues, the book implicitly argues, that we can begin to engage with what needs to be rethought, and how to do so.

Rethinking Curating makes three basic arguments. First, that one must approach a broad set of histories in trying to understand any given artwork, and “for new media art this set includes technological histories, which are essentially interdisciplinary and patchily documented” (283). Second, that such broad histories have led to the unique development of “critical vocabularies for the fluid and overlapping characteristics of new media art” (283). Cook and Graham reason that new media are best understood not as materials but as “behaviors” – participatory, performative or generative, for example. And third, that these behaviors demand a rethinking of curating, new modes of “looking at the production, exhibition, interpretation, and wider dissemination (including collection and conservation) of new media art” (1).

http://rhizome.org/editorial/3617#more

 

HTML5 - Blob

Soft blobby physics. It’s like, you know… jelly?

• Blob 01
• Blob 02
• Blob 03

 

HTML5 - Magnetic

Control and create currents of particles which react to magnetic nodes.
The magnetic nodes emit light depending on how many particles are orbiting them.

• Magnetic 01
• Magnetic 02

 

HTML5 - Trail

Particle movement patterns that generate smooth trails.

• Trail 01
• Trail 02
• Trail 03

 

HTML5 - Particle Depth

Particle positioning patterns using depth.

• Particle Depth 01
• Particle Depth 02

 

HTML5 - Wave

Wave motion rendered using the canvas element.
Version two and three have bubbles floating on the surface,
these bubbles each represent a tweet with the word “water” in it.

• Wave 01
• Wave 02
• Wave 03

 

HTML5 - Particles

Particles slide across the screen and grow as they get close to the mouse.

• Particles 01
• Particles 02

http://hakim.se/experiments/

 

 

Amber Case

Cyborg Anthropologist

Amber Case is just your ordinary cyborg anthropologist. “My father used to read me bedtime stories out of this book called Evolution of Consciousness,” Case says. One night he drew two points on a piece of paper. He asked what the shortest distance was from point A to point B. “A straight line,” she said. “There’s an even shorter distance,” he responded. And he folded the paper over so the two points touched — “which is the idea of a worm hole. Compressed time and space,” Case says. “He told me this when I was 4 or 5, and I would think about it every single night.”

Today Case, just 23, has her own tech consultancy, mind-bending augmented-reality projects you wish you could understand, and a full schedule of speaking appearances, including the MIT Futures of Entertainment conference. And she still thinks about worm holes. “When you get really deep into anthropology, it studies space and time compression. Technology is now compressing point A and point B, that space between people.”

A self-proclaimed math and science nerd growing up, Case decided at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, that the one thing she didn’t quite understand was people. This led her to sociology and anthropology classes, and after hearing a lecture on cyborg anthropology — the study of human and technology evolutions and interactions — she knew she had found the perfect fit. She wrote her thesis on cell phones. Before graduating in May 2008, she set herself the challenge of speaking at her first conference within five months. And she did — at the Inverge Conference in Portland that September. How did she do it? She walked right up and asked. The conference organizer was so impressed by her guts, he put her on the bill to talk about the evolution of the telephone and modern communication, and how Twitter changed it all. “If you set these obnoxious, absurd goals,” says Case, “they end up working out.”

Over the past two years, Case has been building a cult following of tech insiders. Kris Krug, a technologist who first met Amber at one such conference, is a fan of the highest kind. “Anyone who wishes to sell devices, or understand how we use them, they’re all going to be talking with her because she’s a whole level past where normal people are,” says Krug, a Vancouver-based Web strategist and author of Bit Torrent for Dummies. “She’s a digital philosopher of the bad-ass variety.”

“Digital philosopher” feels like the right term for Case as she discusses virtual selves, anthropomorphized smartphones, and the way our technology devices have become remote controls for our own reality. “Bad-ass” isn’t far off either. When she’s not doing cyborg anthropology research, speaking at conferences, or helping clients such as the VC firm Ignition Partners groom their virtual presence, Case is thinking about invisible interfaces and working with her friend Aaron Parecki on augmented-reality pet projects. “I have a GPS I carry around with me that color codes where I’ve been at different times of day, so it makes a color trail,” Case says. She then aggregates the color data to see where she spends the greatest amount of time. You know, for fun.

“She’s a digital native,” Krug says. “She’s from the future. She’s, like, come back to help us figure out how to think.” –Lily Cunningham

http://www.fastcompany.com/article/amber-case-digital-philosopher

Steal from everywhere. Everything is context. Ask anyone from Marcel Duchamp to Richard Prince. A work of video art might become an effective piece of advertising. A paragraph from a book could make a beautiful short film. A stand-up joke could be a functional piece of furniture. Okay, maybe not that. But really, it happens all the time.

http://poptimisms.tumblr.com/

While Western letterpress printing has made a recent revival, what was once considered one of the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China is no longer a sustainable practice in its country of origin.

read more: http://www.idsgn.org/posts/the-end-of-movable-type-in-china/
the writer: http://blog.cherylyau.com/

www.maxwellanderson.co.uk

We celebrate and promote self published books with exhibitions, workshops and events.

http://www.everykingneedsacastle.com/

by Michael Arrington on Jun 27, 2010

I turned 40 in March. I didn’t think of it much, and I don’t plan on buying a convertible sports car or otherwise engaging in a mid life crisis. These age milestones just aren’t as meaningful for most men as they are for some women. Besides, I still have the maturity level of an average teenager.

But one thing I am very aware of is my growing skepticism of some of the crazy startup ideas I see. Five years ago when I started TechCrunch I still had real enthusiasm for any entrepreneur trying to build a company. I know from experience that starting companies is psychologically hard, even in the U.S. There are always lots of critics to tear you down. Sometimes all an entrepreneur needs is a few credulous people willing to say that they have a chance. That gives them the psychological boost they need to fight on for another day.

I have always been that guy, looking for the positive in any startup situation. Even if you fail you’ve just had the best on the job training possible. Paul Graham says it best: “So, paradoxically, if you’re too inexperienced to start a startup, what you should do is start one. That’s a way more efficient cure for inexperience than a normal job. In fact, getting a normal job may actually make you less able to start a startup, by turning you into a tame animal who thinks he needs an office to work in and a product manager to tell him what software to write.”

There is some evidence that the most successful entrepreneurs are 40 or older. I don’t believe that. Or rather, it may be that statistically a startup founded by someone over 40 will be more likely to “win” financially than one started by a 20 year old. But nearly everything that is really disruptive is created by someone too young to know that they never had a chance of winning. So they blindly charge ahead, and they win.

The companies that shape our culture – Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc. – are almost always started in a dorm room. These are the companies that matter in the long run.

It’s so easy to look at a startup and think of the ten startups before that tried to solve the same problem and failed. In fact, most startups look sort of dumb in the really early stages, mostly because if they were so obviously going to win then someone would have likely jumped in already. Like I said, you have to stay credulous to believe.

The wisdom that comes with experience seems like such a valuable asset to have. You have advice that people should listen to, you think, as you smirk condescendingly at the kid with the big idea and no clue what terrible obstacles stand between her and success.

I sometimes feel that skepticism creeping into my thinking when I look at a new idea being presented by an eager and innocent young entrepreneur. It’s a relatively recent thing, and I want to stamp it out like a cancer.

There’s no room in my world for that kind of nonsense. Who am I to tell someone that they can’t change the world? I say fight on. And if you fail I’ll give you a solid fist bump and tell you to get back on the horse, or whatever the saying is, and try again. Because you’re going to get it right, whether it’s this startup or another one.

So please call me on it if you see me starting to act my age. I don’t mind being 40 at all – life definitely gets better as you get older and you figure out what’s really important. But I want to look at startups with the same eager and innocent anticipation that I did when I was 25. Even when I’m 80.

via http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/27/staying-credulous-on-not-letting-being-40-get-in-the-way/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook