Morrissey easter egg found in Google Earth | The Verge
Salford, here we come.
This is cool and all but way to slight 75% of the band here, Google.
“And yet, as significant as this shift in listening habits might be for the music industry, the streaming revolution may seem like little more than a software upgrade for the average listener. While it’s true that these new services reduce the amount of friction we experience when attempting to listen to a certain song right this minute, the paradigm of how we experience music remains largely unchanged. We’re still listening to music on the computer, or on our phones or in the car. All that’s changed is that we no longer need to remember to sync our iPod before heading out the door.”
I photographed and wrote-up the not-so-Christmasy Atlas Sound “Christmas show” for MTV Hive.
Above you’ll find a video demo for The 4D Pop-Up Book of Halloween, an augmented reality children’s book that I built as part of my research at NYU ITP. It’s a handmade pop-up book that’s embedded with a different QR code on each page. When the reader scans the codes using a webcam-equipped device and a companion Mac/Windows/Android application, it produces an animation onscreen that places the reader inside the story. My goal was to build a book that could bridge the gap between one-of-a-kind artifacts and purely digital experiences. If you’d like to see a live demo of the book in person, come on by the ITP Winter Show tomorrow from 2-6pm or Monday from 5-9pm and I’ll be happy to show you how it works!
For my final project for my Physical Computing class, I built a magnetic swipe gumball machine. In order to receive a gumball, you need to swipe a magnetic stripe card (i.e. a credit card, subway card, student ID, etc.). The idea is that you’re buying a gumball without knowing what it’s going to cost you (personal information? money? a subway ride?). If you’re interested in learning about what went in to building this thing, you can read this detailed post over at my ITP blog.
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Um, we’d gladly donate like $20 to a Kickstarter campaign to make Belle & Sebastian a) stop putting out songs that sound like musicals and b) resume releasing singles about sad sex.
Ditto! Hell, I’d pay $50 just to get one more song that’s even half as cutting as “I’m Waking Up to Us”. Time to start submitting alternate reward ideas via the comments?
Stuart as in Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian. As you may have gathered, that’s one of the rewards being offered on Kickstarter for helping to fund Murdoch’s God Help The Girl film. It’s a pity that the Kickstarter video is so painfully unfunny (I blame Hollywood). And yet, it’s still taking every ounce of my willpower not to click on that button. The thought of riding around in a minibus in Glasgow with Stuart Murdoch is almost too much to bear.
If you’re looking for something to do in NYC this Sunday and Monday, might I recommend the NYU ITP Winter Show? I’ll be showing some of my most recent work (an augmented-reality-enhanced pop-up book), alongside 100+ other interactive projects that will amaze, delight and surprise. I attended the show last year and was blown away by some of the stuff that I saw there, so I really can’t recommend it highly enough. Protip: it tends to get really crowded as the night wears on, so show up early!
In this awesome video, musicians and celebs praise Megaupload, one of the websites being slammed by the RIAA and MPAA for being a “rogue website”, for its speed and usefulness. Check it out!
This rules, even if the video itself is hilariously awful and gratuitously long (download “the mega song” for free, really?). I do hope that this results in a full-on rappers-endorsing-file-storage-services arms race, though. Dream team: Lil B and Weezy go to bat for Mediafire in the form of an expository free word association. Make it happen, internet!
“Penny Chisholm, MIT marine biologist, showed GZA around her lab and gave him a sample of prochlorococcus, a photosynthetic ocean bacterium. Additionally she gave him a fully sealed ecosphere containing four brine shrimp aka sea monkeys, which he immediately named Larry, Mo, Dave, and Curly. David Kaiser and GZA discussed black holes, grey holes, teleportation, and quantum physics. Over at the Media Lab Tod Machover showed GZA his “Opera of the Future” and Ethan Zuckerman’s Civic Media team illuminated their ideas on how technology could shape a better world. On the creative side, GZA met his new “homeboy” Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author. The two discussed their processes and hip hop.”
Is it just me or are the Parenthetical Girls one of the most underrated indie-pop bands of the last decade? Granted, hyper-literate, baroque pop with sinister undertones and a pronounced dramatic flair isn’t exactly the most marketable style of music (although that never stopped the Smiths, right?) but even so, you’d think that more folks would have taken notice of the four fantastic records the group has released since 2004. I saw the band play at the Glasslands Gallery on Thursday night (along with the much-talked-about Gauntlet Hair) and when the soundman played the Arcade Fire’s “Crown of Love” in between sets, Zac Pennington got down on his knees and mockingly serenaded his bandmates. It was funny but it also underscored something—the idea that most people are comfortable with a good deal of drama in their pop music just so long as it’s vague enough to be universally relatable. The Parenthetical Girls’ problem is that their sordid tales of infatuation, reproduction and exploitation are perhaps too specific—specific enough to make the average listener squirm in her seat. Of course, that’s the whole point but music like this is always bound to alienate a lot of listeners, even inside a community like indie rock, where the tolerance for confrontation is fairly high. If you’re like me, however, and you find the idea of being made mildly uncomfortable at a show appealing, I’d highly recommend checking out the final show of the Girls’ east coast tour at Shea Stadium on Tuesday night, likely to be their last gig around these parts for a while, if history offers any indication. For a taste of what you can expect, check out my photos and write-up of the band’s Thursday night set at Glasslands over at MTV Hive.
If you read my interview with MGMT collaborator (and fellow ITP student!) Alejandro Crawford a few weeks back, you’ll know that Alejandro and the band had pretty ambitious plans for their performances at the Guggenheim last week. I attended the second of the two shows and am happy to report that it exceeded my expectations in nearly every way imaginable. Perhaps most impressive was the fact that the performance and accompanying light show served to highlight—rather than upstage—the unsettling details of Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture mobile, in accordance with the band’s stated intentions. To read more of my impressions and see a slideshow of my photos from the show, head over to MTV Hive.
“The last stop on our Wright tour was Racine, a factory town that has seen better times. Guidebooks tend to talk you out of visiting, perhaps because the city suffers from high unemployment; empty storefronts abound.”
Previewing MGMT’s Guggenheim Performance Visuals
I interviewed Brooklyn-based video artist and fellow ITP student, Alejandro Crawford, for MTV Hive. Alejandro has been doing some really incredible video projection stuff for MGMT for a little while now—he spent most of last year touring with the band overseas and handling their live visuals—and is currently working on an “audio-reactive LED wall” that will be displayed at the Guggenheim in conjunction with their upcoming shows there. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “How do bands do all those crazy projections that seem to react to the music in real-time?” this might be the peek behind the curtain you’ve been looking for.
For an assignment for my physical computing class my partners (Chris and Olya) and I designed and built a simple musical instrument housed inside a foam ball. Basically, the device allows the user to control the pitch, octave and volume of notes by moving a ball around in three-dimensional space. While the practical applications of something like this are relatively limited (unless Björk wants to order a few of these for her next tour?), it was still a fun project to see through to fruition. For more detailed information on how the ball was constructed, head over to my ITP blog.
