Miranda July Tackles the Web

So, Miranda July isn't just a great performance artist, filmmaker and video artist. She's a great writer. Plus, she recently launched the promo site for her new book of fiction, No One Belongs Here More Than You. We've talked a bit about design, relationships between form and content, and the ways in which people are using the things around them, often online, to craft arguments. Well, here's another example: July wants you to buy her book. Take a look and consider the rhetorical appeal...

Two More Info Videos...

Here are two more videos related, both in form and content, to our class. The first is the one Gordon referenced; the second is a nice explanation/response to ideas around Web 2.0. By the way, what should we call these videos? Are they a genre? Category?

Did You Know? by Karl Fisch (the remix)
The Machine Is Us/ing Us, by Michael Wesch (final version)

Countergaming...

Since we're reading about artist-made game mods this week, I thought I'd post some links to some of the more notorious examples:
untitled game, by jodi
Adam Killer by Brody Condon
(Also see Condon's "DeathAnimations," his in-game suicides and "Waco Resurrection.")
QQQ by Tom Betts
ASCII Unreal by Vuk Cosic
Velvet Strike by Anne-Marie Schleiner, Brodi Condon, Joan Leandre
Projects by Eddo Stern
Also, Brad Kligerman's residency as an artist in Ars Virtua is well worth considering; he has spent the residency developing an art project that incorporates information from the avatars of visitors, such that they actualize the project's content. "Creating a feedback loop involving avatars is a reflection of the necessity to create meaningful space through presence and participation," he writes on his AVAIR site, adding that the project "construes its physical, material context - the local and global qualities inherent to a synthetic space - as both content and form, expressive media and meaning." Read through all four months of archives (there isn't that much material) to glimpse one artist's attempt to "counter" Second Life.

Typography and Multimedia

We talked in class yesterday about typography and design issues in multimedia, and Adam mentioned a short video: it's called Kapitaal (Capital) and was made by Studio Smack.

I also mentioned The Last Day of Betty Nkomo, by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and recommended another piece by the pair, Dakota.

We also looked at the following:
Toyota Ads | Brand New School | 2006
Stranger Than Fiction sequence | MK12 | 2006
NBC rebranding | Capacity | 2006
Pulp Fiction typography assignment | Jarratt Moody | 2007

Yet Another Vision of the Web...

"NeuroZappingFolks" is a Web-based artwork by Santiago Ortiz that "zaps" through the Internet on paths selected by an algorithm using information from del.icio.us. It's a very different vision than we've seen so far, based in part on its use of computation. The rest of LX 2.0 offers some excellent reading on new media, too...

Second Life Doc

No, not the 104 SL doc. Someone else's. Douglas Gayeton has produced My Second Life as one of the Submarine Channel's MiniMovie projects; his is described as an edited collection of dispatches from someone who vanished from RL into SL. Comments? What works? What doesn't?

SL Architecture

"Architecture's Second Life," written by Bryan Boyer and Heather Ring and recently posted on the Archinect site, offers a nice overview of architecture in Second Life. The gist of it?

"When it comes down to it, from an architectural perspective, Second Life just sort of replicates suburbia. In a universe built from free and easily manipulated virtual building units, there is a surprising lack of interesting work going on."

That said, the authors highlight some interesting experiments, including Erik Andren's "intuitive architecture," pictured above...