This year at Oppikoppi, a popular music festival held annually in the Limpopo Province of South Africa, punters won’t have to wait in line for their beers. Instead, they’ll have them delivered via drone technology. Attendees in the District 9 campsite will be able to order beers from their phone. At the moment, during early tests, it is hand guided, but it will eventually fly on a GPS grid. Coachella take note!
Do you ever feel like you spend too much time on your computer and you’re losing touch with nature? Problem solved! The designers at RAW BKNY have created wooden keys for the keyboard of your MacBook. The keys are compatible with all Macbook Pros with a unibody and are made from authentic rosewood and bamboo. Stay connected to the digital world while your fingers caresses, er, wood. Aesthetically fancy. Me likey.
[via Mashable]
Earlier this month, Instagram users @projectlife365, @christianflorin, @alexanderpavone and @mattbg held an InstaMeet at the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles, California. 115 people turned out for the event, and one of them, Ravi Vora (@ravivora), decided to put together a film about the day and what happens when the Instagram community comes together. It’s a nice piece about an emerging collaborative culture of creativity – as well as an insight into how mobile photography and Instagram is influencing our culture.
[via Instagram]
M4SONIC – pronounced M. Four. Sonic. – a 20 year-old EDM producer from Australia has dropped a new video: a live original using two Novation Launchpads in User 1 mode. The two MIDI controllers are playing original samples in a sequence to create the sound. The right hand controls most of the tuneful sounds whilst the left hand is responsible for keeping in time, playing a custom drum kit and various FX and vocal loops. What you witness is a guy performing live what takes weeks to do in studios with the type of precision required of a pianist, but on 128 keys instead of 88. Shit. Just. Got. Real. Watch M4SONIC’s ‘Virus’ video below:
Part mailing list, part music curation service, Noon Pacific sends you a fresh playlist of new and great music. It packages the best new tracks doing the rounds on music blogs across the Internet and delivers directly to your inbox, every Monday at noon, Pacific time (6am AEDT). Get on board and get that head bobbing and foot tapping.
On Monday this week the art curation website Art.sy launched. Art.sy provides a new way for people to discover art and is based on the Art Genome Project. Much like how the music streaming service Pandora curates art according to what songs you like, Art.sy curates art based on your visual taste. The website has one of the biggest collections of art online and comprises more than 17,000 artworks by over 3,000 artists from leading galleries, museums, private collections, foundations, and artist estates. Art.sy works with more than 300 of the world’s leading galleries, museums, private collections, foundations, and artist estates from New York to London, Paris to Shanghai, Johannesburg to São Paulo.
As Melena Ryzik noted in the New York Times:
Any music fan knows that there are myriad ways to find new songs online: a scroll through digital playlists and streaming radio services like Pandora, which serve as musical recommendation engines. Likewise, Netflix subscribers are regularly showered with suggestions for, say, romantic comedies and horror films, based on previously viewed movies.
But until now, there was no automated guidance for art lovers seeking discoveries online — no “If you like Jackson Pollock’s ‘No. 1,’ you may also enjoy Mark Rothko’s ‘No. 18.’ ”
For the Art Genome Project, Matthew Israel, 34, who holds a Ph.D. in art and archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, leads a team of a dozen art historians who decide what those codes are and how they should be applied. Some labels (Art.sy calls them “genes” and recognises about 800 of them, with more added daily) denote fairly objective qualities, like the historical period and region the work comes from and whether it is figurative or abstract, or belongs in an established category like Cubism, Flemish portraiture or photography.
Other labels are highly subjective, even quirky; for contemporary art, for example, Art.sy’s curators might attach terms like “globalisation” and “culture critique” to give ideological context.
Maybe Tumblr or Pinterst is more your bag, but new channels for finding art are always welcome.
Tim Dowling, writing for The Guardian, has explored the Gif file format and its current impact on tech and pop culture. The result is not a bad read about everyone’s favourite looped clips:
Gif is, baldly considered, a file format, and an old one at that. The Graphics Interchange Format was first developed by CompuServe in 1987, to allow for the quick downloading of highly compressed colour images. It also supported animation, which eventually became its defining feature, particularly the repeating animations introduced with the Netscape Navigator 2.0 browser. In the beginning Gifs were largely confined to either rotating things or flaming things, but they quickly became more complex.
By the turn of the century the Gif had become distinctly unfashionable, but within a few years its retro appeal (Gifs often retain the look of a well-thumbed flip book) and simplicity (anyone can make their own these days; well, not me) saw a resurgence in popularity. What was the height of naffness at the end of the web 1.0 era is now a cool, lo-fi mode of self-expression.
Read the full article here.
In this world of constant connections there has been a lot of debate recently about the detrimental effects of the internet and whether we are creating and encouraging a culture of distraction where we increasingly disconnect from the people and events around us. According to research done by half of the BBH Barn 2012 team—made up of Sarah Chan, Rhys Hillman and Scarlett Montanaro – we look at our phones on average 150 times a day. In an effort to save the art of conversation and to encourage people to re-engage with their friends without the constant presence of a smartphone, the team created a Social Media Rehab Kit. The kit contains Instagram filter glasses, Twitter notecards, Draw Something doodle pads, and ‘Like’ stickers. “Our message is simple: Connect with life outside of your phone. We want to spark real life social interactions and create enough fun and conversation that people don’t feel the need to awkwardly scroll through their Twitter feeds”, BBH Barn 2012 participant Sarah Chan said.
[via Design Taxi]
When it comes to the internet and digital technology, I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and I think it’s delicious! I believe the disruption caused by mobile and social innovation is exciting and is making our lives and the way we do business better. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together, so it’s hardly surprising to learn that most of my friends feel the same way and share that same opinion. That’s why I try to make a point of reading articles by people who pose a counter view. It challenges my beliefs and can reframe the way I approach thinking about certain topics. So, with that in mind, here’s a selection of interesting articles I’ve read recently that explore this counter view. These articles suggest that the effects of the internet and digital technologies are deleterious to our health and, possibly, our creativity.
First up, Ian Leslie writing for Intelligent Life, looks at the important role of serendipity in innovation and creativity. Serendipity, he suggests, is more than happy coincidence – Leslie suggests it is a crucial component of a creative culture and that it is under threat from the internet:
Today’s world wide web has developed to organise, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made available to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, rather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.
When the internet was new, its early enthusiasts hoped it would emulate the greatest serendipity machine ever invented: the city. The modern metropolis, as it arose in the 19th century, was also an attempt to organise an exponential increase, this one in population. Artists and writers saw it as a giant playground of discovery, teeming with surprise encounters. The flâneur was born: one who wanders the streets with purpose, but without a map.
… some of our most serendipitous spaces are under threat from the internet. Wander into a bookshop in search of something to read: the book jackets shimmer on the table, the spines flirt with you from the shelves. You can pick them up and allow their pages to caress your hands. You may not find the book you wanted, but you will walk out with three you didn’t.
… serendipity, on the other hand, is, as Zuckerman says, “necessarily inefficient”. It is a fragile quality, vulnerable to our desire for convenience and speed. It also requires a kind of planned vagueness. Digital systems don’t do vagueness very well, and our patience with it seems to be fading.
Next up is Tony Dokoupil’s piece from Newsweek which has been doing the rounds on the Internet this week. Titled, Is the Web Driving Us Mad? Dokoupil’s article canvases the digital shifts that have ocurred in the last fives years and their effects on our mental environment:
Questions about the Internet’s deleterious effects on the mind are at least as old as hyperlinks. But even among Web skeptics, the idea that a new technology might influence how we think and feel—let alone contribute to a great American crack-up—was considered silly and naive… Instead, the Internet was seen as just another medium, a delivery system, not a diabolical machine. It made people happier and more productive. And where was the proof otherwise?
Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.
Meanwhile, over on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, Justin Fox poses the question, When Will this Low-Innovation Internet Era End? Fox investigates the idea that in this time of unprecedented technological change, we are in fact not as innovative or clever as we like to think we are and that recent innovations in communication (apps etc) are blinding us to the fact:
It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature.
Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st century and say, “It was an actively creative society. Then the Internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.”
And, lastly, in The ‘Busy’ Trap Tim Krieder takes aim at the culture of being ‘busy’. In a highly caffeinated economy with the culture of apps that are meant to make modern life easier, he reflects on our full social diaries and suggests that our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness:
If you live…in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.
There is definitely some food for thought here.
While I’m broadly optimistic about technology and the digital culture it is inspiring, I think it’s important to take note of arguments that challenge that view. The recent works of people like Jason Silva are more palatable to me because they align with the way I frame modern culture. But taking a step back and considering the alternative is not just good practice – it’s essential for gaining better strategic and cultural insight.
Jason Silva is a filmmaker, journalist, futurist and philosopher. The Atlantic have called his videos “movie trailers for ideas”. He has called them “shots of philosophical espresso”. Silva is a presenter at TEDGlobal 2012 which kicked off today in Edinburgh. The inspiration for TEDGlobal 2012 is “Radical Openness”. As the world becomes interconnected, the ways we relate and learn about one another (and the rules about what we share) are changing. Inspired by the ideas of TED, Chris Anderson, Richard Dawkins, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Steven Johnson, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil and many others, Silva created this gem. See your doctor after viewing, because his enthusiasm for ideas, technology and life is infectious!
This could be a game changer for urban longboarding! Designed by Po-Chi Lai, a Royal College of Art grad, the Stair Rover is a skateboard with eight wheels and a Y-shape aluminium frame. The cantilevered trucks allow the long deck to traverse stairs and other obstacles in the modern urban landscape. Check out the slick video below shot by Juriaan Booij showcasing the Rover at London’s Barbican. Me likey!
[via Core 77]
