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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
The Escape is a brilliant Mercedes commercial which some cultural critics would contextualize within the New Aesthetic. As part of an integrated advertising campaign the clip invited consumers to go online and rescue a woman caught in a simulated Google Streetview API universe where death equals ‘being blurred out’.
(Source: darklyeuphoric)
The director-actor-relationship.
(Source: nami64)
Pirate Bay have achieved their aim. After all, their aim wasn’t to make a fortune from copyright infringement, no matter what IFPI and the BPI claim. Their aim was to make the copyright industries look ridiculous, outmoded and to place these companies into direct conflict with music and film fans. The Pirate Bay’s point has been to try to demonstrate that copyright itself is past its sell by date and can only be sustained through creating a dystopia of control, censorship and surveillance.
We don’t have to choose between freedom and copyright - Jim Killock, Open Rights Group, 3 May 2012. (via hautepop)
Nostalgia + Zeitgeist = USB Typewriter Computer Keyboard
An Underwood connected to an iPad, via a USB port - no, it’s not the most convenient solution but can it get any more stylish than that? This technological pastiche combining one of the most iconic communication tools of the early 20th century (“the first truly modern typewriter”) with the state-of-the-art communication medium of the early 21st century is a bit pricey but it definitely seems like the perfect gift for any Media Archeologist…
What Happens in an Internet Minute
Via Intel:
In just one minute, more than 204 million emails are sent. Amazon rings up about $83,000 in sales. Around 20 million photos are viewed and 3,000 uploaded on Flickr. At least 6 million Facebook pages are viewed around the world. And more than 61,000 hours of music are played on Pandora while more than 1.3 million video clips are watched on YouTube.
All in all, that’s 625 terabytes of information sloshing about the tubes each minute.
If we do some math that’s 878.9 petabytes per day which is a bit difficult to wrap our mind around.
But if we convert that to the universal measurement of the MP3, we get the equivalent of about 235.9 billion songs passing through the internet and mobile networks each day.
In Search of Haruki Murakami (2008)
Notoriously media-shy Murakami finally agreed to be interviewed in 2008, but only on condition that his face would be off-camera and his voice not heard.
Alan Yentob succeeded in producing an intriguing impressionistic documentary on this Japanese cult-writer.
Visualizing Film
With the Academy Awards this evening we thought we’d take a different look at analyzing films.
Created by Frederic Brodbeck for his graduate project at the Royal Academy of Arts, Den Haag in the Netherlands, Cinemetrics breaks films down scene by scene to determine their overall structure and prominent characteristics.
Via Brodbeck:
Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side…
…[T]oday there are already a lot of information graphics using meta-data related to film and cinema (budget, box office data, awards won, relationship between characters etc.). That’s why I wanted to use the movie itself as a source of data, to see what sort of information can be extracted from it, to find ways of visualizing it and to create the necessary tools to do this.
Brodbeck’s released his code for the project over on GitHub.
For more film visualizations, check out the results from Information is Beautiful’s “Visualise Hollywood Challenge.”
The competition provided designers and developers with a dataset of every Hollywood film from 2007 - 2011 (the dataset is here and worthwhile to check out on its own). The winning entries create a gallery of great interactive visualizations of what’s happening on the big screen.
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
A collection of photos of objects embedded in New York City’s asphalt – an oddly addictive piece of visual urban anthropology. (via)
How Facebook keeps the porn, gore, and hate out of your Newsfeed
from MSNBC Technolog:
“Pedophilia, Necrophilia. Beheadings, Suicides, etc.”
Those are some examples of what Facebook’s outsourced content monitors must endure while filtering the Internet viscera, according to one who spoke to Gawker’s Adrian Chen. Animal abuse, “bad fights, a man beating another,” and “KKK cropping up everywhere,” were other examples provided by employees of oDesk, a California-based content-moderation service staffed by employees in India, Mexico, the Philippines and Turkey who look at Facebook content.
The Internet can be a dark and horrible place, on this we should all agree. Despite the short-lived exceptions, such as the coordinated spam attack that littered Facebook with porn and gore in November, the social network remains a comparatively clean, well-lighted place. Thanks to a few disgruntled and/or traumatized content monitors in those countries, we now get a peek at how Facebook protects us, and more importantly, itself.
For every photo of a breast-feeding mother or nude drawing clumsily removed from Facebook, content monitors slog through overwhelming evidence of humanity at low tide. For the dirty job of censoring content on the social network that just filed a $100 billion IPO, at least one former oDesk employee told Chen he earned $1 an hour. Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan man, vented to Chen about the oDesk job he describes as humiliating exploitation of workers, and let loose some long-held mysteries on the why and the how of Facebook’s censoring process.
Derkaoui shared a one-page cheat sheet for moderators with categories such as “Sex and Nudity,” “Hate Content,” “Graphic Content” and “Bullying and Harassment.”
Read the entire article.
In 1991 Francis Ford Coppola predicted that what is now known as participatory culture will revolutionize film:
Suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna be the new Mozart…and make a beautiful film with her father’s little camera-corder, and for once this whole professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever, and it will really become an art form.
THE MAKING OF JOHN CASSAVETES’S ‘HUSBANDS’ (BBC, 1971)
Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk & John Cassavetes - the ratpack of US independent cinema
Welcome to the meme-ification of the sitcom, a phenomenon in which the latest iteration of television comedy writing anticipates and includes the Internet as a secondary delivery vehicle right from the start.
A proliferation of GIFs is the primary mark of a show’s success in this category. “Parks and Recreation,” “Happy Endings” and “How I Met Your Mother” all have fan-maintained Tumblrs to collect and distribute these homemade files. It’s not surprising that the shows with the most devoted, savviest online audiences are the ones that are sometimes on the bubble of network acceptance;
From: ‘So Long, Water Cooler; Hello, Hashtag’ by Jon Caramanica in The New York Times (09-12-2011)
(Source: lifesucksthenyouregenerate)
This “It’s the ’90s!”-SUPERCUT
Andy Baio not only coined the term supercut - referring to the constantly growing meme of “obsessive-compulsive montages of video meticulously isolating every instance of a single item, usually cliches, phrases, and other tropes” - he also came up with the idea to collect all supercut videos in a comprehensive, browsable database. This is oh so handy for research. Cheers!
Bye, bye 35mm
In 2012 the Netherlands will be the first European country to screen all films digitally - in all cinemas nationwide, according to an article in the Dutch paper Trouw.
Why Avatar played a major role in finally putting celluloid to rest
For more than a decade the film industry was speculating about how and when digital technology would make analog film obsolete, yet this anticipated paradigm shift seemed to get postponed consistently until finally, in 2009, James Cameron’s Avatar turned out to be such a huge box-office hit that investment in digital technology seemed to become less of a risky business idea, in Hollywood & beyond. At least that’s what market researchers are claiming.
(still: Cinema Paradiso, G. Tornatore 1988)
