General Web Content
General Web Content is an ongoing series that spotlights developments on the internet which bear on aesthetic and/or cultural concerns. In this edition, we turn to eBay blogs. The authors here assemble eBay listings in their posts according to an overarching idea, theme or sensibility. If you have an eBay blog you would like to share, please post links in the comments section.
About Sentimental Value:
I’ve always had a love for vintage objects and a curiosity about their former lives. Sentimental Value collects some of the more noteworthy stories about clothing and accessories I’ve discovered while digging through Ebay.
About Reference Library:
Most of these posts originate as my disappointments on eBay. You can sort by the REF labels or search for something specific.
About Hanne's Fashion Blog:
Welcome to Hanne's Fashion Blog! Hanne's Fashion Blog is an Ebay Blog, filtering the greatest stuff from Ebay for you. The best fashion website during a recession!
Films (2008) - Charles Broskoski
The piece explores internet-time, or how time passes on the internet, by providing a contrast to immediacy of online media. On his site, eight well known films (Pulp Fiction, Terminator 2 and When Harry Met Sally among them) play continuously on a fixed daily schedule whether users visit the site or not. The screen is black save only for the subtitles of the dialog.
Untitled Black Video (2009) - Martijn Hendriks
Reconstruction of a cellphone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution that was leaked onto the internet, only using found comments on the video that were posted on web forums on the first day of the video’s appearance
The Shape of Things to Come
"We are living in interesting times," science fiction author Charles Stross observed on his blog last week. "In fact, they're so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF." The makers of Superstruct, a new project created by the Institute for the Future, would disagree. The IFTF has launched what they're calling "the world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game;" in it, players are asked to imagine themselves ten years from now, then flesh out the details of that near-future world through posts to a wiki, discussion forums, Facebook, Superstruct's own site, and elsewhere. But players won't be creating this collective vision of tomorrow from scratch: the game provides a core set of hot-button issues that need to be addressed in 2019 -- couched as reports from the Global Extinction Awareness System -- which include a growing pandemic, the immanent collapse of the world's food supplies, power struggles over energy sources, and the "diaspora of diasporas" of displaced masses. Using a speculative fiction to ask thousands of users to cobble together potentially useful solutions to very real problems, Superstruct can be seen as an online variant of alternative reality gaming, juiced up with elements of crowdsourcing, prediction markets and the collaborative authorship of expanded universes. The very premise of this new mutation in science fiction writing says a great deal about what we think about our own life now in these interesting times: the future is not so much a brave new world to be explored, but a complex problem to be solved. - Ed Halter
Worlds of Wonder
The Tokyo Game Show, Japan's massive video game expo, traditionally serves as a major convention for the commercial gaming industry, but this year launches a sidebar delicately named Sense of Wonder Night, which embraces work created from the international indie gaming world. Inspired by the Experimental Gameplay Sessions, which began at the Game Developers' Conference six years ago, Sense of Wonder Night focuses on innovative games that, in the words of the organizers, evoke "a feeling that something will change in their world and make them gasp at the moment they lay eyes on the games or hear the game concepts." For those who can't be in Japan on October 10th for the presentation, many of the finalists' games can be downloaded or have trailers posted online. Among them are Depict, by Jesús Cuauhtémoc Moreno Ramos, which promises to be a shape-recognition game played with phone cameras; Daniel Benmergui's Moon Stories, a love story with multiple narrative outcomes and an ingenious Polaroid-snapshot gameplay structure; an optical-illusion 3D shooter called The Unfinished Swan by Ian Dallas; and Mark Essen's druggy hypercolor trip Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist. Opening stateside concurrent with Sense of Wonder Night is the Bellevue, Washington edition of IndieCade, which will include a preview of fl0wer, the new title from the makers of indie success story fl0w, and an exhibit of thirteen indie games including Eddo Stern's sensory-deprivation experiment Darkgame, Jason Rohrer's gently allegorical Gravitation, and Faith Denham's Block H, which takes on the history of political conflict in Northern Ireland. Both positioned on the overlap of art and industry, these two showcases are testament to the wide variety of endeavors that currently fall under the "indie" label, which includes everything from browser-based games to politically-minded gallery installations to (possibly) next year ...
From Alpha to Omega
Artists are often credited with inventing new languages, but of course the building blocks of these code hacks, if you will, are the letters of the alphabet. A new online exhibition entitled "Abecedarium:NYC" takes the Modern English alphabet as its starting point. Curated by Susan Agliata and Lynne Sachs and appropriately hosted by the New York Public Library, that longstanding database of the alphanumeric, the show invited artists to imagine readings of the city of New York and its boroughs, based on their interpretation of a word beginning with their assigned letter. The twenty-six final pieces construct overlapping narratives about the city and its denizens, as portrayed in interactive maps, videos, and audio works. Each entry takes a different approach as to the genre of story told, ranging from noirish mysteries to nonfiction historiographies to humorous character studies. Start with your favorite letter and see if you're able to resist the other twenty-five. - Marisa Olson
Recorded/Live
Houston venue Aurora Picture Show's annual multimedia festival Media Archaeology kicks off tonight and will run through the weekend. Dubbed "Live and Televised," the diverse group of artists selected for this year's festival integrate pre-recorded audio or visual media into their live performances. For the opening event, legendary culture jammers Negativland will broadcast a religiously-themed radio show to a blindfolded audience. For a preview, click play below and close your eyes:
The Club Who Was Thursday
Bearing a deceptively straightforward name, The Thursday Club at Goldsmiths College, University of London plays host to a wide range of technologist-artists for its recently-announced Summer Season; in upcoming weeks, the Club's guests will explore such diverse topics as narrative interactivity, biofeedback, coded textiles and "strategic walking." On April 17, Rachel Beth Egenhoefer presents works in progress from her ongoing art-melds of knitting and coding, including a knit zoetrope and knitting with the Wii. Writers Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph talk about their "networked book" Flight Paths on April 24; a novel to be based partially on strange-but-true occurrences of immigrant airline stowaways tragically plummeting to earth, Flight Paths is currently crowdsourcing research and ideas in its online forum. May 8th brings two artists who use medical technologies to esthetic ends: Camille Baker, whose MINDTouch combines biofeedback and mobile phones to create live performances, and Marilene Oliver, who creates artworks with MRI and CT scanning data. Future clubbers include E:vent organizers Colm Lally and Verina Gfader, artist/writer Richard Colson, and "live coders" Alex McLean and Dave Griffiths. - Ed Halter
Image Credit: Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Detail of Knit Zoetrope (Work in Progress)
Call for Submissions:
IEEE VISAP'15 / Data Improvisations / Call for Papers and Artworks
Posted by Angus Forbes
Edwin VanGorder