Eric Pakurar, took a photo every day of the same Greene St doorway in Manhattan for eight months straight, recording how the graffiti changed as part of his Chemical Warfare Project.
He is currently soliciting the identities of the individual artists, the individual pieces on Flickr.
The previous post got me trudging through my big file of clippings, and where I found this video of Obscura Digital‘s demo of their software for coordinating 7 HD projectors down at Mint Plaza.
Sure, it’s essentially an ad, but it is pretty cool.
Back in May, Urbanscreen, and Rossa & Rossa presented the video installation, “How It Would Be, If a House was Dreaming” at the Galerie der Gegenwart (Gallery of Contemporary Art).
This isn’t Urbanscreen’s first project, nor their first projection on the Galerie der Gegenwart, but it is their most popular to date.
On a technical note, Urbanscreen uses the free MXWendler software.
Makes me long for 01SJ, or I guess really ISEA, since 01SJ just wasn’t the same last year.
I play more than my share of flash games, most of which are only okay. Occasionally, there’ll be one that’s actually original, rarer yet, one that’s clever. Last year, John Cooney (JMBT02 Studios) released Achievement Unlocked, a commentary on the trend of creating dubious “achievements” in games. (Hell, even /. got into the act.) Which, judging by the comments on Kongregate, sadly, I believe flew over the heads of the majority of the players.
Now Raitendo has released You Only Live Once. A game that lives, up to it’s title, and unsurprisingly, has pissed off the majority of the Kongregation.
I really like how endearing each photo is. Something like this would be infinitely better for my dad’s weather station (A Davis Vantage Pro. Highly recommended.), than the horrible UI that WView provides by default
Shane Acker created an animated short a while back about tiny numbered cloth people in a post-apocalyptic world. Tim Burton is turning the short into a full movie.
Visually, it’s amazing, but I think I prefer the original short to the feature. The short doesn’t feature any dialog, and so that adds to the outerworldness of the story. I understand that most people can’t be bothered to watch something with no dialog (even Wall-E had dialog), but dialog forces extraneous notions like backstory, romantic subplots, interpersonal conflicts, that take away from experience the presented world. I’m not saying that these things can’t exist without dialog, they clearly can (well perhaps not backstory), but by using dialog they are brought to the forefront with a sledgehammer. Still, I’m hopeful for the feature.
9, comes out surprsingly enough, 09-09-09. (That’s ten years to the day of the North American Dreamcast release.)
“Unfinished Swan” is an interactive project from Ian Dallas. The player exists in an all white world, which is slowly revealed as the player shoots black paint over the walls.
Ian insists on calling this a “game”, but I don’t think that’s really a good word for something like this. Games have goals and rewards. This doesn’t. There’s no story, no goals, no explicit reward. It’s an experience, an interesting experience to be sure, but it’s a paradoxically a passive one.
During his talk at TGS 2008 he says he’s surprised that “players” universally became bored within 20 seconds. The reason seems obvious, the lack of goals. I enjoyed watching the demo, but at the same time, I can’t imagine actually playing this for very long.
It seems like he’s going for sublime enjoyment, sort of like Katamari Damacy, but he’s forgotten that Katamari had goals and rewards. Yes, Katamari was a very stylish and simple game, but it was fun because of the challenges. Without challenges there’s nothing to motivate the player, and so he/she quickly becomes bored. Since Unfinished Swan doesn’t have goals, it’s much more of an interactive video rather than a “game”. Not that that’s a bad thing per se, but they should not be confused. If Swan had a story, not even really challenges, I could see it working more as a game. Judging from the demo above, there’s potentially one there, but from his all too brief talk, I wonder if he’s trying to make it too open ended and free form.
I one time came across a blog post talking about the sureality of uploading videos to YouTube and the like as “asdf”. The uploaders cared enough to upload it, but no enough to actually give it a name. If they don’t even care enough to name it, then why should anyone else care?
I was talking about this today, and decided to demonstrate sheer crap that’s on YouTube named this, when ironically, I found the sublime. It’s the music (Of Montreal’s cover of “Color Me In”), and the sheer persistence, if not sisyphusian persistence of the guy. It’s amazing.