Audio Activism

Cool Stuff found via del.icio.us… These items aren’t related to each other really. Just cool stuff for you to enjoy.

STAR WARS gif - Episode IV told using an animated gif.

Rading the 20th Century MP3 - a mashup by DJ Food

THIS ONE IS HOT!
A podcast RSS feed of MP3s bookmarked on del.icio.us. What a great way to find new audio! Just copy that link into your podcast download app (iTunes, Juicer aka ipodder, etc.) and get what ever the group mind that is del.icio.us selects.

skull_king

Originally uploaded by Luodanli.

Ruby tips me to a set of stencils on Flickr that appear to be taken by a US solider deployed in Taji, Iraq. Ya’ll should check out the Iraq or Soldier tag on flickr…lots of AMAZING pictures. Thanks for sharing with us Luodanli, come back safe!

londontown 027

Originally uploaded by TwoCrabs.

Somewhat related links to the photo… DIY kids I love ya!

Stencil How-To and Community
Stenciling Tutorials


Stencil X Core - a stencil community on livejournal

another excuse to post a BANSKY stencil photo…

155-5503_IMG

Originally uploaded by Babylon Fish.

In my exploration of stencil art in DIY books at the Internationalist bookstore and on the photo website Flickr I’ve discovered BANSKY. He’s this amazing street artist from Bristol, UK. Art historians might call him a public artist. I see him as a Robin Hood Artist, stealing from the rich property owners and giving to the people beauty. Please check out his website and the amazing collection of photos of his work on Flicr. Tag: Bansky

the designated poodle walker

Originally uploaded by wacky doodler.

One of my favorite RSS feeds is from the Stencil photo pool on flickr. http://www.flickr.com/groups/wwwflickrcomgroupsstencil/pool/feed/?format=rss_200

Some of the top tags for this pool are: stencil, streetart, graffiti, art, urban. All of this art is the digital art gallery I dreamed of in the 80’s. Even better it changes often like a new show has been hung in a gallery. Very influencial work for me. I need to get to work on a design for our wedding invites.

Ok… this post isn’t spam beacuse it’s title has the word sex in it. (might attract a lot of spam. tho’…) The fact is gender is a very important part of our lives. It’s who we are, literally. Gender is Political. How we function and live is very important. Dis-Ability is Political.

So this morning I saw this sign. It is a xeroxed peice of paper COVERING a permanent women’s bathroom sign in a university building. It reads; “UNISEX” “It Does not matter if you have a vagina, penis, or other, ALL bathrooms should be accessible to ALL people.”, and “Should be Accessible to Differently-Abled People”

Interesting awareness campaign. I’d call this protest art. (Sidenote: I took these pics with my Treo 650 camera, then uploaded them to Flickr. Capturing stuff like this is what makes a mobile camera with a network connection awesome!)

Ruby and I recently saw the movies 2046 by Wong Kar Wai, Serenity by Joss Whedon, and Mirror Mask by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean.

2046 is a beautiful film noir like movie with LOTS of close-ups that was shot in color and set in the 1960’s and the year 2046. Serenity is a funny Blade Runner like Sci-Fi movie with just enough cowboy genre characteristics to be fun and not annoying. Mirror Mask is the most surreal film I’ve ever seen and gives The Brother’s Quay a SERIOUS run for their money. Go see them all. (I highly recommend the Firefly DVD box set. Serenity the movie is based on the TV show Firefly. Same characters - same fun.)

Yep… I was crazy excited about the new Apple Video iPod yesterday. Still am. But today I bring you the sobering facts. Video is harder to produce than audio. Especially if your aiming for an entertaining style that most people want to watch. This difficulty comes about because of aesthetic constrains. Many of us - myself included - are well trained in popular cultural definitions of what is “good” in video. I’m not even going to try and define that here. Maybe in a dissertation some day.

To the point of the complexity of video production Rabbel on his AnarcoGeek blog said this:

Since the dawn of podcasting people have been looking beyond audio to video. I’ve mostly dismissed this as dreaming, and then pointed out the exceedingly high production costs to video. I’ve worked on producing videos and it’s a lot of work to get something which looks at all good. For that matter audio is a lot harder to produce than text. We are all trained in school how to write, and a little how to talk, but fewer people learn how to act. Creating quality productions is hard.

Please go read the rest of Rabble’s post. He really is a smart man.

Now I can totally relate to these concerns and have had similar experiences but… when I see Chuck Olsen’s Minnesota Stories videos I BELIVE lots of good vlogging we all want to watch will happen. It’s all a matter of changing production techniques to match a new medium and a new aesthetic quality. We all just need to find oursleves a new voice.

Last weekend a bunch of friends and I went to see the movie Hustle and Flow. Several of us had seen trailers and thought they looked good. How often is it that trailers look like you’ve just seen the whole movie? How often do trailers completely lie? Well, not this one. Hustle and Flow is awesome! Quentin Tarantino WISHES he could make something this good!
(more…)

Now that Google’s net worth has toped Time-Warner’s making it the biggest media company in the world, will it eat itself? In high hactivist style Hans Bernhard & Alessandro Ludovico have made something to help it along. They’ve created a hactivist art protest in the form of the Global Web-Marketing & E-Business Information Magazine or GWEI. (Notice how those initials are the same as Google Will Eat Itself…) Check out their live installation art that describes the project and its purpose. Here’s a bit of their own words,
“We generate money by serving Google text advertisements on our website GWEI.org. With this money we automatically buy Google shares via our swiss e-banking account. We buy Google via their own advertisement! Google eats itself - but in the end we’ll own it!”

Sounds like an interesting plan to me. Very like something the Yes Men might do. It brings awareness to Googles new mega-corp status. Will Google abuse their power? Shall we play along and believe all that we have read on the web? Or shall we act in our own lives and look for more evidence of positive change down the street? I love the grey areas that art creates. We must question everything or serve like slaves. Guess I just served these very creative artists by passing along their meme. By linking to them we raise their Google ranking. Thus their ads should be worth more. Cha Ching!

The bottom line is no corporation as powerful as Google can be completely trusted as the arbiter of so much information. Doesn’t their fiscal power finally demonstrate the power of the info economy we live in? This darling of the Internet may one day eat us all. I mean how long will they continue to link to sites that question them or work actively to destroy them? For now Google shows that the search phrase “Google will eat itself” is linking 828 pages.

We need a open source community search engine!