Visit the Native Instruments website for more information, screenshots, videos and audio samples.

The HBO Story Cube embraces the spirit of HBO telling deeper more engaging stories in innovative ways. Demonstrating that a change in perspective changes everything. The HBO Story Cube shows four sides of a single story simultaneously. Only when you’ve seen all four sides of the story will you begin to see the bigger picture.

Have a look over here. And there’s also a video installation.

The foundation was formed in an effort to promote children’s literacy by encouraging kids to dream and dream often. The foundation’s goal is to donate one book for every copy of An Awesome Book sold by Awesome World llc. Books are delivered directly and distributed to schools, hospitals, libraries, camps and shelters both domestically and worldwide.

How awesome is all that?

I got a copy of An Awesome Book for my daugther some time ago and not later than now, you should get one as well in the Awesome World Store. You can preview the full book here. And please watch the video below, or even better: go to Dallas’ website and enjoy the full-blown bouquet of awesomeness.

Awesome Book Tour from Dallas Clayton on Vimeo.

Wir haben einen Artikel über “Daten als Material” und weitere Aspekte rund ums Thema Datenvisualisierung für die erste Ausgabe der weave geschrieben (Ausgabe 05.09, Seite 37 ff). Das Magazin, eine neue Line Extension der PAGE mit Schwerpunkt “Interactive Design”, ist ab heute am Kiosk und als Abo erhältlich.

I was always interested in field recordings involving shifting. Not just recording a single place, but being in constant transition of surroundings. For example taking a train ride from A to B and recording my immidiate environment.

For playing back such a recording, there should be ways much more interesting than traditional linear timelines as known from regular audio players. As an experiment, I mapped the recording of a segment of my way to work on a Google Maps screenshot of that very area in Hamburg. I have drawn a black line along the rails from start to destination, and a red dot is moving along that path as the audio plays back. To make the connection between the audio material and the map really clear, I used a discrete train trip from “Dammtor”, with one stop at “Sternschanze”, going to “Holstenstrasse”. The stop is obvious, but there are also announcements in the train giving an additional hint.

This is just a simple and rough example, but I think it opens up a lot of creative possibilities to work with field recordings, or sound representation in general. I’m definitely going to incorporate such ideas into my future music releases. There’s already geotagged sound, but technology and platforms should be soon ready to let us create and (re)use even more advanced and sophisticated data somewhere between audio, time and location.

Als Protest gegen die soeben in Kraft getretenen Internetsperren, befindet sich Spreeblick heute, am Mittwoch den 22. April 2009, im Streik. Wir haben Spreeblick über Nacht bei der Umsetzung dieser Aktion unterstützt.

Yesterday morning I was taking the ICE train back home. Since it was pretty packed, I decided to sit down in the train bistro and read a book. Which is quite a challence, since there’s a lot of people passing by all the time. But there’s something even more distractive than the people themselves: the automatic sliding door, or the door that’s supposed to slide open automatically.

Apparently, the proximity sensor only works for people taller than around 1,80 m (or 5,9 ft, if you’re in the US). For everybody else, the glass door just remains closed – leading to all kinds of reactions: people bitching and cursing, pushing all kinds of things they think could be a button, jumping, waving their arms, asking the bistro service person for help etc.

Of course, I was sitting right next to the scene, so I could have been a helping hand. But my book was too interesting, and I’m talking about a 4,5 hour train ride and approximately 75 people in need for assistance. These are bad excuses, but also the main reason I did not interfere was that older guy sitting vis-à-vis and the way he brilliantly managed the situation. Over and over again, so happy he could help (he was bored).

Apart from providing every irritated person in need for help with the same joke (pointing his empty cup of coffee as if he’d ask for money), he asked them to press the red button above the door. The interesting thing is that nobody really pressed that button, far too high to reach for the majority, but the door opened nevertheless. His idea probably was: if people are moving their hand towards the red button, their arm crosses the radius of the sensor and the door opens.

Maybe he actually thought they should press the button and was irritated himself. But anyway, how much more abstract and complicated would it be to say “move your waving hand towards that black area up there which has a proximity sensor built in to detect if somebody’s close to the door”. Explaining to trigger a motion sensor that doesn’t intuitively work as it should is probably more abstract than asking to press a red button.

I would say I’m a big fan of street art generally. I always loved urban visual culture “hacking” the often uniform appearance and identiy of a city – from the early days of Graffiti, to the classics, to the more unusual or advanced approaches.

This morning I came by a brand new piece, drawn on the pavement with chalk. It was totally attracting my interest, but I was also struggling to actually pay attention. It wasn’t about the piece itself – it’s nothing special I’d say, apart from the fact it is trying to be interactive (when I was first passing by, the chalk crayon was perfectly placed in its circle, when I came back 3 minutes later to take the photo, I already found it a meter away, knocked over and in crumbs and I had to carefully move it back for the shot).

I think my hesitation comes from being afraid of getting pulled into some more or less clever corporate street advertising campaign. The scepticism to look at it more deeply, but mainly to take a photo or write something about street art pieces in general. Same with apparently “misused” billboards where there is “art”, or pieces that look like art instead of the common ad bills – is it a street artist, using the opportunity of empty billboards, or just another outlet for an advertising campaign, officially and legally booked by some media agency?

I do for sure not categorically reject advertisment in the urban environment, apart from 98% of it being rubbish it totally belongs to urban visual culture. But in the realms of street art in the truest sense of the word, it really leaves mixed feelings when purely commercial corporations are trying to make such an originally independent creative movement their brand ambassador.

Update: Just found the following video by Antiadvertisingageny that fits in here a bit:

I’m totally into the graphic approach for the video timeline on the Water Incorporated website, but I like even more how playing back the video creates tension: what’s going to happen when the water reaches the tap?