The latest Radio Berkman podcast talks with Jonathan Zittrain about Herdict, a service that lets us together discover which sites are being blocked by whom. Then there’s an interview with Judith Donath about her MIT Museum installation that lets us experience what it means to live in a world supersaturated with information.

[Tags: berkman herdict judith_donath jonathan_zittrain art museum network_tools filtering censorship digital_rights ]

Comments Off on [podcast] Seeing the network – Its traffic, obstructions, and its social effect

Scott Kildall has posted to a public mailing list a very useful compendium of links about an attempt to create a work of art as a Wikipedia article. I have not seen the Wikpedia page and it’s been deleted but the Talk page is there. (And from the Talk page, it sounds to me like the deletion was appropriate.)

[Tags: wikipedia art ]

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Video games have gotten one rev away from awesome. While the graphics on PC games are not yet truly photo-realistic, they are good enough that, in the hands of superb graphic artists, they are not only immersive, they are stylistically interesting. Bioshock is a terrific example of this. Far Cry 2 is realistic enough that you want to pull over and watch the scenery now and then. The new Call of Duty is visually good enough that killing Nazi and Japanese soldiers was too gruesome. The human figure, facial expressions, and even dirt and dust are getting very close to being good enough for drama.

So, here’s the movie I’d like to see using these tools. It’s a drama, possibly a mystery. Multiple narrative threads and interdependencies. All set within a single city, or in sites that I can teleport between (unless travel becomes more rewarding than it is in most games). I want the characters to enact the plot. And I want to be free to wander around the city, eavesdropping. I want to be a ghost, a disembodied eye and set of ears, a camera, moving around the room where characters are now interacting, choosing where to look and who to listen to. The first time through, I’m not going to be in the right spots at the right time. Eventually, though — and perhaps with some guidance from the plot or extrinsically (“Go here now!” arrows) if necessary — I will see and hear everything, and I will understand what happened.

I don’t want to interact. I don’t want to choose my own ending or help characters find the key or move the crate. I want to watch a movie, but be completely free to move through its settings as I want. And, perhaps the software will let me record the movie as I’ve seen it, and share my path with others.

I wouldn’t know how to write a movie like this. Maybe it can’t be done in a way that makes for a satisfactory experience. But I’m curious. I’d like to see one. [Tags: movies video_games theater art narrative ]

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Julian Beever makes incredible sidewalk art trompe-l’Å“il that photographs in 2-D amazingly well.

And that’s not even the most impressive!

[Tags: julian_beever art sidewalk_art ]

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I am a crotchety old man about graffiti. 99.9% of them — and, as usual, all my statistics have been authenticated by having been made up — impose an adolescent narcissism. But I also think: (a) I don’t really understand the cultural positioning behind it, (b) some of it is public, rebellious art, and (c) it’s not like the commercial exploitation of public space is so great.

So, the documentary Bomb-It looks very interesting. (The initial trailer is meatier than the new one.) (Thanks to RageBoy for the link, for this follow-up, and for posting the beautiful poster.)

[Tags: graffiti bomb-it art ]

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I just came across smARThistory. Here’s how Beth Harris and Steven Zucker describe it:

We had both developed quite a bit of content for our online art history courses, and we have also created many podcasts, and a few screencasts for our smARThistory blog. So, it occurred to us, why not use the personal voice that we use when we teach online, along with the multimedia we had already created for our blog and for our courses, to create a more engaging ” web-book” that could be used in conjunction with art history survey courses. We are also interested in joining the growing number of teachers who were making their content freely available on the web.

It’s interesting, multimedia, good looking, free, and nicely voiced, although I personally would like to see them push it further, especially with regard to incorporating students and other readers. (Easy for me to say.)

[Tags: art history art_history textbooks education ]

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