Tom Waits Reads Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart"

For the past two years Maria Popova, the curator of the incredibly fun-and-interesting-to-read "Brain Pickings" has wished the above poem of Tom Waits reading from Charles Bukowski's poem "The Laughing Heart" to her readers for her New Year's wish to them. With all thanks to her for the great find, we think you, our readers, might like it too.

[Brain Pickings: Tom Waits Reads Bukowski]

2010 Reflections and a Look Ahead by @JeffPulver

Two years ago we had the great pleasure and fun being a part of the first 140Conf by Jeff Pulver. We had an amazing time discussing the potentials and challenges of Twitter. And we met a number of our current collaborators. More importantly, being a part of the 140Conf had the kind of special feeling you get when you know you are part of something major at the very inception. Those kinds of experiences are rare in life. But we had it when we were part of 140Conf.

So it is with great interest that we watched Jeff Pulver's New Years reflections. We think you'll find it as interesting as we do.

Detroit: A Brooklyn Case Study (A Kickstarter Project)

Mary Lorene Carter, one of the principals at Loveland, sent us the below letter to you, our readers, encouraging you support the below art project.

Hello Imagination Age,

I wanted to let you know about a project, SUPERFRONT, that LOVELAND has partnered with for their exhibition, Detroit: a Brooklyn Case Study. This is an exhibition of different artist views of the city of Detroit and how Detroit represents problems found in every other city, but on a greatly exaggerated scale. LOVELAND was invited to sit on the jury this fall and SUPERFRONT's 25 inch parcel in our microhood Hello World are a central project for the exhibition. SUPERFRONT put out a RFP as to what should be built on their inches and a number of the exhibitions submissions focus on just that.

Also, though this exhibition will open in LA this January it will be coming to Detroit this summer where it will be hosted by LOVELAND! This Kickstarter round http://bit.ly/gdTjdK will help produce the show and then eventually ship it to Detroit. Sharing this with any you know who might be interested as well as supporting it in any way you van would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for all of your support!

Mary Lorene Carter
LOVELAND
Chief Inch Officer
http://makeloveland.com/

[Support Detroit: A Brooklyn Case Study on Kickstarter]

New York Magazine Book Critic's Handwritten Marginalia

Sam Anderson, the book critic for New York magazine, writes in the margins of Jonathan Franzen's new book, Freedom.

The Millions has an exceptionally fun post by New York Magazine book critic Sam Anderson, who has provided scanned screenshots of his handwritten notes in the margins of the books he has read over the past year. His quotes are at times biting, other times hilarious, but most of all a great read. Once you're finished with that, you should go follow him on Twitter. Each day he tweets the best line from the book he's read that day.

[The Millions: A Year in Marginalia: Sam Anderson]

Via @RobinSloan

"3D Printed Flute"

Here's a video by MIT Media Lab grad student Amit Zoran demonstrating a fully functional flute printed on a 3D printer. 3D printers are already commercially available through organizations like MakerBot, which it was just reported is already a million-dollar company. With these kinds of things being printed, its not long before, well, a whole new industry of cool businesses crops up self-publishing amazing objects.


Via Bruce Sterling.

Ten Street Artists You Should Know

The art of street artist "Laguna" as featured on My Modern Met.

My Modern Met has a great summary series of images of ten worldwide urban street artists whose names and art you should know. In our travels, set against the backdrop of a global economic collapse, we've witnessed a major increase of urban art. Collapsing infrastructure has created new canvases for artists.

The above image is from My Modern Met. The below image is from Rita J. King taken on the streets of Lisbon this year, capturing the work of Mister Cat, about which she blogged earlier (but who did not make their list).


Image Credit: Rita J. King, "Mister Cat in Lisbon"


[My Modern Met: 10 Street Artists You Should Know]

Carnovsky's Hypnotic, Layered RGB Art

The work above by Milan, Italy-based collaborative team, Carnovsky (Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla) makes me feel like I should don a pair of old-timey 3D specs.

RGB’s technique consists in the overlapping of three different images, each one in a primary color. The resulting images from this three level’s superimposition are unexpected and disorienting. The colors mix up, the lines and shapes entwine becoming oneiric and not completely clear. Through a colored filter (a light or a transparent material) it is possible to see clearly the layers in which the image is composed. The filter’s colors are red, green and blue, each one of them serves to reveal one of the three layers.

[Carnovsky: RGB]

"The Star Wars Christmas Special...That Everyone Really Wanted"

Gamervision has posted a sharp new video called, "The Star Wars Christmas Special...That Everyone Really Wanted." The timing, voice-overs and edits are right on mark.

[Gamervision: The Star Wars Christmas Special...That Everyone Really Wanted]

memolane

Memolane - Your time machine for the web from Memolane on Vimeo.

@DavidAHood just posted on Twitter:

Been waiting for something like this. Now just need it laid out over a map...

He's been waiting for memolane, which creates a timeline so you can go back and time and search through your history.

Mindful of the fact that it will all be searchable one day, will such services inspire people to live life as art?

Gender and the Executive Workforce: Accepting Discomfort

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg on why we have too few women leaders.

The topic of gender and the executive workforce is of central importance to my own work--my company, Dancing Ink Productions, specializes in the culture shift toward collaborative creativity and action in enterprise groups. Over the years I have worked closely with Tammy Johns, Manpower, Inc. Senior Vice President for Global Workforce Strategy, who is focused in 82 global labor markets on this issue and others. Tammy Johns' visionary leadership has informed my own perspective in many ways, and working with her gives me hope that Sandberg's vision for her daughter, that she might be liked for her achievements, will come to pass more regularly in a changing world. It isn't as if women can't succeed--even women who, like Johns and Sandberg, are dedicated mothers at the same time. But Sandberg points out that the numbers on top executives who are women haven't budged since 2002 and they're going "in the wrong direction."

Why?


John Hagel on what he perceives to be a need to shift to the female archetype.

After John Hagel gave his talk, a couple of colleagues and a friend, all women, brought it up in conversation. All agreed that his heart was in the right place, after all, what woman wouldn't be happy to finally hear that the very paradigm we've been conditioned to abandon, the very essence of what society deems to be "female," is now being recommended by a thinker on the edge of business as the new dominant characteristic of leadership? But on the other hand, we *have* been conditioned to abandon this paradigm, to be more "male," more aggressive, more cutthroat and, as Sandberg says, to keep our hands up longer at the end of a talk so we too might get called on for questions.

I don't think women need to become more like men, or less like men, or that men need to become more like women. This creates the notion that there's an etched-in-stone gender archetype for each sex, that one is dominant and triumphant while the other has to learn to adapt to fitting into an idea that doesn't represent how they see themselves. Hearing this sounds a bit like, "It's time for whites to start emulating the brawn demonstrated by blacks." Sure, calling an entire group of people brawny isn't exactly an insult, which is part of the problem. In complimenting the perceived strength of an entire group, the nuance of being human is stripped away and people in that group are left feeling something like, "I recognize that you're responding to a stereotype about how you perceive my entire demographic but we're humans, not the borg." Nevertheless, John is onto something: the dominant paradigm is shifting and the characteristics long identified as "female" are in high demand.

So what is the answer to this massive quandary?

There's no denying that women have been marginalized. This is partly due to the complex issue of male dominance, even if part of that dominance is learned behavior. That "male" archetype, as Hagel points out, leads to an acquisition-at-all-costs mentality in which emotion and long-term sustainability play no role. Hagel also speaks glowingly of women as if we are the kinder, gentler half of the human race, but the women I know who reacted to his talk snort at that, all too aware that often women are inexcusably one another's worst enemy, which is really, it seems, what Sandberg is getting at when she says she hopes her daughter can be liked for her accomplishments.

My feeling is that we will all benefit from having a new leadership characteristic that places creativity and agility above the idea that a woman "acts this way" and a man "acts that way" because we all need to evolve together to create a world that enables us to survive a shared widespread economic and cultural crisis.

I believe that this characteristic is a willingness to be uncomfortable, in the short term, in order to achieve long term breakthroughs. This means, in part, making room for individual accomplishments and ideas from diverse people while at the same time remaining focused on a group's long term mission. In other words, keep your hand up if it makes you uncomfortable and causes adrenaline to race through your body because that's how you're going to get called on to ask a question. Or attend to your private life even if it means responding to a work issue an hour later.

Be a full human being, with some of the attributes generally assigned to males by biology and society (and some complicated third thing created by the overlap), and some of the attributes that are considered female. Allow other people to be full human beings, and face the discomfort in yourself when your ego tells you to dislike someone out of jealousy and instead realize that the very elements that cause you to want to mark your territory to establish your own dominance are the very assets that will enhance the diversity of your team. There is no stronger modern leadership characteristic than the ability to become a super conductor, and that requires, above all else, a willingness to be temporarily uncomfortable when challenged and instead of eliminating the source of your own discomfort, accepting it. This is the path to mastering the shift.

Rita J. King Guest Blog at BoingBoing: "Inchvesting in Detroit"

BoingBoing has just posted the second installment of Rita J. King's Guest Blog series. This one's entitled "Inchvesting in Detroit" and features a video by inchholder Jason Silva, who has previously been profiled on this blog.

[BoingBoing: Update on "inchvesting" in Detroit]

Who Are You?

@GetStoried posted a dare on Twitter today and I took it:

"Go ahead, I dare you, type your name in and see what happens..."

Personas | Metropath(ologies), a project by Aaron Zinman at the Sociable Media Group at MIT Media Lab, tells you how the Internet sees you:

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

Who Are You?

@GetStoried posted a dare on Twitter today and I took it:

"Go ahead, I dare you, type your name in and see what happens..."

Metropath(ologies), a project by the Sociable Media Group at MIT Media Lab, tells you how the Internet sees you. It's illuminating, to say the least.

Word Lens

Word Lens would have been extremely helpful in Bilbao, Spain, in order to avoid erroneously ordering hooves for dinner!

NYC 1912 Vintage Subway Cosplay

New York City Photographer Jane Kratochvil whose work has appeared on this blog before, has a beautiful series of images from a December 12, 2010 Cosplay in which a vintage New York City subway car was revived for a Circa 1912 ride and tea party. Here are some of the images, one of which includes a surprise cameo from virtual worlds and bboy aficionado, Rik Panganiban aka Rikomatic.








[Jane Kratochvil Photographer: Vintage Tea Party on the Vintage NYC Subway Trains]

Rita J. King Guest Blogging at WarrenEllis.com

I first learned about Warren Ellis in 1998 from one of his biggest fans, Charlie Chu, who is now an editor at OniPress, a Portland Oregon-based comics publisher. At the time, I was editing a small webzine. Charlie regaled me with two flavors of stories of Warren's genius: One was his break-out cyberpunk graphic novel TransMetropolitan, whose protagonist, Spider Jerusalem, was a writer, natch. The other was Warren's intuitive understanding of how to engage his fanbase on his website. Warren took a lot of time to connect with each of his readers and fans and gave them the space to use his space for creative output.

Fast forward to today to find my collaborator, Rita J. King blogging for Warren Ellis. Well, I think that's just about the coolest thing ever.

[WarrenEllis.com: Guest Informant: Rita J. King]

Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner: "This is Futurism"

In a 1981 letter posted on the Philip K. Dick website from Philip K. Dick to Jeff Walker of the Ladd Company, which distributed the film, Dick has an amazing realization about the potential of the concept and the film, it "is not science fiction, it is not fantasy, it is ... futurism."

How right he was.

[Philip K. Dick: Letter to Jeff Walker re "Blade Runner"]

via @ritajking

The Courage to Create

I recently bought this painting of Kim Boekbinder (shown right) from artist La Gitana Katelan Foisy, shown left.

In Kim Boekbinder's In Between Everything, the mesmerizing artist makes the point:

"...just as art is the gap, art is also the void. I am learning to live with the emptiness, not to give in to it, not to submit to a depression or a fear. And when I can be empty, without trying to stuff myself full of anything and everything, that is when my best work begins."

In times of great anxiety it becomes difficult to pull this emptiness off, but it's a necessity.

In The Courage to Create by Rollo May, he argues that the process of creativity has encounter at its center. An artist doesn’t just depict a tree or a person, but rather a unique encounter with that object or individual. The depiction requires omissions and augmentation to match the artist’s imagination, or at least come as close to capturing that intangible vision as possible. This record, with its specific details, cannot exist until the effort is made to document and capture the intimacy of the encounter. The creative work endures far longer than the ephemeral encounter that inspired it and glazes it with new meaning that can be shared and even trigger a new reality. In order to be fully present for the encounter, emptiness is a necessity.

Encounter has two binary poles: being and non-being. In recording the encounter, a struggle with meaninglessness is undertaken. May warns that encounter can lead to anxiety, since it’s a mystery when it will occur or what it will invoke. In Giacometti, encounters led to rage, expletives, and anguish--but he was committed to enduring these consequences because doing so gave his life and work meaning.

At the root of all creation is the chasm between the idea generated by the encounter and the process of realization. Anguish is a part of this experience, because the self is altered and identity is threatened. Like Sisyphus, condemned to eternal rolling of a rock up a mountain only to watch it roll back down each time, the artist must find meaning in the anguish and process. The great lesson of the existentialists is to persist in the face of anguish and despair.

The forms that take shape below the surface are where the meaning of encounter lies. Anxiety must be confronted if the artist is to enjoy the work of creating a new global culture and economy. That energy can be used to shape a world, or a vision of it, that more closely matches the imagination. This is the first step toward making it real.

“Is there someplace where reality speaks our language--where it answers us if we but understand the hieroglyphics?” May asks. Creative people do not run away from non-being but rather wrestle with it and force it to produce being. They “knock on silence for an answering music and pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.”

NASA Hubble Advent Calendar

I know, I know. We're a dozen days into the Julian Calendar month of December, which makes adding an Advent Calendar to the mix, this side of some kind of chocolate deprivation water torture.

That being said, the above is a NASA Hubble Telescope Advent Calendar!

Can you get more geek chic than that? Other than the existential question of whether Orlando Bloom is returning to the two-part cinematic version of "The Hobbit", I think not.

[NASA Hubble Telescope Advent Calendar]

Simple, Yet, Lovely Interactive Liquid Simulation

This beautiful, graphically simple liquid simulation is another great illustration of the innovation and creativity coming out of applet culture.

[Simple, Yet Lovely Interactive Liquid Simulation]

via @neb.

Best. Loveland. Documentary. Ever.

:) Loveland (: Inches in Detroit from Eric Hill on Vimeo.

We've blogged a lot about Jerry Paffendorf and the Loveland micro-real estate and now micro-journalism projects. But the above documentary by Eric Hill is one of the best video chronicles of the journey from idea to reality about the Loveland project.

It's about ten minutes long. And worth every minute.

[:) Loveland :) Inches in Detroit by Eric Hill.]

Augmented Reality Christmas

This video by metaioAR starts off like it might just be another cheesy holiday message, carol and all, but then it reminds us of the untapped magic of augmented reality. And bonus for being funny--the drinking reindeer is my favorite part.

Thanks @garyphayes and @im2b.

Globe with Reverse Lettering and Mirror Base for Improved Southern Hemisphere Viewing

Ever since I learned that "up" in a planetary sense is a completely arbitrary term, I've always felt awkward about the fact that the Southern Hemisphere of Planet Earth was on the "bottom" half of the planet.

Enter: Odnom.

Odnom is a globe of planet earth, designed by Italian design firm Palomar, with a mirrored base and reverse lettering on the Southern Hemisphere to allow for ease of viewing of the countries and regions of the Southern Hemisphere of Planet Earth.

Though it doesn't place the Southern Hemisphere on "top" or in some sort of fluid space where top is relative, it does attempt to give it equal visual play.

[Odnom]

Loveland Update from Jerry Paffendorf: You've Come a Long Way Inchy

Jerry Paffendorf, who first imagined and lead the creation of the Loveland project in Detroit, which ultimately spawned the Imagination Station and now Corkstarter, has just posted what amounts to a State-of-the-State blogpost that is one of the most informative and interesting posts I've read yet. It examines both the intent of the project and the future of it. Here's an excerpt:

To that end, something's been brewing for the last six months that's reaching a fever pitch. See, we're at a point in our experimentation where we've discovered things I think it would be irresponsible for us not to focus on improving and scaling to make people's lives better. It's funny, there's this startup incubator called Y Combinator whose founder, Paul Graham, has a simple mantra for entrepreneurs: "Make something people want." I've always spun that around in my head to "Make something people won't," as in, make something no one else will make, and that will be a great and liberated place from which to start making things people want, in a way they didn't know they wanted, because they didn't think it was possible. "Crazy enough to work," we like to say about that, and LOVELAND has it in spades.

As I look around at what LOVELAND's built and what's happening in Detroit, it's impossible not to think outside of the inch and the microhood. It's impossible for us as intelligent, creative, ambitious people who want to build things that haven't been seen before while doing good, and who are pouring beakers of powerful new internet technology back and forth into beakers of powerful new social connectivity on a daily basis, to not want to have the biggest impact possible and genuinely change people's lives and create new possibilities. This city is absolutely overflowing with huge, scary problems and equally huge, inviting opportunities to be helpful and create change. And it's basically dictating where the project is going next.

[You've Come a Long Way Inchy]

More on the Future of Books: Augmented Storytelling

Everytime I see a story like this I'm reminded of the prescience of Neal Stephenson's other famous book, "Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" about a girl who is given what amounts to a part-Augmented Reality, part-Virtual World book that teaches her how to be a member of society.

A recent article in New Scientist explores the both the potential and the challenges of creating augmented reality books.

The books available at present do indeed have an added "wow factor" that must not be underestimated, especially when it is used to good effect to enhance the book's narrative, but in a set-up where the book and augmentation appear on a screen there is a fundamental, jarring discontinuity that detracts from the magic of the experience. Perhaps this will become less important as we become more used to mainstream AR - books or otherwise. At present, AR books and humanity are both still evolving, and in the future the twain shall successfully meet.

[New Scientist: Storytelling 2.0 Open Your Books to Augmented Reality]

Support Citizen Journalism & Community Innovation by Voting for Corkstarter, Detroit in the Knight News Challenge

[Update Dec. 30: The Corkstarter Team has put out a renewed call for supporters to take a few minutes to register and vote for this cool and important project.]

The team behind Loveland and the Imagination Station in Detroit, with whom we collaborate, have a new proposal in to the Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge that you should support by voting for it. The process is relatively simple: Create an account on the website and rate the proposal.

The project, which will be based in Detroit, will, if funded, open new inroads to thinking about the transformation of community and journalism. The team has been exploring the transformation of Detroit from a major urban center to a shrinking city. This proposal will serve both as a form of urban journalistic empowerment and a means of helping us understand what it means to be part of a community during a time of radical economic collapse. From the proposal:

“Living In The Map: Corkstarter” is a social neighborhood mapping initiative proposed by the Imagination Station (IS) - Detroit’s first independent creative campus. The Motor City is undergoing massive necessary change, and as it evolves it needs to cross the digital divide, get online, become transparent, and listen to the voices of the community. Our project has two essential elements: authentic community engagement and an online social map.

[Vote For: Living in the Map: Corkstarter, Detroit]

Did Kickstarter Make Pledging Cool?

Seeing the above video request from the band members of London-based Cornershop (famed for their dance-and-hum 1997 hit "Brimful of Asha") really intrigued me. The site seems to function so indistinguishably from the model that Kickstarter uses that it made me wonder if Kickstarter hasn't made pledging cool again.

With Kickstarter, you're no longer donating for tax breaks or charity like you would if you were donating to a not-for-profit, an act that is arguably supposed to make you feel good for doing good. Instead, you're giving money to support things that are meaningful to you and make you feel good for arts sake. I'm not saying that giving to charity doesn't make a person feel good. I'm saying that culturally we are taught to see charity work as more socially good.

Technically, Cornershop, as they say on the video, is selling CDs. But they are doing it in a way that, for fans likely, will be a really fun, inspired way to buy. For £200 I can have dinner with Cornershop? Sounds like a bargain!

Speaking of bargains. I was blown away to see TikTok, a Kickstarter project to convert an iPod into a watch, has exceeded $579,000 in sponsors for their project, which invited supporters to "Be a part of making a cool product that no one else would take the risk on and enabling a design firm to produce its own undiluted product."




[TikTok Ipod Watch on Kickstarter]

[Cornershop on Pledgmusic]

What "Follow Friday" on Twitter Really Amounts To

Image from The Oatmeal.

Web comic, "The Oatmeal" has a great rendering of what "Follow Friday" really amounts to. For those who aren't familiar with Twitter culture, "Follow Friday" is when someone Tweets the names of people whose tweets (I might tweet, "#FollowFriday #FF @ritajking") they like as a recommendation for their followers to follow. The Oatmeal posits that instead of serving as a useful referral of interesting people, we are actually being inundated with so many Follow Fridays that we can't distinguish good names from the sheer volume of names.

What do you think?

[The Oatmeal: How #FollowFriday is SUPPOSED to work.]

Via: @AndreaKuszewski