Ala' Diab

Hi All,

As announced in the seminar of October 21st. I have participated in the writing competition mentioned in the title and I won one of the three top prizes!!

It's the little things that matter :)

Without further ado I give you the "masterpiece":

Music [X]
A View from the Future of Music

The consumers of today are going to be the creators of tomorrow. End of story. Not exactly a revelation, judging by the ongoing trend in Mash-up culture, Machinima and User-Generated-Content (UGC) on game forums. What this mean is that given the proper tools, people are going to be creating as much as they are consuming and thus bringing to the fore the notion of self-broadcasting.
If we combine the ubiquity of smart phones, the increase in throughput of wireless infrastructure and ease-of-use of music creation, we end up with an all-in-one personal publishing powerhouse that leverages the advantages of social networking applications and concepts to drive self-publishing and promotion.

User-Centric Music
On the big-label front, open and less restrictive reuse and distribution of AAA titles will happen where creators will be fairly compensated but at the same time consumer appropriation and reinterpretation of the IP will be encouraged and enabled. Your favorite band’s album will be interactive; each song will be multi-tracked where you can if you choose to turn off the drum track or listen to one song in acapella mode. The natural extension would be laying your own tracks over that and making it your own. The tools will be there for it to happen. Not only that, but you will share either the original track or your own remix of it with your friends ala twitter and your friends will follow your personal station and even recommend it to their own social network.
There’s also ‘play’ potential to this where you could design your ‘Name That Song’ game for people to participate and play a guessing game.
Not only will this be a great promotional tool for the originators of the content, but also it will be hands off, organic, and low maintenance for the publishers.

Aware Media
Another interesting development might also push music into the area of geo-tagging and locative media. This will provide the listener with ability to associate the media they consume (music being part of that) with a time and place that’s meaningful and personal, for example: you are taking a hike and you reach a particularly difficult section of your trail, or you stumble upon a birds nest and coincidentally a song comes up on your media player’s list that has an enhancing effect on that particular experience. You will be able to associate that song with that place and that moment, effectively making your media context aware. Naturally you will be able to share that with your network creating a library of memories that far extend the life of a song.
Imaging your parents had the ability to annotate that Beatle’s concert they went to in the 70’s, or associating a John Lennon song with the location of his assassination.

For the directed research at ICT this summer I've been looking at what makes certain sounds more appealing than others. And whether certain frequencies had a registration in our heads as declarations of a warning or alternatively inviting and soothing.

I started creating short bursts of sound progressing from purely electronic 'synthesized' sounds to a mix of real and electronic sounds.

More on that can be found here

On another note: an interesting study by our own USC Annenberg School for Communication has published a study on video games and minority representation that's causing a lively discussion at Gamasutra.

"Latino children play more video games than white children," the report states that no games featured characters that were both playable and "recognizably Hispanic"

If you care to know what that's about, you can check it over here.

This one comes from Techradar:
a Dubai-based game company Game Power 7 is bringing Rappelz, the korean MMO game, to the middle eastern gaming market.

In a nationalistic twist, they're renaming the game 'Hope of the Nations'. And did I mention that it's 1.5 GB dowload? Local ISPs brace yourselves..

Besides the head-scratching attempt at trying to make money of a nascent, bootleg-ridden market, the company is making many changes to the games look and feel; the music and the characters' appearance in the game, among others.

It would be interesting to see how it performs financially in a non-credit-card economy of the middle east.

Right-Click and save for a larger view.

This is a postcard that was sent by a newcomer to the world. Naturally, it looks very much part of our world. But also reflects some of the anxiety of being in a new place without knowledge of what it holds.

Since it seems that i'm on a mission with no end in sight: the mapping of the constitutive artifacts of the weirdness-from-japan category. I present to you the latest in interactive toys. A device that allows you to pick a digital character's nose. Yep you heard me!

The Tuttuki Bako from Banda, Inc. Japan allows the 'player' to tick a finger in an orifice on the side of the machine, whereupon a digital represeantaion of the finger appears on an LED screen. And if that wasn't enough to cause chills down your spine, there are actual games that exploit this 'mechanic' if you will: you can push around a tiny little person, or pick someone’s nose, or pet a pint-size panda bear. The possibilities are endless! This entertained lady tells it all. And in case you're wondering, it can be had for a mesely ¥3610 ($37 USD) here.

Caution: some of the crude animations might be offensive.

Two pieces of game-related news have caught my attention recently illustrate the complexity of the cultural sensitivity vs. freedom of speech dichotomy.

The first one was the delay of the release of the anticipated game Little Big Planet due to the inclusion of a song in the game's soundtrack that was deemed offensive to Muslim players. An interesting piece about Toumani Diabate the legendary Kora player from Mali defending the song and an illuminating discussion about how different Muslims interpret the controversy.

Another more recent development is Microsoft's decision to ban the release of Fallout 3 in the Indian market without any prior consultation or market research out of fear of offending the Indians' cultural sensibility. Apparently one of the core concepts of the game goes as follows:

survivors of the apocalypse use "brahmin" - two-headed cows mutated by radiation - as pack animals. In Hindu religion, cows are revered and it wouldn't surprise me if the ability of players to shoot up herds of "brahmin"

Such 'marketing disasters' are unique opportunities to engage in a dialog about what creates the Sacred and how both companies and players can benefit from a public intervention on such a scale. Instead, corporations sheepishly sweep the hole matter under the rug in the name of better sales.

I think it self explanatory, except for the fact that it's in Japanese!

Would somebody step up to the translation task? Of particular interest to me what it says about the brains of the thing!

"Just Looking" is a DVD that has been recently released in Japan by Avex - a Japanese entertainment giant - to cure "shyness" in Japanese men towards talking to women.

The DVD is 96 min long and features 50 women from different ethnicities staring directly at the camera.

I think the guiding principle is that if guys stare at the women on the TV long enough they will overcome the seated awkwardness about being around women.

Failing to make anything of this, and granted that this can filed under 'weirdness from Japan, I can't help but see the futility of such a device; not only is it reducing the entirety of a human being to a scripted excitation on phosphor or liquid crystal it also denies people (men in this case) realising the 'reward' in putting themselves in harm's way.

The DVD costs around $25. No Blu-ray release in the works.

Here's an idea: what if you had a bike that not only serves as a mode of transportation, but also produced clean water in the process? Crazy, right?

Not according to IDEO, whose "Aquaduct" won the Google-sponsored Innovate or Die competition this year.

The Aquaduct is a bike with a pedal-powered water filteration system built around a Peristaltic pump that enables people to produce clean drinking water. Which becomes crucial if you live in a dry area where the closest supply point is a puddle 3 miles away!. So disaster areas and countries with little access to luxury items as cars or pipes that deliver water right to their homes!

I think it's a novel idea that is currently still in prototype phase but IDEO seems to be interested in developing it further. Here's a video the tells it all.

At the Venice Biennale of Architecture this year there was a number of entries that blurred the line between art and architecture. One interesting piece was 'Cloud' by Taiwanese artist An Ti Liu.

Cloud is an assembly of appliances that deal with air: purifying, washing, filtering and sterilizing the airspace, extracting bacteria, allergens, germs, spores, dust and any other unwanted particles floating around in the atmosphere. There nothing 'interactive' about the work, it just hums in complete anonymity, it looks like an artifact from a pure, hygienic future where the project of Modernist architecture is realized: a better, fitter, healthier living environment for a better you.