1. The Gamepod interface from eXistenZ, a film by David Cronenberg in which he explores avatars and abstractions.

2. An interface from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Data competes with a regional master playing a game that utilizes a 10-input interface attached to the user's fingers, allowing game manipulation through finger movement.

3. Another interface from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which allows the user to control several simple holographic projections with literally the blink of an eye.

Without further adieu, the video link.

Consider a novel. When there is a concept or idea pivotal to a paper being written by an academic attempting to prove a point, that point is supported by an argument that includes evidence in the form of citations. If the novel is illustrative of the point or an aspect therein, it is included in the paper’s citations. This novel, as a cultural object, represents a portion of the foundation of an argument that seeks to illustrate an observation that, bluntly, is more than the novel examined alone. Thus, the novel represents part of a new cultural work (the paper), and the paper is dependent on the novel’s existence for its existence. Currently, publishers do not require that novels "disappear" under certain circumstances, nor do they have the ability to remove a novel from libraries, bookstores, or homes.

Now, consider the example of a piece of media on YouTube, created by a YouTube user, that is perfectly communicative of a given cultural trend or a larger body of cultural work that is becoming pervasive at the time of its inception. When this object of culture, which happens to be situated on YouTube, is observed it is simply a piece of media - this includes both visual and aural aspects of the YouTube video. Suppose an academic, or for the purposes of this argument, any person who considers him or herself a part of culture who can comment on this video in the context of culture, begins to form an argument centered around that video. In its final form, the argument represents more than just the YouTube video (or videos as the case may be), and represents a new cultural object, separate entirely from the video by which its creator was inspired. Thus the author references that video in his or her argument as evidence of a larger cultural trend.

Suppose the video evidenced includes known copyrighted music by a large rights-owning organization such as Warner Music or Sony BMG. YouTube is required to remove a video that utilizes some form of copyrighted material, iff the rights-holding organization requests its removal. However, given that this video has now been inspiration for and acts as evidence/grounding for a new and separate cultural work, does the right to view this video remain in the hands of that rights-holding organization? The video clearly embodies more meaning than can be attributed to its soundtrack or the nature of its visual elements – the video represents a piece of culture created separately from its elements and its meaning cannot be attributed only to an element such as a portion of its soundtrack.

Furthermore, now that this video is the basis for the creation of a new piece of culture, where lie the rights to its existence? Does an organization that owns a piece of the aural or visual elements of the work retain the right to remove this object from culture?

If the video is removed, where does that leave the derivative work that relies on the video to illustrate a trend or aspect of culture? The observation remains valid, but the argument does not.

This “veto” should not lie in the hands of an organization that has no true stake in the created culture. Each piece of culture created is more than the sum of the visual/aural elements by which it is characterized. Further, the ability of a rights-holder to remove a piece of culture from existence, to make it inaccessible to the culture by which it was created, nullifies the institution of academic observation and criticism that has driven our understanding of cultural trend and meaning throughout history.

The conceptual assertions “YouTube is culturally significant” and “The broadcast rights of rights-holding organizations for media must be controlled legally and are of utmost importance” are in direct opposition, and cannot be reconciled without a retooling of both copyright law and the legal system by which it is harbored.

Pretty cool development: The Pirate Bay has created an interactive map of torrent connections around the world. It's obviously not 100% accurate as it doesn't include all torrent trackers across the internet, but it does give a little bit of insight into the behavior of one set of users. It's separated by country and as of writing it looks like the US is responsible for 8.37% compared to China's 25.75%.

Check out the map here.

In case you missed it, Tomb Raider: Underworld was recently released to mediocre reviews and even less excitement, but the kicker was this twitter message posted by Guy Cocker, UK editor for Gamespy:

call from Eidos--if you're planning on reviewing Tomb Raider Underworld at less than an 8.0, we need you to hold your review till Monday.

This is not the first time this has happened - not too long ago Eidos embroiled itself in controversy over Kane & Lynch for posting fake reviews/scores of the game on its website. This was in response to a slew of bad reviews the game received because it was - get this - not that good of a game.

The overwhelming opinion of the internet is that the best way to stack metacritic scores is to make a good game. Sounds right to me.

It's not every day that Google actually shuts down a service it has invested time and money into, but really, who didn't see this coming? The stylistic art was kind of interesting, but there's not really anything to do in their little rooms but chat. Which I guess is fine, but that's not much of a hook.

Sad times for the users who liked to hang out in the Pyjama Partie room though:

According to a post on Google's blog, they want to "ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business."

Check it out before December 31st if you want to see what this (failed) experiment actually was.

"A Day in Highland Park"

Conceptual: This postcard is both longer and thinner (in terms of ratio) than a normal postcard, and the reason is to allow a progression and to capture aspects of a moment more than just to show a picture. A postcard like this could be one that is purchased, or one that is made from a machine. One could write on the post card, or one could send it without anything on it - the point is to receive the images, not the post card. The images provide the personality and personalization.

Absent of any text, this post card is also representative of a moment of time, with both front and back two different perspectives on the same scene.

When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Arstechnica's Julian Sanchez provides an interesting analysis and discussion of these concepts in his article "Conceptual Art and IP." In it, he highlights exactly why I find this discussion interesting: Where does your work end and mine begin? Exactly how different in process and execution does my piece need to be for me to be free from liability? When your process informs my final piece, are both my property? Are either?

Interesting enough to warrant more discussion than we currently have on the subject, I think. Do these types of process patents apply when you're leading a player through your piece - is the way that the player experiences the piece open to patent, simply because it's a process by which a piece is created, when the piece is a space open to exploration?

Specifically, this is a video technology that takes pictures from around an object (in this case a car), and composites the images in much the same way that Google Street View does, through in real time and with the ability to display at a given angle to increase visibility for a driver.

Fujitsu envisions this technology integrated into most cars to help drivers park their cars and merge into traffic, but there are questions as to whether or not it would make a crash more likely while merging just because drivers would have to adapt to a new system.

However, this is pretty cool technology and I'm sure there are lots of other applications that we can think of for a chip that can composite four streams of images into improvised video... Maybe some kind of helmet for bikers with an eyepiece? Pretty expensive, but pretty awesome. Plus I could listen to my iPod and write my bike at the same time.

Wiki: The wiki portion of this project should be complete at least in part by late October, and will be broken up in to several parts.

1. A brainstorm to help shore up the series of events characterized by Disconcerted.
2. First, a layout of what I’m going to be creating, and map of the articles
3. Fill in the media and write the articles.
4. Hyperlink in and out of wikipedia to create the sense that this actually happened, and allows wikipedia to fill in the gaps of the world.

Visual Media: a series of photographs documenting some of the things that have happened (these may or may not be included as a part of the wiki as visuals)

5. Photographs
6. Possibly Video and Art (paintings, drawings), depending on time.

Visual Style: The visual style that I’m trending towards right now is in the vein of Jeff Wall, who is a contemporary photographer. His style is very vivid, with a significant emphasis on capturing a stylistic and staged moment in time. Here are some of his photographs to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

The overall end result of a Disconcerted event or in the Disconcerted world would be a general feeling of "That was weird, but I can't figure out why." Questions that people ask themselves, like "What's going on?" "Didn't I hear that already?" "When did that happen?" "Why is it so uncomfortable in here?" are the kinds of things I want people to be asking themselves, but only to the point where they're thinking it and not necessarily to the point where they're talking about it with other people while at the event. After the even is fine. If people are uncomfortable but can't put their fingers on why, then I have succeeded.

The atlas is a little different. I've thought a lot about how I want to start digging into providing insight into this world, and I've decided that I don't want to just rely on experiments. I would like to create a fiction around the world, and have that fiction be integrated into the presentation of the Atlas. Something along the lines of a memoir of someone who was paying attention when certain weird things started happening all over his town/city/area, and things just didn't seem right for a while. Maybe as a diary or a series of diaries.

Another idea is to have it be the memoir of the disconcerter, although I find it a little more interesting to be disconcerted than disconcerting. Another is to have a hyperlinked website that would have short stories and some related art and definitions to go along with it, and music or ambient noise. Maybe a wiki or something like that, but for this world. I'm really not sure how I want to go about presenting this concept, and even a live demonstration isn't entirely out of the picture - I should be pretty good at making people uncomfortable by the end of the semester.

One thing I'm worried about is that taking this concept interactive would make it very easy to tread back and forth on the line between afraid and uncomfortable.

The last idea I've been kicking around for the Atlas would be something along the lines of a case study of experiments and concepts (working and not working). This would include information and records of events of which disconcerted was a part. I'm not too hot on that one though.

Assets:
Book/Website/(wiki?)
- Fiction
- Events
- Soft/hard linking for the website
- some music (but I could find that pretty easily)

For the table of contents, if I were going to do a wiki:
- History
- Events
- People
- Reporting (events with a bias)
- Little easter eggs, internal references and definitions that would be linked to

This is a little map of a space in which disconcerted is actually going to take place in a couple of weeks - I figured this would be a really good way to give an impression of what I'm thinking about in this project.

The concept works like this: users participating in Disconcerted do not know that they are participating. The information about the show is not related, and the events that take place are music/art events with no mention whatsoever of disconcerted. This is important for the setup, because Disconcerted is designed to make participants uncomfortable without their knowledge.

The space would be open for people to leave at any time, and the only thing separating it from the rest of the world is the door through which attendees enter. Any barriers to exit would have to be staged, with a pretense so that people do not know that they're being made to stay.

To the map: There are two types of objects on the map besides the layout: mics and speakers. The premise of this concept is to record conversations as they are happening and play them back several minutes afterwards from a different place in the room, just below ambient noise level.

There are several points of congregation that I mapped out based on the times I've been to the Unknown, specifically next to the bar, on the couches, and in the back areas of the stadium seating. The mics are placed to record localized conversation in the center of areas of congregation (or near to the centers). The speakers are placed to provide a relatively even ability to play back sounds of any kind - crickets or insects are another idea for this layout.

Conversations could be recorded at one place and played back from a different place to subtly confuse participants, or they could be played back in nearly the same place. Both would likely have a similar effect.

I think this is a pretty good example of what Disconcerted tries to be - for the world of disconcerted I'm thinking that the direction is going to be taking this world and having disconcerting events occurring over a period of time, unknown to its inhabitants.

It's called the Carte de Tendre (in french). Sadly, after thinking about this more I think I'm going to go with a world called "Disconcerted" instead.

There's also a 7mb version of this map here if you want to print it out and put it on the side of a building.

Good stuff to those who click

Storage Containers were the first thing I noticed: bags, flash drives, computers, purses, wallets - we all have these on us, usually at least two or three of them.

The second thing was Security items - items that represent something important, but we hold onto them so we don't lose everything when we lose them. Things like debit/credit cards, where if you lose the card you don't lose all the money in your account.

This led me to the concept of Enablers - credit cards, membership cards, tickets (ticket stubs), keys - things that allowed us to do other things or go places. I had a very large number of these things, and in fact they represented more than 20% of the total number of objects that I had on me.

Presentation available here for those who would like to see it. It's in a keynote wrapper, so I hope you have iWork.

For as long as the technology has existed, webcasters have been (un)regulated the same way as terrestrial radio stations - specifically, most were not required to pay royalties for the music they played. This system was originally established a half-century ago to allow for labels to have free advertising at the hands of the stations, and for the stations to use the music to both entice listeners and deliver advertising content. It was a symbiotic relationship that lasted for decades, and until recently it was never questioned.

In early 2007, Federal courts ruled in favor of a then-unknown entity called SoundExchange in its bid to increase (create) streaming media royalties on the internet. The company managed to push through its legislation ahead of the strong push-back by consumers and webcasters, and with the royalties raised remained stalwart in their assertion that the labels deserve this revenue.

Immediately after the ruling, it became apparent that the effects on radio broadcasters would be akin to genocide. NPR and KCRW quickly filed complaints and warnings about what this would do to the industry with the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), virtually all of which went unheeded in the months following. With the ruling in the public spotlight, there was little doubt that the only entities in favor of this type of legislation were the large labels and SoundExchange, which would be allowed to skim off the top of the revenue. Unfortunately, efforts to curtail the fees or allow for certain types of safeharbor remain unrecognized.

The most insulting aspect of the law is the consolidation of wealth that it allows. SoundExchange collects revenue for each hour each listener is “tuned” to a station - regardless of the content of the station, or from which label the artists originate. This means that SoundExchange collects revenue for not only major label artists, but also for any other artists that any webcast or satellite radio plays, ever.

According to the company, this is a service for all labels. In order for a label to collect revenue from SoundExchange for the play its artists receive, it must sign up with SoundExchange and pay the annual fee associated with being a part of the behemoth. Unfortunately, in many cases the fee required for membership is much higher than the potential revenue for a small independent label. This means that in practice, SoundExchange, and thus the large labels, receive payment not only for their artists but for every independent artist played on a webcast station. They would argue that labels are free to sign up with SoundExchange and receive their portion of the royalties, but with annual fees higher than their potential revenue it is not worth it to pay more out than you receive. The money thus stays within SoundExchange, and is siphoned to the large labels in their ratio-based royalty payments.

And you’ve probably heard of Pandora and the extremely interesting and innovative Music Genome Project. For some background, Pandora is one of the largest webcasters on the internet with close to 1 million active listeners - daily. According to the Washington Post and founder Tim Westergren, the webcaster probably will not make it past their first royalty payment because of the high fees:

“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”

...

Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.

As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.

And an insightful elaboration with additional background from ArsTechnica:

Buckling under the weight of the Internet radio royalty hike that SoundExchange pushed through last July, Pandora may pull its own plug soon. Despite being one of the most popular Internet radio services, the company still isn’t making money, and its founder, Tim Westergren, says it can’t last beyond its first payment of the higher royalties.

SoundExchange offered a potential reprieve from the royalty hikes, but that turned out to be a red herring to sneak DRM onto web radio. In the end, SoundExchange was able to initiate a massive (and retroactive) royalty hike on Internet radio stations, imposing per-user fees for each song. Adding insult to injury, the royalties on Internet radio will double for big stations by 2010, to an estimated 2.91 cents per hour per listener—far higher than the 1.6 cents that satellite stations would pay. Radio stations don’t pay fees like these yet, but don’t worry. SoundExchange is working on fixing that problem.

Besides the obvious fallacy that these royalty payments actually make their way back to the artists who deserve them, this war of attrition on what amounts to incredible amounts of free advertising makes very little sense. That is, unless you view it as a way to regulate how your consumers can experience musical culture. Much like Digital Rights Management software, this move simply limits consumers’ ability to consume the media they wish to pay for by limiting them to concerts and album purchases - neither of which will be helped by limiting the ability of innovative, tasteful djs to expand their listeners musical horizons.

Labels and SoundExchange would argue that they are entitled to this revenue, and that just because music exists doesn’t mean it should be free. That may be true, but I don’t pay the city of San Francisco and its residents royalties so I can walk down the street and experience the culture there. And while I’m more than willing to stop in a local shop and buy lunch, or records, or clothes, I am by no means required to do so. Just as music flows through the air, I’m more willing to buy bread I can smell on the street than bread in a black airtight bag with the baker hovering over me making sure that I’m getting any information about what I’m buying before I buy it.

As a staunch music consumer who spends not hundreds, but likely thousands, of dollars on music each year, I have been and remain outraged by this and every other effort the larger industry has made to more effectively vertically integrate and squeeze out the currently more agile and thus more successful independent labels. I haven’t purchased a CD from an artist on a major label in almost seven years now, and I don’t intend to start any time soon.

But to the issue at hand: How do we save Pandora from its seemingly imminent fate?

Click that advertisement.

Everyone click the advertisements on their main page and maybe, just maybe, they’ll have enough money to last through their second payment. So do it. And tell your friends and colleuges - tell everyone who listens to Pandora that if they don’t chip in for their favorite passtime at work that it’s going to disappear.

And if you’re feeling generous, make a donation. Do the same for NPR. $25 or $50 is less than many people spend on coffee in a given month, and it can make a real difference to the bottom line of companies and orginizations like this.

So do it. We all know that this is immoral, but the only way we can have an effect is to take action. So click. Donate. You could even write a letter to your congressman or the CRB telling them how you feel about this type of media and market consolidation. You’re a consumer, you’re the one whose dollars they are after. Write a letter to the big labels telling them that you’re so outraged by this that they’ve lost a customer.

But most importantly, do SOMETHING. Passivity is why this war is being lost.