Category Archives: Remix

katrina: the protest remix

boing boing posted about it a few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article about it today. A rap song by The Legendary K.O., samples Kanye West’s “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” comment on NBC. K.O.’s song (free for download) was, in turn, sampled by Marquise Lee who used it as a soundtrack for his video remix of the Katrina disaster. After watching Lee’s video (which is truly amazing) read the Washington Post‘s transcript of Kanye West live on network TV.

The song and video have been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of “readers” who heard about the work through internet and other media channels. What does this mean for the future of the book? The New York Times sums it up nicely with this quote:

“A. J. Liebling famously commented that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one,” said Mike Godwin, legal director of Public Knowledge, a First Amendment group. “Well, we all own one now.”

walking around inside a book – bob’s interview in halo space

spartanlife.jpg A couple of months ago, Bob did a rather unusual interview for This Spartan Life, a new online talk show set in the world of Halo video game series. I just received word that the first episode is now up. The show is hosted by Damian Lacedaemion, a hulking, bionic warrior sporting a thousand pounds of body armor, a visored helmet, and what looks like an enormous, ion-charged hair clip. Ordinarily, this character would be blazing his way through an interplanetary battle zone, but here, he’s chatting it up with Bob (also represented by a fearsome armor-plated commando) about the future of books. The effect is truly bizarre.
The show was taped in a studio, with Bob and Damian (played by director Chris Burke), controllers in hand, seated in front of an Xbox console. Totally abandoning the story line of the game, the two avatars move through the surreal landscape – part derelict Soviet steel mill, part remote desert island – as though simply going for a stroll in the park. All their meanderings are recorded through a video feed and edited later on. Periodically, the conversation is interrupted by unfriendly fire from other online gamers unaware that a more civil interaction is taking place in the forbidding combat terrain. Damian has to deal with these intrusions, casually lobbing a grenade mid-sentence, or swooping across several hundred yards of game space to decapitate an assailant, swooping back to catch the end of Bob’s remark. It’s quite entertaining: the incongruousness of the conversation within the alien landscape of the game, the sudden bursts of violence. It reminds me a bit of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which turned an old Hanna Barbera cartoon character into a talk show host with real celebrity guests. In the case of Spartan Life, there’s something weirdly logical about placing a conceptual conversation about the future in the future. A nice expressionistic touch.
simsmachinima.jpg The show fits into a recently emerged genre of films set in video game environments, known as “Machinima.” Most of the Machinima films I’ve seen are best described as surreal sitcoms – short episodes commenting on the inherent strangeness of video game worlds. The characters are often in the midst of existential crisis, asking “what am I doing here?” Like certain other genres (say, musicals), video games can appear comically absurd by adding just a small dose of reality. So far, Machinima has played in this territory, floating banal chit chat into the hyper-violent game worlds, finding humor in juxtaposition. Other games, like the Sims, offer their own possibilities for comical remixing. It’ll be interesting to see if the genre matures beyond this. By conducting real interviews, often with people unfamiliar with the game environment, This Spartan Life introduces a nice element of surprise.
It’s hard for us more traditional readers to grapple with the significance of video games. During the interview, Bob muses about what it will be like to walk around inside a book. What if other readers are interrupting or joining in the story you are reading? I grew up playing linear 2-D games like Super Mario Bros. and Castlevania. By the time the next generation of game systems was hitting the market with their new immersive 3-D narratives, my gaming habit had tapered off. But increasingly, kids are growing up with the expectation that narrative worlds (like books) will be interactive, multidirectional, and almost hallucinogenically real. There is the familiar complaint that younger generations have short attention spans, but the evidence offered by gaming suggests the opposite. While many kids may indeed have short attention spans for traditional media like books and certain kinds of films, they are perfectly capable of spending long stretches of time in complex game environments that combine stories with problem and puzzle solving, and that allow them to engage with peers within the game space. This is territory explored by Steven Johnson’s new book, which I have yet to pick up. But I’ll end with an amusing quote from his blog that I posted back in April when the book was coming out. It imagines what might have been society’s response if video games were in fact the older invention and books the dangerous new toy.

Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying–which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements–books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.
Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia–a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion–you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.

the grokster decision

The Supreme Court’s MGM v. Grokster ruling came and went without comment from if:book (we miss you Ben). When I heard about the decision, I told myself: Kim, you should write a post about that. But my only thought on the subject was, So what? The ruling can’t stop the change that is underway. Then I ran across this marvelous William Gibson quote: “We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us.” That’s from a recent article in Wired entitled “God’s Little Toys: Confessions of a cut & paste artist” He also had this to say about the record industry:

Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.

My sentiments exactly.

google maps with u.s. census data

gcensus.jpg
Another great hack: gCensus.com. The thing I like about this is the fluidity of the data changing across scale and location. As you zoom in and out, or drag across the map, the statistical markers re-cluster, while to the right, “totals for viewable area” (population, housing units, land/water area) shift smoothly. You feel as though you are using a highly sensitive instrument.
Hack I’d like to see: real-time birth/death map (using hospital data).

book DJs: hear penguin, sample penguin, remix penguin

First there was the DJ, then the VJ, now Penguin audio books is sponsoring “penguin remixed” a contest that might spawn a whole new genre–are you ready for the BJ ?
According to the website, “thirty of the best spoken word samples from some of the greatest books of all time and the finest actors around.” are available for remix. “Download the samples, use them in your music, submit your tracks. The ten top tracks, as voted by you, will be turned into a Penguin digital audiobook, which will be available through the Audible.co.uk store and via iTunes UK.”
Just to get your creative juices flowing, here is one of the samples available for remix. It’s from Lewis Carroll’s, “Alice in Wonderland,” read by Susan Jameson.

remixing the news

There’s been an explosion of creative tinkering since the BBC opened up its API (applications programming interface) last month. An API is a window into a site’s code and content allowing techie types to build new applications with BBC material. It’s really worth going over to the BBC Backstage blog to take a look at the first batch of prototypes and demos. The majority are clever splicings of BBC data – news, traffic reports, images etc. – with Google Maps (everyone’s favorite lately), not unlike chicagocrime.org. Other notable examples: an RSS feed of BBC complaints; a feature that allows you to tag articles and read tags left by other readers; and a nice “tag soup” visualization of financial news.

Correction: A reader kindly pointed out that BBC Backstage hasn’t actually released APIs yet (though they intend to soon). The projects I’ve referenced use BBC feeds, or have scraped content directly from the BBC site. APIs are to follow soon (more info here). When they do, the scaping process will become much cleaner. For now, the BBC welcomes projects that “use our stuff to build your stuff” the rough-and-tumble way, and is happy to showcase them on the Backstage site.

The API is becoming a powerful tool for creative reinvention of the web. Back in April, I wrote about Dan Gillmor’s piece on “Web 3.0”.. Web 1.0 was the early web, a place you went to read – a series of interconnected brochures. Web 2.0 is the “read-write” web – it’s a place you go to interact. Web 3.0 is where we start weaving the disparate pieces into new forms. APIs let you do this. You take one application and design a new front end that shows your point of view. Or you take two applications and mix them together, creating something new and illuminating. Right now, Web 2.0 is pretty well in place. The tools for self-expression and interaction are pretty accessible – email, chat, blogs, etc. But the weaving tools required for 3.0 are available only to advanced users. We’ll see if that changes.
Here are grabs from four of the map prototypes at BBC Backstage:
Traffic Maps:
BBC traffic map.jpg

Map of BBC London Jam Cams:

BBC traffic cam map.jpg

Photo Mapping:

BBC photo map.jpg

Map of the News:

BBC news map cricket.jpg
For more analysis, check out this article on O’Reilly Radar.

illuminated letters

Boing Boing links to a fun new toy called Web of Letters – a kind of automatic ransom note generator, pulling letters from Yahoo’s image search to compose the word(s) of your choice. Also take a look at this Flickr version (simply replace the “omegg” part of the URL with your desired word).

omeggweblet4.jpg

I tried both versions with “omEGG” – the title of a work in progress by the institute’s artist-in-residence Alex Itin. I found it resonated nicely with Alex’s work, which pulls on image fragments and cultural detritus, remixing and juxtaposing in fascinating ways. Both versions work quite well, but I found that on Web of Letters (first image) I had to click through several searches to find a mix that was pleasantly legible and didn’t use repeat sources. The Flickr hack (below) is nice in that you can change individual letters until you get it just the way you want it.
omeggweblet5.jpg

It’s a fun game that suggests how the web can be mined to illuminate content in playful ways (and to write ransom notes in a hurry).

email mystery novel and remix reading

Just back from the wonderful Decade of Web Design conference in Amsterdam – more to come on that soon. Catching up now on reading and turned up two interesting links on Boing Boing… First is a mystery novel that you read in email installments over a 3-week period. It’s not free – costs $7.49 – but I figured I’d give it a try. I should receive the first part tomorrow.
The other thing is an exciting collaborative writing project in Reading, UK. From their site:
“Remix Reading is an artistic project based in Reading, UK. It’s aim is to get artists (working with music, video, images and text) to come together and share their work, be inspired by each others’ work, and ultimately to create “remixes”. All material on the web site is released under a Creative Commons license, which allows you to customise your copyright so others can use, copy, and share your work as you choose.”