The Interface is the Message

I just came across this TED talk by Aaron Koblin – artist and now lead on Data Arts at Google Labs. It’s a treat. Koblin whips through his work – from his data visualisation projects which began with Flight Patterns, through his meditations on the human and the crowd using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to his standout 2010 work with Chris Milk – The Johnny Cash Project  - exploring collaborative creativity, and The Wilderness Downtown - which takes advantage of HTML5 and javascript for personalisation. ( See earlier posts on The Johnny Cash Project and The Wilderness Downtown.) It’s a formidable body of work – playful, critical, moving – and fascinating to hear his account of how his thinking has evolved. Enjoy!

Ain’t No Grave

I just came across a short documentary recently posted on You Tube by Chris Milk, director of the luminous Johnny Cash Project. It’s based on interviews with some of the fan / artists who have taken part in his virtuoso crowd-sourced work. The interviews underline the powerful feeling about Johnny Cash that the project draws on, and help explain just how good so much of the art work is, in that people show themselves as more than willing to invest time and effort in homage to an artist who had given them so much. The project is a very contemporary act of devotion, a collective memorial.

I recall a decade or so ago, people would say; “The internet – it’s all very interesting, but you don’t get stories there, or emotion. I mean, when was the last time you cried at your computer?” Well, that would be this morning, watching this video… It’s very moving – about loss, yes, but also about human creativity, and what we’ll give for culture that feels authentic.

The Creative Internet

Google Labs have just released a round up of 106 noteworthy online projects – The Creative Internet. It’s a treasure trove and a great resource – looking across genres and themes – Audio, Movies, Visual, Data, News etc.

It features a number of collaborative projects I’ve written about here before – In Bb, Thru You, The Johnny Cash Project, The Wilderness Downtown – some that I’ve meant to write about but haven’t got around to like the Michael Jackson tribute; The Eternal Moonwalk. It also showcases a number of projects that are new to me. There are too many to mention but do check out the presentation.

In particular, it was exciting to be introduced to Perry Bard’s impressive global remake of Dziga Vertov‘s classic documentary Man with a Movie Camera, a project which is right up my street, and which is understandably nominated for the You Tube Play Awards. I’ll return to this, and to the Remake phenomenon,  soon.