Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Have you heard of Layer Tennis? In short it's two creatives going head to head in battle of skills. The match involves both combatants swapping a single file back & forth in realtime with 15 minutes to complete their "volley". After each volley, commentary is provided by an independent 3rd party. Winners are determined by voting via Twitter by including the #LYT hastah + the contestant of choice.

Friday's match featured Shaun Inman vs. Aaron Scamihorn, and was won by Shaun Inman with his final "volley": Sheep Not Found aka Layer 10. If you're interested the semi-finals are scheduled to kick off tomorrow, June 26th, and the finals will be on July 10th.

Very fun to follow along. Also - as an FYI, Layer Tennis is sponsored by Adobe Creative Suite 4.

Patrick Dunphy

The ITP Show is billed as "a festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators," and it is just that.  ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program, is an arts graduate program at NYU that continually attracts great people and delivers great ideas and work.

This past Monday night, I got a chance to attend the Spring Show and saw tons of great art mixed with great technology.  Here are just a few of the tons and tons of amazing projects that were on display.

Imagined Location re-imagines new ways to look at, use and play with geographic information.  Think of turning Google Earth or Google Maps into a kid's toy.  Rearrange states and continents, generate land with clicks, see your address rearranged as a sort of puzzle, and so on.  Digital maps have changed how we use maps forever, and these are some very forward-thinking approaches to what we might do with that data.

New controllers are sprouting up everywhere; the Wii, the iPhone, touchscreens are all fairly fairly common these days.  But one controller at the show was a new one to me in the world of computing: MUD.  As a software controller, mud is quite a bit different than the rest and this project shows us the limits that we can and will go to in interacting with our computers in the near future.

Che-Wei Wang's work with time and his clocks bring up lots of conversations around sustainability and how we interact with time.  This project reminded me of Swatch's notion of Internet Time and Stewart Brand's work with the Long Now Foundation.  Rethinking how we deal with time isn't the most obvious topic to bring up at your next client meeting;  but then again if you're talking about Hulu, Tivo or any other number of current media platforms, you're no stranger to the idea of timeshifting.

The future is now, at ITP.

Evan Cordes

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Designer Mike Rohde was hired to created real time sketchnotes for this year's SXSW. I am only on slide eight and my eyes are wide:

1. Love the way this tells the story of SXSW.
2. SXSW's brand is catapulted thanks to this and similar types of UGC. What happens when great creators are allowed to express their engagement with a brand or brand event?
3. The art direction is inspired. It would be difficult to plan this depth design + content.
4. It's on Flickr -- why not the SXSW web site? It might be there, but the user chose this platform for his own reasons -- Flickr offers so much more for the user's benefit. Now it's up to SXSW to leverage this, if they can...
5. Slide 8: "Couldn't write fast enough..." This guy's humble.

Speakers and presenters should feel honored to be in this moleskine. To hear more about how Mike Rohde creates these real time sketchnotes, you can listen to this Thirsty Developer podcast from last October. Thanks to David Feldt for the link.

Craig Ritchie

Got that new "C-O-M-C-A-S-T" song stuck in your head?  The catchy indie-folk tune is the only audio in a new Comcast TV spot about all the cool stuff you can do via their Triple-Play service package.  In the TV spot, people sing the song as they move around diagonally on a beautifully rendered isometric grid.

Online, the recently launched "ComcastTown" site keeps the song as a looping background track while giving you a bank account and a library of furnishings to decorate your own apartment and share it with your friends via Facebook and email.

I quickly and easily decorated my "studio" with furniture, brick walls, a faux-panda rug, a couple of turntables and a "maneki neko" lucky cat statue. One thing I found annoying was its auto-notify feature telling my Facebook network as I added each item. Overall, though, I was very happy with my decorating results and the ease of use selecting items and moving them around the isometric sandbox.

IMHO this site is a great way for Comcast to show how it can play a central role as a digital media provider/connector in customers' homes, while reiterating its Triple Play offering. The charming illustrations of the town and room furnishings go a long way to put a soft touch on this branded experience. The seamless Facebook integration also helps to make this socially entertaining and ensures a wide reach.

Jay Bain

Remixing is an often unappreciated art form, but there are some groups out there who take the art of remix to such level, there is no denying that it is exactly that... art.

I've always been a fan of the Emergency Broadcast Network, a multimedia group from the early 90s who use clips of news, music video, and movies to create seizure-inducing, but amazing videos. EBN's videos can be found today on YouTube, but during the 90s they were circulated tape-to-tape by art students and fans of odd entertainment along with MST3K episodes and Heavy Metal Parking Lot (Hell yeah!).

More recently, Israeli funk mucisian Kutiman launched Thru-You.com, a new album which was painstakingly created entirely from YouTube videos and mixed into 7 track songs. The website allows you to listen to each track in an easy interface that mimics the best of YouTube and MuxTape. The result is nothing short of incredible. It's art, it's entertainment, and it's evidence of something pretty amazing...

We are living and have been living in the Remix Culture for quite some time. We have taken entertainment out of the hands of studio executives. We have taken broadcast channels away from the hands of networks. The social web itself represents a platform based on letting go of control, sharing ideas and code, building on what others have built, and freeing your data. The perfect environment for the art of remix to thrive in full entertaining glory.

Marta Strickland

Christophe Huet is a french artist that specializes in photo retouching. He's created ads for Playstation, Nike, Motorola & Rossignol to name a few. His website showcases a sampling of his work. Other than a slideshow of all creative work as you visit the homepage, by far my favorite part of the site is the "Making of" section. Within it, you can step through each the creative process to see how the final result was achieved.

http://www.christophehuet.com/

On the same topic but not advertizing specific, Erik Johansson, a student from Sweden showcases his personal work. All photographs & retouching work are originals to him.
http://www.alltelleringet.com/

In short, this is amazing & inspiring work.

Patrick Dunphy

Here's the perfect site to check out before the 14th. Learning To Love You More is a project put together by California-based artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher with help from web designer Yuri Ono.

The site features 70 assignments to be completed by users who then submit their results - anything from writings to photos, videos and more - back to the site. The site has also turned into a book and a series of exhibitions in galleries, schools and senior citizens' centers, and even radio shows and film festivals. One family of six, the Olivers in Seattle, completed 63 of the assignments on the site, and published a blog to follow their progress as it all happened.

And if the site, the exhibitions and the Olivers' blog aren't enough, there is also a book that features a selection of the art and the personal stories from the website.

Karri Ojanen

When I went to Wired's Next Fest last October, I had the opportunity to play an upcoming game for PlayStation 3 called Flower created by ThatGameCompany. Instead of killing people, monsters, or zombies like the Top 10 Games of 2008, Flower is about roaming in a dream like environment, and helping flowers to bloom.

Each level takes place in a different flower's dream. The goal of the game is to guide the petal into other vivid color flowers in this never ending field, triggering more flower spreading around in this world. During my 10 minutes with the game, there were no instruction anywhere to teach me how to play, but as a "professional button presser", I quickly learned how to control it by tilting the controller to move around the scene. The sublime movement made me feel like I was just a gust of wind. The more petals you collect, the more sounds samples you will reveal to create a beautiful melody. It's not only visually stimulating, it interacts with sound, making you feel relaxed and calm... which you don't often feel playing a video game.

Jenova Chen described Flower as a video game version of a poem. It sounds a bit abstract, but I'm looking forward to see how the game developers can take this "interactive art form" to the next level.

Euphenia Cheng

The National Film Board of Canada turned 70 this year. To celebrate this major milestone, they've launched a new website. It's a goldmine of Canadian filmmaking which features over 700 films, both old & new which are all available for online viewing, for free.

From the site itself:

"Our collection includes animation, documentaries, experimental films and alternative dramas. We showcase films that take a stand on issues of global importance that matter to Canadians - stories about the environment, human rights, international conflict, the arts and more. Works that push the boundaries, give a voice to the underrepresented, and build bridges between cultures."

Seeing such classics such as "The Sweater", "The Cat Came Back" & a personal childhood favorite "The Log Drivers Waltz" was a trip down memory lane that brought a smile to my face.

Visit the site, experience some Canadian culture & enjoy. I know I did.

Patrick Dunphy

I just (finally) watched a special on Sundance called Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye - released in 2003 (one year before the artist's death).

While I wasn't at all impressed with the directing or even the concept of the film, I was reminded why he's my all time favorite photographer. If you can get passed hearing his every word through an interpreter and what might be lost in translation (HCB is French) and just WATCH him speak and interact with his own work, you'll fall in love with this old man, too.

He comes across as this regular grandpa-style guy. He sits at his kitchen table pawing at stacks of photographs not concerned with fingerprints or creases or dust - with no regard for his work as the precious objects they are. He's just THIS GUY looking at his "snapshots" - delving back into endless memories of captured moments in his life. He's been just about everywhere in the world and met just about every significant person over his 40+ year photography career. And he's still just THIS GUY - this guy who lived 600 lives worth.

He wasn't caught up in the technology of the camera or the deeper meaning of his photographs. He didn't even print his own work. His only concern was capturing what he saw in a pleasing and "geometric" way. It's really beautiful to watch such a master interact with his work in such an unpretentious way.

He's inspired me all over again.

Sandy Marsh