BERLIN — Nearly 10,000 fans packed a new stadium here to watch Italy best France in the world cup final sunday.
But there were no brilliant saves by Italy’s Buffon on the field there, no ignoble red card for France’s Zidane. And, in a few weeks, there will be no stadium, either.
It is the latest incarnation of an increasing trend for hosts of world-class athletic events: the disposable arena. Designed to be taken down after the quadrennial soccer tournament ended, the Berlin stadium was a scaled-down replica of the storied Olympiastadion across town where the real final was played. Spectators watched the championship match on a huge TV screen at each end of the field.
World Cup sponsor Adidas AG built the temporary stadium for about €5 million (about $6.4 million) to flag its brand to soccer aficionados unable to secure or afford tickets for the actual games. Tickets sold for €3 — not the €120 to €600 that fans forked over for the final, which had long been sold out.
Text source: NYTimes
Scroll the list of the 10 most popular Web sites in the U.S., and you’ll encounter the Internet’s richest corporate players — names like Yahoo, Amazon.com, News Corp., Microsoft and Google.
Except for No. 7: Wikipedia. And there lies a delicate situation.
With 2 million articles in English alone, the Internet encyclopedia ”anyone can edit” stormed the Web’s top ranks through the work of unpaid volunteers and the assistance of donors. But that gives Wikipedia far less financial clout than its Web peers, and doing almost anything to improve that situation invites scrutiny from the same community that proudly generates the content.
And so, much as how its base of editors and bureaucrats endlessly debate touchy articles and other changes to the site, Wikipedia’s community churns with questions over how the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the project, should get and spend its money.
At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.
One day, while he was shaving with a straight razor that was so worn it could no longer be sharpened, the idea came to him. What if the blade could be made of a thin metal strip? Rather than spending time maintaining the blades, men could simply discard them when they became dull. A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable-blade safety razor was born. But it didn’t take off immediately. In its first year, 1903, Gillette sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits (“shave and save” campaigns). Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley’s gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.
The following text and interview were written for the exhibition “An 8-bit Moment in Gameplay: [giantJoystick],” featuring a ten-foot scale working model of the Atari Joystick by artist and media theorist, Mary Flanagan. The exhibition takes place from February 4 to March 17, 2008. You can read more about it at http://gallery.calit2.net.
Both, text and interview, focus in part on the concept of gameplay and its relation to the mainstream as well as the fine arts. The texts are worth archiving in Remix Theory because they shed light on video game culture which, as it’s no secret, relies extensively in concepts of appropriation intimately linked to the current practice of remixing (Remix). For instance, video game players, or gamers, are no longer only expected to play games as out of a package, or as released online; gamers are expected to actually contribute to the game infrastructure by customizing it, either for personal play, or for the enjoyment of the larger community, following the tradition of open source. Examples of this activity are numerous (see Wikipedia list).
Video game culture is in large part fueled by the same principles that have made networked culture possible: the possibility to share and remix code as desired, to then re-release it for the community to use and improve upon, again. This tendency follows my proposition about the blogger which encapsulates a consumer/producer model that is proactive in media culture. Some skepticism is healthy here, and it must be acknowledged that romanticizing such model is a real danger for new media and remix culture.
The following texts, then, offer a window to some of the issues that inform gameplay today. The texts can be considered valuable because they reflect upon and extend the opinion of one of today’s gameplay insiders, Mary Flanagan.
TEXT: An 8-bit Moment in Gameplay: [giantJoystick]
gallery@calit2
Atkinson Hall
University of California, San Diego
February 4 to March 17, 2008
Featuring [giantJoystick] by Mary Flanigan
gallery@calit2 proudly presents “An 8-bit Moment in Gameplay: [giantJoystick],†featuring a working, large-scale game-interface-sculpture designed for collaborative play by artist and media theorist Mary Flanagan. [giantJoystick] (2006) takes us back to the early days of video games when they entered the home. It features classic Atari games from the 1980s, including Adventure, Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede, Circus Atari, Gravitar, Missile Command, Pong, Volleyball, and Yar’s Revenge. The recontextualization of such classics opens a space to reflect on the brief and dense history of video games and the aesthetics of play.
Video game consoles, which offered low-resolution graphics known as 8-bit, were made popular in large part by Atari in 1977. However, video games did not enter the average household in full force until the early 1980s. To many, the years 1979 to 1986 are remembered as the “golden age†of video games – a period when popular culture would also be exposed to digital technology with the introduction of the personal computer. It is, then, not surprising that video games entered the home in this time period. Flanagan’s [giantJoystick] takes us back to this pivotal moment by turning the Atari joystick into a work of art, which carefully combines her interests in art-making as well as gameplay.
REDMOND, Wash. — TUCKED away in a building on this forested corporate campus, John Montgomery and his team of 17 programmers might be more at home in Silicon Valley than at Microsoft.
Compared with its tenacious Internet competitors like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is generally still viewed as being more of the shrink-wrapped software generation than the Web 2.0 world.
In Silicon Valley today, software is increasingly delivered as a Web service, it is often put together by teams of programmers who might be scattered on three continents, it’s often free to users, and Web surfers usually do the testing soon after the first prototype is complete.
By contrast, Microsoft has long been a software engineering culture in which huge projects like Windows Vista are developed and tested by teams of hundreds, and whose completion time is measured in a large fraction of decades.
Although it is not yet widely visible to the outside world, some people inside Microsoft are beginning to break that mold.
Mr. Montgomery, a veteran product manager who has also worked as a computer industry writer and editor, is an example of how it just might be possible to teach dinosaurs to dance.
Google.org, the philanthropic division of Internet giant Google, Inc., announced plans Thursday to distribute $26 million in grants to support initiatives in a variety of fields, ranging from disaster prevention to renewable energy. Larry Brilliant, head of DotOrg, discusses the company’s efforts to expand its charitable giving.
JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, Google’s efforts to become a big player in the world of philanthropy. Ray Suarez has that story.
RAY SUAREZ: With the unofficial corporate slogan “Don’t Be Evil” and a high-flying stock value, search engine giant Google is using its vast wealth to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges: global warming, disease, and poverty.
Just as Google says it strives to be a different kind of company, so, too, is the company’s charitable arm, Google.org, trying to be a different kind of charity.
The company has said it will dedicate 1 percent of its profits annually to its philanthropy, after getting it started with three million Google shares. At the moment, that’s worth nearly $2 billion.
Here to tell us more is Google.org’s executive director, Larry Brilliant, a physician and epidemiologist who worked on the successful campaign to eradicate smallpox. He’s also a co-founder of the online community The Well.
One of my favourite blogs over the last year has been Remix Theory, a writing project quarterbacked by media theorist and artist Eduardo Navas. Eduardo is also the author of Remediative and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, a fantastic essay that beat-juggles a variety of paradigms that range from remix history through to data mashups. Eduardo and I have been firing questions back and forth over email for a few weeks and he has provided a compelling window into his research.
How did you get started researching the remix as a critical paradigm?
It was more a matter of bringing together activities that I had been exploring throughout my life. At the age of 12, during the early eighties, I became a break-dancer and at the age of 18, or so, I bought my own turntables and sound system. Then I began to DJ in the Los Angeles area, something I would do until 2001 or so. During this time I also played percussion in a couple of Salsa cover bands. I was also very involved in the visual arts since I was a kid, and when I reached my mid-twenties I decided to focus in art as a profession and enrolled in art school in the mid-1990’s.
I eventually got a BFA from Otis College of Art, followed by a residency at Skowhegan School of Art, and then I received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. It was during my Graduate studies at Cal Arts when I became heavily invested in New Media. While at Cal Arts, I also played percussion with the Cal Arts Latin Jazz Band, and I also developed various music projects with another visual artist, Justin Peloian. Obviously, being part of a visual arts program meant that I would make “art†and so I was also heavily invested in studio based art. I was very influenced by Conceptualism. I simply loved (and still love) ideas, and I embraced my time at Cal Arts because the school has very good critical thinkers teaching.
‘Ye decides to rope in a rapper for Graduation LP after all.
OK, so Kanye West has had a change of heart -there will be one rapper on his upcoming Graduation LP after all. Lil Wayne has made the final cut and will appear on a track called “Barry Bonds,” Roc-A-Fella/ Def Jam confirmed Tuesday (August 14).
Bonds -Major League Baseball’s controversial, newly crowned home-run king -is apparently a metaphor for how big West thinks the record will be. The chorus goes, “Here’s another hit, Barry Bonds.”
As he’s been doing on “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” its remix and “Stronger,” West uses “Barry Bonds” in part to proclaim his continued evolution as one of the top lyricists in the game.
Robert Scoble spent the last week giving his new Amazon Kindle ebook reader a test drive, reading a couple of books and declaring the progeny of Jeff Bezos a failure. He thinks the usability and user interface suck and it lack features such as a touch screen, social networking and the capability to send electronic goods to others. He wants version 3.0 of the device.
David Pogue of the New York Times is far kinder to the Kindle.
So if the Kindle isn’t a home run, it’s at least an exciting triple. It gets the important things right: the reading experience, the ruggedness, the super-simple software setup. And that wireless instant download — wow.
Even though most people will prefer the feel, the cost and the simplicity of a paper book, the Kindle is by far the most successful stab yet at taking reading material into the digital age.
Amazon.com introduced its electronic book reader today at a packed event in New York. Unlike other products in this area, Amazon’s $399 Kindle is designed to be used without ever connecting to a computer. Instead it has a wireless Internet connection that lets users browse Amazon’s online store on the device and download a book in less than a minute.
Amazon is trying to do for books what Apple has done for music. It has linked its device tightly to its own online bookstore, just as the iTunes music store is tied into the iPod. Amazon has 90,000 titles for sale at launch, including books from all major publishers.
Best sellers and new releases will cost $9.99. That represents a substantial savings off of Amazon’s already discounted prices. Amazon is currently selling hardcover bestsellers for roughly $13 to $20 and trade paperbacks for $8 to $11.
