Image and text soure: Engadget

Jun 29th 2006

You wax faux-nostalgic about the heyday of early robo-Kraut-rock, your early signed pressing of Radio-Activity is rivaled only by your original Neu! Super / Neuschnee 7-inch, and you got a belly laugh at that one scene about the record the nihilists once cut in The Big Lebowski. Kraftwerk fans, today is your lucky day. The original one-of-a-kind prototype vocoder Kraftwerk pictured on the rear cover art of and used to record “Ananas Symphonie” and “Kristallo” on their 1973 release Ralf & Florian. As of the time of this writing it’s already up to five grand, so if you want yourself an extremely expensive piece of history for electronics and electronic music, you’d better get a move on, schnell.

Note: the above text was a comment on the following post from Music Thing:

26.6.06 by Tom Whitwell

Lots of people say things like ‘RARE legendary’ in eBay auctions for DX7s and Casio VL-Tones, but eBay item #300001522431 doesn’t go for hype, just saying “prototype VOCODER of german 70´s Electronic Pioneers”. What’s on offer is Ralf & Florian’s vocoder, built to order by a local electronics company, and later used on the intro to ‘Autobahn’. No bids so far at $3,800, with ten days to go. (Thanks, Kaden)
UPDATE: It went for $12,500!

Text and image source: The News Hour

Note: We are definitely entering a new stage of mass opinion.  The fact that Youtube is playing a role in the next U.S. elections demonstrates the ease incorporation of web 2.0 in mainstream culture: the individual can apparently express opinions and be heard like never before, but how effective is this, really?  The analysts interviewed in the feature below express the outcome to be more or less business as usual as most candidates got to promote their own agendas, while immersing in new media culture.   

Democratic presidential hopefuls fielded questions directly from the voters Monday in a debate sponsored by CNN and the video sharing Web site YouTube. A reporter and political analyst discuss the candidates’ answers and new debate format.

GWEN IFILL: It was yet another candidates’ forum, but last night, the questions came from Internet-savvy Democrats.

REMY MUNASIFI, McLean, Virginia: My taxes put some kids through college, I can’t afford to send myself. Now, tell me, if you were elected president, what would you do to help?

GWEN IFILL: YouTube, the wildly successful Internet video-sharing service, joined with CNN to host the debate at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. CNN screened 3,000 submissions. The ones that aired ranged from serious and emotional…

Read the entire feature at  The News Hour

Note: Archived for historical purposes.

Image source: http://www.twinsoft.fr/intl/fr/
cariocaweb/convertigo-ems-enterprise-mashup-server.htm

Text source: IBM

New “IBM Enterprise Mashup” Technology Allows for Creation of Five Minute Custom Applications

NEW YORK, NY – 15 Jun 2006: NY PHP Conference — In a keynote speech to leading technology executives, Rod Smith, IBM’s vice president of emerging Internet technologies, declared that the technologies underpinning blogs, wikis and innovative sites like Google Maps and Wikipedia on the Web will transform the way productivity applications are developed — in some cases in as little as five minutes — using the ever-expanding palette of Web 2.0 components available for free on the Internet.

According to Smith, the rapid adoption of Web 2.0 technologies is encouraging clients to experiment by marrying the growing combinations of online Web services with existing data and information from inside their business, enabling the creation of new applications that bring the experience and utility of popular next-generation Internet applications to business users.

(more…)

Image and text source: ZDnet

June 18th, 2006

ZDNet blog colleague Joe McKendrick beat me to the punch earlier this week with an excellent analysis of the fascinating ramifications of IBM’s recent statements at the New York PHP Conference aimed at mainstreaming mashups and Web 2.0 technologies.  If IBM is getting seriously involved in this, there must be something to it, and certainly Rod Smith’s comments are receiving considerable attention.

Interestingly, most enterprises I talk to these days barely have mashups on their radar, yet I also continually hear from those same folks about how hard it is to create increasingly integrated business applications, as well as the slow pace of rolling out new functionality to users and customers.  There indeed seems to be a rising corporate appetite for faster, more effective ways of building applications particularly when reusing existing IT software and information assets.

(more…)

Image source: The Crate Digger
Text source: Simmons College

The Introduction

Hip hop as a ding an sich is marked by some confusion. Consider the name; is it “hip hop,” “hip-hop” or “hiphop”? You will see all three used in titles in this bibliography. Hip hop is, at the same time, a cultural phenomenon that developed in the late 70’s in the projects in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and a musical style from that phenomenon. Nevertheless, hip hop has become a pervasive element of popular culture, as witnessed by this bibliography. There are hip hop exercise videos, children’s books as well as books, magazines, magazine articles and theses about it.

Read the entire entry at Simmons College

Image source: comunismodaforma.zip.net
text source: Rhizome.org

July 18, 2007

From this Friday until the beginning of August, Sao Paulo’s Galeria Vermelho hosts one of the most riveting exhibitions of the summer. Curated by local critics Fernando Oliva and Marcelo Rezende, ‘Communism of Form: Sound + Image + Time ? The Music Clip Strategy’ brings together works by 30 Brazilian and international artists that reflect, examine, or evoke the aesthetics of the music clip within contemporary visual culture. The show’s organizing principle takes on French critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of ‘communism of form,’ an expression that identifies the current art practices based on an immense library of images, emotional states, and psychological experiences generated by post-Fordist societies that are shared both by the artists and the audience–as the music clip– that thus engage in a participatory relationship with the pieces. Many artists–such as Forsyth & Pollard (UK), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Nuevos Ricos (Mexico), Laibach (Slovenia), and Tetine (Brazil)–developed new works, addressing with different and surprising styles the fundamental elements of the music clip: sound, image, and time. As Oliva and Rezende say, ‘the music clip, with its absence of an hierarchy between the old and the new and the technological and the craft, puts in motion all the world�s repertoire.’ A blog comprising several posts–from film stills to YouTube videos–and a book with various commissioned essays and interviews discussing the theoretical frame of the show complements this project, expanding its original and very opportune features in unexpected ways and furthering the debate around this prominent cultural expression. – Miguel Amado

Dragon Boat, Installation by Huang Yong Ping (2003)

Image and text source: Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education

Spring 2004
Introduction

The Mass Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) is located in North Adams, a small city (pop. 15,000), in northwest Massachusetts that is a three-hour drive from New York City or Boston.  The museum is located in a former mill complex, built in the 1860’s.  During the American Civil War (1861-65), the mill housed a textile company, the Arnold Print Works, until 1931; the Sprague Electric Company occupied the complex with more than 4,000 employees until 1985.  Now that the museum is in place, the main factory with twenty-five adjoining buildings remains economically associated with this former New England mill town for over one hundred and forty years.  [paragraph 1]

Read the entire review at  Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education

The following is a response to my brief posting about KnowProSE’s entry on a Cultural Remix. I have no comment at the moment, but KnowProSE’s response is worth considering. I’m sure to write something about it in the near future. For now I leave you with KnowProSE’s comment (which starts with a Quote from Remixtheory):

RemixTheory commented, based on this entry:

“This particular video is contextualized as a “Remix.” I’m not sure I would agree completely, because it is more of a performative hybrid of different styles–rather than a sampling of material. Regardless I do find the comments by KnowProSE worth quoting below.”

Well, I was speaking of the cultural remix – not a technical remix. It incorporates, as RemixTheory says, a hybrid of styles. So I watched the video again – it is a cool video – and I kind of have to disagree on the technical remix standpoint. The DJ isn’t scratching with empty records, but that’s hokey. However – the English is probably sampled — ‘Yeah… there there there it is…”.

Still, I meant it as a cultural remix, and a tribute to the ability to mix cultures effectively. It is not far removed from what Lawrence Lessig wrote of (and hopefully still writes of!), and it is also not far removed from protecting people from a patent process which is a little nuts.

Text source: http://www.knowprose.com/node/17671

Image and video source: Google Video

Note: Though the term “Remix” may be over-extended in this particular video interview with Harold Bloom by Charlie Rose, one is more than likely to learn a few things about important literary texts and their current interpretations.

Watch the entire video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?
docid=-3586098824214298816

Le Corbusier
1947, Photogram
Image source: http://www.govettbrewster.com/

Text source: Ctheory

4/8/2004

“Architecture is either the prophecy of an unfinished society or the tomb of a finished one.”
— Lewis Mumford, 1934. [1]

Of all the varying impacts of postmodernity (whatever we can or cannot agree that to mean) one of the most ubiquitous has been the preponderance of Lifestyle as ‘a life of style’ — the “Wallpaper*ization”[2] of the proposed environment we are meant to inhabit. The stylist, the designer, the imitator has sought to create a modernism within postmodern eclecticism. Yet this is a modernism that only embraces the totalitarianism internal to a mis-read Nietzschean-derived will to power and order.

While it could be argued that postmodernism was the triumph of theory over substance, it was a reversal of a Marxist derived modernism: now all that melts becomes solid in the air. Like melting substances, disorder became the form of representation. Like a melting substance, that which seemed ephemeral became attached, sometimes organic, sometimes as collage but always, and this is crucial, as a form of ornamentation.

Read the entire text at Ctheory