Schlomo Rabinowitz

losertakesall:

My favorite photo from yesterday.

My yearly catchup with the creator of Expedia. Always a funny Bill Gates story. We are both a part of a group of Elvises going for 18yrs. Smartest crew who gets dumb on a Sunday. (Taken with instagram)

the-scandyfactory:

NEVER FORGET

NEVER LOSE PERSPECTIVE

Taken with Instagram at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012

Self Portrait with #ART

danielclowes:

The official Daniel Clowes site has been active on Twitter for a week now but I only just saw:

http://twitter.com/danielclowes

And I also just saw that they’re posting on Flickr too, with a few pictures from the Oakland exhibition:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/66503486@N05/

You can purchase an app that will quiz you on your knowledge of company logos. This sounds incredibly sad and unfun. (Taken with Instagram at The internets)

luckyshirt:

If you’re thinking “HOW CAN NBC CANCEL PARKS AND REC AND EVERYTHING I LOVE” then you need to take a second to remember that America is pretty big.

And that most Americans aren’t on tumblr, let alone reliving their favorite TV moments through animated gifs.

Most Americans are on facebook….

My pimp foodtruck. 246 Ritch st. Till 2p! (Taken with Instagram at The Lunch Box)

Tabula Rasa (Taken with Instagram at Om Shan Tea)

noneck:

Who wants to form a corporation to buy Kenyatta!?! I’m serious! Let’s kickstart this man in the most ethical way possible!

kenyatta:

The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood

This is my project proposal for a 2012-13 Rhizome artist commission. I’m going to sell my name to a corporation for three months. They will take over all of my public interactions both online and irl. Kenyatta will become a product. I will not exist.

corporatepersonhood:

The Project for Corporate Personhood (aka Kenyatta Co) is a three month performance that explores the topics of “corporate personhood” and personal identity.

The American Supreme Court and some politicians have declared that corporations should be treated as persons. So what happens when a person voluntary assigns their personhood to a corporation? Can it be used to raise awareness of the issue of corporate personhood and create spectacle in the process?

Kenyatta Cheese (creator of Know Your Meme, an artist, an activist, and a person) will sell the exclusive use of his name to a corporation for a period of three months. That corporation will assume both the real world and online identity of ‘Kenyatta Cheese’, reimagining his personhood as a brand with the help of ethnographers, lawyers, focus groups, public relations departments, a creative agency, and friends and acquaintances. During this period, Kenyatta (the person) will not be able to use his name except in the case of emergencies and air travel.

In order to develop Kenyatta Cheese (the product), the corporation will conduct research and development, mining his personal life, online profiles, and browser data for uniquely identifying information. The corporation will hire his friends and family to “be” Kenyatta Cheese at public events, speaking engagements (technology and media conferences), and social gatherings, interacting with people based on their own ideas of how they think Kenyatta Cheese would behave.

These public interactions will be documented through hidden video and interviews will be conducted to capture the thoughts and feelings of the Kenyatta Cheese “betas”.  People who interact with these betas will be given a business card directing them to complete a customer service survey online.

This documentation will serve as the basis of standard operating procedures for being Kenyatta Cheese, brand guidelines, and a marketing and media buying plan.  The corporation will then hire social media “gurus” to take over and run all instances of Kenyatta Cheese online including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a personal website.  Strangers will be hired off of Craigslist to represent the brand at public events in cities around the world (complete with afro wig and business cards).  Like the research beforehand, the interactions of these Craigslist hires will be documented and they will be interviewed.

The three month project will culminate in the compilation of a dozen or so interview videos, the creation of the corporate and product documents, the capture of company interactions in social media, and hopefully two public panels: one at SXSW (or similar conference) exploring the topic of personal identity and marketing featuring 4-5 “Kenyattas” and a second panel at the New Museum exploring the topic of identity through the stories of several Kenyatta’s, artists working on similar issues, and representatives from each of the companies involved in creating Kenyatta Co.

Possible Kenyattas will include but not be limited to author Baratunde Thurston, technologist Anil Dash, artist Kevin Slavin, writers Nick Bilton and Clive Thompson, entrepreneurs Nora Abousteit, Know Your Meme co-creators Jamie Wilkinson and Elspeth Rountree, performers Mike Rugnetta and Patrick Davison, actress Michelle Krusiec, sociologist Tricia Wang, and Kenyatta’s mom.

Got the high score on pinball! To bad I only get to put in three letters. (Taken with instagram)

Taken with instagram

Taken with instagram

I dunno, maybe I have something to teach Jen Proctor’s class.

ftomfilm:

As of my writing this, there are 11 12 different Chrome Experiments under the webGL video collection - I am writing for two reasons, 1) because I would like to help add to that collection, and 2) I need your help in doing so. 

An Open Proposal to Google Creative Labs

The short of it: I have a feature documentary - titled For Thousands of Miles, or FToM for short - about bicycling across the United States, I would like to release this film online for free using a special player that takes full-advantage of webGL to expand and share additional stories within the film that otherwise could not be shared in a linear manner.

Why approach Google Creative Labs? To be blunt, I can’t accomplish this alone. To build a collection of in-depth experiences tied around an hour and forty minute long film will require a tremendous amount of teamwork and technical skill that I alone do not possess. 

I can see three roads to take here, 1) find a way to fund and organize this team independently, as I am not independently wealthy, this option raises more questions than it answers; 2) reach out to the same Creative Lab that built projects like ROME or Wilderness Downtown, the same Lab that best understands what challenges exist in building an experience like this; or 3) admit that I’m over my head and lost, and abandoned this idea. 

My hope is that the people at Google Creative Labs have been waiting, waiting for a chance to show that webGL can be used outside of just animated shorts and music videos, waiting to show that the technology can expand traditional films in a truly unique way, a unique way that TV or movie theaters cannot even come close to matching; my hope is they’ve just been waiting for the right kind of film. 

I will do my best to list out aspects of this special player that I know exists in other examples, but some of these elements, such as streaming an HTML5-friendly movie file, vs pre-loading an entire movie file, are things I have yet to see done with more prominent webGL video projects. 

Also, all of the non-linear story-lines exist only in pause-mode of the feature film, that’s an important note, in play-mode the film is full-screen and has no scrub-bar, volume control, or pause / play button; clicking anywhere on the film while it is playing will enter pause-mode and from there all kinds of things open up for the viewer that are specific to scenes. 

Having said that, here we go: 

• Maps view: Selected scenes of FToM that take place on the open road, which many do, will be matched up within a mix of Google streetview, Google maps and even Google earth view. UI Notes: 1) streetview would take advantage of webGL to render color-filters that more-closely match the currently paused-scene in the film, also, the current scene will snap as closely as possible to the streetview-world around it, 2) Earth View would especially apply in scenes near heavy mountain ranges, such Glacier National Park, 3) Maps view tied to scenes in the film will help reveal the overall path taken between Washington state and Maine. 

• Areas of the film that reveal specific locations in maps will allow users to submit photos from those locations - most of the routes in the film are from popular bicycle paths across the country, it is likely a huge collection of other traveller’s photos and videos could be used to connect strangers through the film that have taken similar journeys. 

• Selected scenes that contain narration will let viewers use pause-mode to dive into different versions of the script. Much of which was handwritten or typed out on a typewriter, the pages often have early notes and ideas sketched out in the margins, some lines in the film were scribbled down on napkins, and all of this would be explorable to viewers. 

• Moments of FToM that feature music will let viewers download music, share that piece of music to their blog or twitter account… other pieces, pieces that feature original music created for the film, will show behind-the-scenes footage of the music creation process. 

• Certain footage in the film has been used in supporting videos, for example: a scene of the two main characters saying goodbye for the next 4,000 miles plays out both in the feature film as well as in an earlier making-of series, this connection will appear in pause-mode allowing the viewer to shift from continuing that scene in the film, or branching off into the making-of regarding that scene.

• Several moments in the film touch on early influence, relying on archival footage from as far back as the 1920s - pausing the film during these scenes would let the viewer watch original newsreels mentioning the people in that scene, or read through autobiography excerpts, scanned letters that are now in the public record.

• Using either browser-cookies or connecting accounts (facebook, google +, etc) viewers can visit the film from other computers and pick up where they left off, most importantly with unlocking moments or features in the film’s player, such as: commentary tracks that could be switched on and off, or downloaded from within the player to iTunes, etc. This might be represented as a Daisydisk-like sunburst diagram of how much of the project you’ve explored, the middle diagram might represent the film itself, and the outer rings might represent different experiences. Whatever visual approach is used, the viewer will be aware that they have explored, say, only 40% of the film - and give ideas to where additional stories are linked. 

• Certain moments of the film would unlock different views, views that wouldn’t be available on first loading the site. Say, for an example, you stop the film 16 minutes in, these scene happens to reveal a map location of where it was recorded, it also links to a special view that shows a US map with highlighted areas of where scenes happen, and you can jump to a scene by location vs jumping to a scene by timecode. 

• Weather elements in pause-mode: During a 4,200 mile bicycle trip across the country you experience a fair amount of weather: snow, rain, fields of floating pollen. During the scenes in the film where these kinds are visible, the viewer would see an extension of this in pause-mode. WebGL rain or snow would fill the browser window that borders the paused / contracted video-window. Other features would come about in these paused scenes, say script exploration or a making-of for a piece of music in the film, but around them there would be light or heavy rain, or a snow storm spinning around the script pages related to those scenes. 

• Sound Design will be an important part of the viewer experience in pause-mode, just because the viewer has paused the feature film doesn’t mean the mood and experience is broken; supporting SFX will be important in pause-mode to help keep the viewer in the world of the film, even when they are, say, venturing off into script archives. 

I’ll end the list here for now. I believe the above serves as a good starting point for what could be built around For Thousands of Miles using webGL. Here’s to hoping this open proposal finds its way into the right hands. If anyone reading this wants to contact me, you can do so at info @ FToMfilm. Thanks for reading. 

Deb ‘Spoons’ Perry Does The Black Keys (by CoolAccidents)