goldengod

O is for Opera by darkmatter

A friend of mine, Jhayne Holmes, is currently raising funds to purchase the Raja Theatre on Commercial Drive and convert it into a multi-purpose arts venue called Heart of the World.

I’m really hoping that this project takes off. A new entertainment venue in Vancouver for live music, theatre, and movies would be a big boost to the local arts scene. It also promises an uncommon online aspect:

As a web presence, Heart of the World will offer podcasts of performances, a gallery of streaming video of performers, the chance to chat with featured artists, and up-to-date interviews, reviews and schedule listings.

Jhayne has already raised $48,000 in a short period of time for the deposit and is now trying to raise $500,000 by January 15th to cover the down payment. She is shopping the business plan around to potential investors. If you don’t have half a million dollars but you’re interested in helping, you can donate money to the project via Paypal or purchases shares for $200 each.

The project has received coverage both online, by the likes of writer Warren Ellis and in print media such as the Georgia Straight. A reporter for the Globe & Mail has recently interviewed Jhayne for a piece that should be appearing in the January 5th issue.

It’s definitely a cause worth checking out, as well as supporting. Hell, I’ve already committed to volunteering as a ticket bitch for a few nights each week to help keep things running. I’m hoping that my indentured servitude will give me a chance at showing some of my photos in the foyer, which will be used as a small art gallery. If arts venues or enslavement are your thing, go check out the website.

Don’t Question the
Captain, Boy. by cabbit

I have finally managed to get my photos from the Talk Like a Pirate Day 2006 Flashmob available in the gallery section. These photos have been on my Flickr account for a while now, but I’d forgotten to post them here.

For those of you who aren’t aware, Jhayne Holmes organized a flashmob for a whole bunch of to show up at Grandview Park on September 19th in pirate costumes and be piratey.

We arrived complete with musicians, cardboard ships, and an army of local photographers. Many naval battles and countless duels were held. Everyone involved had a great time.

On top of that, CTV Vancouver showed up to interview Jhayne and film footage of the whole event. I had tons of fun and managed to get some fantastic photos, take a look!

You can see them in my photo gallery or in the Pirate photo set on Flickr.

teLivEsion by Esther_G

The New York Times recently published an interesting article about targeted advertising being used for television, among other things. The article focuses on recent Wendy’s commercials, which react to events that just happened in college football games. It also explores how households with pets (for example) will be shown more pet-related ads than another household, even if they’re right beside each other.

The first half of the article focuses on new technology that allows television advertisers to film multiple different versions of the same commercial and then choose which will be shown, minutes before the ad would be broadcast. This allows the raccoons in Wendy’s television ads to comment on what has just occurred in the game or show that the viewer’s watching.

The Wendy’s ads will reflect events in the football games, creating what ad executives call a reverse product placement of sorts. Instead of putting Frostys or Wendy’s fries into a TV program, the company will incorporate a show’s content in its commercials.

Unfortunately, it appears that it is being used in addition to in-show product placement, not as a substitute. If it were a replacement, I’d be a lot more enthused about this idea. Product placement in movies or shows has always irked me, since the days of E.T. and his Reese’s Pieces. I feel I should be compensated, with cheaper movie tickets or whatever else, for the fact that I have to sit through an ad that I didn’t know would be forced upon me. It’s like going to see a play and having someone dump a crying baby in your lap halfway through the first act. Who the hell wants to deal with that at all, let alone for free?

Perhaps I come at this from a strange perspective, but I find myself thinking ‘I wonder how this will affect what is shown at the Cannes Advertising Film Festival?’ Will they show the funniest version, or all versions? Will it even catch on enough to have an impact?

Traveling Without Moving
by Fred Armitage

The second half of the article deals with targeted or contextual ads. If you’re not familiar with these, they are what you look at every time you go online. Essentially, if you’re on a website that’s all about ostrich fucking, the ads that will run in the sidebars are probably going to be for other ostrich-fucking related sites. Or supply stores, whatever. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not all that knowledgeable on the mechanics of ornithological intercourse.

For the first time, this technique is possible on televisions. Rather than television advertisers having to stratify their advertising based solely on geographic location, they can vary it based on a database containing highly detailed profiles of the household. I find this stuff fascinating, but it’s also intensely creepy and violating. I can also imagine a lot of awkward situations where your friends come over to watch TV and get a glimpse into your hidden desires.

I find myself no longer treating this endless progress of ads as a force that must be stopped at all costs. Instead, I gaze upon it with a fond but tolerable amusement, like a toddler playing with mommy’s massage wand.

NEC Japan has an excellent little gallery of future design concepts that you can take a look at. All of the products involve networking to some degree and are designed with the near future in mind.

What surprised me was how relevant a lot of these appear to be, even two years after initially designed. At the same time, they seem impossibly distant, as if they were being seen through the wrong end of binoculars. All manner of obstacles are currently in the way of any of these becoming a reality soon.

I think gumi suffers from this near/far dichotomy (from now on, referred to as the ‘Grover Perspective‘) the most out of the concepts in this gallery. This is partially because the current rise of interest in RFID chips and copyright management are such major topics for the tech & blogger worlds. Actually, they’ve been major topics for a couple years now. I keep expecting something more exciting to happen.

The distance of the design lays in not only the legal trouble associated with developing such a thing but also the technological issues associated with creating truly secure RFID chips. And let’s be honest, nobody’s going to really eat these things when they’re done with them. Maybe in Japan, but not here. It could even be a high-tech extension of the Bukkake and Paintkkake movements!

The dual screen laptop, duo-pc, is one that could easily be done today, created like a larger version of a Nintendo DS. The cost would no doubt be prohibitive, but the design appeals to me. You could use touch sensitive LCDs for both and just have a keyboard mapped to the bottom one by default when the unit is in hinged mode. Hell, you could probably get art.lebedev to help design the keyboard layout. They’ve delayed the Optimus keyboard yet again so they might have the spare time.

Flacon strikes me as an interesting concept but completely impractical and in many ways poorly executed. I’ve very much felt as of late that a lot of my photographs are neglected, considering how many I take, so a device like this appeals to me immensely. However, in its default mode, the images are far too small to be practical or interesting. Even when used in projector mode, it’s really a glorified LCD picture frame.

The concepts for tag, wacca, and nave aren’t even really worth addressing to me. They are neat to look at it, but have no real future or potential beyond that. A user over on diepunyhumans, where I posted this a while back, commented that p-ism was really the only one that interested him. That one was hard for me to categorize, having actually used and sold the little-known Logitech io Digital Pen. It sounds good, I won’t argue there. However, the actual practice of stuffing that many features into something that we routinely lose and treat poorly is probably not the best idea.

What do you guys think of these future design concepts? Can you do one better?

The Hasselblad H3D is not quite as crazy as The Gigapxl Project, but it comes damn close. Using some of the largest image sensors in the world, measuring 48 by 36mm, Hasselblad has created an incredible 39 megapixel digital camera. This is much higher than current digital cameras or SLRs, which range from 6 to 16 megapixels.

High resolution photography such as this has been available for a while, as evidenced by the previously mentioned Gigapixl Project and this article by Ken Rockwell. In the past, it involved using a large format film camera to take the photo. After shooting with one of these 4×5″ large format cameras, the negative would be processed and then scanned on a high-resolution drum scanner. Today any consumer-grade 4800dpi scanner will work just fine as an alternative to expensive drum scanning.

These extra steps eliminate it as a solution for most of us lazy folk. However, some company whose name I can barely pronounce has made up for our inadequacies in the form of a ridiculously overpowered digital camera. You can read all the tech specs on the manufacturer’s site, but I warn you that they might make your head hurt.

While I am really happy to see serious advances are being made in the field of DSLR image sensors, I know it will still be decades before digital photography can even begin to consider matching film quality. You really only need to look as far as the medium-format black and white film work of Lung Liu (here or here) or read a few of Ken Rockwell’s articles on the quality of digital cameras.

There’s a reason major photographic magazines by and large still refuse to accept digital submissions, and that reason is quality.

Hasselblad H3D Digital [Gizmodo]