Beautifully executed pixel takeover of NYC, and then the world. If you like retro arcade games mixed with real-world footage in a fantastical mashup. Then you’ll love this. Ensure a full-screen view, wait for it to load and then hit play.

The lovely Rachael sent this.

Blu Dot inspired by the furniture finding scene of NYC (called ‘curb mining’). Dropped 25 Real Good Chairs in NYC to see what would happen. This video is what they discovered.

When I first moved to Bondi collecting furniture from the street was the only way I could furnish my place. You’d see me carrying random items up the street at all hours of the day – seizing the opportunity when I could. With the comings and goings of the local inhabitants it wasn’t hard and you often found some gems. Even electrical stuff with stickers saying they still worked. I’d always wonder how many owners an item might have had. Blu Dot’s experiment goes some way to explore that culture and I applaud them. I like the chairs too.

Good to see NAB / ClemengerBBDO (Melbourne) using him and his technique in their latest ad ‘The Little Wonders’.

Part inspired by a chit-chat with Katie Chatfield and Ian Lyons this morning. Here’s an idea for a smart airline that wants to raise its green credentials… why not help your Twitter customers offset their air travel. Create an app or # tag that allows users to log their trips. Said airline could then offer to go halves on the carbon offset. Loyalty, talkability, value return – the planet is saved :)

Not to mention the fact that the whole initiative could be brought to life with individual ‘twitter travel stories’ showing a users travel overtime. The stories could be similar to the above – but personal – showing me where I went and ‘what I was doing..’.

User-data-generated clips that I can embed… send to friend and so forth. I mean, I could even merge my photos with the data… and put the whole thing on my mantle piece for the family to see!!!

I want my twitter, flickr, worldmap, gps, realtime data visualising picture frame – or similar.

Who has an A3+ printer so I can actually read it without scrolling back and forth and up and down? Not that I’m complaining – thanks for the hard work and genius IA – keep up the good work.

The making of Telematics City by Hook. Is a data visualization trip through the creation of a 3d city, from app to wireframe, to render and fly-through – featuring 1200 buildings. It seems to be commissioned by Toyota and Lexus and I think is interactive from the console / kiosk featured on the Hook website.

Who ever was the creative team on this – I hope your livers are alright?

Find out anymore – let me know.

My lovely friend Claudia Pearson, who lives in Brooklyn NYC, is an artist and illustrator. We were chatting during that cross over time, when one country awakes and the other is preparing for sleep, and got to talk about her new work. Pictured above are some of my favourite ‘alphabet’ illustrations.

We also got to talking about the credit crunch and how the homemade / craft movement is seemingly picking up, as people focus on their individual skills. I’d hazard a guess that Etsy.com is doing rather well at the moment. Has anyone seen evidence of this, more markets, more craft websites, Etsy accounts, other than mine and Claudia’s hunch?

To see more of Claudia’s ‘alphabet’ work (S is for Scooter, C is for Chopper) visit her Etsy shop.
…and continuing the theme check out her illustrated book, Tribal Alphabet, on Amazon.

However the first time I saw Pika Pika (JP blog) was on SBS last night.

I’d watch it in HD, looks better, just click the icon far left of the YouTube player.

Röyksopp’s ‘Remind Me’ music video is a classic from 2002. The video gives me music, narrative and informational fantastic-ness. As you know I’m a sucker for diagrams, data visulaisations, infographics and information represented in more digestive forms. It’s good to rediscover things that inspire you.

It [the music video] features a day in the life of a woman working in the London’s Square Mile solely through infographics; this includes labelled close-ups of everyday objects, product lifecycles, schematic diagrams, charts, and is generally illustrated in a simple isometric visual style.
Source Wikipedia

French motion graphics studio H5 are behind this piece and its worth having a look at their other work – very talented.

Minilogue – Animals from ljudbilden on Vimeo.

Quick post… had to share.

Check our man on the ground; Thaddeus Maximus’s photostream here

Big fan of data exploration and what better social network to explore that the stream of conciousness that twitter empowers and delivers. Twistori is a project that explores twitter comments by instances of the words ‘I; love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish. In much the same way that Johnathan Harris’s We Feel Fine does, but with blogs. Choose the word you want to explore by then sit back and laugh, sigh and wonder as the ‘tweets’ appear.

Can your phone do this?
Talk to me… so if the iPhone wasn’t hacked, cracked and genuinely pushed beyond the realms of its supposed purpose in life – this couldn’t of happened. May we all open our lives and platforms to invention and opportunity!!! It’s Friday, I’ve had a beer – bare with me and get enthused.

First seen on: MAKE

A 35-minute feature filmed entirely in Second Life has been sold to HBO. Its entitled ‘Molotov’s Dispatches in Search of the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey’. The video below is an overview of the feature, below that is the trailer.

This cross medium narrative I find extremely inspiring. Second Life inhabitants have been filming/recording their world since its inception – but this ‘first life / second life’ character analogy is brilliant – its not just role-playing in what could be seen as a ‘virtual studio’. It’ll be good to see if the story works for film fans – and is not eclipsed by Second Life. It seems to me that the story cannot be told without Second Life, its integral to the narrative – which is why I think we’ll see this potentially becoming a milestone in both film and online media. Everyday there’s something new, don’t you love the fact that evolution is everywhere and in everything!

About the feature, grabbed from MolotovAlva.com;

In January 2007, a man named Molotov Alva, disappeared from his Californian home. Recently, a series of video dispatches by a Traveler of the same name have appeared within a popular online world called Second Life.

In these dispatches Molotov Alva encounters everything from Furries to Cyberpunks to Neo-Luddites to Sex Slaves to the King of the Hobos, Orhalla Zander, who becomes Molotovs guide as he searches for the creator of their brave new world.

Filmmaker Douglas Gayeton came across these video dispatches and put them together into a documentary of seven episodes.

An interview with Douglas Gayeton on SubmarineChannel

Read the Press Release on PRWeb

The Burble is a massive structure reaching up towards the sky, composed of approximately 1000 extra-large helium balloons each of which contains microcontrollers and LEDs that create spectacular patterns of light across the surface of the structure. The public, both audience and performer, come together to control this immense rippling, glowing, bustling ‘Burble’ that sways in the evening sky, in response to movements of the long articulated interactive handle bar at the base of the structure. The ephemeral experience exists at such a large scale that it is able to compete visually in an urban context with the buildings that surround it.

Again – I’m dismayed at living in Australia when you see work like this coming to life in my home city of London. That said, there is always something somewhere which I’d like to experience.

Moët Chandon commissioned Architect Usman Haque to bring to life the ‘Golden Spectacle’. Particularly like the idea of 150 people making this installation come to life… true audience participation!

Get the lowdown from the Guardian.
Big shout to the BigShinyThing crew for the heads-up – made my Monday morning!
The installation is new to London, but was first seen in the Singapore in 2006 (see video).