24 June 2008

Word-Scramble on Steriods

Mobile technology is certainly changing the way we communicate. It is also changing the way we socialize and entertain ourselves. When my friends at LocaModa invited me out to see their new Wiffiti/BarCast screen in action, I looked forward to a few drinks and geeky conversation about technology. Instead I found myself in a heated word-scramble game.

Welcome to Jumbli, a multi-player boggle on steroids. The object of the game is to find words within the letters scrambled on the screen before time runs out. Once you find a word, you put it into a text message and send to a specified number. Highest scoring word wins.

I’m a fairly competitive person –well fairly may be an understatement - in any case, the scene became a shouting, texting, laughing experience. So you can imagine my excitement when I learned that this was only a mini-Jumbli.

Jumbli! actually lives in Times Square on a giant HD screen (corner of W 47th and Broadway). When a round starts you are playing against people in NYC. If a round isn’t live, you’re playing against others on the web.

We’re going to see more and more of these type of public multi-player experiences, especially as our mobile devices improve. My advice, start practicing.

17 June 2008

The new, hot tactic seems to be pick you're own ending story-telling (who didn't love the Choose your Own Adventure books from the 80s).

For active users - check out 1 million monkees.com which allows writers (monkeys) to contribute different tangents/chapters to stories.

For those with more passivity in mind, check out Get the Girl by Twix, which allows users to choose how the protagonist behaves.

12 June 2008

I am on a call right now...and the account director just said that a tag cloud is a convoluted way to get to content.

The audience: software developers

wow.
I just received this from Filmmaker Magazine - the Editor's Note to this week's email is so fantastic that I'm pasting here.


"I want to talk about Hans Haacke and Trent Reznor, but give me a moment to get from the first to the second.

Haacke is a German-born artist whose conceptual work often interrogates the political and cultural associations produced by the sponsorship of art by corporations and large-scale funders. Rather than celebrate the purity of art and the artist, Haacke sees the contemporary artist exhibiting his or her work at a museum in a show sponsored by, say Exxon or Philip Morris, as being part of the "consciousness industry." For Haacke, when framed in such a way, the art itself becomes complicit in the messaging of the corporation. And, furthermore, when faced with a system in which the only way for a museum to support the arts is to actively seek such corporate sponsorship, it is only natural, Haacke believes, that the artist, consciously or not, start shaping his or work to the ideological preferences of the funder. In this way, art itself changes. In an essay entitled "Museums: Managers of Consciousness," he wrote:

"Those engaged in collaboration with the public relations officers of companies rarely see themselves as promoters of acquiescence. On the contrary, they are usually convinced that their activities are in the best interests of art. Such a well-intentioned delusion can survive only as long as art is perceived as a mythical entity above mundane interests and ideological conflict. And it is, of course, this misunderstanding of the role that products of the consciousness industry play which constitutes the indispensable base for all corporate strategies of persuasion.

It was never easy for museums to preserve or regain a degree of maneuverability and intellectual integrity. It takes stealth, intelligence, determination -- and some luck. But a democratic society demands nothing less than that."

Okay, this analogy is way imperfect, but I thought about the honest, ascetic rigor of Haacke's arguments and the controversies they've created in the art world this week after reading the article by Jon Pareles in The New York Sunday Times entitled "Trent Reznor's Frustration and Fury: Take It. It's Free." In it, Reznor reacts against the supposition being promoted by Chris Anderson and others that intellectual property is all destined to become "free" by himself beating everyone else in the race to the bottom and giving away his last two albums on the internet.

From the piece:

"Mr. Reznor has no global solution for how to sustain a long-term career as a recording musician, much less start one, when listeners take free digital music for granted. "It's all out there," he added. "I don't agree that it should be free, but it is free, and you can either accept it or you can put your head in the sand.""

I thought about Haacke, though, when Reznor talked about the one road he doesn't want to take in the new free economy. He knows what he doesn't want to do: make his music a marketing accessory. "Now just making good music, or great music, isn't enough," Mr. Reznor said. "Now I have to sell T-shirts, or I have to choose which whorish association is the least stinky. I don't really want to be on the side of a bus or in a BlackBerry ad hawking some product that sucks just so I can get my record out. I want to maintain some dignity and self-respect in the process, if that's possible these days."

Thank you. I'm glad somebody has come out and said that the technological innovation of the internet, with all its price-decimating properties, shouldn't obligate us all to become the filler in between banner ads just in order to be seen. But that's just what a lot of people are saying artists of all kinds must become in order to get their work seen these days.

As Haacke would ask, what ideologies does such acquiescence require us to endorse? Going further, what does that do for our work? Do our movies mean the same if they are sliced and diced and released like time-release drugs over social networks? Or if animated bugs hawk products and shows by pirouetting in their lower thirds? Or if their narrative structures are reshaped to accommodate the expectations of those who'd rather play them as games?

Yeah, I know, all of this is just another form of advertising, and advertising has been around forever. But there's something pernicious about the assumption that history is leading the filmmaker to the place where such behavior is unquestioned in the name of independence.

Okay, that's enough of a rant for this week. Go out and see some movies. On the big screen. While you still can.


Best,
Scott Macaulay
Editor"