MetaFilter posts tagged with NewMedia

Choose your own misadventure: the story of Interfilm

escabeche — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:45:32 -0800

" There were lots of small children in the audience. I thought about asking one little girl if she had voted for the paddle, the rod or the cattle prod." In 1995, a company called Interfilm revolutionized the movie industry. Oh, no, wait, it didn't. Audiences at Mr. Payback, "the first interactive movie," pressed buttons on a joystick attached to their seat to vote on the actions of the characters on-screen -- for instance, what kind of physical abuse a captured thug should undergo. Despite the pedigree of director Bob Gale (writer/producer of Back to the Future) and co-star Christopher Lloyd, critics were not impressed. The company folded a week after releasing its third interfilm, "I'm Your Man," scored by Joe Jackson, which did, a few years Interfilm was the brainchild of "conceptualist" and guy-with-gigantic-glasses Bob Bejan (Dateline NBC interview), who now works at a next-generation, data-driven marketing agency that delivers strategic, multi-channeled communication solutions designed to cultivate and sustain relationships between brands and their audiences. Watch: Clips from "Mr. Payback." The making of "I'm Your Man." (warning: A. Whitney Brown.) Read: the New York Times on the 1998 DVD release of "I'm Your Man." Booklet copy from the "I'm Your Man" DVD.

If I can't dance, I don't wanna be part of your (information) revolution.

nebulawindphone — Sat, 09 May 2009 09:02:17 -0800

Mortal Engine (highlights; interview) and Glow (interview) combine dancing and projected video to stunning effect. The secret? The dancers aren't following the light — the light is following the dancers. Infrared lighting and a surveilance camera allow the software to track the dancers' movements even on a dark stage. Consequently,

Mortal Engine has no pre-rendered video, light or laser images. Similarly the music mix is open allowing various sounds to be completely generated from movement data. In addition, pre-composed phrases are triggered by the dancers’ motion or by the operator in relation to where the performers are in any given sequence. This essentially means that there are no fixed timelines and the production flexes according to the rhythm of the performers.

Those performers are Chunky Move, a Melbourne modern dance troupe. Frieder Weiss, the guy doing the video engineering, links to some other projects using this technology and has also worked with the Palindrome Performance Group, whose website is a pain to link into so you'll just have to explore it on your own.

Saving Journalism?

Jeff_Larson — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:21:57 -0800

Steve Coll [pdf], Marissa Mayer [pdf], and Arianna Huffington [pdf] testified today at the Senate Commerce Commitee's hearing on The Future of Journalism, but clearly the main attraction was David Simon [pdf].

"Journalists' children deserve to be fed" -- a plan to save the NYT

nance — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:24:34 -0800

Steve Brill has a crazy idea that just might work. Would you pay a modest annual fee (about the cost of a magazine subscription) to read the New York Times online, if it means the survival of the world's greatest news~~paper~~, er, news-gathering organization? It's an interesting idea.

Open-source online exhibit platform

Miko — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:40:31 -0800

Omeka is a newly available, open-source web platform, bringing good-looking, functional online exhibitry within reach of smaller museums, libraries, and arts groups. From the Center for History and New Media.

Delaying News in the Era of the Internet

ericb — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:26:50 -0800

Wikipedia Updater Fired For Scooping NBC on Tim Russert's Death -- "When Tim Russert collapsed ten days ago, his colleagues at NBC held off reporting the news for almost two hours so his family wouldn't hear about it from the media....The news appeared on Wikipedia 40 minutes before the NBC report, with all of the verbs in Tim's entry changed from present tense to past. It appeared on the New York Times's web site 5 minutes before the NBC story. It zipped around Twitter all afternoon. According to the New York Times, the person who updated the Wikipedia entry 40 minutes before NBC reported it worked at Internet Broadcasting Services, a company that provides web services to TV stations including NBC affiliates." "IBS says a 'junior-level employee' changed the Wikipedia entry to reflect Russert's death because he or she thought it was common knowledge. When NBC discovered the entry--and freaked out about it--someone else at IBS deleted the date of Russert's death and changed all of the verb tenses back. And then IBS took care of the employee.

'An I.B.S. spokeswoman...added that the company had 'taken the necessary measures with the employee and apologized to NBC.' NBC News said it was told the employee was fired.'"

At least as interesting as a one-link-to-wikipedia post.

Crumpled Farm — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:43:06 -0800

Max/MSP is a graphical programming environment primarily used for music, video and multimedia. Max/MSP has sometimes been described as a digital erector set. David Tinapple describes Max in this way: "it's like you're drawing a diagram of what you want the program to do, and then when you're done drawing the diagram you've also sort of accidentally programmed it". Named after Max Mathews, Max was developed for MIDI processing at the French institute Ircam by Miller Puckette during the late 80s. In the following years, Max was passed around and underwent several permutations. A history of Max is here. In 1997 Max found a stable, loving home up at the San Francisco based Cycling '74 where MSP, an architecture for realtime audio processing, was added. In 2003, Cycling '74 released an addition to Max/MSP called Jitter, for realtime manipulation of video, 3D graphics, and matrix data. Max has many relatives including Miller Puckette's Free Software Max cousin Pure Data, Native Instrument's Reaktor, Bill Orcut's Lily, Apple's Quartz Composer, and Yahoo Pipes. Max is useful for mapping, converting or processing any kind of input data to any kind of output data in an arbitrary way the user specifies. Max/MSP comes with 450 "objects" that can be linked or "patched" together graphically to create a kind of flowchart that represents how data will be processed (pictures of Max "patches" here). In addition to the standard Max objects, there are thousands of user-created objects, called "externals" that allow for anything from getting data from an Iphone or Wii Remote to support for numerous programming languages to computer vision to tools for ambisonics. Maxobjects.com maintains a database of thousands of Max objects. Max's Pluggo allows Max patches to be saved as VST plugins for use in audio editors such as Pro tools, Logic or Ableton Live. A variety of musicians, artist, performers and researchers use Max. Notable musical artists who use Max include Autechre, Menomena, Radiohead, Kevin Blechdom (previously), Fennesz (previously), Keith Fullerton Whitman/Hrvatski, Monolake and Jamie Lidell. In the late 90s and early 00s Max/MSP and Cycling '74 were center of a controversy fabricated by the enigmatic Net Artist Netochka Nezvanova (previously) . Max has been used to control all manner of things, from a lightbulb-covered building facade to a maze that reconfigures itself around you to a game of "flaming simon". Max can be controlled by anything from iPhones, timecoded encoded records, a variety of sensors to a Radio Baton. Several commercial software applications are known to be created in Max including the VJ application Vidvox. It is rumored that Ableton Live was prototyped in Max. Tomorrow marks the release of Max 5. The transition from Max 4 to 5 has been compared to Apple's transition from OS 9 to OS X. Still waiting in the wings is the announcement of the exact nature of a collaboration between Cycling '74 and Ableton (here and here). A video (at 52:30) of Robert Henke (of Ableton and Monolake) talking about Max/MSP with a bit about the collaboration between the two companies. An interesting interview with Joshua Kit Clayton, electronic musician and developer of Jitter, about Max/MSP, digital art and culture.

2007: The Movie(s)

Weebot — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:38:34 -0800

Indiewire put out their second annual film critic's poll recently. There Will Be Blood tops the list, with Zodiac, No Country for Old Men, Syndromes and a Century, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days following behind. A spiritual successor/competitor to the Village Voice's film poll, Indiewire polled 106 North American film critics—mostly those who work online or in the alternative press—for their favorite films, performances, documentaries, etc, as well as their thoughts about the year in film. Here's the full list, as well as the lists for best film, performance, supporting performance, director, screenplay, first film, documentary, cinematography, and undistributed film. It all comes with an accompanying essay, as well as an essay about 2007 in undistributed film. It also comes with a collection of the critics' comments—critic's defending their orphan #1 picks, their thoughts about the best and worst films of the year, and comments about the state of film culture. You can also view it by each participating critics' ballot. (The ones that I follow are Scott Foundas, Ed Gonzalez, J. Hoberman, Nathan Lee, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Matt Zoller Seitz, Amy Taubin, Charles Taylor, Scott Tobias, Armond White, and Stephanie Zacharek).

LA homicide

docgonzo — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:02:56 -0800

The Homicide Report, by Jill Leovy: An L.A. Times blog built on the list of homicide victims reported to the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office each week.

Moguls of New Media

divabat — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:06:06 -0800

WSJ: Moguls of New Media Have nearly a million friends on MySpace and you get $5000 endorsements. Make a comedy podcast with cocktail recipes and you get endorsed by Steve Jobs and get interest from advertisers. Post seemingly impossible self-potraits on Flickr and you get hired by Toyota. The Wall Street Journal looks at these and many more "whos' who of new media". from BlogHer

A Swarm of Angels - A Wikifilm

slimepuppy — Fri, 12 May 2006 02:37:21 -0800

A Swarm of Angels is about making a £1 million movie and giving it away to one million people in one year. By using the Internet to gather together 50,000 people willing to pay £25 to join an exclusive global online community – The Swarm – the project’s ambition is to make the world’s first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film. (more inside)

Craigslist dooms Bay Area print media

jonson — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 09:51:47 -0800

Interesting (if biased) article on the downside of Craigslist's populist appeal in the form of it's contribution to the imminent death of the print newsmedia, especially in the SF Bay Area.

Parsing Terror

digaman — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 07:36:09 -0800

Osama bin Laden, littérateur and new-media star. A thought-provoking analysis of bin Laden's adept use of Koranic language and the Internet by Bruce B. Lawrence, an Islamic scholar at Duke who edited a new anthology of bin Laden's public statements called Messages to the World. The Western media -- says the millionaire mass-murderer formerly trained as a useful ally by the CIA via Pakistan's ISI -- "implants fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media are doing!" Know thy enemy. [via Arts and Letters Daily.]

Carlos Quevedo — Tue, 12 Nov 2002 02:12:30 -0800

Mr. Print, Meet Ms. Web; Ms. Web Meet Mr. Print... As a long-time Argentinian exile, I'm quite proud to report that, amidst (and notwithstanding) the economic chaos, my favorite daily newspaper, Clarín, is experimenting with a (free and complete) Internet edition that ambitiously attempts to combine facsimiles of the printed pages with the Web-friendly version. It even has (perhaps excessively) an estimated time for reading! What do you think? [In Spanish, but, for the purposes of the present evaluation, not important. Please click on "Ingresar".]

BentPenguin — Thu, 17 Oct 2002 10:34:25 -0800

The end of free online news is in sight according to Reuters. I think they are premature, but assuming for a moment that this is in fact the trend, what will this do to Metafilter? {More inside}

frednorman — Wed, 04 Apr 2001 06:50:19 -0800

Suck, Feed and Plastic on the ropes? (item two) Word is that Automatic Media is feeling the pinch and time is running out. The company behind the three already-mentioned properties relies on advertising revenue it is simply 'too hip' to attract, writes to the Dotcom Scoop, and it has apparently tried to license out the Slash-based community publishing system used on Plastic as well. Will they survive? And should they? Discuss. (via MediaNews)

sylloge — Fri, 11 Aug 2000 13:05:24 -0800

Public Broadcasting Gets Funky
The CBC (sort of like NPR, but Canadian, federally-funded and with TV too) has a stealth project, 120seconds. They are planning to embrace new media in a big way and this is their start: stories, music, film, experiments. Not bad.

maura — Wed, 14 Jun 2000 09:44:31 -0800

Does new media want moms around the office? Mothers in Silicon Alley talk about the struggles they've had to face with trying to juggle their (male) bosses and their children. Even working from home doesn't cut it in some bosses' eyes.