INFOGRAPHICS: 2012: the iPad domination continues
New infographics piece that I did for Tablet2cases - this time it's about market shares and how the iPad dominates the globe. Reviewed by the T2C guys as "it looks like a Russian nuclear war game" - taken as a compliment, to be honest. Check out my infographics portfolio here - and if you want me to work for you, you'll know where to find me. (Yeah I do commissions and contractuals. Did I tell you I need a job in London?)
ADVICE FOR BANDS: from Jeremy Dawson of Shiny Toy Guns
I have a huge interest in video tutorials/advice videos on self-promotion, self-branding and creative processes. Long-time readers might remember my fits of posting Zoog/Angelspit's blipverts on how to work on lyrics, drop the bass or form band cohesion - now it's time for someone new! Keyboardist/bassist Jeremy Dawson of one my favourite bands, Shiny Toy Guns, posted a three-part interview for bands: pieces of advice, tips on using social media and should you listen to your own music. At all. Whatever that guy says really resonates with what I do and how I do it. Go check his words of wisdom NOW!
Jeremy Dawson of Shiny Toy Guns recalls how being a "Yes" band has helped seize opportunities to play in the biggest shows. His advise to new and existing bands comes from his personal experience from touring the world with Carah Faye, Chad Petree, Mikey Martin, Daniel Johansson, Sisely Treasure, and Ursula Vari. He stresses the importance of having a work-sleep balance and having personal time. According to Jeremy, "You will self destruct" if you do not make this a priority.
Shiny Toy Guns pioneered the use of social media during their formative years. In this video, Jeremy discusses how successful bands are currently using social media and also strategies for effectively engaging with their fan base. If you're in a band, you don't want to miss this.
Jeremy Dawson explains his take on how to make music for everybody. He discusses the pros and cons of listening to your own previous material for inspiration or focus on current musical trends instead. Do you focus on making music for you or music for everybody to enjoy?
DEMOSCENE: spacecut by cncd
Assembly Summer 2012 Demo competition entry, 1st place.
Title: spacecut
Author: cncdPouet.net: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=59615
SUPPORT & WATCH: Taryn Barker Demon Hunter - prequel episode & indiegogo campaign
The pilot episode is a prequel to the main series. When Taryn Barker's sister is abducted she takes it upon herself to journey into the darkest corners of the city to save her.
The main series is a gritty crime thriller. It follows Detective Beckett trying to solve the brutal murder of a middle aged man, who was decapitated. Called into the police station, his prime suspect is a young woman named Taryn Barker, who admits to killing the man she believes to be a demon. As Taryn is being interrogated, more murders take place and Detective Beckett's daughter is kidnapped by a demonic force, he'll need Taryn's help and trust if he wants to make it out of the game alive.
Definitely promising. Claustrophobic, gritty and filthy, this looks like the angsty Goth teen sister of Grimm. I say, shoot the big brother and let her roam the lands. Yes, you can pinpoint mistakes in acting and settings and there are a thousand ways you can make this more kickass, but the potential is very, very much there. Go and support the series in any way you can - they so deserve it.
SUPPORT HERE:
fundit.ie
indiegogo.com
makemyseries.com
facebook.com
BLADE RUNNER: Emma Stone photoshoot in Interview Magazine
Emma Stone has an absolutely amazing new photoshoot in the new issue of Interview Magazine, which pays homage Blade Runner and other classic neon-infused science fiction films. Check out Emma wearing a host of noirish fashions, in the middle of a bleak future nightclubscape surrounded by men in dark sunglasses. These men have seen things you wouldn't believe. (via io9)
VIDEO SHORT: Bat Man of Shanghai
Batman of Shanghai is a series of animated shorts from the DC Nation block on Cartoon Network, presenting a unique re-imagining of the Batman universe in a heavily stylized form, set in a 1930's era Shanghai.
Cartoon Network has released a three parts of the series online — each spotlights a different character — showing us Bane’s ode to King Kong, Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Bat Man and a high-speed three-way fight.
Moodwise transports me right back to the Liquid Television/golden-age MTV cartoon shows. I am dumbfounded, amazed and definitely left longing for more. WATCH ALL THREE SHORTS HERE! (Recommended by Monsieur Made in DNA!)
PHURPA: live in Paris
Cannot get enough of Bon ritual overtone chanting. This is an exceptional (audio and video both amazing) recording of Phurpa in Paris, Théâtre du Châtelet.
DAILYWTF: the hello aleister crowley kitty
I'm not exactly sure I believe I see this. But Dangerous Minds posted this and if they did, they had a damn good reason to do so. It's on Etsy and DM has more links, so go wreak havoc there, too.
PHURPA: Tibetan bön ritual drone meets Alissa Nicolaï [highly experimental]
Recorded in Moscow, DOM-club, live with Phurpa, 2011-Oct-29, posted via EdwardDarOrla, someone with an apparent great interest in not only Phurpa but anything Tegin.
You might have noticed my interest on the interwebs for Phurpa, the rgyud skad overtone chanting Russian ritual group with a special interest in Bön, Tibetan pre-Buddhist practices. (Here's the first PD post about them on 2011.01.01.) This is a recent find - a collaboration between Phurpa and Alissa Nicolaï, shrieking on drone, pain over matter, not unlike the Die Form/Aube collaboration Ukiyo (with the vocals of Mutsumi Oku) or the more anguish-filled releases of Mother Destruction/Sixth Comm.
Dress made by Alissa. Iron ribs and fingers made by Alexei Tegin (leader of Phurpa). Photos by Gremo Photography.
DAMAGE CAPTURE FILE 02: trained death midgets [cyberpunk, glitch and counterculture]
Hello. Etape 2 for Capture File: a coffeebreakful voyeurism into cultural products of cyberpunk, futurepresent, glitch culture and whatnot, every Thursday in the eurozone. This week: more Soundcloud finds, augmented reality solutions and various other random finds of silicone. Above: a great collage of Tokyo night streets mashed together with the Vangelis Blade Runner soundtrack (sent by ákosmaróy). If you have anything to add, share or comment, do so here or find me anywhere on the interwebs with the planetdamage handle. And, yeah, have a great weekend.
BALLISTIC AUDIO LOOT:
This week's audio loot inadvertently begins with MORE AMBIENT GLITCH. One of the nicest finds of last week was Enig'matik Records and their latest compilation Painting Pictures on Silence, more electronica for work, zoneruns and anything else you could think of. Similarly laidback but even more experimental is Infinite Rounds, the first album of Hecq that he released under his own name, BEN LUKAS BOYSEN, free to download with similarly glitchy-experimental stuff from the Grundruck archives. Glitch and minimal electro are also abundant EVERYWHERE, especially on Soundcloud - giving you NEWK and JENNIFER TOUCH this time, both of them from the upcoming artists section. If you're more for non-vocal experimentica, Newk will be your companion for the evening, if you're more like into analog bass, a minimal sound and some female vox on top of that in the vein of Farah or Chicks on Speed - then Jennifer Touch is definitely for the taking. Also: my friends at ANGELSPIT are doing a new business model for their releases so far with a package called Spitpill - a 4 GB package that's filled with not only albums but lots of extras from particular album eras, definitely worth trying! (I'd recommend Krankhaus or Blood Death Ivory for Angelspit noobs.)
(Check out samples for each album behind the thumbs. You have to trust me on that one.)
And Hedflux's Rhythm Prism, a find via Enig'matik was a huge psybreak jump-up two-hours session, so I need to give you this, too!
AUGMENTED REALITY:
The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.
This week was quite a read into augmented reality and its practical applications, mostly advertising and resumes. Keiichi Matsuda's videos were easily the BEST find into AR, showcasing a potentially bloodcurdling density of ads, you'll find these blow with his comments - read more about his take on the future on keiichimatsuda.com. I was also wondering a lot about how to make a good AR CV - and then I came across this augmented reality CV campaign from 2010 - not the kind of solution that would be an instant win for the masses, though. This was also something we talked about with a number of people - and our sadness felt on how low-grade you have to go to give cheap or overused technology to the masses. QR codes huge in the UK AGAIN? Yeah, new waves of iPhone releases, the ever-raising iPhone penetration and then a new wave of Android platform penetration does provide further waves of possibilities for agencies - until we can smash our faces against the new waves of active lens and AR headwear.
The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.
Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology defined by its ability to overlay physical space with information. It is part of a paradigm shift that succeeds Virtual Reality; instead of disembodied occupation of virtual worlds, the physical and virtual are seen together as a contiguous, layered and dynamic whole. It may lead to a world where media is indistinguishable from 'reality'. The spatial organisation of data has important implications for architecture, as we re-evaluate the city as an immersive human-computer interface.
STUFF TO READ:
KEIICHI MATSUDA: Cities for Cyborgs - 10 Rules
DONA M. WONG: The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics
AHA!-MOMENT NEWS OF THE WEEK:
New Theory: Universe Didn't Start with a Big Bang but with a Big Freeze
Hackers Backdoor the Human Brain, SuccessFully Extract Sensitive Data
Warren Ellis' documentary CAPTURED GHOSTS is finally out and available for orders
More stuff next Thursday. News chips and weirdness all week at planetdamage.com. Stay tuned.
DAMAGE CAPTURE FILE 01: murmur of a glass sky [cyberpunk, glitch and counterculture]
Hello. This is Damage von Rock and this is your coffeebreak into cultural products of cyberpunk, futurepresent, glitch culture or however we prefer to call this these days. This is a weekly edition of recommendations into music, books, weird reads, youtube podcasts, counterculture movements and whatnot. Share and retweet this and send me love, hate or more links to spread to planetdamage/gmail. As for the weekliness: expect Thursdays and I'll keep this regular. I'm receiving so much content these days, it would be dozens of different kinds of sins not sharing the fun with you all. Above: one of the greatest tech advertisements I've ever seen, all orchestrated to the amazing music of Hecq.
BALLISTIC AUDIO LOOT:
That moment when you realize that you're working with headphones on so much that most of the music you listen to is just ambient or sentient glitch. NEW MIND's Fractured is the odd-one-out: if you liked Skinny Puppy, Yeht Mae, Pouppée Fabrikk, Numb and all the harsh and dissonant industrial of the nineties, this will be right up your alley. Lots of great buys and long-forgotten favourites in the cart this week, too. Cyberpunk's musical underdog Eric Chamberlain might have been a bit too obscure with his projects Index and Index AI (his album Sky Laced Silver from 1995 IS A BLAST, one of the best cy electro pop albums I've EVER heard) but with great catchy tunes HE IS GOD. Two of his latest side project releases (TELEPHERIQ and COCONAUT) are evident proofs of this - nothing too harsh but a lot of catchy electro with a nineties sound. Perfect. The biggest surprises this time come from Tympanik Audio as always: STENDECK's Scintilla and brand-new label release Lights by TINEIDAE are gorgeous ambient/glitch releases, great to work to, except for the moments, when you like tracks so much that you need to taskswitch just to look at Winamp. Terrible, I know. (And yet, you simply cannot go wrong with their stuff. Ever.) BEN LUKAS BOYSEN - better known for a few of us as HECQ - also released a new jewel, a more traditional sounding, brooding dark ambient movie soundtrack for Restive, this time on Hymen. And last - something you really need to spend your 5 pounds on - comes the Electronic Explorations compilation. Oh. My. God. All money goes to keep the Electronic Explorations podcast alive, and for that, 61 artists donated exclusive tracks to the cause, which in itself is just enough to donate, and the list of artists will appeal to you very much if you've been in this scene for at least a spell - Access to Arasaka, Milanese, Enduser, Bong Ra, Neil Landstrumm, Ital Tek or The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble... GET THIS COMPILATION!
(Check out samples for each album behind the thumbs. Except for New Mind. You have to trust me on that one.)
And Stendeck's been haunting me, so here's their latest video.
A NEW SHOW TO KEEP YOU HATING
H+: The Series has been something of a stir during the past week. Transhumanism has been on our tits since Sterling, Kurzweil has been all over the news with turning ourselves into methuselahs, then basically making a Lego Mindstorm bot out of the galaxy, R.U. Sirius published H+ Magazine and now he's running Acceler8or for us grinders - and now this. What happens if A Company fits us with implants and a worldwide virus wipes the trendsetters and their eager followers? Or basically this is how it looks from here - very short episodes keep us from getting the bigger picture which is both a great mechanism to keep us all waiting and a goddamn bother at the same time. Great production quality, though! (And six "episodes" are already out!)
READING THESE AT THE MOMENT
Mattin & Anthony Iles (ed.): NOISE & CAPITALISM
Rosa Menkman: THE GLITCH MOMENT(UM)
Karen McCarthy Brown: THE VEVE OF HAITIAN VODOU: A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF VISUAL IMAGERY
I am playing Jenga with the stuff I need to feed on - books on infographics, traditional Chinese medicine and lots of Japanese grammar. That one completely because of Miss Toyclouds.
STUFF TO BE HAPPY ABOUT
Yes, this is also partly personal.
Cannot thank Grant Morrison enough to pull me back into the weirder segments of the counterculture and his influence on my past two years is immense. The 2DVD version of the documentary Talking With Gods from H8LA will not only give you a long look at his work process on the non-magickal comics industry work and an interesting panopticon on how other comics artists see him, but also his take on fighting writers' block, magick apart from sigilwork and a longer introduction into his friendship with Frank Quitely. If you're a fan, this is a must. If you're not yet a fan, this is a must, too! (If you need introduction, get his life-changing comics masterwork The Invisibles, read his primer into chaos magick Pop Magic!, check out the wee bit chaotic and weird 45-minutes talk he had at Disinfo Con or check out his Alternity performance.)
My first gonzo non-fiction book on cyberpunk, possible futures and alt/pop culture entitled DAMAGE REPORT was published this April by long-time work partner company MangaFan - and apparently the feedback flow hasn't finished yet! Top pic: two interviews in paper mags: one on social books and more generic stuff in the 2012 July issue of PC World and one on my take on future gaming in the 2012 June issue of Gamestar. Bottom pic: Hungarian creative/socmedia professional mag Kreatív wrote quite appreciatively of the mad brainstorm and claimed it's on the best track to go for a cult status. Hope this is not a kind way of saying But we need to kill you first. Or maybe it is. I should have trained death midgets nailed to my front door.
FINALLY! A collaboration with the acknowledged Australian cyberpunk magazine MACHETE GIRL (they're really working hard to keep cyberpunk afficionados and newbies ROCKING)! This should be out late August - early September if I remember everything right and this issue will also feature a piece I wrote on how technology, bodymods, superhero branding and magick all run side by side.
YOU GUYS SENT THIS:
Gameplay trailer for cyberpunk third-person crime/shooter/immersion package REMEMBER ME. This IP is developed by Capcom, takes place in Paris in 2084 and the protagonist Nilin sounds a lot like.. Yvonne Strahovski? (This one was sent by Ripla - thx! - together with the game trailer which was also sent to me by CoSMo!) And, oh yeah, another one by him below, which is a Live Action "Sleeping Dogs" fight film - taking a bit after Ong Bak and an excessive use of smashing doors at heads. Apparently, any kind of door. Even the one that looks like a table.
AR SHORT: Sight
A short futuristic film by Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo. This is our graduation project from Bezaleal academy of arts. (more on vimeo)
Interesting take on why you don't need visual décor in private/public spaces anymore, if augmented reality can do that for you instead. Whole new niche market/job possibilities - you'll still need the elements of visual comfort, such as beds or bathtubs, wondering about the next generic step that will eliminate the need, something along the line of a sensory layer of reality. Resonates with Warren Ellis' idea on an AR contact lens system called Clatter. (Link sent by @dismay22 and also @moiré - this page features a comment that actually recommends my book Damage Report to see what happens after we get embedded into a future like this, the one seen in Sight? ROCK!)
TRAILER: total recall 1990 vs total recall 2012
Just for the sake of clarity: this is not a comparison of the respective trailers, but a remake of the 2012 trailer with some 1990 footage (mostly) lipsynced to the 2012 voice track. You can find the original 1990 version is here. Sadly, though, according to IGN, it's nothing more than "...a cover song by a decent, but forgettable tribute band." Same goes for Twitchfilm who say "Without a clear understanding of the stakes, the characters lack any motivation for their actions, other than a vague sense of "kinda good" vs. "sorta bad." As far as it goes, the motivation is provided by someone saying "Catch that guy," someone questioning "Why?", and receiving the answer: "Because I say so!""
