Its hard to believe that Brooklyn is Watching, a mixed-reality art project co-developed by Jay Van Buren and Popcha!, has surpassed the ripe old age of one – how exciting! What’s even better is the five finalists from the Best of Year 1 Festival (selected by a panel of five guest judges), have taken over the main room at Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, NY, as well as also being displayed at Odyssey in Second Life.

I had the chance of attending the kick-off party last week, and let me tell you, the space looks spectacular! The five finalists are each presented on a small LCD; the attached headphones stream BIW podcasters’ commentary and ambient music, really allowing a sense of immersion with the artwork. Guests are strongly encouraged to vote for their favorite piece, as the winner of this tally will win the coveted Golden Eyeball Award!

Another fun part of the evening was taking a group photo of some of the Brooklyn is Watching artists in Second Life; check out the photostream here. It was great to see such an enthusiastic turnout, and I’m glad this emerging, experimental art form is getting the attention it deserves. As a side note, the gallery’s artist-in-residence, Gregory de la Haba, has a spectacular display in the back room.

Don’t fear that you missed the opener, there are some great events coming up:

SATURDAY, 8/15/09, 6:00 — Virtual Artists in Panel Discussion
A group of academics and artists will engage in a panel discussion regarding themes such as design strategies for large virtual spaces in Second Life. Pavig Lok who was responsible in part for the design of Greenies will present his ideas and first hand experiences. Lori Landay from Berklee College of Music will discuss what she considers to be the difference between virtual art and art that is shown in the virtual world. Stacey Fox will talk about her experiences with promoting virtual art in the Department of Visual Art at Kansas University.

SUNDAY, 8/16/09, 7:00 — Lecture with One of the Pioneers of the Metaverse World
Jerry Paffendorf, an artist and entrepreneur who lovingly refers to Brooklyn as Silicon Ghetto, will share personal adventures and new ideas combining virtual worlds, art, business, the web and what’s happening with Crazy Company and the LOVELAND project to collaboratively own land and create a new city on a grid of a million inches in Detroit.

About Brooklyn is Watching:
Brooklyn is Watching, conceived of by Jay Van Buren, executed as a collaboration with Boris Kizelshteyn and the Popcha! development team in February 2008, is a breakthrough relational art project that invites interaction between the two thriving art communities of Second Life and Williamsburg, Brooklyn accentuating the power relations between and among them. It consists of a series of inter-related spaces for artists, audiences, and participants. The primary spaces are a square parcel of land (sim) in Second Life where artists are invited to leave their work for one week (when it is automatically returned), and an alcove in the Williamsburg art gallery–Jack the Pelican Presents where the sim can be viewed on a large monitor and entered via an avatar.

[Brooklyn is Watching]
[Popcha!]

The first interesting one was a collaborative polling company called urtak, which offers different categories of user generated polling topics. From their website: “The goal of the Urtak project is to find an answer to the question “What do men and women live by?” Since no single person has the knowledge to answer this question, we propose that we must work together, pooling our knowledge and insight to learn what we all care about, what unites us, and what makes us different from each other.” It seems like an interesting company, however, what compels those people to answer the polls. This is a good idea that is lacking a sticky component.

Vocab Sushi was another interesting concept. The free service offers “bite size” vocabulary words and sources them from thousands of news and media outlets daily. The vocab words are offered in contextual examples and one can play “never ending” games with those words. The company was founded by Jeff Novich and the website notes: “VocabSushi provides thousands of sentences that demonstrate any vocab word’s contemporary usage in news articles. Compared to the brute force method of flashcard definitions, a deeper understanding of the word can be attained simply by reading several interesting sentences that contain that word.” It is an interesting replacement for flashcards, and I believe this will catch on. I would have loved to use this years ago when I was studying for the SATs. Although I subscribe to Anu Garg’s Word.A.Day, I can nonetheless see myself using this service once in a while.

Sponge Cell presented a new form of flash based interactive banner advertising. The company is using social networking tools built into ad banners to help push content directly from banners as opposed to relying on clicking through the banner and arriving at a new website. The company writes: “The best advertising gives its audience information that they want to hold onto and share. Sponge Cell lets people do just that, by pushing advertising onto calendars, social profiles, mobile devices, home pages and other permanent places, without disrupting their browsing experience.” The company is attempting to mitigate a persons aversion to clicking a banner and being steered away from their chosen website. Sponge Cell’s banner’s allow for brand interaction directly on the banner. Another interesting idea, but once again, what compels me to interact with a banner which has an added social media component? Sponge Cell did discuss their advertising algorithm (patent pending) which bases the ad not on the search key word but on the aggregated data that the search terms yields. I thought this was already built into Google’s algorithm, but go figure.

The most interesting application was Zagat’s Augmented Reality Application called NRU.

The application allows you to find restaurants, nightspots, and shops “near you.” As you rotate your mobile device (360 degrees), the location of the restaurants appear relative to you. It also syncs with Zagat’s detailed reports on the restaurants. Although Zagat reviews are not user generated and have a top-down approach, the service is still fairly compelling as a closed source offering of reviews opposed to Urban Spoon. Check out a video demo of the product here:

The product is only offered on the Android as of now, but with the release of the magnetometer on the iPhone — we should see this application at the app store shortly (as long as Apple opens up the channels for AR production on the iPhone). This is a cool app and just the beginning of compelling AR apps to reach the market.

NYTM also invited two guest speakers: Iranian technologist, Ali Amami, who discussed the recent Iranian election, consequential revolt and the role of social media. This was the 10th election in Iran after the Islamic revolution and is the first election since then to see the levels of protest. Ali Amami stated that this was a new school revolution as a result of social media. He said that cell phones were used as capturing devices, where citizens became independent news outlets. Facebook was used as a community organization tool and YouTube was a video distribution channel that major media outlets, like CNN, turned towards. The question, however, was what went wrong? Well, first off, Nokia sold wiretapping equipment to Iran’s Telecom giant (source: Wall Street Journal). Also, Iran’s internet is state owned and they intercepted and filtered content with the ultimate suspension of internet service across the country.

Amami’s message to NYTM was that as technologists, we need to think about ways to work towards solving the issues of wiretapping/filtration, interception and suspension of the world wide web. He urged companies like Google and Yahoo to not bow to fascist government requests.

And the evening ended with Douglas Rushkoff discussing his new book, Life inc., about an open source economy.

It is always a pleasure to hear Rushkoff speak — he is intelligent, charismatic and extremely articulate. Speaking to the NYTM crowd, Rushkoff offered the analogy that our economic system is like a closed source operating system, though we behave as if our role in the economy was somehow organic. He argues that although there are natural elements and emergent properties of our system, our currency and economic affairs hold a bias to corporations (which are anti-competitive) and a centralized currency (which seeks to create value from top down) — the opposite of an open source economy, which was most closely realized in the late Middle Ages. During the late Middle Ages, there was tremendous spending and abundance, where with local currency people invested and reinvested from the bottom-up — wealth was distributed to people who created value. Those who did not create value, did not make money. The aristocracy, seeing the uprising of the middle class and that wealth was no longer controlled by the centralized authority — made local currency illegal. This type of approach extends to today’s times. Rushkoff offers the solution (to the NYTM crowd) of an open source economy which is being facilitated by the internet and low start-up capital. As our economy is at a downfall, he is urging us to take advantage of the situation and create value through the net.

It was an interesting evening at NYTM, and I look forward to the next meet up! NYTM also showcased the 3 finalists of their t-shirts competition (you can vote here.)

Wednesday night I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of PSST!3 at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. PSST!3 is a series of 17 animated shorts, each made collaboratively by 3 distinct teams working on the beginning, middle, and end, each team taking over where the previous left off.

The resulting art quite possibly induces the most psychedelic visual experience one can have without resorting to chemicals. I was blown away by some of the young talent out there, and even more happy to see such work flourishing outside the big-budget corporate commercials, where one is most likely to encounter creative animation these days. Moreover, its great to see so many disparate directors, animators, and designers able to express their unique visual style, while also contributing to a larger cohesive project. To take this to the next level, I would love to see a feature-length project showcasing a singular story, yet have each scene directed by a different animation team. Either way, when it comes to the future of animated film production, large-scale collaboration will be integral.

The first 6 films are now available on their site — I highly recommend you check them out.

[PSST!3: A collaborative film series]

[Madoff Social-Network Map]

Last Wednesday the 7th, I had the privilege of co-presenting Brooklyn is Watching at the prestigious Technology/Art meetup dorkbot-nyc.

From their website:

“dorkbot-nyc is a monthly meeting of artists (sound/image/movement/whatever), designers, engineers, students, scientists, and other interested parties from the new york area who are involved in the creative use of electricity.”

Artist Jay van Buren, my partner on the Brooklyn is Watching project, and I gave a visual and conceptual tour of the project.

Jay described what Brooklyn is Watching is, and then I riffed on the value of the project to Popcha! as a sponsor. To summarize: Popcha! worked with Jay to realize Brooklyn is Watching in order to illustrate the depth of engagement possible in Virtual Worlds. Given an opportunity to have their creativity appreciated, people will flock to that opportunity. Many SL projects underperformed in the past because they did not put enough emphasis on engaging people in a discourse that genuinely values their contribution, I wanted to be sure that Popcha! had a very visible project that stood out in this regard, one that demonstrated the unique engagement opportunity that exists in Second Life. In the last 10 months we have had over 6k visitors to the sim with an average engagement time of nearly 1.25 hours. Our presentation was very well recieved by the full house in attendance.

We were honored to share the evening with interactive art pioneer Zach Lieberman whose idea of Doing It With Others (DIWO) summarized not just the projects on display that night, but indeed may be the credo of all social media.

Also presenting was Di Mainstone, whose incredible techno couture was the most masterful blending of textile craft and technology that I have seen to date.

I recommend that everyone reading this blog get on the dorkbot mailing list and attend a meeting in your area.

As reported by O’Reilly, Google is continuing to heavily invest in GeoData on multiple fronts – from exclusive deals with satellite companies to their in-house projects such as Street View and Map Maker. The company has recently released a few images that illustrate their progress.