I’ve been listening to a lot of Robyn after watching her absolutely kill it on Letterman with the single “Dancing On My Own”, a great song in its own right, and hearing the lean-back, reggae-tinged track she did with Diplo that was dubbed “No Hassles” when a clip of it leaked on Youtube (now “Dancehall Queen” on the album).
I just discovered she’s also got a video for Body Talk Pt. 1 opening track “Don’t F******* Tell Me What To Do.” It’s not my favorite track on the record, but the concept is a new one – the video is online, in 3-d, and is synched up with Twitter, pulling in tweets marked with the hashtag #killingme and displaying them on the bottom of the screen, providing a real-time update of what’s killing everyone out there in the Twitter-verse. To watch the video, go to Robyn.com/killingme, which is written entirely in code.
It’s just not as fun without 3-d glasses, though, right? It makes me second-guess myself not picking up these 3-d aviators (and clip-on attachments) that I’d run across at the Surface to Air store in Paris, made by the always-bizarre fashion and art collective Bless.
After watching an old Janet Jackson video (don’t ask; it’s a long and winding road that brought me here), I’m remembering how fascinated I was when this first came out in 2000. This is how we’d pictured the new millennium, and somewhere, just across the ocean, there were people were actually living this way? The tricked-out Japanese apartment was cool, but it’s all about that instantly-covetable robotic dog wandering through it. This was the AIBO (short for Artificial Intelligence roBOt, which is kind of stretching things, acronym-wise).
A few years later, Beck came out with a video featuring dancing robots. They were on loan to him from Sony in Japan and were, at the time, the only four of these robots in the world. Dubbed the QRIO (short, somehow, for Quest for cuRIOsity – yes, again, your guess is as good as mine) and also known as the Sony Dream Robot (or SDR for short, and how are you supposed to keep track of all these names, pick one and stick to it is what I say), they’re intriguing to watch but apparently not enough to produce for the marketplace as Grand Plans for the QRIO/SDR have been put on hold.
In the meantime, there’s always the PLEN. A robot who skates pulls a little more weight in my opinion anyway.
Ever since their debut in 2006, their hit song Heavenly Star has stucked in my head from time to time whenever I played Lumines on my PSP. When will Lumi, the famed fictional hologramed Japanese singer, with her beautiful, but sampled and digitized voice, release her next album? Avatar has made 3D movies a growing fad, expanding the boundary of virtual reality in entertainment. And VR is certainly becoming a word pertaining not just to Internent, and computer games. So I thought about Lumi from Genki Rockets again. Unlike Simone, Hollywood’s rendition of a virtual being coming to life, Lumi is arguably already alive. Her album has been a big hit in Japan and amongst anime fans, and her hologram appearances a signature performance. Hundreds of Japanese paid big money to see her “live on stage” in Tokyo in 2008 (see below). No one really knows who Lumi is, because she isn’t actually real. The origin of her voice remains unknown. She exists in the real world only as a recognized, but non-existent being. So the question is, when will Lumi finally visit Earth again with her new album?
Everyone is a DJ and anybody can scratch. If you have a laptop, grab a copy of Virtual DJ, or Traktor, do some auto beat matching and you’d be DJing live in 10 minutes. Or if you are old school like us, shell out a couple hundred dollars to get some CD or vinyl decks, and you can scratch like these (annoying) 5 year old YouTube sensations in a couple days. But if you don’t got the dough, nor a MacBook, but still have that iPod Shuffle, then may we suggest the Lecci Mini MP3 Mixer ($29.99 from AC Gears), and you can still invite all your hipster friends for a proper party. It’s true you won’t be able to scratch with Lecci, but at least you can crossfade in real time without the assistance of some expensive computer programs. Old fashioned like the good old days, beat matching and crossfading all with your own ears. Just remember to invest the money saved in a couple more bottles of Vodka and your guests won’t even notice when you screw up.
From the lab of André Michelle, a flashcoder working from Berlin, let me introduce you to this week’s new timewaster. Although, can it really be considered wasted time if you’re doing something that seems, in a way, productive (making music)? Do you think my boss will buy that level of bull hockey; not only buy it, but cheer, guffaw, clap me on the back and reward my creative initiative with the offer of a pay raise or introduction into some dubious-sounding sort of profit-sharing program? Yes? No? Outlook Not So Good?
If you like that (have you clicked over yet? Do it! Click the buttons! Hear the blips! Taste the rainbow!), you’ll love this – a flash simulation of a vintage Roland drum machine. Oh, and by the way, I’m sorry to drop something so addictive on you in the middle of what seems to be a nationwide firing frenzy. Disclaimer: check this out, click around, make bleep-bloop tunes to beat the band; but please, by all means, do it discreetly. DISCREETLY, I SAY.
Adidas is getting into augmented reality in a unique way — taking some of their most iconic shoes and stamping them with an AR code on the tongue. Holding these shoes up to a web camera will them cause the 3d Adidas Neighborhood to bloom right out of the shoe. Just…I don’t know, watch the video.
As time goes on, Adidas will be releasing games specifically tailored for this AR Pack. Use your shoe as a phone? Running game like you used to do with Nintendo PowerPad (known in Japan as Family Trainer)? Maybe I don’t understand how this is actually supposed to work. I guess I’ll just watch the Youtube video again and keep quiet. As for you, click over to the Adidas site for a preview of the AR experience. Download a special code and go to town. As it says on the site, however, the only way to get the full nine yards is to grab a pair of the shoes.
iPhone users – here’s a new way to customize your home screen. This iPhone Font designed by Anthony Burrill seems easy enough to implement and looks great. Click over to the site and watch the short instructional video on Youtube.
Recent Comments