I’m totally addicted to this: the Globe Genie, by Joe McMichael. You just have to press the Shuffle button, and you’ll be teleported via Google Street View in some random location…

[via Boing Boing]

Matthew Albanese constructs small-scale meticulously detailed models using various materials and objects to create emotive landscapes. The real-fake aestethic that results is strangely attractive…

Mi-Sex’s (New Zealand/Australian new wave rock band) promo-video for the hit single ‘Computer Games’. October 1979. I’m fascinated…

Jammed up tight by red traffic lights
Advance one level on green
These opportune commuters
They’re blasting on thier hooters
I fidget with the digit dots
Frustration rules out there
As the XU-1 connects the spot
But the matrix grid don’t care

[via 990000.tumblr.com]

You, the World and I: new video work by Jon Rafman. A voice over essay about love, memory, photography, technology, and our experience of the world.

“In this modern day Orphean tale, an anonymous narrator also desperately searches for a lost love.  Rather than the charms of the lyre, contemporary technological tools, Google Street View and Google Earth, beckon as the pathway for our narrator to regain memories and recapture traces of his lost love. In the film, they are as captivating and enthralling as charming as any lyre in retrieving the other: at first they might seem an open retort to critics of new technology who bemoan the lack of the tangible presence of the other in our interactions on the Internet.” (full statement here).

[p.s. this is another work that will be shown in Maps and Legends, my forthcoming exhibition during FotoGrafia Festival. Come and have a look if you're in Rome from September 23th to October 24th]

[via rebelart]

Augmented City, by Keiichi Matsuda (best vied with 3D glasses)
keiichimatsuda.com

“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.”

[via today and tomorrow]