Hasta La Ideas

Brothers and Sisters’ StreetMuseum app is in the running for a Webby Award

Making us all feel a little bit longer in the tooth is the news that the Webby Awards are 15 years old this year. Nominations for the big one, as far as web and digital excellence goes, have just been released…

52 nominations come from the UK in a field that boasts a fair few highs from the pop culture year: SoundCloud, Flipboard, Twitter, Arcade Fire, the Old Spice guy, and Angry Birds are all up for awards as is, er, the ubiquitous Justin Bieber.

Nominees earning multiple nominations include NYTimes.com (18), Funny or Die (10), Google Creative Lab (8), The Guardian (6), BBC (6), CNN (6), NPR (5), MLBAM (5), and TED (5).

The public can help decide who takes home a Webby by voting in The Webby/AOL’s People’s Voice Awards at webby.aol.com (until April 28).

Here are a few highlights from the huge list of nominated projects, which can be seen in full on the Webby’s site, here.

In Animation there is The World’s Smallest Stop-motion Character Animation and Making Future Magic: iPad light painting.

In Best Use of Device Camera the Tate Muybridgizer and much-loved StreetMuseum.

In Blog – Cultural the fantastic Letters of Note.

In Documentary: Individual Episode there’s the moving Saying goodbye with my camera.

In Game or Application Balloonacy 2 and in Games the British Museum’s Time explorer.

In Music there’s both Thomas Dolby – ‘The Toadlickers’ and the excellent Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Downtown.

In News the Guardian iPhone app, their Guardian Eyewitness app, plus in News & Politics: Series, Haiti: 6 months on.

And, of course, in Weird there’s the reliably bonkers, rathergood.com.

Winners will be announced on May 3 and presented with their awards at a ceremony in New York on June 13.

Tate’s Muybridgizer app is also up for a Webby. Images by mls7o

CR in print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog, but if you’re not reading us in print too, you’re missing out on a richer, deeper view of your world. Our April issue features our Top 20 logos of all time. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)207 292 3703. Better yet, subscribe to CR, save yourself almost a third and get Monograph for free plus a host of special deals from the CR Shop. Go on, treat yourself.

Bizarre, creepy and altogether stunning visions of digitally-influenced identity

Of all the questions posed by the digital age, the weird, wonderful and otherwise convoluted relationship we have to our bodies may be one of the least explored. A new book encompassing photography, fashion and other artistic mediums, “Doppelganger: Images of the Human Being” takes a look at the visual depictions—from torsos woven from strips of flesh to head-to-toe tribal suits freely referencing multiple cultures—of the phenomenon.

On the premise that the Internet, as the dominant medium for social interactions, has led to physical anonymity, the collection of startling and provocative images is curated on the concept of a “media identity.” This doppelganger of the actual human body is based however loosely or disproportionately on self-perceptions as well as those shaped by the bigger social context. Chapters organized by creative approaches like Dissolve, Deform, and Escape delve into how more than 80 conceptual artists envision these human simulacra.

“Exploring what deeply concerns people emotionally and representing it pictorially is one of the most interesting things happening in art and visual culture today,” explains editor Robert Klanten in the book’s preface. From tangible, more conventional layers like costumes and masks to photo-technical renderings and artistic manipulations, this sizable coffee-table tome reveals the innumerable permutations of human form that have emerged in this very short span of time. Perhaps the result of its translation from German, Doppelganger’s preface can seem a little abstruse at times, which hardly seems to matter given that the rest of the book’s evocative and unsettling images speak for themselves.

As disparate and unusual as these various depictions are, at the heart of the visual story is the idea of authenticity; though artificial, these deliberately-executed layers sometimes reveal more about their creators and wearers than their actual faces and bodies.

“Doppelganger: Images of the Human Being” sells from Amazon and Gestalten.

Here’s our first post about what CR’s readers have been doing to raise money for Comic Relief. We’re sure loads more of you are doing something funny for money too, and we want to hear about it, so we can feature your fundraising on the blog. Let us know what you’re up to by leaving a comment or emailing neil.ayres@centaur.co.uk.

First up, over at the University of Wales, Interactive Media student Gary Smith has created what he describes as a Chaos Engine (shown below), set to track the movements of anything red. He’s attached a red nose to it, and records the movements of this (when it’s physically swung by someone) to generate data visualisations (there’s one shown above). Smith is then selling these as prints, with proceeds going to Comic Relief.

Nick Hilditch has been randomly illustrating unsuspecting people’s tweets for the past year. To celebrate hitting the anniversary of irkafirka, as the process is known (the name means ‘doodle’ in Hungarian), he and partner-in-crime Chris Bell decided to ask for donations to Comic Relief for what they termed ‘#firknoseday’. Anyone on Twitter donating money would be added to a ‘watchlist’, and be in with the chance of having a tweet illustrated. The pair asked followers to spread the word by tweeting this:

“I want a good firking on Friday 11th March, so I sponsored @irkafirka http://bit.ly/GoodFirk #FirkNoseDay”

With the resulting illustrations looking something like this:

As indicated above, the original #FirkNoseDay was due to take place solely on Friday 11 March (the anniversary of irkafirka), but due to the level of response and the potential of more money to be raised, #FirkNoseDay has turned into #FirkNoseWeek, with Hilditch and Bell extending the offering through to Red Nose Day itself.

Other CR readers helping raise money include Matt Glen, who is making and selling badges (above). The Scottish Words site, a website that illustrates Scottish words, is doing its bit by lending this week’s cartoons a Comic Relief theme and asking for donations in return. And Helen and Lori, proprietors of Tenderfoot Gifts, are handing over the proceeds of their monster-themed kids’ workshops.

Unloveable Steve is running an egalitarian sweepstake in response to #twitrelief. Entry’s a reasonable £1, and the winner will win a follow from Steve, which he promises to fulfil even in the unfortunate accident of his own death. Staying with Twit Relief, for those with a bigger budget, this lady will cut short her hitchhiking trip to Switzerland to not only follow you on Twitter, but also follow you around a London supermarket of your choice.

Remember, let us know what you’re up to for Red Nose Day as we want to feature as many fundraising efforts by our readers as we can this week.

And if you’re interested in bidding on any of the items we’re auctioning, here’s a reminder of what we’ve got on offer so far:

Build’s Moon posters: Day and Night

Paul Davis portrait

James Jarvis vinyl toy

This Red Nose Day – that’s March 18 for anyone not paying attention – and for the days leading up to it we’re going to harness the power of the mighty CR Blog and our Twitter followers to help raise as much money as we can for Comic Relief.

Last week I was one of many people who criticised #twitrelief, Comic Relief’s version of TwitChange where the public bid in ebay auctions to have celebrities follow them. (I’ve always believed that Twitter is fundamentally about sharing interesting information with other people and that ‘follows’ are a reward for doing so. I have a problem with the concept of asking someone to pay you for the privilege of having them follow you, whether it’s for charity or not. The 7 Reasons blog sums up my objections pretty well. I also thought that bundling in the fun ‘extras’ on offer with the idea of having someone pay for you to follow them, would put off many Twitter enthusiasts who would otherwise want to get involved. I’m sure there are lots of people who would happily bid to get their hands on Neil Tennant’s keyboard, but who find the idea of paying for him to follow them distasteful.)

‘Alright then’, some people shot back, ‘and what are you doing to help?’ Fair point.

We’re sure that many of our readers will be planning fundraising activities for Comic Relief on Friday, so firstly we’d like to help you raise awareness of these. Let us know about them by emailing me: neil.ayres@centaur.co.uk or tweet @creativereview and we will blog about and tweet your activities.

We’re also going to be asking some of our favourite designers, Illustrators, photographers and creatives to provide humorous work for sale or auction on ebay, with all the proceeds of course going to Comic Relief.

My original tweet last week may have come across as mean-spirited or pompous to some, and was harsher in tone than I’d intended it to be (I called the project “horribly ill-conceived and ego-stroking”). But my grumpiness over #twitrelief doesn’t mean I don’t support Comic Relief and its objectives.

Watch this space for more details of how CR is going to be trying to help.

Chris O’Shea unveiled a new interactive installation at the Barbican in London at the weekend that enabled visitors to swap their bodies with their friends and then control their movements…

Body Swap was shown as part of the Barbican’s Weekender Festival (March 5-6). In O’Shea’s installation, two visitors stand in front of a screen, their image is captured by camera and turned into a pair of paper cut-out versions of themselves. The images are then swapped, so that each participant can take control of the other’s movements.

“The aesthetic is of a low polygon 90s video game,” says O’Shea. “Music plays and prompts you to act out to the audience and each other. Dance around, jump in the air, do anything you like to make them look silly. However don’t forget, they are doing it to you at the same time.”

Two players of differering heights, a father and son for example, see a reversal of scale, O’Shea explains on his website. “The youngest magically becomes big, and the adult shrinks to the proportions of the child.”

To create the work O’Shea used an XBox Kinect camera, custom written software in C++, openFrameworks, OpenNI for the full body skeletal tracking, plus openCV. The project was commissioned by Barbican Creative Learning for the Barbican Weekender Festival 2011.

In another recent project, O’Shea has also made a fantastic interactive educational game for children, Little Magic Stories, which enables drawings to be brought to life on stage, via a holographix projection film.

More of O’Shea’s work is at chrisoshea.org.