Later. Meantime, here’s a load of Yarn-bombing that’s happened in Sydney, Aus…

from and

That last one reminds me of these things that Australians put up on power-cables when work is going on nearby… I’d never seen them before… asked Simon what they were… “Those are Tiger Tails Mate”

Brilliant. Australian naming conventions are the best. Everything is absolutely literal… eg, when I live in Melbourne I used to live opposite this sausage shop owned by a woman named Sue. Name of shop? “Sue’s Sausages”.

How could it be anything else?

Anyway. Yarnbombing… I love the idea of high-adrenalin knitting. Brilliant.

As opposed to actually drawing on walls…

From Ideapaint – which is the opposite of anti-graffiti paint – instead of making walls graffiti-proof, every wall becomes graffitiable.

As opposed to the proliferating virtual-graffiti, otherwise known as Augmented Reality… which as far as I can tell is (so far) basically to do with projecting hyperlinks and thought-balloons over everything.

(from)

In this instance, gone a bit social.

Which I think is a neat idea, but I’m not really seeing a killer-app I don’t think. Not yet anyway. I think the main problem I have with this is, it that to these jaded eyes, it already looks like spam, and it hasn’t even started yet really.

Grafittibots. I can see this going very very badly wrong.

from instructables

They’ve been around for a while – but I really like the idea of these. Seed Bombs… basically little balls of compost with seeds in them that you can craftily strew about the place and a couple of months later, marijuana plants are springing up outside govt buildings etc.

I think they have potential as a form of civil disobedience – against things like the horribly damaging drug laws, and the likes of Monsanto, who should (in my most humble of opinions) be put in prison for attempting to own the food chain.

Reminds me (in a round about sort of way) of the Nazi Trees

That finally (I think) bit the dust, in 2000 – similar to Japanese soldiers in WWII – still fighting, decades after the war had finished… even though (technically) the trees themselves weren’t actually Nazis and were basically just innocent bystanders, so it wasn’t terribly fair if you ask me. Couldn’t they have just planted some more yellow ones to make it say something else?

Anyway, there’s a thing about Guerrilla Gardening here:

A variant of which appears to have turned up in Sweden recently:

Although this is less of a Guerrilla Gardening thing as a… reclamation of our own spaces… and maybe the latter decades of the 20th century was a blip – I can remember the generation that were adults when they went through the 1930s, 1940s – and you simply didn’t get back yards without vegetable gardens. It seemed (by the 80s) kind of old-fashioned, although now to grow a vegetable garden seems more like a declaration of independence, of sorts.

From the internet vapourware machine…

filling the ether with articles filled with words like “could” and “might”, and featuring beautiful designs for things that will never be made, planted (like flowers) in weed-gardens of advertising.

Which I find fairly irritating as you can possibly gather. Experience is everything. Skin in the game is everything. The older I get, the more of an Empirical Puritan I become. If it’s not real, it’s not real.

From Joshua Harris, Via

I’m not sure if it is what I think it is, because I’m an ignoramus* but what it looks like to me – what it looks like it could be (almost) is a way for people to make their own music videos.

It provides a palette, a brush and a simple mechanical hand-holder (you fly sideways across the page) basically turning you into a human scribble-bot, loosely choreographed in time to some music. When the song is finished, you can send it to your friends.

It’s similar in some ways to what MGMT did a while back – but they alas are controlled by a major record company, who’s head is firmly stuck up the arse of the 20th century – so they block video embedding and ban youtube (et al) copies. The idiocy of these people is utterly dumbfounding – these are the same people who pay millions in payola “Independent Promotors” to get something on the radio, then persecute/prosecute people who are actually trying to help them, for free, in a medium far more powerful.

Check it out. I’ve gone out of my way to break the law to help you people. I think this song is excellent and I’m advertising on your behalf, for free, at cost to myself.

Your record company doesn’t deserve to be in business. Sack them.

So anyway – back to the slinky inky thing – I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that this is the future of music promotion – giving people the software tools to make cool videos of their own… but it’s a fairly good tactic I think. I mean people are going to do it anyway – I found this the other day:

Which is a video that someone’s made of Catpower’s cover of a Velvet Underground song.

It utterly gob-smacks me that there are about 300 variations of this on youtube – and this is a pretty obscure song.

And it’s illegal (although Matador Records don’t contribute to the RIAA and I know because I ask them, because I boycott all companies associated with the RIAA) – it’s illegal, and people are doing it in droves anyway, in this huge act of civil disobedience which would be Ghandi-like if it actually mattered that much, and if the people involved were even thinking about the political aspects rather than simply expressing themselves.

Simple amateur creativity is the biggest act of civil disobedience going on in the world today?

It’s a nice thought.

Still. The Velvet Underground.

It’s been said that they never sold any records, but everyone who heard them picked up a guitar. It does my head in that they’re from the 60s, and not even the late 60s – and in a funny kind of way they represent a prototype (of some sort) of what’s happening now – what Clay Shirkey describes as an open invitation to participate, as in “I could do that too”. They taught the world to sing, by the age of 21. They broke every mould and taught people how to write songs from the pieces – listen to the song-structure in that first catpower video. It’s a tacit freeing of all successive artistic progeny from the constraints of conformity. You don’t need verses, you don’t need choruses, it doesn’t have to rhyme, it doesn’t have to be radio-friendly… and most importantly…

… it doesn’t even have to be terribly good.

And that in a nutshell is the genius of it.

I’m almost tempted to make a website of home-made videos of songs that are covers of Velvet Underground songs – 2 generations of replication etc – by both artist and medium.

But I won’t. I’ll just break the law by embedding this:

It’s not even a video… but getting back to the initial point about writing systems that allow people to create and propagate their own videos – like the inky thing at the beginning could almost be… really, the whole internet is one giant system for doing just that.

ps: Initial inspiration courtesy of atomicshed :twitter.

pps: it’s also projectable onto walls:

pps *

Someone who can speak many languages : Multilingual
Someone who can speak two languages : Bilingual
Someone who can only speak one language : English.

C’est moi.

“Flocks of creatures spawned on the surface of a building, animated according to the physical bounds of the façade, as if they were aware of the design and appearance of the building.
Artificial Dummies creates a relationship between its behavioral algorithm driven lifeforms and the public space of a façade, a building or a monument, by conforming real-time animations to the architectural features.” www.todo.to.it – which is a really cool site methinks.

The creatures remind me of the ones in this game – which I was horrendously addicted to a while back, and which is excellent etc.

Via -> then-> then -> then -> Japanese Manhole cover map!

Which is just beautiful – not just for the way it looks and sounds, but the innocence… the joi de vivre. Each light is a tiny voice saying “yes”. It is (in some ways) the offspring and the acknowledgement / reply to this:

There is something almost divine in this. It’s like artistic re-interpretation is our way of raising our faces and acknowledging the creator… and acknowledging that we are all creators.

So anyway, on Twitter this morning, @cennydd made @rivalee a fish : ><)))°> so in response, I made an owl (°v°)

It seems that there’s an entire subculture based around knitting things and “dressing” objects like trees etc, that are just standing there, minding their own business.

from: http://deputy-dog.com/2008/11/urban-knitting-worlds-most-inoffensive.html

yarnbombing
knitted landscape
jafagirls
knit sea
knitta please
masquerade
micro-fiber militia
ladies fancywork society

and each of these blogs has links to others… the shear scale of this does my head in.