A certain sad story about a wild japanese gameshow is popping up on few blogs and I thought I’d share. In January of 1998, a Japanese comedian named Nasubi participated in a reality TV show in Japan in which he was stripped of everything and sent into a room. The place was empty save a stack of magazines and postcards. To survive, he had to win one million yen (about $9,000) by mailing in contest entries. Everything he eats must also be won through the mail. You can read the full story here.

So what was the point? The article concludes

…it was to test the thesis that contests had become so ubiquitous that it would be possible to live entirely on what one had won in them. This was called kensho seikatsu (Living off contests).

I think the psychological trauma this caused is the most horrible bit. The most disturbing part reads

Nasubi’s first ordeal ended in December. The thing that put him over the top was, of course, a bag of rice. Unfortunately, he didn’t know that he had won and continued writing postcards. That night, he was paid another visit by the producer, who crept in with Christmas crackers to wake him up in the middle of the night. There was nothing congratulatory in the producer’s manner as he refused to answer Nasubi’s questions, and continued setting off the Christmas Cracker’s until Nasubi realized that he had successfully completed his challenge. Nasubi was curled up into a foetal position, and seemed unused to talking to other people.

Nasubi’s website is a bit hard to read, but you can find it here.
For an unhealthy dose of some other exciting and less depressing Japanese shows, mash here.
I think it would now be appropriate to recommend a highly relevant book to the issues (Japan and other things we don’t understand about them) at hand:

Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships
On another related note (It’s Japanese tangent night, didn’t you hear?) take a peak at Kimiko Yoshida’s Futuristic Brides {link}

Here are the chewiest photos from a recent trip to SF MOMA’s Olafur Eliasson exhibit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Small art, but still not very good

37 nanoartists from 13 countries and 4 continents sent 121 NanoArt works to this second edition of the international competition. Public online voting is now open through March 31, 2008 at www.nanoart21.org. Judging is via the Internet and decided by the site visitors.

This site was founded by the artist and scientist Cris Orfescu (www.absolutearts.com/nanoart) to promote worldwide the NanoArt as a reflection of the technological movement. NanoArt is a more appealing and effective way to communicate with the general public and to inform people about the new technologies of the 21st Century and should raise the public’s awareness of Nanotechnology and its impact on our lives.

On the poorly designed site my favorite works are by Pran Mukherjee, Eleanor Howe, and Mark Stock


The original image was taken from nanograting research. The process used was: thermal oxidation of silicon, deposition of a thin Cr layer, spin-coating of 200nm thermal plastic resist, nanoimprinting of a grating structure into the resist, and plasma etching of the resist, Cr layer, and then silicon oxide layer. This image is a failed portion of the oxide etch step, probably caused by insufficient Cr etching. The image has been subsequently cropped and colorized to accentuate features and suggest alternate narratives.
25000x magnification

Some are pretty terrible, and resemble the artwork of the mad scientists these guys probably are.

Warning: Some images below are not children friendly/Not safe for work/ include simulated ejaculations. Read on…

The most comprehensive exhibit of Takashi Murakami is a must-see in Los Angeles. Prints, Massive Statues, videos. (Online Exhibition Info).

Here’s some highlights. These photos were not taken by me:

Inochi!

Murakami says much of his work is autobiographical. Inochi, then, would be representative of his awkward school days as a quasi-cyborg alien-type thing coming to terms with his Japanese schoolboy identity. (full scale body model here) A group of kids were watching this video and it took a few clips for their parents to realize it was not right for the kiddies:

Collaboration with Kanye West

A music video for ‘Good Morning’ by Kanye West played in a nice screening room. (video here) A Kaiki Kiki short film about watermelons fertilized by their own poop also played (trailer here and official Kaiki Kiki site here).

My Favorite Print

He’s a pop art / Edo period Japan, character developer mixmash MACHINE!

Photograph by Papermakes Planes.

The most incredible pieces are in the lobby

They’re also the most controversial (flickr set here): Read the rest of this entry »

The finalists for Getty Images ‘The Next Big Idea’ contest are worth looking into. The contest solicited film makers and visual artists to

Pitch a film about The Big Idea. Yes, The Big Idea. Whatever that means to you. It could be a narrative. It could be a hallucinatory sensory experience set to music. It could be abstract. It could put forth an argument, it could tell a joke, it could make us laugh or move us to act. It could be something else…something original that you care about and that we can‚Äôt predict.

{more info here}

The Winner: “The Closest thing to Time travel”

{VIDEO}
It sent a chill up my spine in the last 5 seconds of the movie.

The Burble is held down to the ground by the combined weight of the crowds holding on to the handle bar. They may position it as they like. They may curve in on themselves, or pull it in a straight line - the form is a combination of the crowd’s desires and the impact of wind currents varying throughout the height of the Burble.

I saw that Google Earth was now doing web searches through .kml files. Interesting thought I. For some reason, the first thing that popped in my head was “I wonder if someone has pinpointed where Apocalypse now was filmed.” When I typed that in, the only result Earth returned was an unnamed kml (map) file found on quikmaps.com. It was a group of waypoints, numbered as though demarcating a route. Attached to waypoint 1 was this:

The lone sliver of sunlight that came in through the blinds was enough to cut through his sleep like a razorblade. Unaware of what woke him, he sprung upright in bed, panicked and wet with sweat. Blood bounced through his head and his heart filled his chest cavity. His throat was constricted with last night’s vomit and he felt like he was drowning. Slowly, the shape of his bedroom came into place: the dresser filled with athletic medals and a gun, the pile of clothes at the end of the bed. Something stirred under the blankets next to him and for a moment he thought that maybe it was a monstrous python. Maybe he wasn’t really awake but living a dream inside of a dream. With care‚Äìas if he were delivering a baby on a bus‚Äìhe lifted the covers to a find a nude woman in his bed that very obviously wasn’t Zlatica. He let the blanket fall back on the woman. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said aloud. “This is going to be some God-damn day.”

Then I said to myself ‘Web 2.0 is fucking nuts.’ This group of waypoint was in Slovakia, in a small town called Senica. The story ungracefully tumbles into a Dubliners-type tale set within 17 placemarks. Each placemark contains about two paragraphs of text. This is strange on a number of levels.
I’m used to seeing waypoints in Google Earth where someone points out a lighthouse or their grammas house… but this is an actual bit of creativity. I was fascinated. The mystery writer (all I know about him/her is that they published on quikmaps.com) created a story that walks you through one man’s day, laying out his hopes, suspicions, habits, and desires. To read it yourself, you can simply open this file. If you do not have Google Earth, I highly recommend you download it here and open that golden nugget of mystery.
The unnamed story reads like a story written by someone who’s read a lot of stories. Sadly, he forgot the first rule of writing stories: You need a catchy title. I think he meant to call it ‘Brewskies for the Huskies.’ And so it goes. Waypoint 17 is titled ‘Four Beers’

Fero sets four beers on the table. Each is a half-liter. Brewed in Topalcany. Golden and diffused like sunlight shining through a muslin curtain. The head is so thick and white with foam that a one Krown piece would easily stay afloat on top of it. The four of them stare at the beers. Petey runs his tongue across his lips, raises his eyebrows and smacks his hands together and begins to rub them like he is starting a fire. Palo laughs at Peter. “Here we go again, baby. And Dave reaches for his beer, the beads of moisture wrap around his fingers and he slowly draws it towards him. Jim is the last to take his beer. It is heavy in his hand, comforting, a feeling he has grown used to in three years and one he will miss in the years to come. They lift their glasses, touch them, look each other in the eyes and in that moment that will stay with them, the moment laced with possibility and the descent into joyful drunkenness where all decisions are good ones and all women good-looking. There will be a few bad nights, nights soaked in double vodkas, nights when they will question (God, purpose, country and themselves) and nights of boredom where they will empty pack after pack of Petra cigarettes. But those nights are few and this certainly will not be one of them. The moon is bright and they are young and coming through the gate are four women–blondes and brunettes, tall, short, but all soon to be beautiful. Palo is the first to say “na zdravie” and the other three follow. Fero is on the porch bathed in the light pouring out of the door from inside the bar. His wife calls him and he turns and disappears into the light.

Oh there’s more didn’t you hear?

Occasionally he reminds you that…

On his way there, like every day, he stopped at the corner market to buy a pack of Sparta cigarettes and a single bottle of Trnavan beer that he drank on the way to work.

I really don’t care how bad this story is, or where it will take me. I just want to know why someone chose to input all these wacky paragraphs into a map. I’ve had no luck trying to uncover anyone who’s mentioned slovakia, senica, or quikmaps.

Reading those first sections had me thinking that it was actually a personal diary of a lonely internet geek who was dramatizing his day. Then I read this:

By chance, though not a big enough chance to save Vlado’s life, the ambulance squad was half a block away, tucked in behind the clinic. Paul ran out of bed and into the hallway before he was fully awake. Pan Doctor grabbed his arm and pulled him out into the already warm summer morning. They were both on the scene before Tomcat had a chance to pull the ambulance out of the garage. A small crowd of mostly Trencin bound bus passengers and workers from the nearby market circled the body‚Äìafraid to touch it or check for pulse for fear that death is contagious. Paul and Pan Doctor pushed through the circle. It wasn’t easy to look at death but Paul was getting used to it. Last week in one of the smaller villages a man tried to commit suicide by placing a shotgun under his chin. Just at the moment when he went to pull the trigger, the gun slipped, blowing the front of his face away. “Unfortunately,” Paul thought, “he lived.” He prayed for steadier hands when his time came. He had not been to many death scenes, but the ones he had been at contained certain ironies that were not lost on him. Near Vlado’s crushed skull lay a broken beer bottle and just out of reach of his twisted hand was a cigarette that would burn longer than Vlado’s life.

Get the KML

From Google Street Map View, aka art emergent from the info-machine. zeroed in on by the Great Collector, crying out one at a time without knowing why. If you’re not in the center of these images, you’re blurry. [Gallery here]
These images were likely created by this automaton: [from here]