3D HTML5 Petition For the Open Web

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I’m excited to announce the official launch of a new project I’ve been working on with Mozilla. Mark Up is an online statement of solidarity in support of a web that should remain open, free and healthy. It’s similar in concept to an online petition where everyone is invited to add their signature, name or mark. Each mark is rendered in 3D using HTML5 and connected end-to-end to form a continuous line, representing a unified global statement on the fundamental importance of an open and free internet. Add your mark and become part of the line that connects you, me, Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle and many others:
http://markup.mozilla.org

Mark Up is an open initiative with both the data and source code freely available. All of the marks are saved as .gml (Graffiti Markup Language) and can be used interchangeably with many other applications.
For any data nerds, the entire collection of marks will be made available here and updated periodically as the site grows.
Much of the credit for this project goes to Laura Mesa and many very busy Mozillians. Development for the project was done primarily by The Barbarian Group.

Copyright Violation For Freedom

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(“Let the Bullets Fly is the highest grossing domestic film in China’s cinematic history.” Wikipedia)
China’s lack of restriction over copyrighted material can be exploited to help spread outlawed content to a large online audience seeking entertainment. Youku and toudo.com are mainland China’s largest online video providers *, and are fertile soil for planting seeds of democracy in the cracks of copyright violation.
How To:
1) Download movies popular in China. Make sure they are in Mandarin, or with Chinese subtitles. If searching on Youku or Tudou, search for the Chinese title of the movie (rather than the English equivalent) and then download the video (Download Helper is a good tool). English Wikipedia entries will often include the Chinese characters of Chinese movies, people and events.
2) Download videos of issues outlawed in mainland China. A good place to find this kind of content in Mandarin is on Taiwanese news websites or on youtube by searching for a topic in Chinese (e.g., 茉莉花革命 = “jasmine revolution”).
3) Edit clips from step #2 into the clip from step #1. Keep the added content short and sporadic enough that they don’t draw too much attention away from the main attraction. I’ve been inserting about 30 seconds of political content for every 30 minutes of entertainment.
4) Upload the finished product to youku.com, toudo.com or others. Remember that all text should be in Chinese. It may be helpful to copy and paste text from existing uploads of the same the movie. Chinese video sites are more likely to remove a video for political content rather than copyright violations, so once the movie is uploaded don’t draw attention to it by linking to it.
Notes on uploading videos: To upload a video, you will need to create an account on the video hosting website. The steps are identical to all other websites (you supply an email, password and captcha code). Google translate is useful for figuring things out. Once logged in, most sites have upload arrows in the upper right-hand corner. You can upload up to 200 mb online and up to 10 gb if you download a site’s uploader application. This process seems to run smoother on Windows machines.
Example clips:

Personal Internet Cache Archive

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Personal Internet Cache Archive (November 9, 2010)
C-Print
150 x 88 cm
1 of 1
2011
Internet cache: “a mechanism for the temporary storage of web documents” (Wikipedia)
An ongoing study of archived images collected passively through my everyday Internet usage. Internet cache is visualized using off the shelf screen saver and image viewing software to produce archival prints and videos. Each print is a unique archive of cached images from a specific date.
I will be posting an ongoing series of Personal Internet Cache Archive studies on my blog over the course of the next year.
November 9, 2010 selected print details:






(For full size details go here).

Animated Gif Mashup…. the Workshop

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1 Day
20 participants
894 animated gifs
1 music video
I ran the inaugural Animated Gif Mashup workshop last week at NIMk as part of Video Vortex. Big thanks to all of the gif hunters and mashers that spent their Thursday wading their feet in the pools of web 1.0. The above video was created entirely from gifs found and mashed by workshop participants over the course of a single day.
GIF source material available here (1 | 2 | 3). Thanks to Video Vortex for the invitation, NIMk for hosting and Anna for the write up.

A few slides from the resulting presentation: