Creating Great Analog Souvenirs for a Digital Era
Slidedeck from Ryan Bigge’s March 11, 2013 talk at SXSW about analog souvenirs and physidigital objects: “Online and offline worlds are now melting together.”
“It isn’t clear when this happened to her; perhaps it happened to everybody at once. But at some point the internet became more real than the physical world. There was a time when it seemed like a dream – an impossible thing with uncertain implications. And then suddenly it was everything. There are people, she knows, who don’t use it, who have no presence on it, who can’t be searched for, who can only be accessed by going to their house and knocking on their door. But those people are the dream now. They’re like ghosts.
There was a time, she thinks, as her hand moves back toward the keyboard, when a physical artifact—a letter, a piece of clothing, a room full of still-unopened boxes in another world—was the conduit to what could be known about a person. Touch that thing, hold it, smell it. Inhabit it. Close your eyes and remember.
Now, you search first, remember later. We don’t need memory anymore—the internet has replaced it. And it’s a good thing for Elisa, because it is all she has.”
- From Familiar by J. Robert Lennon
“Just include the hashtag #ISLPaint on your next tweet and IStrategyLabs’ PaintBot will rip off a shot in your honor. Set up in the offices of the social media agency, the automated paintball gun is linked to an Arduino controller that’s programmed to respond to the hashtag.”
“Gone are the days that a little wobble in a work of art conveyed the sense that it was melting. For the modern audience, the fluidity of objects in Robert Lazzarini’s body of work, for example, immediately registers instead as having been run through the computer and messed around with. As a nod to this sea change in perception, Italian designer Ferruccio Laviani has created the brilliantly disorienting Good Vibrations storage unit for Fratelli Boffi.”
“Waterloo Labs rigged up four go-karts to manipulate the throttle, gas and brakes along with an RFID Item system so they could make a real-life, playable version of the Nintendo game Mario Kart.
To recreate the game, they built a system to control the movements of the go-karts (speed, brakes, and steering) as well as a wireless communication system.”
“Hello Lamp Post! is a new public art project that will let you communicate with post boxes and lamp posts without anyone questioning your mental health.
The public installation invites people to tune into secret conversations throughout the city and communicate through street furniture such as lamp posts, bus stops, bins and post boxes. The project will use the codes that city councils and public servants use to tell one object from another when a light bulb in a lamp post needs changing or a bus stop needs to be repaired or rerouted — for example, each post box in Bristol has a six-figure code, while storm drains have 14.”
“We’re a web magazine and event production/experiential marketing agency based in Washington, DC and NYC.
I guess if there was a good word that meant something about bridging the gap between online and real life we’d use it here.”
“In many ways, physical objects are disappearing from our daily lives: stacks of bills are being replaced by their online equivalent, shelves of CDs and records are now accessed in the cloud, and newspapers are read online (the ones that are left, at least). That much is obvious. But perhaps you’ve noticed a parallel trend—as the world becomes increasingly digitized, people begin to crave and romanticize the physical.”
“Indisposable Concept (iCONCEPT) is the process of using one roll of film from one disposable camera to capture and share the world around you through a sequence of shots. The beauty of this process is that each shot taken is unique and untouched. The images can’t be deleted, only a certain number of shots are available and nothing is revealed until the photos have been developed. This is a raw exercise capturing the world around you in it’s purest form.”
“I’m sure some folks will enjoy Cossette’s Instagram campaign promoting the Toronto Silent Film Festival, but I think it works better in theory than in practice. The flipbook-style fusion of old and new technologies is a cool concept (check out the trailers here, here and here), but scrolling quickly on my phone in slideshow view to achieve the effect of animating a few seconds of old-timey still images wasn’t particularly compelling.”
“Nostalgics of Tetris, Atari and disk games: at High Definition time, take pencils and scissors to make your handmade pixels. The 8-bit aesthetic has much to invent, even when it is homemade and mixed with current technology!”
“2012 was the Year Of The Glitch, according to designer Phillip Stearns. The Brooklyn-based creative, whose favored form of media is electronics, has cobbled together blankets “layered with irony” as part of a current artistic project. The items, measuring 40 by 60 inches, have been modeled on patterns from “intentionally broken cameras” and aim to combine the cold, hard logic of a digital system with softer, malleable entities, like memory.”
