Author: MHB

  • Storytelling

    Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man...
    Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man…
    Our friend Christine Huang recently spoke about storytelling and its purpose and evolution within culture. It was brilliant, so I share.

  • Tweetcloud

    Tweetcloud

    je tweet, donc je suis
    je tweet, donc je suis

    In the last 3 hours, Chad Scira‘s project #tweetcloud has generated +10,000 uses and in the process added the same amount of followers to his twitter feed. What I love about TweetCloud is that it helps to reinforce the truth that the internet, esp Twitter, is screechingly human. It is fueled in many ways by our quest for self-examination and in turn, sharing those findings with others.

    And at the same time, if we look at the words that most people tweet, our use is also rooted in phatic communication, making noise for the social sake of proving we still exist.

  • Crookers

    when things get for real, my warm heart turns cold.
    when things get for real, my warm heart turns cold.

    PK and MHB are shooting a music video for Crookers, bopping all about Brooklyn before Thanksgiving. We’re going to be running fast, feeling like we’re in Sabotage. And you know we like maps, so here’s where we’ll be, all in a day’s work.
    DBLtru

  • Futures of Entertainment 4

    she is a particle + a wave at the same time
    a particle + a wave
    @raafirivero and @michaelhb are going north to the Future today and are excited like kids in candy stores. Up at M.I.T. we’ve met some of our fave thinkers and tinkerers and have since worked with many. More thoughts soon, and likely a flurry of tweets on the #FOE4 tip.

  • The Collapse

    i tweet electric sheep
    i tweet electric sheep
    The above tweet from @kunur just knocked my socks off. Not sure what to think of it yet. Walt Whitman said that with the mind/body connection, if you lose one, you lose both. So in the time of digital natives, if they lose their networked identities, how do they function? Beyond the pangs of withdrawal, how do they construct themselves?

    I feel like this virtual/real world collapse is the cyborg identity that William Gibson et al. predicted. It’s not about inserting a microchip into our brains, it’s about the tentacles of tech reaching our hearts.

  • Killscreen

    Kill Screen Magazine

    We are very excited that the new video game magazine Killscreen has secured it’s first round of finance via Kickstarter. Given that Call of Duty 2 just made $310M on its first day, the market is long overdue for more in-depth cultural conversations about gaming.

    For starters, read this excellent Wall Street Journal article by Junot Diaz: Grand, but no Godfather. And then subscribe to Killscreen.

    -wY1dkCKZ7Q

  • Betting On Shorts

    Betting On Shorts

    On November 14th, the film festival Betting On Shorts will screen its program simultaneously in London, Athens, Barcelona, Bucharest, Maribor, Naples, Novi Sad, Poznan, Thessaloniki, Stockholm and Wiesbaden. And the short film Windows Vista: Predator Edition by Desedoian Paul Kamuf is in that mix.


    Betting On Shorts is unique not only for it’s dispersed distribution, but also that:

    So the audience can have some fun as well, we invite everyone to bet on which film will win. Bets must be placed before the screening. But no worries: trailers of all participating films are screened in all participating venues and on the website a week in advance of the competition. Those who have placed their bet well, can win cinema tickets, dvds, books and the like.

    I think that a festival giving additional and unique value to the audience is in sync with Brian Newman’s talk Better Than Free. Former CEO of the Tribeca Film Festival and a film industry consultant, Newman engages this issue:

    As the wealth and survival of traditional media businesses are built on selling precious copies, the free flow of free copies is undermining the established order. If reproductions of media are free, how can we keep on financing films and how can we find value in the media we create and sell?

    Given that we can now see short form content online, it also behooves film festivals to re-think their USP and value exchange with audiences, and I believe Betting On Shorts is doing just that.

    predator