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Art

‘Clouds’: An Experimental, Interactive Tech-Art Documentary

By Marina Galperina on

Wouldn’t you want a documentary film about coding and new media to be something new itself? A film like you’ve never seen before? Artists and creative technologists James George and Jonathan Minard are working hard and dreaming deep to finish their “full-screen, immersive, interactive audio-visual experience” featuring 30 new media artists, curators, designers, and critics. Why should you Kickstart Clouds? They’re not just exploring the very fringe of rapidly changing ideas and possibilities of tech-art: They’re making a piece of tech art about it. … Read More

Web

What’s On at Flavorpill: The Links That Made the Rounds in Our Office

By Alison Nastasi on

Today at Flavorpill, we learned 50 pick up lines for Olympians. We discovered a charity group that provides bullied teens with free plastic surgery. We wondered if one-night stands were empowering or soul-crushing. We liked seeing the Louvre’s classical sculptures dressed in contemporary clothes. We finally found out… Read More

Art

Fascinating Paintings of People Entranced by Their Phones

By Emily Temple on

Last year, we fell in love with New York City-based street artist Dan Witz for his phenomenal hyperrealistic mosh pit paintings – but it looks like the artist is just as interested in the quieter moments of human identity in modern life as he is in the wildest ones. Design You Trust pointed us towards this gorgeous and unsettling series of portraits of people completely hypnotized by their cell phones, whether texting or dialing or just staring into the gleam, their faces lit up by the electronic glow. Click through to check out the series, and you might just feel the urge to set your phone aside for an hour today. Maybe. … Read More

Partner Buzz

Marketplace Watch: The Top 10 Windows Phone Apps

By Doug Levy on

If you get the feeling it won’t be long until everyone in the world has a smartphone, you’re not alone. The allure of an all-in-one device that makes calls, takes photos, accesses the web, plays music, and does pretty much anything else you can imagine is pretty hard to resist. And with the unveiling of the new HTC Radar™ 4G phone, our friends over at HTC are making it even harder. Featuring a sleek, polished-metal design and 4G speed, it uses the Windows Phone platform to offer innovative functions like Live Tiles for your updates, People Hub for your contacts, and Threads for your conversations. But that’s not all it offers: With the Windows Phone Marketplace at its disposal, it gives you access to thousands of awesome apps. While some of them — Facebook, Twitter, Angry Birds — you don’t need us to tell you about, we’ve rounded up ten of our favorites that may not already be top of mind, so you can put them at the top of your list. … Read More

Tech

New Technology Dressed Up As Vintage

By Emily Temple on

Though the trend of new gadgets pretending to be vintage has been going on for a while now (some have called it “nostalgia tech”), thanks in great part to Urban Outfitters, the style seems to be shifting a little. Now, in addition to creating new gadgets styled after vintage versions of themselves, companies are coming up with various ways to dress up or augment new technologies to make them look old, using skins, apps, and add-ons to create trompe l’oeils that aren’t even supposed to be that convincing, just ironic. It’s as if the current generation is embarrassed of their new toys and feels the need to hide them behind faux-book covers and pictures of Game Boys some of them have probably never even played with. Click through to see our roundup of new technology masquerading as vintage, and let us know if you want a Stereolizer. … Read More

News

Conversation Pieces: 5 New Articles Worth Discussing This Weekend

By Paul Hiebert on

Welcome to Conversation Pieces, where Flavorpill curates five articles from the past week that you should read. Some are long, others are short. Some are from major publications, others aren’t. The only thing all these articles have in common is that they’re interesting. This week we examine cures for writer’s block, what being a Luddite originally meant, robots that think they’re human, the virtues of solitude, and more. After the jump, find something exciting to discuss this weekend in the home, at the bar, or on the street. … Read More

Film

Flicktweets: Social Media for Film Buffs

on

MRQE, the biggest, most comprehensive movie database you’ve never heard of (which has actually been around since the beginnings of the web when the only browser was called Mosaic), just launched a new service called Flicktweets, which lets you bypass all the reviews and trailers and get right to the on-the-ground, real-time film buzz via Twitter. Tapping into the massive ongoing chatter of a bazillion daily tweets, they’ve figured out how to make sense out of it all, matching and grouping posts around specific film titles. They’ve also just released it as an iPhone app, which is where it excels. For when there’s no time for reading complete sentences and you just want the instant, visceral reaction… great, sucks, or meh. Let’s try it with a few titles listed on Flavorpill, for which we’ve labored over that old art form of grammatically correct… Read More

Art

David Hockney Shills for the iPad?

By Kelsey Keith on

In one of the stranger op-eds we’ve read of late, art critic Martin Gayford writes for Bloomberg News about British painter David Hockney and his huge crush on Apple’s iPad. We hope the piece isn’t an insidious new marketing plan targeting art consumers with spending capital and is instead just an attempt by The Olds to show their adaptability. After all, if David Hockney can find a way to transport the “tricky” device with an awkward shape (he “has always had his suits made with a large internal jacket pocket for carrying sketch books”), so can you, you spry young thing. Wonder if Hockney’s trying to reinvent the swimming pool?… Read More

Web

Apple Leak and Proof That Investigative Journalism Lives On

By Kelsey Keith on

We’d like offer a proverbial standing ovation to the fine folks at Gizmodo, who posted this morning a convincing visual and functional explication of the top-secret, yet-to-be-launched 2o1o iPhone. In a stupendously thoughtless misstep, someone left the prototype in a bar in Redwood City, California, and Gizmodo editors examined the phone from front to back, inside and out. We’re left wondering whether it’s all an elaborate red herring and if not, what happened to the unlucky Apple employee who lost the device. Unemployment? Most likely. Death? Quite possible. Peep the specs after the jump.… Read More

Art

Maps Get Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi

By Kelsey Keith on

We’ve covered cut-out paper art and textile art and everything in between, but stumbling upon Shannon Rankin’s map art makes us glad there’s still a use for quickly-outdated old school road maps. (Quick jaunt down Memory Lane: remember fighting over The Map on family car trips? Trying to figure out the difference between I-95, 895, 495, and 195? Trying to fold it back up after seven hours of strife and a losing battle with McDonald’s ketchup packets?)

Now that pesky but beautiful paper maps have been put to more creative use, high-tech navigation options proliferate. We’ve got two new apps to try after the jump, plus more map porn from Shannon… Read More