PJ Rey's Post on Distinctions of Virtual, Mediated, and Augmented Reality » Cyborgology

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Excerpt from PJ Rey's article:

"Last week, fellow editor Nathan Jurgenson made a post entitled “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality” with a call for more concept work surrounding this topic. I hope to make a contribution to that effort by discussion three competing theoretical paradigms of Internet research. These three distinct perspectives perceive the Internet as either virtual reality, mediated reality, or augmented reality. I argue (in the spirit of Saussure) that these three perspectives are only fully comprehensible defined in relation to one another...."

I Like this! First feature-length film made specifically for Net distribution debuts on Youtube - RT @rosspruden

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From the LA Daily News

"The first feature-length film made specifically for Internet distribution, "Girl Walks Into a Bar," debuts Friday to a potential worldwide audience of millions on YouTube.

Directed by Sebastian Gutierrez - who, coincidentally, has another micro-budgeted film, "Elektra Luxx," opening Friday at West L.A.'s Nuart Theatre - "Girl" could establish a new path for increasingly under-exposed, small independent films to find substantial audiences.

"It's so hard for independent movies to get bought and put out," Gutierrez said. "And there's so many of them - 2,000, maybe, last year, and only one of them was `Winter's Bone.' And the ones that do get released only play in two theaters, five theaters."

"Girl" is a comic noir mystery, made up of 10, 10-minute, narratively interlocked scenes. This enabled natural commercial breaks, which have been filled on YouTube by presenting sponsor Lexus..."

read the full post:

http://www.dailynews.com/lalife/ci_17586655

truth and dare festival showcases non-fiction film - launches in Missouri- artforum.com / film

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Excerpt from original article on artforum.com

"EVEN THOUGH THE US FILM FESTIVAL LANDSCAPE gets more congested each year—every city, every demographic, and every taste seem catered for by now—America still lacks a truly progressive showcase for nonfiction film. Such events have proliferated in Europe, where many of the most adventurous new festivals of the past decade are nominally devoted to documentaries, among them FIDMarseille (where the boundary-erasing programming has helped shape our current understanding of hybrid cinema), Punto de Vista in Pamplona (which skews toward experimental nonfiction and is named for Jean Vigo’s conception of a “documented point of view”), and CPH:DOX in Copenhagen (which one year awarded its top prize to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers). The dominant American view of documentary film, challenged by woefully few events (MoMA’s far-ranging Documentary Fortnight is one partial exception), has much to do with the type of work that HBO or PBS will finance, that Sundance will program, and that the Academy will nominate. While this system produces several worthwhile films in any given year, it also creates a glut of issue-oriented and celebrity-driven docs, and reinforces a de facto ideology that equates the art of the documentary simply with journalistic storytelling, prizing content over form and information over contemplation.

The True/False Film Festival, which concluded its eighth edition on Sunday, is a small but significant corrective step, splitting the difference between this traditional perspective and a more pluralistic notion of nonfiction film. Unfolding over three and a half very busy days in the college town of Columbia, Missouri (home to the University of Missouri, Columbia College, and Stephens College), T/F is also the model of a regional festival, bringing diverse international work to enthusiastic, open-minded local audiences. The mood is celebratory (buskers take the stage between screenings), and while the festival makes a point of avoiding a juried competition, it requires all filmmakers to attend Q&As (a handful are inevitably Skyped in, but almost all make the trek to central Missouri) and there is also a strong industry presence (producers and programmers are brought in to serve as discussion “ringleaders”)...."

Looks Promising: The Echo Nest Makes Pandora Look Like a Transistor Radio | Fast Company

Read David Zax's full post on FastCompany

"More cowbell! Everyone from Christopher Walken enthusiasts to major record labels to Columbia University is excited about The Echo Nest. The many uses, frivolous and non-, of Echo Nest's massive 30-million-song dataset.

You music lovers out there probably think we're living in a Golden Age. iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody, music distribution and discovery couldn't get any better, right? With the proliferation of music sites and apps, we must be at some sort of saturation point, after all, the telos of digital music technology.
But spend a bit of time talking to Brian Whitman, cofounder of The Echo Nest, and you realize that we're really in a digital music Stone Age. Sure, we've come a long way, but there's still plenty we can't do--our recommendation engines are limited, as is our ability to sift information automatically from songs (to tell the sex of a singer just from his or her voice, for instance). The Echo Nest, a five-year-old company devoted to aggregating, indexing, using, and sharing vast troves of music data, just announced a collaboration with Columbia University's LabROSA (Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio) on something called the Million Song Dataset, free to use for non-commercial music researchers...."

New Mobile Apps Are All About the Group: Tech News and Analysis « Thnx to! RT @socialisticny

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Read Darrell Etherington's full post on gigaom.com

"If you’re still making apps catering to individual users, you’re behind the times. A growing trend in mobile apps seems to recognize that one is indeed the loneliest number, and has developers targeting groups instead. Group chat, group check-ins, group buys, group love: it’s all about the multiples, baby...."

Examples include: Groupon, Path, Yobongo, Red Rover & of course, Facebook....