Bit of a round up

Been insanely busy lately... hence a bit quiet (ie. no high concept grandstanding) and about to take something of a holiday, so thought I'd just bang down a few "recently noteds"...

Thanks to Paul Schütze for pointing me at this fabulous Bldg Blog interview with Daniel Dociu, a Seattle-based artist and "Chief Art Director for ArenaNet, the North American wing of NCSoft, an online game developer with headquarters in Seoul". The interview is insightful but, oh, the pictures, the pictures!  Dociu's work reminds me of the sci-fi book jacket and album cover art I grew up with - Roger Dean, Rodney Matthews, Chris Foss - but is plainly light years beyond it. And it's interesting that the video games field is perhaps currently the only sphere to let work like this live. Ravishing stuff.

Can I just say how much I've been enjoying Mary Ann Hobbs' weekly show on Radio 1? Some of the stuff she's been dropping - some extraordinarily deep house, grime, and of course dup step - is frankly the only music that's excited me even vaguely as much as metal for quite some time. The show goes out on Wednesdays between 2 and 4pam, so most likely you'll be checking it out on demand... so don't forget you've only got seven days to catch each show. This week's standout moment: a Brendan Moller remix of Appleblim & Peverelist. Sublime. Also check out MAH's blog and myspace.

Perils of DRM, Part One Million: a great story in the Register today drawing attention to Microsoft turning off the DRM servers on its defunct MSN Music service this Summer. Seems that anyone daft enough to have bought any music from it will either have to burn their files to CD or else they won't be able to keep hold of them once they upgrade their OS. I repeat: this is music people have bought. Nice.

Been doing a lot of work of late with the ferociously smart Justin Spooner, including a workshop with the Barbican in London for whom Justin knocked up this little diagram illustrating Chris Anderson's thoughts on the culture of Free (which is surely going to have as much impact as his Long Tail observations from four years back or so):

I bring it up purely because it reminded me instantly - and irrelevantly, to be honest - of the wonderful Atomium in Brussels, which I visited as a child and have remembered fondly ever since. Like, say, the moon shots or Concorde or Thunderbirds, it has something of the unrealised possible futures about it. Anyway, looking for some shots of it to show Justin, I strayed across its website and bugger me... a. the Atomium is 50 this year, b. there's shitloads going on to celebrate the fact and c. the website itself is quite the most gorgeous - if simple - pieces of interaction design I've seen in ages. 

I love their mission statement: "building a new world for modern human beings, giving them new dignity in a friendly meeting of all people". Sweet. Here it is, anyway:

Our mate Kate Lawrence has finally got her finger out and started posting again on Jumpstart Trainershoe. Now Kate goes to about a thousand gigs a year as far as I can tell, and while we don't always see eye on the tatse front, I have to say she's got a better sense of what's going on in what I guess I'd characterise as independent rock & pop than anyone I know. And, fuck, is she ever dedicated to it. Her latest posting takes Killing Joke as a starting point for some insightful  - and musically illustrated - musings on just how influential the 80s are right; I, for one, am convinced.

Nice spoof on social networking sites at nclüdr. A few of the gags are a bit overwrought, but the captcha on the register page made me laugh out loud. On my own. Bit close to the bone for some of the professional digital utopians among us, and, yes, I mean me. Thanks to Chris Jones for that one.

And talking of digital utopians... Bit out of date this one, but went along to Royal Society of Arts a few weeks back for a lunchtime lecture and Q&A by Clay Shirky, who was talking through some of the themes in his new book Here Comes Everybody. (I should say that there's been a lot of really good stuff happening at the RSA of late... a very impressive programme of lectures and talks about trends in media and communication.)

Actually, what was especially impressive about Shirky is that he's really not a utopian; indeed, he has a nicely self-deprecating line on his falling from faith on that front. He is enthusiastic about social networking and the like but is actually one of the few people in his field talking about this stuff in any political context: Belarussian flashmobbers, twittering pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt and so on. But he draws some convincing examples of how the new comms tech can be used for ill, too. Anyway, you can listen to the talk on the RSA site, along with whole bunch of other stuff, including the not-unrelated Charlie Leadbeater talk on his book We-Think.

And back where we came in: video games. My guess is that billions of words have been published about GTA IV in the last 40 hours, and I don't want to add much to them. But I was tickled by a line in yesterday's Independent. In an article entitled What is Grand Theft Auto, and why does it cause such controversy? the author, Rebecca Armstrong, presumably writing for a largely middle class, middle-aged readership observed "it's light years away from traditional video games like Space Invaders or, later, Sonic the Hedgehog". Well, thanks for that apercu, Rebecca. I'm reminded of Stephen King's observations about parents needing to "monitor their children's life in the pop culture", but if there are any parents of teenagers quite as out of touch as Ms Armstrong seems to think, I'd be staggered...