“We’ve had a lot of requests for rap videos,” photographer Alexander Porter says. “I just shot one yesterday.” In a basement Bushwick art studio, by the stacks of DSLRs and Kinect sensor bits, creative coder James George shows me how the RGBDToolkit works, again. Since 2011, George and Porter’s innovative toolkit has been ricocheting through the New York art-tech community. It’s just […]
Just in time for the rising concerns sparked by the NSA leak, here’s OFF Pocket — “a privacy accessory that zeros your phone’s signal, blocking all incoming and outgoing wireless communication.” Designed by Adam Harvey, the privacy conscious entrepreneur that brought us the “drone-proof” hoodies and scarves of Stealth Wear — as well as the very simple idea of anti-facial recognition makeup. Expanding upon these ideas, Harvey […]
If you enjoyed DJ Hennessy Youngman’s CVS Bangers mixtape, here’s his newest compilation. In response to the shocking leaks, it’s highly topical, well-mixed and the Eric Edwards-esque DJ drops are hilarious. “I always feel like Somebody’s watching me…” “SOMEBODY IS.” Ok, maybe not so hilarious. Because the NSA is watching you. So “clear your browsing […]
Here’s the perfect way to retaliate against the NSA for all that privacy they’ve been violating lately: “Operation: Troll the NSA,” a campaign that’s asking anyone who cares to send the same buzzword-laced but ultimately innocuous email at the same time this Wednesday. To participate, simply copy and paste the pre-written text into an email […]
Technology has a way of giving us our deepest desires, for better or worse. The iPhone is destroying our attention spans. Soon enough, our Google Glass is going to record your life for you, identifying faces and remembering what you did last night. Google’s new mobile operating system is based around the premise of tracking […]
London is notorious for its network of CCTV cameras. The surveillance efforts are ubiquitous, Orwellian and frighteningly advanced: Authorities can watch and track people, from camera to camera, all over the city. While New York City is moving in the same direction, at least in London a menagerie of signs has been deployed to remind the […]
I suppose it was always going to come to this. Deutsche Bahn, the company that runs Germany’s railways, plans to use drones equipped with super-sensitive infrared cameras in an attempt to catch graffiti writers in the act of painting trains. According to the BBC, the drones, which Deutsche Bahn hopes to test soon, will be virtually […]
Sorry for the money shot upfront, but wow. We’ve been anticipating dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei‘s heavy metal music and here it is: “Dumbass.” Or something worse, really, something the New York Times only refers to as “a rather vulgar Chinese word.” Ai worked with Wong Kar-wai’s cinematographer Christopher Doyle, which is why the video is […]
You’ve heard of facial recognition, that old classic of the dystopian surveillance state. But what about racial recognition, a system that would instantly let authorities know whether or not that guy creeping around the premises of a national landmark is terrorist-colored or not? According to a report from Slate, that exciting new technology may be headed to […]
When’s the last time you saw a traditional music video that made your jaw drop in the same way that, say, Michel Gondry’s “Sugar Water” clip for Cibo Matto did? I’ll wait a minute. How about an interactive video–a little easier, right? There’s OKFocus’s Photoshop-emulating clip for Tanlines, this crowdsourced video made of Vines, Chris […]
