centerimg id="image1642" src="http://rhizome.org/imagebase/article/2130/polite-umbrella-2small.gif" alt="polite-umbrella-2small.gif" //centerbr / centerimg id="image1643" src="http://rhizome.org/imagebase/article/2130/politeumbrella1small.gif" alt="politeumbrella1small.gif" //centerbr / centeriImage: JooYoun Paek, Polite Umbrella/i/centerbr / ipa href="http://www.jooyounpaek.com/"JooYoun Paek/a builds small, object-based responses to urban life, transforming the aches and pains we customarily suffer, at the hands of the metropolis, into novel sites of reflection, social courtesy, and rest. The artist's humorous, insightful approach bespeaks her familiarity with her subject; she was raised in Seoul, Korea, and moved to New York in 2005 to attend NYU's a href="http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/"Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)/a. Fresh from her recent participation in "a href="http://eyebeam.org/engage/engage.php?page=exhibitionsid=190"Untethered/a," at a href="http://eyebeam.org/"Eyebeam/a, and "a href="http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=5632"Design and the Elastic Mind/a," at a href="http://www.moma.org/"MoMA/a, JooYoun caught up with me at her a href="http://www.lmcc.net/"LMCC/a Workspace Residency studio, on the twenty-ninth floor of the Equitable Building in Manhattan's Financial District. - Tyler Coburn /p/i pbWhat's the difference between wearable technology and what you make?/b/p pThe difference? Well, I never define what I make as wearable technology. I think I'm just doing conceptual work that's wearable. Wearable technology is more about focusing on using new technology and making it fashionable, but also highly functional. I don't think my work was ever designed for utilitarian purposes. But oftentimes the methodologies of what I'm doing and wearable technology overlap, and that's why people think, on the surface, that my work is similar./p bpThat really comes across in a piece like a href="http://www.jooyounpaek.com/politeumbrella.html"iPolite Umbrella/i/a./p/b pYes. I made iPolite Umbrella/i after I came to New York for ITP. ITP isn't really a fine art school. It focuses more on collaborative and innovative practices. We had an assignment of observing daily life and behavior, and I began to observe umbrella usage. Quite interestingly, it was the fall of 2005, which was one of the rainiest times in New York City. October was a record-breaking month. It rained almost every day. This was my first time living in New York, so I thought this was usual. Previously, I had framed myself as an artist working with sculpture and sometimes in performance and photography and video, but after going to ITP, I began to explore design. This didn't bother me that much, because the observation of life was already a part of my creative process, which either came out as very utilitarian or very expressive objects. It always started from the observation of mundane moments./p pbOne of the things that I find interesting about this piece is that I can imagine an umbrella that just condenses uniformly, but your model responds to specific scenarios, such as a particular angle of passing. One or all sides of it can compress. So it's not just something that has a function that’s designed to meet a generic social scenario; it's something you can control on a case-by-case basis. I think that specificity is what pushes it beyond just being a quirky object./b/p pIt's not only helpful to you. It also gives a gesture to other people. I definitely involved the cultural reference of people bowing to one another in this piece./p pbSo you see the compression of the side of the umbrella as a gesture of social politeness?/b/p pYes. It has a morphing gesture, but conceptually it gives other people more space./p pbI can see a similar interest in modifying and improving everyday city life in a href="http://www.jooyounpaek.com/ssc.html"iSelf-Sustainable Chair/i/a, which is also controlled by the user, yet is far more absurdist in conceit./b/p pWith this piece, I was also inspired by New York and walking in the city. I was getting sick and tired of walking the same commute route from my station stop to my home every day while carrying a heavy backpack. I wanted to make something that could make every walk I take more meaningful. The idea was very abstract, so I began to add up the days and minutes of my commute time. My walk ended up being almost fifteen full days per year. That time should be more exciting, so I made this chair. I thought that each step could generate some energy, which can then transform into something else./p centerimg id="image1644" src="http://rhizome.org/imagebase/article/2130/selfsustainablechairsmall.gif" alt="selfsustainablechairsmall.gif" //centerbr / centeriImage: JooYoun Paek, Self-Sustainable Chair/i/centerbr / bpIt punctuates the commutes. No two walks are the same anymore, depending on when you choose to stop or pause or contemplate. I like the way that once the chair becomes full, it not only gives you the option to rest but sort of forces you to. It makes you stop for a minute. It seems like a lot of your work is about using fast-paced technologies to slow down, or as palliatives. The origami project, a href="http://www.jooyounpaek.com/foldloud.html"iFold Loud/i/a, comes to mind. You actually stitched circuits onto sheets of folded paper, such that a given user's manner of folding would close the circuits and release specific human vocal harmonies. The possible combinations aren't just beautiful to the ear; they're soothing./p/b pThere is that kind of notion./p !--more-- pbBut not, as you were saying, in a practical fashion. More in a fanciful fashion. Like iSelf-Sustainable Chair/i, this object presents a far-fetched way of relaxing, which more interestingly offsets our pace of living than an object we could buy from a store for stress relief./b/p pSome people ask about iPolite Umbrella/i, "So when will we see it on the market?" And I groan, "Oh, I don't really think it would work that well on the market."/p bpI think the fact that you're not distributing them as such also lends to how they function conceptually as art-objects – to their being singular ideas manifest./p/b pYeah. I think it's about the statement. You mentioned the origami work. It reflects some of my personality, but this foldout doesn't really tie into my past work./p pbHow do you mean?/b/p pIt's a very design-oriented work. The object isn't really tied into any context./p pbWell, it's tied into a historical context./b/p pYes, it is tied into a historical context, but not necessarily into the daily mundane experiences that a lot of my other work ties into. So I'm having a hard time connecting it to the other work. iFold Loud/i was more about exploring technology with my personality, in my way. I made it as my ITP thesis project. I could have gone more in the direction of fine art, but I wanted to take the chance to use technology and see where it ended up./p bpBut there's also an everyday reference. I grew up in the States and we didn't make origami, but we would play games with folding paper, like predicting our futures. Even origami is something that is made in Japan as a way to pass the time. So while it's definitely more of a niche reference than those in your other works, I think that there's still a connotation of the everyday. But I agree with you. It is more to the side. I don't think this means that it's more of a design object, though. I think it actually very much engages with contemporary conceptual art strategies by taking a method of folding, an idea of sound production, and the idea of origami as hardware, and drawing an axis between these points. This seems like a very contemporary approach. I couldn't speak to how much it engages with the design world, but I think it's very relevant to contemporary art./p/b pYes, thank you./p centerimg id="image1645" src="http://rhizome.org/imagebase/article/2130/foldoudsmall.gif" alt="foldoudsmall.gif" //centerbr / centeriImage: JooYoun Paek, Fold Loud/i/centerbr / bpIn the text on your website, you describe the work as having a "meta-technological aesthetic." What do you mean by that?/p/b pThe technology isn't hidden. It forms the exposed circuits, so you can actually see how it's working. The technology is bubbling up. It has a different sensibility than most devices, where things are hidden behind a button and you don't know how you trigger the events on the screen./p bpSo given that iFold Loud/i marks something of a departure form previous work, has the stuff you've been making since been more in line with it?/p/b pWhat's interesting is that I'm still working in the way I used to, and Fold Loud is developing as a side-project. For the Eyebeam Fall show, "Untethered," I had two pieces. One was called a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyebeam/2831757646/in/set-72157607128132407/"iNot-Bicycle Cover/i/a, which is a bicycle cover that camouflages your bike. It's a small cover that looks like a pile of garbage bags that you can unfold, pump up, and inflate. The other project was called a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyebeam/2899668716/in/set-72157607128132407/"iNothing In It/i/a. It's a little bag, and when you open it, it releases the sound of objects. When you close it, they disappear. And when you open it again, you hear different sounds. But when you look into the bag, you see that there's nothing in it./p bpAre all the sounds from public, urban space?/p/b pThere are a lot of these sounds. There is also the sound of a ticking clock./p pbWhat informed the sounds that you used?/b/p pI was thinking a lot about this. Should I have the sound of someone telling a story? Should I have the sound of someone singing? I actually tried to minimize that effect and use the sounds of random objects to not convey too much of a specific story. With a story you have to listen from the beginning to the end, but these sounds should make sense anytime you open the bag./p bpAll the sounds are also things that might be heard as the bag is carried around, so it seems appropriate to collapse them into a mobile, personal belonging. It makes it seem like the sounds you hear have actually been collected by the bag./p/b pInteresting./p bpSo I have to ask: how was it practically made, given that you can't see anything inside?/p/b pI ideally wanted everything to be self-contained within the bag, but for this show I had to make it quickly, so the audio system is beneath the pedestal and the bag is made with a zipper sensor. The concept of the piece relates to the idea that what's in the world is only there because of your belief, and if you start to believe in different ways, things will change. So it was about making you recognize the notion of what you’re believing in - that your belief is really creating the world. Nothing else. /pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rhizome-fp/~4/473940998" height="1" width="1"/

Thesis live on Bassculture Radio, Amsterdam [109MB]

Ed. Note: The following is Boing Boing guestblogger Clay Shirky's first post. Clay's traveling today, so I'm posting this one on his behalf. Image above: "Don't believe the Devil, don't beLIEve his book," a CC-licensed photo by Celeste, a Flickr user in Buenos Aires - Argentina. --XJ Every now and again, there is an essay that is so well written, so cleanly expressed, and so spectacularly wrong that it clarifies something you previously understood only dimly. James Gleick's recent advice to the publishing industry, How to Publish Without Perishing, was that for me. Gleick's thesis is that publishers are people who sell objects, and he means this not just as a description of their past, but as strategy for their future as well. He makes much of the book as a thing, noting that we talk about "book lovers", but never "CD lovers", he writes of books in terms of possessing them, and his advice to publishers is to cede speed, relevance, and even popularity to digital businesses, and to shift publishing into reverse: Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it. This proposed Ye Olde-ing the industry makes the choices faced by publishers suddenly seem more urgent. There are book lovers, yes, but there are also readers, a much larger group. By Gleick's logic, all of us who are just readers, everyone who buys paperbacks or trades books after we've read them, everyone who prints PDFs or owns a Kindle, falls out of his imagined future market. Publishers should forsake mere readers, and become purveyors of Commemorative Text Objects. It's the Franklin Mint business model, now with 1000% more words! In the same way the internet has forced newspapers into a 'news vs. paper' moment, the publishing world is in a 'readers vs. book lovers' moment. In this environment, the single most important choice anyone in publishing has to make is this: "How many generations do I want to be in business?" Because hawking Ye Olde Codices to aging connoisseurs is a one-generation business. Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher "To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks." From Aldus Manutius until recently, book lovers have been the most passionate readers. Now they are mostly just the oldest readers. Thanks to digital data, there is a fateful choice to be made between serving lovers of the text and lovers of the page; I think even Manutius would have sided with the readers over the collectors. I hope today's publishers do as well. Previously: Here Comes Clay Shirky (The Changing of the Guestbloggers)...br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=1453de22556064e7a74ac0c73c7a4a5cp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=1453de22556064e7a74ac0c73c7a4a5cp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=1453de22556064e7a74ac0c73c7a4a5c" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

pBlack Friday sales up 3% to $10.6 billion, the smallest gain in three years. ShopperTrak estimates 9.9% fewer shoppers this holiday season. The International Council of Shopping Centers expects a 1% sales increase at U.S. stores for the November-December period. A Gallup Inc. poll says U.S. consumers may spend 29% less on gifts this year. (a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087sid=aBvgyrY3aNPgrefer=home"Bloomberg/a)/p pNumbers for Cyber Monday (online shopping on the first Monday after Thanksgiving) aren't yet available, but current estimates are that Internet sales will be even with last year. (a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_11115641"San Jose Mercury News/a) Nielsen Online said web site visits on Friday were up 10% and eBay was the top destination (Amazon.com was second). Paypal said its number of transactions increased 26% over last year. (a href="http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2008/dec/02/120208-online-retailers-report/?zIndex=18135"San Diego Union Tribune/a)/p pMusic retailers reported weak sales on Black Friday. First-week estimates for big new releases by artists such as Kanye West and Guns N' Roses have been pared down. Big box retailers were down as much as 40% while indie chain Newbury Comics said comp store music sales were down 21% for the last two weeks of November. (a href="http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i632e90144f07ffd6a7649226b4aec061"Billboard.biz/a)/p p(If CD sales were down 25 to 30% on Black Friday, that would be par for the course. Weekly album sales are regularly down 20% year over year since September. Take out a 20 to 30% increase in digital album sales and you're looking at a deficit around 25% or more. The a href="http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2008/11/29/delayedalbums.html"weak release schedule/a can't be helping.)/p pIn a note to investors, Pali Research analysts downplayed strong sales after Thanksgiving. "We do not believe that a strong opening weekend in retail means a strong holiday season for retail. .. In the end, it is hard to predict an entire holiday season based on one weekend of data points and some store checks. However, the data and stores we have seen do not change our thesis that 2008 will be a rough holiday season for (Best Buy). We would continue to avoid the stock, even at historically cheap levels" (a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/shop-talk/2008/12/01/check-out-line-strong-sales-may-equal-weak-profits/"Reuters/a)/p pTNS Retail Forward estimates online retail sales will be up 9% this year (a href="http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2008-11-30-holiday-shopping-bargains_N.htm"USA Today/a)./phr/[music jobs] a href="http://coolfer.jobamatic.com/a/jbb/job-details/43602"The Beggars Group Matador Records is seeking a Paralegal/adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?a=qIX6o"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?i=qIX6o" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?a=5NkkO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?i=5NkkO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?a=prJAO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?i=prJAO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/coolfer/~4/472661921" height="1" width="1"/

Video game consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 (PS3) are going to evolve into "multimedia gateways" and will soon be receiving a lot of video, according to Dallas-based research firm The Diffusion Group (TDG). They argue that when it comes to on-demand video content, the consoles can go toe-to-toe with local cable or satellite TV operators. They are very bullish on the consoles, but not so much on standalone set-top boxes (and there are many) — precisely because such a stance doesn’t involve buying yet another set-top box.

According to TDG, by 2012, roughly 190 million households will use a next-generation game console — of them, some 80 percent will be connected to the Internet, and 75 percent of console-connected households will use video-based services at least a couple of times each week. Another report estimated that Microsoft will make $726 million from its Xbox Live Video Marketplace.

Having covered the technology industry for as long as I have, I take such bold predictions with a Mount Rushmore-sized pinch of salt. But I do agree with the overall thesis that consoles will serve as the center of your living room. We have numerous clues pointing to this.

For instance, Netflix’s service is being built into the Xbox. In addition to 12,000 movies available via Netflix, Microsoft Xbox Live has about 15,000 movies (1,000 of them HD); Microsoft Xbox has HD TV shows available for download as well. Sony has launched its own movie download service for the PS3 platform with over 1,000 movies, and Nintendo is working on its own version of the online video experience.

Despite all these positive signs for the consoles, in my opinion the big push for Internet video in the living room is going to come from embedded systems in the next generation of connected televisions and new Blu-ray DVD players. Where does that leave many of those standalone set-top boxes? Their investors aren’t going to be thrilled by my answer. Or TDG’s bold predictions.