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Washington D.C.-based musicians Bluebrain created an album that is actually a location-aware iPhone app called The National Mall (out today via Lujo records). Open the app while on the National Mall in Washington, DC and the music reacts to how you move about your surroundings. As reported on Wired UK,

approach a lake and a piano piece changes into a harp. Or, as you get close to the children’s merry-go-round, the wooden horses come to life and you hear sounds of real horses getting steadily louder based on your proximity.

We have previously looked at augmented reality art on this blog, such as Jon Rafman’s compelling Street View images,  Google’s Street Art View and Clement Valla’s “Postcards from Google Earth, Bridges” project. The National Mall is an augmented album, imploding digital media with your specific movements within physical space. The listener-turned-cyborg’s experience of the album comes in the form of the codetermining interaction of media and physical space.

The artists will release their next location-aware augmented albums for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park followed by another set to the length of Rt1 in California.

The Cyborgology Editors Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey are the guests on the latest Office Hours podcast. We chat about the Theorizing the Web 2011 conference we put on, as well as the Cyborgology blog. Listen here.

Google Maps has a new tool to help the consumers of its popular maps also be producers. Users-generated improvements will be a benifit to many, but probably most to Google itself. While the Google video below paints all of this in light of personal or civic empowerment (“leave your mark”), we should also understand that this move towards us becoming “prosumers” of these maps is also about the company taking advantage of our free labor in hopes of earning greater profits. Does that bother anyone?

In his Beyond the Beyond blog (hosted by WIRED magazine),  cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling recently made some comments on my post, “Cyborgs and the Augmented Reality they Inhabit.”

Here’s how he describes the piece:
[…] an argument about the definition of Augmented Reality and the definition of Cyborgs, until you can get ‘em to click together like puzzle pieces. But so much debris is left on the floor when they’re done with the theory tin-shears, that the debris looks more interesting than the remainder.
Though it may appear quite critical, I actually agree with Sterling on this point—authors on this blog have rendered augmented reality (and the cyborgs that inhabit it) quite banal.  Or, rather, the techno-saturated world that has emerged in the 21st Century appears to us far more mundane than the exotic dystopian imagery that enveloped the famous cyberpunk novels of yesteryear.  The fantasy of ocular implants and digital immersion have given way to the seemingly unremarkable reality of smartphones and Facebook. Through the “theory tin-shears” futurist art of the past becomes the sociology of the present.  But, the study of present realities will never be as exciting as the imagining of future possibilities. more...

Shepard Fairey, that designer most famous for creating (stealing?) the iconic Obama image, has designed the cover for the new edition of Marshall McLuhan’s famous book, The Medium is the Massage. Fairey is known for creating art that often makes reference to the way propaganda is used by the powerful to control the masses into obeying. In fact, Fairey’s famous “OBEY” graphic is a reference to John Carpenter’s brilliant 1988 film about consumer culture, They Live (plot: with the help of special sunglasses, advertisements are revealed as actually reading, “obey,” “consume” and so on). Be it advertising, print, television or social media, McLuhan’s points remain important.

“Electrical Information Devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know”. more...

Mozilla Firefox add-on MafiaaFire Redirector

Wired’s Threat Level Blog is carrying a story about the Department of Homeland Security demanding that Mozilla take down an add-on that lets users easily redirect to sites that have been given a take-down notice due to copyright infringement. Maybe censorship is too strong a word, but it certainly appears as such. Mozilla agrees and is requesting a reason for the takedown. The government has yet to respond.

Via WIRED.

The Facebook “like” button is only one year old, but has already become ubiquitous across the web, and the globe [via Facebook]. Theorizing the effect of this is becoming an important new project.

Zizek writes this week in Inside Higher Ed about how cloud computing is a space dominated by two or three companies (read: Apple and Google). He states,

“cloud computing offers individual users an unprecedented wealth of choice — but is this freedom of choice not sustained by the initial choice of a provider, in respect to which we have less and less freedom? Partisans of openness like to criticize China for its attempt to control internet access — but are we not all becoming involved in something comparable, insofar as our “cloud” functions in a way not dissimilar to the Chinese state?”

Is a computing market dominated by a few private companies really similar to the “Great Firewall” (officially, the “Golden Shield”) of China?

Project Cascade from the New York Times seeks to visualize how news stories break and are disseminated online. By illustrating how stories explode through the social web it provides a glimpse into our highly networked information society.

Would you be willing to give up your DNA data as part of an identification system? Cool design project by Jamie Thoms.

Product Designer Jamie Thoms has released a new public engagement project which invites the general public into the world of science and identity. The D.N.A Stamper, offers the public the chance to contemplate the impact of granting someone access to their biological data. The aim of his project is to challenge the public to think about how much they value their identity. Who should have access to this information. Your partner? Family? The police?

The D.N.A. Stamper simulates extracting a sample of the users D.N.A. and uses this to stamp a consent form, to verify the user’s identity and offer tissue for hypothetical testing. The owner of the sample will have to fill in the consent form expressing how much of the information in the D.N.A. the holder will be privy to.

Mr. Thoms has taken inspiration from companies such as “23andMe” which process peoples D.N.A. for a fee and films such as “GATTACA” which offer an extreme view of where we could end up if the use of the information contained in D.N.A. becomes public.  more...