Rather than having your ashes scattered when you die, why not press them into a vinyl record instead? This is new service from a company called And Vinyly, created by a former 90s techno artist who thought he was “getting a bit old”. And Vinyly offers to turn your remains into your favourite track, a recording of yourself or specially composed music from their music production team and band ‘House of Fix’. And Vinyly also has a design team and in-house artist to create bespoke album covers. This follows artist Nadine Jarvis’ concept for a set of pencils made from the carbon of a cremated human body. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind. And similarly, Dutch Designer Wieki Somers who has turned human ashes into “useful objects” including a toaster and vacuum cleaner. The idea behind all this is about rethinking the way we commemorate people and dispose of human bodies.

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Just as Intel’s Creators Project sort to break the artist out of the gallery, we are seeing the rise of urban interventions which bring art to the masses and help us to reconnect with our everyday surroundings. This isn’t another group of Bansky wannabes, but urban intervention with a certain sophistication. French street artist Arno Piroud is just one who is out there putting fiction into reality. After you see his film, you begin to see the inspiration for the gong-winning Fun Theory Volkswagon campaign. Similarly, the recent Wish Come True Festival over in Toronto by Friends With You, encouraged people to come out and play to bring to life their rainbow city of totems, magical mushrooms, oversized bouncy houses and inflatable characters. Read more about all this here.

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Ever wondered what it’s like hanging around up in Heaven? The bloke in charge of these freaky paintings – “Celestial Soul Paintings”, obviously has. It’s simple stuff – send him a photo of yourself and he’ll fanny about with it, adding rainbows, unicorns and dolphins and making fucking laser beams shoot out of your eyes and stuff. Oh yeah, he’ll probably want a shit-load of your money as well. To be honest, he hasn’t got a frigging clue what it’s like up here. The truth of it is that you can’t even float down the street without being hassled by Jimi Hendrix pulling stunts on his BMX as he tries to impress Yootha Joyce. Don’t see any of that in these shitty paintings.

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Welcome to “travelling like a human”. Sounds appealing doesn’t it? Ten seconds on Airbnb and we were already hooked. Airbnb is like a slicker version of Craigslist with places to stay everywhere we’d like to go. It allows anyone from average joes to stately homes to rent out their extra space to visitors. Listings include crashing on someone’s sofa to renting a castle or treehouse for your trip. Sites like Airbnb (and similar smaller services like istopover.com and crashpadder.com) are turning the travel industry on its head. Sadly, rather than up their game in the face of competition, legislative action and the health & safety police has begun to protect the established travel industry. We love the idea of sites like Airbnb, which bring value, inspiration, and homeliness to the business of tourist accommodation, so we’ll be behind the NY sub-letters movement to call Gov. Paterson for support. This is yet another example of the growing trend for going-it-alone, successful young entrepreneurs creating services that we really wish we’d thought of.

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Kraftwerk hid behind their robots, but increasingly the robots themselves are the stars. It started with big dog, the military robot that looked like two half-dogs stuck together, acquiring 10m hits on YouTube due to its disturbingly life-like movements. Big dog is an unusual case of Western robot celebrity – the vast bulk come from Japan. There are the expected cute robots, the less expected violinist robots, and then the incredibly creepy robots, which have been trying too hard to look human and fallen deep into the uncanny valley. The US has put up a good fight with the slightly pedestrian facial expressions robot, but for sheer WTF-ness Japan was always going to win out with the impressive pen-spinning, dribbling and ball-throwing robot hands and the very well-dressed Aiko, who has Santa, Sexy Nurse and Victorian nymphet outfits, among others.

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Did you enter a piece of film in the Life in a Day project this week? It all got a bit exciting last Sunday with people all around the world filming a snippet from their life that could make it into the world’s first user generated feature length documentary. YouTube has partnered with Ridley Scott and Slumdog director Kevin Macdonald to create the film that will premier at Sundance Film Festival next year. Life in a Day aims to create an intimate collage of life in a single day around the world, incorporating footage shot by YouTube users globally from last Sunday, July 24th. “Life in a Day is a time capsule that will tell future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, 2010. It is a unique experiment in social filmmaking, and what better way to gather a limitless array of footage than to engage the world’s online community,” says Macdonald. Although he loves the fact he is in the hands of the amateur, the key creative guideline is that these clips are non-fiction and have a real sense of intimacy to them. You can follow the journey of the film on YouTube over the next few months and with professionals like MacDonald and Scott involved it will be worth watching.

Over the last few years, local independent cinemas have started screening “Then And Now” archive films, showing local people and places from bygone years. Outside of London, these screenings are becoming wildly popular, and it’s not your usual Art-House crowd, but families, grandparents with their grandkids, and people that would normally steer clear of all that pretentious foreign muck. Local cinemas are using these screenings to engage their local communities, forming profitable creative partnerships with local government, schools, youth clubs, libraries, and museums. It’s a lovely way of bringing together local neighbourhoods and connecting people through a sense of shared history. And yet, amidst the blizzard of transience that often passes for community in London, this trend has largely passed us by. Last year the Independent Cinema Office pulled together The Big Smoke, a peripatetic programme of archive material showing London between 1896 and 1945. These films are currently doing the rounds of London’s boroughs, although the audience seems to be the rather closeted and self-regarding Art-House crowd. The screenings don’t seem to have attracted the same diversity or engagement of audience that has been seen in the regions. New strategies will need to be developed to engage with these new audiences in an urban context. A festival of Edwardian Shoreditch anyone? Well, until then, enjoy these films from a lost London.

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The phrase, “It’s like something from Brass Eye/Day Today/Chris Morris”, has long since passed the 70’s/80’s references to Monty Python as the benchmark for surreal news. Most things that are compared to the grand master of modern news-media manipulation usually fall a bit short. Gazza arriving at the Raoul Moat hunt in Rothbury, however, didn’t. This surpassed Geri Halliwell being a UN anti-landmine campaigner and Beckham Spice being a design consultant for Range Rover. This was Gazza, live on Real radio giving almost clear instructions – albeit, through a fog of lager – on how he had arrived to find and save Raoul Moat or ‘Moaty’ as he claimed to know him. Having listened to the events unfurl live last Friday, Sabotage Times spent Saturday morning transcribing the conversation. The highlight being Gazza’s care package for Moaty. The bizarre thing is there’s a good chance Gazza’s intervention could well have been more productive than what the 250 armed officers and RAF Tornado managed to achieve. It cost £4m to find a bloke and have him kill himself. Gazza would have done it for the price of his taxi from Newcastle and the expenses for the bread, chicken, NUFC jacket, fishing rod, dressing gown and lager which he’d bought along as supplies for the Fugitive.


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The latest issue of London underground youth-pop culture magazine The latest issue of London underground youth-pop culture magazine Super Super is emblazoned with a cover that broadcasts ‘The Rise of Generation Cult’. Read on and apparently this new generation is going to react to the ‘palpable restlessness in the air’ and is all too aware that we and indeed the planet are on ‘ borrowed time’ and that a ‘change has gotta come’. The magazine article goes on to reconcile a breakdown of the cultural economy with the real one and predicts the last of the youth culture movements whose evolutionary glory is crowned when they become a section in Topshop. So does this mean a retreat underground? Not necessarily. They think ‘Generation Cult’ will bring new wave of cultural shifts and trends that will be about subtlety, association and consideration. No more ‘me statements’ but an ear and eye for the collective mood. Generation Cult is over being angry, not out of apathy but because of a wider global awareness. And that’s because at its most positive the ‘cultish’ provokes a sense of attention to detail, emotion, touch, passion, faith, connection, experience community, belonging and perhaps in equal measure positive exclusion i.e., ‘we won’t stand for that anymore’.
This isn’t just the stuff of pop culture magazines either. Findings by trend consultancy The Future Laboratory offer interesting parallels. Their 2010 Retail report cite community values, preference for the local, the climate, ethics, quality, and friends and family as rising concerns for consumers. At Mother we’ve pondered what might Generation Cult mean For Brands. Undoubtedly it will mean earning access, and access via some cultural ‘off-roading’. There will be no bluffing. It will help to have friends on the inside.

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The Preserving Virtual Worlds Project is a research project by librarians at the University of Illinois in the US to archive dozens of famous computer games. Due to complete in August, the programs they’ve had to archive go back over four decades and include the 1993 version of Doom, various editions of World of Warcraft, and MIT’s Spacewar! Circa 1962. The major project activities have included developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life. Project coordinator Jerome McDonough told Ars Technica why the project was important. “In the United States, we have two thirds of American households as active gamers. This is what people are doing with a significant amount of their time, and if people in the future are going to understand what this society is like, they need to understand gaming. And how people gamed”. The team are still working on how and where they will be preserved, but you can see their intent. On the web we have the IMDB a database for movies, YouTube and millions of photo libraries document culture through the lens of a camera, whilst iTunes is home to billions of songs. So why should video games not have a place to live on online, where we are able to access the wonderful worlds, characters and levels of video games that have played such a central part of popular culture in the past 40 years.


Thanks to Neil Bennett

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