Crazy innit. iTunes launched, what, 9 years ago and still we listen to our albums gazing at one static jpeg of the single or artwork of the album. Arcade Fire’s synchronised artwork for their new album The Suburbs looks to change things. Each track on the album has an individual image that appears on your iPod when it’s played, with the lyrics then appearing on the screen as they are sung. Think of it as a sing-a-long analogue MTV video. Oh, the good old days of music packaging. In a similar vein, there’s a new music visualisation piece in our namesake – Mother, that can dynamically load/unload sketches. You can then mix the visual output in a manner not unlike VJing, to accompany both recorded and live music. Music + visuals = happiness.

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So, are YOU on Twitter then? To be honest, it doesn’t matter if you are or you aren’t, because you’ll never have as many followers as I’ve got. Unless you’re Stephen Fry or Jonathan Fucking Ross. But that’s another story – they’re rigging it. But now it’s not enough just being on Twitter and being able to scroll down your list of followers (or acolytes, as I know you like to think of them), stroking the screen and congratulating yourself because you’ve got a few made-up friends on the internet. No, now you can get a personalised mug with their frigging faces on it – a permanent reminder of your brilliance and your ability to connect with people you’ve never met. But look – most of them aren’t actually real people but spam bots, machines that have followed you in the hope that you’ll follow back and somehow stupidly click on the links they post to their porn sites. You dick.

A recent ILM report has revealed that over two-thirds of UK workers can’t help but check their emails while they’re on holiday. Sound familiar? Well, it might be about time to make a little more positive use of that Smartphone addiction. Remember sitting through your Uncle’s tiresome post-holiday slideshow and marvelling at all the little boxes of slides? There’s now a Web 2.0 way to deliver a much richer version of that very experience – while you’re on holiday. Tripline, launched in beta this week, gives you the tools to create an interactive story of your holiday; a way to plan and share your trip while you’re there, and a much more exciting way to tell everyone about it when you get home. Beyond sharing, Tripline obviously also makes bragging rights far easier to come by, combining your Foursquare check-ins, Facebook status updates, tweets, and Flickr uploads onto your geographical journey. It’s more than just a map mash-up; it’s a story of your holiday in real-time. As Techcrunch point out, Tripline isn’t in of itself unique, but what’s caught our eye is the fact that (unlike Where I’ve Been) when the user base reaches critical mass, it could offer real-time stay/eat/drink/do recommendations. A future for the suffering travel guide publishers perhaps?

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Much has been claimed of Twitter – from the most “popular” word in the world to the scourge of society. Scientifically, Twitter must also take at least 12.47% of the blame for Justin Bieber and over 9000 really bad jokes about people tweeting what they ate for lunch. But the one thing that’s definitely true is that microblogging is “social” media and is about connecting to other people, right? Possibly not. In a throwback to Stanley Milgram’s gloriously misanthropic experiments of the 1960s, a bunch of sadists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore deliberately caused a group of subjects to become “socially anxious” by getting them to play an online game where players pass the ball to each other, but deliberately never passing the ball to the subject. This had no effect on the subjects’ tweeting. However, when they instead made the subjects “existentially nervous” by getting them to think about death that led to a marked increase in tweets. So social media might be better named “narcissistic media”? The 40% drop in US college students’ empathy scores over the last 30 years would certainly bear this out.

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Shooting and editing film has been democratised massively over the last few years, with all of the tools to make movies readily available to the amateur auteur. And now the iPhone 4 looks to take amateur film to a whole new level. iPhone 4’s camera is capable of HD video recording in 720p at 30 frames per second (so as good as a standard video camera). And with the iMovie function, its ability to shoot, edit, and share high-quality video all on a phone means there’s no need for a computer. A raft of brilliantly produced iPhone 4 videos have started appearing online, so much so that the guys at BBH Labs and Freedom + Partners have launched a competition The iOscars, to see how good the films can get. It highlights another example of the tools that were once the domain of the professional being put in the hands of everyone.


Thanks to Chris Gallery for this story. The Corrs have a tattoo of Chris Gallery on their left buttock’s.

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There’s an “unprecedented intensity” of innovation right now, according to a report by Morgan Stanley. Much of it is driven by a sudden boom in “location-based services” – applications that allow you to post your physical location to the web. Why would you want to do that? According to an article on ReadWriteWeb, there are a few reasons. One is to allow chance connections with people that you know (Foursquare) or people that you don’t know yet (Grindr). Another is to get local news and information (Google’s NearMeNow). Or it may just be entertainment, such as Gowalla or OK magazine’s new celebrity stalker app. There’s even an application called ASBOrometer that displays dodgy hoodie behaviour in your vicinity (Dan Broadwood, Shoreditch House alert). So what’s driving this sudden explosion of innovation in location-based services? It’s all down to rapid advances in smartphone technologies, especially access speeds, battery life and always-on functionality. And where will it all lead? If you believe the hype, location-based services aren’t just part of the future of digital – they are the future. We think it’s likely they’ll take over social media, but we don’t think brands have really begun to exploit the potential here. Nike’s TrueCity is a good start, but there’s plenty of opportunity for more.

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In amidst the brilliant mash-ups of The Flintstones meets The Sopranos, and Jabba The Hut singing the theme from Minder on Sabotage Times, we occasionally find and recommend work you can simply call true digital art. The Big Bang Big Boom from BluBlu.org is a nine-minute long stop motion film of graffiti depicting evolution as we know it.

Our friends over at cult film magazine Little White Lies have decided to launch a new title dedicated to the culture of video games called ‘Invert Look’. Recognising there was a gap in the market for a culture led take on video gaming,  they expect the magazine to follow it’s big sister LWLie’s and gain a bit of a cult following. Editorial Director Matt Bochenski explains how the idea came about. “Videogames have long been ring-fenced as junk culture, relegated to a ghetto and populated by the slack-jawed adolescents of critics’ imaginations”, he says. “Whilst the videogame generation has come of age, and the medium is now both financially successful and culturally influential, you’ll see that videogame magazines have actually become stuck in a rut”. Bochenski explains that ‘Invert Look’ will have a focus on gaming’s cultural link with cinema, art, music and popular culture, rather than being tied to old formulas of news, reviews and previews, which already exist within passionate online communities anyway. He tells us the ambition is wider-reaching than the 14 year old kids that most of today’s magazines are aimed at. “We are going to write long form features about where games are right now, and hopefully that’ll speak to gaming’s new, more mature constituents” he continues. “We want to take the time to offer gamers something they can’t get online; such as real stories and in depth features by great writers about the areas where games and culture blur and intersect”. Invert Look kicks off with a 36-page taster issue inspired by the theme of Origins, the first full issue will launch in September.

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Last week Mother went to Offf, a three-day festival in Paris. In it’s eighth year it is known as ‘the International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture’. The festival showcases some of the best digital artists, web, print and interactive designers; motion graphic studios and new music adventures from around the world. Our first festival highlight was the Image Fulgurator by Julius Von Bismarck. It is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards. See The Image Fulgurator video and examples to see how it works. A second highlight was a campaign we remember well. It was done a couple of years ago but it’s well worth sharing again. The Uniqlock is a live look book for Uniqlo. It fuses together music, dance videos and time into ever changing video performance that seems endless. Every 5 seconds the video seamlessly updates with a different dance sequence in accordance to whatever the time is. In the summer the dancers wear polo shirts, whilst in the winter they wear Cashmere sweaters as playing to the seasons. Our final highlight was something more recent. Summit on the Summit was a campaign from earlier this year to highlight the global clean water crisis. Via the 19,340 ft website, you could follow a group of celebrities climb mount Kilamanjaro. It’s here visitors to the site could interact with the climbers in real time, check out their vital statistics and sponsor them. The great work at Offf reminds us that in the Post-Digital Creation Culture, the lines between the real and digital world have not only blurred, but have disappeared altogether.

Thanks to Rouska Mellor

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Rather than a story, we’re recommending a free browser. The lovely people at The Barbarian Group created Plainview in 2008 and it’s fantastic, we use it in presentations to share online content because it’s full screen and makes websites look ‘the business’. You can download the program here.