Awful Handwriting
Ad Ramblings and Web GuffArchive for Events
The Invisible Festival
Spotify, we heart thee. Not content with making music shiny, legal and free again, the little buggers are now inviting you to host a mini-festival in your own home, with special time-sensitive playlists that work just like the schedules for festival mainstages. Utterly nonsensical but it’s absolutely smacking of Innocent loveliness, and it’s spot on.
The Extraordinaries
I like people that are clever with the iPhone. One day, I’d like to be one of those people, but for now, these guys will have to do. Meet ‘The Extraordinaries’ – it’s along the same kind of vein as that clever little word scrambling human-checker that you get on web forms, that inserts a scrambled word AND a word from a scanned book for you to check and correct, helping the transcription process one noun at a time.
Understanding that we’re all baseline wankers that only have time for ourselves, this app turns the concept of volunteering upside down by letting you fill your most boring moments with a little bit of goodness. Just fire up the app and partake in any of the micr0-activities that are listed, like adding relevant tags to an image from a museum collection, and add it to the community pool. One little act, multiplied by every user, spreading the work out between thousands and getting it done just as effectively.
The M&S ad of posters
This isn’t just any ordinary German Fish shop poster.
This is a live, look-how-goddamn-metaphorically-fresh-our-produce-is German Fish shop poster.
Mm.
Surgery Live
An ambitious and characteristically daring experiment for Channel 4 this week, as a series of serious surgeries are to be broadcast live through the channel over four consecutive evenings. If their past dalliances with controversy are anything to go by they’ll score a large audience simply by tapping into our inevitable morbid curiosity – we’ve all seen surgeries performed through countless medical documentaries, so surely the only real attraction for a ‘live’ performance is to gawp just in case it goes wrong?
Regardless, I’ll be watching (for pretty much all the reasons above, too) – and perhaps joining in, since they’re justifying their live broadcast on the surface through a level of interaction brought to life through twitter and facebook. Viewers will be able to ask questions to the surgeons as they work, to gain unprecedented insight into the individual surgical processes.
Tuesday’s op might be a bit too far though – brain surgery on a conscious patient. Whoever’s volunteered to climb on the camera-slab for that one has some real balls. It’s one thing to question a professional about his work in a live environment, but to involve the person with a chunk of brain exposed? That’s a little too much ‘live’ for my liking*.
Visit Surgery Live for programme details
*I’ll still be watching (shamelessly)
Doritos Dodgeball
It’s been ages since I’ve seen anything done with live interactive video – nothing since the brilliant Absolut Machines – but Doritos have given it a fair crack here by letting you pelt total, exhausted strangers with an onslaught of rubber balls via a giant remote controlled cannon. Six of the buggers, infact – so if you’re smart enough to get five mates on there at the same time, everything goes a bit darwin as you throw together to pick off the stringy ones.
It looks like they’re struggling for teams to fill the full month schedule they have planned – so if you’ve got a few mates and a spare afternoon, throw them an email and you’re probably in with a good chance of getting infront of the cannons for a chance at a holiday in Vegas, too. Or bruises.
Listening Post
“By pulling text quotes from thousands of unwitting contributors’ postings, Listening Post allows you to experience an extraordinary snapshot of the internet and gain a great sense of the humanity behind the data. The artwork is world renowned as a masterpiece of electronic and contemporary art and a monument to the ways we find to connect with each other and express our identities online.”
I’m already a big fan of the Science Museum in London, but after a friend told me about an exhibit I’d missed on my many visits I made time to go and see it with Mauro today after we left DraftFCB (lovely people, hope to be seeing them again soon).
Bloody Hell.
It’s virtually impossible to describe and so dark & fluid that photography and video simply spoils it, so I’m not going to tell you anything about it other than that you need to get the fucksticks over there and sit in with it for about 30 minutes. It’s simply mesmerising. Go now.
The Real Hotelicopter
Remember the Hotelicopter? Well, after all the japery that got quite a lot of people going, the real one has launched today – and it’s a lastminute.com meets comparethemarket.com holiday and travel search engine thingy. Fail.
Weird thing about this is, they’ve conjured up a gimmick that got a massive amount of traffic through to their website on and around April 1st – but fucked it right up by running a weeklong countdown before the real service launched today. No-one’s looking at the URL anymore, because there’s no giant flying hotel to gawp at – so the whole thing feels a bit pointless. Why didn’t it launch ON April 1st?
Pack of Fools
Waitrose launches the Pinana…
Alpine Legend hits the 360…
….and the Hotelicopter plummets. Millions Die. Tsk.
Wanted Ads
Had a fun day at the Wanted Ads competition yesterday – stressful, but bumped into a few familiar faces and had a laugh with the brief. Look! There’s Wal! Wal wot’s from the internets! Starstruck twice in the same week, aren’t I a lucky chap.
Edit – Apparently we got shortlisted (top 5) so that’s a bonus, but they’ve gone and lost the work we put in so we’ve got to remake it for the online vote. So less bonus.
Earth Hour AR – Wunderman
Hold the Earth in the palm of your hand (literally) with this great bit of AR. This is the first chance I’ve had to personally go hands on with augmented reality tech, since everything I’ve come across until now has required a software download that I couldn’t get on OSX, or had a browser implementation that needed the code to have come from somewhere else. Not this time!
Print the AR code, slam it infront of your webcam and the world is your palm-sized oyster.
Link here.
