Interface design is most successful when the medium is the message. Here are two examples, polar opposites, that illustrate that principle beautifully:

On the left is a site for Whitevoid, a company that creates interactive installations for museums and events. The site is essentially an interactive sitemap, elegantly exploded in a gently-rotating 3D space. The interface is fluid, responsive, and highly intuitive – effectively selling the company's capabilities, even before you view any of their work.

On the right is a site by writer and performance artist Miranda July.The entire site is a linear series of simple messages, hand-written in dry-erase marker on the author's kitchen appliances. This presentation format is funny, clumsy, and deeply personal – conveying, in just a few clicks, the writer's particular brand of eccentric satire.

The approach of the first is antithetical in nearly every way to the second: polished vs. crude, high-tech vs. low-tech. But in both these cases, the medium delivers the message (Whitevoid = slick tech / Miranda July = quirky wit) so effectively that you get it, instantly and indelibly.

A marine stationed in Iraq, usernamed Dreamcrusher, got bored and started posting some photos on this YayHooray thread.  In spite of shitty software (he's resizing in MS Paint) and long upload times, he's continued to post at regular intervals.

The photos, while not professional in quality, are striking in their earnest and unstudied depiction of everyday Iraq – more so, in fact, because they aren't editorialized by the polish and poise of a professional's work.  Equally interesting are Dreamcrusher's accompanying notes, delivered in spare, unpunctuated prose:

In other posts, he relates how difficult it is to maneuver a camera while wearing a flakjacket, rifle and helmet;  how nice the locals are, except that they keep asking him for weird things like soccer balls and gloves;  how he's learned to "sleep through a small firefight in my humvee."  He signs off with lines like, "well i am going to head off and eat my haliburton dinner."

Dreamcrusher has formed a little fanbase of YayHooray users who await his next upload with bated breath, and who genuinely seem to be concerned for his welfare and safety.  On one occasion, he promises to upload his next batch of photos straight away, then goes silent. Worried YayHoorayers post, "That was 5 hours ago... you think he's okay?"  (He turns back up in a few hours, having taken a break for food.)

In his own way, Dreamcrusher is doing what mass media and the Washington PR machine are failing to do: provide a thoroughly honest, matter-of-fact view of the war, and a sympathetic portrait of the people fighting it.

Here's a brief and wildly over-generalized history of art:

Once upon a time, art had a simple purpose: it imitated life. The Mona Lisa, the self-portraits of Rembrandt, the Death of Marat – pictures of the world, of life. Then art started to veer off course a bit. The Impressionists began to blur the boundary between the depiction and the act of depicting. Then the Cubists started taking some serious liberties with form, the Fauves with color, the Futurists with time. This all came to a head with the Abstract Expressionists, who finally flattened the picture frame and squashed out of it any lingering hint of depiction. (A Pollock isn't a picture of anything, except paint.)

For decades afterward, the art world carried the Abstraction stick up its butt. This meant that the imitation of life wasn't something an "earnest" artist could do anymore. Any type of depiction that followed was of the Campbell soup-can variety: really another kind of abstraction, just on a meta-level. So for a long time, it seemed nobody knew how to depict life anymore, except in a "been-there, done-that" kind of way.

And just in time to save the day, comes Tim Hawkinson.  Emotor, shown above, is a self-portrait sliced into pieces and rigged up to a series of motorized wires. The resulting portrait is in constant motion through a series of captivatingly weird facial expressions. The eyes wink and widen, the lips sneer and smile, the eyebrows arch and flatten, in a fluid and creepy ballet that is an imitation of life, but somehow more than that: it's an imitation of being alive.

Much of Hawkinson's vast and wacky ouevre imitates life, but never in the classical sense. Pentecost  features a series of hanging figures that drum out a syncopated rhythm with their bodies against a massive tree-like structure. Blind spot is another self-portrait, depicting the parts of the artist's own body that he can't see – his face, back, shoulder-blades, and anus – sewn together into a single contiguous surface, forming an entirely new species of creature.  Signature Chair is a plodding and faithful mechanical creature, which tirelessly signs the artist's signature on a piece of paper, drops it on the floor, and starts over with a fresh piece.

None of these pieces are depictions of life in the pre-Abstraction sense, but something altogether new: they explores that weird, wonderful, and genuinely innovative place where the imitation of life becomes something alive in itself.

The Hamptons are gauche and the Catskills are over-touristed. Where can a reflective New Yorker go for some peace and quiet?  Having the sort of temperament that is thrilled by the contemplation of my own mortality (I should have been French), I recommend Woodlawn Cemetery.

Only a 40-minute subway ride from downtown Manhattan, it's a universe away from the city:  400 acres of undulating green hills, century-old trees, and about 300,000 dead people, who are delightfully sedate companions. Visiting on a Saturday afternoon, we literally had the entire place to ourselves, encountering no creatures (living) apart from two wild geese and a red-breasted robin.

Many famous folks are interred here, including Herman Melville, Miles Davis, and Joseph Pulitzer. But the real attraction is not who's buried, but what they're buried in. The profusion of gorgeous mausoleums references ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian architecture, some of which are designed by the likes of John Russell Pope, James Renwick, and the legendary firm of McKim, Mead, and White.

Next weekend, take a good camera, wear comfortable shoes, pack a few granola bars, and head up to Woodlawn (take the 4 train north until you can go no further; it stops right at the cemetery gates).  After a week of urban overload, there's nothing more invigorating than the peace of the dead.

A beautifully-executed site with a powerful message. Titled "Ik zie ik zie wat jij niet ziet" (which translates as "I see I see what you don't see"), this campaign against child neglect and abuse was executed flawlessly by the Dutch agency Achtung!.

I've been documenting the Brooklyn graffiti scene for the past year, and it's full of innovative artists, working in ground-breaking materials and methods. But nobody breaks the paradigm like Leeds artist Paul Curtis, who goes by the tagger alias Moose. The Moose method is to clean the walls he tags – the negative space left behind is his art. (See photo – possibly a reference to that Dylan Thomas poem?)

Authorities are debating what to do with him, as they can't exactly haul him in for cleaning without a permit. "You force people to confront whether or not they like people cleaning walls," he says, "or whether they really have a problem with personal expression."

Talk about the medium being the message. 

The Hon. Richard Posner, known for his defense of First Amendment law in video games, and for his leadership in the field of legal economics, will be delivering a lecture (in avatar form) in the online game, Second Life.  Posner, who will be speaking on the subject of constiutional law in the era of terrorism, will be speaking in the virtual lecture hall along with other scholars in the fields of communication and culture, such as Lawrence Lessig. The event is sponsored by those super nice people at Creative Commons.  My resident avatar's been asleep in storage for a couple of months, but I guess I'll wake her up and buy her a nice new outfit, for this occasion.

Details:
December 7th, 6-8pm Second Life Time (PST)
Center Auditorium in Kula
To reserve a seat, email jennifer@creativecommons.org

this woman, Claudia Mitchell, is the world's first recipient of a bionic arm. developed by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, the process involves re-wiring the patient's own nervous system. nerves in Mitchell's shoulder, which once communicated with her arm and hand, are re-directed to healthy muscle in her chest. surface electrodes attached to the chest then trasmit the nervous signals from her brain to the robotic arm, allowing her to control it simply by thinking. sensory feedback is so sophisticated that Mitchell can feel variances in pressure as well as temperature.

yeah, this was pretty much the most amazing thing i've heard all year.

yes, i like games, and i'm inseparable from my psp. but i've never been the mmorpg type  –  the idea that vast communities of human beings live the most thrilling moments of their lives through their avatars makes me a little sad.

but second life is intriguing. a 3d virtual world, populated by digital avatars, SL is unusual in that it is a real economy. using a conversion system that turns game currency into US dollars, members can transact with one another, buy and sell "real" estate, goods, and services within the SL world.  most importantly, the game protects the intellectual property rights of its users – anything you create in SL (the game provides a built-in object editor tool)  legally belongs to you, not to the game's creators, linden lab.  it's yours to develop, use – or sell, either in the game, or on one of  many external community sites. 

the notion that the ethereal stuff of creativity can materialize into a transactable object is anathema to classical economics – there is no free lunch, the capitalist adage goes. you can't make something (marketable) out of nothing. but the vast virtual marketplace of SL has turned that truism on its head.  just as video games have gleefully violated the laws of physics, are they now leading the way to a revolution in economics?

this rabbit knows more than you do
roll over, ambient orb.  the ambient  rabbit is here. he's way smarter, and squeal-inducingly cute. created by the french company violet, and bearing the cumbersome name "nabaztag" (yeah, they'll need to re-brand for the US market), this little guy wirelessly transmits information about the weather, traffic jams, incoming e-mails, etc. his indicators are a belly full of softly glowing colored light (you can program colors to mean different things) and ears that wiggle (also programmable to signify different types of incoming data). he also speaks messages out loud in a variety of voices you can choose from. (link courtesy of alexis.)