The Marine Environmental Research Institute (MERI) is hiring someone with writing, technical and graphics skills at the MERI Center for Marine Studies in Blue Hill, Maine. Meanwhile this Tuesday the Bangor Chamber of Commerce is showcasing business advice from L. L. Bean, Black Dinah Chocolatiers, and yes, Shipyard Brewing Company.
Point-and-shoot cameras and the music industry are dying, pundits say. So what’s to come? Pundits have the answer for that too–in fact they have a whole fancy infographic for it.
California-based bamboo supplier and renewable material promoter CaliBamboo offers free materials to the best project, and last month NMD alumnus Chris Bagley bagged the prize for his bamboo ski capstone.
The Vermont Lake Monsters, to be exact, a Minor League baseball team located in Burlington. And the Boston Red Sox are looking for interns for their TV and Video Production department.
UMaine New Media graduate Chris Bagley stepped outside of the box in 2009 when he switched from a Web-based capstone to start a local business premised on building environmentally responsible skis. The do-it-yourselfer built his own ski press in his garage and began turning out prototypes–and turning heads on the slopes. As the Bangor Daily News reports, this will be the first season his skis will be available to the general public, custom-built for both East Coast skiing conditions and to customer specifications.
Oct 172010
Fairly awesome music video for Charlotte Gainsbourg’s “Heaven Can Wait” featuring Beck. Definitely surreal, in the full-on, Rene Magritte sense of the word. The director, Keith Schofield, has some other, similarly good vids out there, such as this one for Chromeo’s “Don’t Turn the Lights On”.
Oct 152010
William Gibson’s last three novels (starting with Pattern Recognition back in 2003) are essential reading, in my opinion, for anybody who’s into New Media these days. They’re all set in the modern day, though the characters are decidedly sci-fi– hackers, marketing execs (hackers of a sort), graphic designers, fashion designers, filmmakers, and so on–generally controllers and creators of information.
So, on one level these books (and I sincerely recommend you start with Pattern Recognition) serve as commentary on our jacked-in, post 9/11, etc., society, but on quite another, more immediate–and I think gratifying–level Gibson just uses these themes as an occasion to produce some incredibly focused, almost morbidly precise writing. The density of his prose can be a little daunting at first, but once you get into the swing of things it’s quite good. A little vacuous at times, definitely show-offish at others, but on the whole simply delightful.
A bit like wine-tasting perhaps–the kind where you have to spit out the wine after a few seconds. It’s ridiculously good sometimes–the prose seems almost calibrated to induce a kind of lyrical hypersensitivity in the reader–but on the whole it lacks heart, and leaves one feeling not a little empty.
Reviews:
P.S. If you’re into fashion, Gibson’s descriptions are basically candy. Finely textured, gunmetal-black candy.
Oct 152010
Hello,
My name is Dennis St. Pierre, I am an MFA student in the Intermedia Program here at the University of Maine.
I am announcing a new light hearted, humorous and informative voice opposed to the Tea Party Movement. Everything is explained below in a press release I wrote.
We are still adding content on a daily basis to our site, especially the intelligence, (aren’t we all) and there are lot’s of products that are not in our online store yet.
Hopefully everything will be completed soon. None the less, it is time to announce.
So please visit our site, purchase goods in our effort to stand up to the Tea Baggers and fight for our country while at the same time raising money and awareness for important causes. Help us go viral and spread the call.
Any advice, feedback, links to great information and content you think would be appropriate to add to our site, would be greatly appreciated.
I hope life finds you all well. I wish you all great happiness.
Dennis St.Pierre
Hello Everyone,
I am Dennis St. Pierre, an ordinary worker, a student, an artist and most important a citizen! I am a Perturbed Passionate Patriotic Pacifist (say that 4 x fast) who is tired of the high jacking of our Democratic Republic by the Tea Party and feel it’s time to do something about it. So I and some Friends, have created the NOT TEA (yes naughty) Party. We have decided to fight back using humor, intelligence and common sense.
Like most of you, we have little time to go to meetings and assemblies, coffee party’s etc. We are so busy just staying afloat. But that doesn’t mean we have nothing to say and the time to speak up is passing us by.
By not voicing our opposition, by remaining silent and complacent, we are allowing a possible takeover of our government and ultimately our country. This is the work of the ultra wealthy and the extremely misinformed in the guise of “Patriots”, who call themselves the “Tea Party”.
It is through simple acts of defiance that we can defeat this opposition. We all know the power of marketing; we all know how powerful a few words can be. We all can defeat this rhetoric filled and misinformed group and take our country back.
How? We fight back without malice, but instead armed with humor, common sense and strong intelligence as our weapons, We take simple actions like that of wearing a T-shirt, placing a bumper sticker on our car, placing a sign on our lawn to be our voice when we don’t feel like direct confrontation. We take time to gain knowledge by reading and debate. Suddenly, you gain strength, armed with the knowledge of being one of many. Suddenly you feel strong enough to stand up and confront the bullies directly.
We believe as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. believed that it is through many little acts of non violence and intelligent defiance that true power prevails. These acts include the use of Humor, Knowledge and Good Will.
That being said; we are attempting to give you the means to defeat this takeover. We have created a website www.notteacompany.com or www.notteaparty.com . It is being updated constantly with News, A Library, Links, Cartoons, Humorous Videos, a place to exchange knowledge, as well as a Mercantile where you can buy products to voice your displeasure of the Tea Party. Products with humorous double entendre rally cries! “I’m NOT TEA”, “Sooooo NOT TEA”, “NOT TEA & NICE”, “It’s Nice 2 B Naugh-Tea” and many others that support the “NOT TEA PARTY” idea. We will soon have “Wicked Not Tea Coffee” as well. 15% of all profits go to NON PROFITS.
So, I hope you will go to our website and our store and become part of a “Wicked Not Tea Party”. So laugh, be informed and perform acts of Good Will all while being NOT TEA!!!
Sincerely,
Dennis St. Pierre
The NOT TEA COMPANY
For more info please contact me via email at notteacompany@yahoo.com
“Remember…… try to be good and if that’s impossible, Be reeeaaalllly bad and tell me how good it was!!!! 
”
“Imagine” john lennon
Giga Pudding – Cannibalized from Boingboing, natch. I thought this a rather awesome example of advertising as art. And btw, does this pudding come in a bucket or something?
Mmm… Bucket of pudding… [Homer Simpson salivating noises]…
Sure, you can sign up for courses at the online Khan Academy like Bill Gates says you should. But Khan just teaches stuff you can already find at college–he’s not going to help you remix a song or write a great tweet. Enter Wired University’s “21st-century course catalog full of tools you need now.” Well, it’s more a curriculum in search of a forward-thinking provost to implement it.
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/PeoDifR2X2I/
It’s the 21st century. Knowing how to read a novel, craft an essay, and derive the slope of a tangent isn’t enough anymore. You need to know how to swim through the data deluge, optimize your prose for Twitter, and expose statistics that lie. In the following pages, you’ll find our updated core curriculum, which fills in the gaps of your 20th-century education with the tools you need now. Call it the neoliberal arts: higher learning for highly evolved humans.
COURSE LISTINGS 1. Statistical Literacy Making sense of today’s data-driven world. 2. Post-State Diplomacy Power and politics, sans government. 3. Remix Culture Samples, mashups, and mixes. 4. Applied Cognition The neuroscience you need. 5. Writing for New Forms Self-expression in 140 characters. 6. Waste Studies Understanding end-to-end economics. 7. Domestic Tech How to use the world as your lab.
And then there’s Sal Khan’s Academy. Good thing he doesn’t give grades or notice if you’re late to class–I’d hate to earn the Wrath of Khan.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/08/29/0456229/Bill-Gates-Enrolls-His-Kids-In-Khan-Academy?from=rss via Byline theodp writes “At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who’s been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. ‘This guy is amazing,’ Gates wrote. ‘It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.’ Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the ‘unbelievable’ Khan Academy tutorials that ‘I’ve been using with my kids.’”
Sep 192010
The new rules for technology that every kid should learn. They’re surprisingly cautionary (“Every new technology will bite back”), coming from former Wired editor Kevin Kelly. Could he be returning to his Whole Earth Catalog roots? (via Bill Kuykendall)
Apr 262010
Waterfall Arts presents Still Water Co-Director Joline Blais talking about her work in ecology, the New Commons, and cross-cultural networking on Monday 26 April at 7pm.
Have you ever played a guitar that sounds like a thunderstorm? Worn glasses that automatically upload a photographic history of your everyday life? Schussed down Sugarloaf with skis made from organic materials?
This Wednesday, thirty-five New Media seniors will rock the U-Me campus with a night of curb-jumping capstones.
Held in Lord Hall from 4 to 6pm on Wednesday 28 April (Maine Day), this event showcases senior projects that reveal or transform what we take in with our eyes, ears, and even taste buds. More than one-off student projects, many of these startups already have sizable audiences, proving that an economy in the dumps is little deterent to the creative undergrads of the University of Maine’s New Media Department.
Open Your Eyes: The 2010 Capstone Night
Wednesday 28 April 4-6pm
Lord Hall
Find out more about projects featured in the 2010 Capstone Night
The ‘pre-distressed antique futurity’. William Gibson wrote about this when we was writing about atemporality, associating it with his ‘Zero History’ novel that he is working on. Gibson was saying that if you have a genuinely avant garde idea, something that’s really new, you should write about it or create about it as if it were being read twenty years from now. In other words, if you want to do this, you want to strip away the sci-fi chrome, the sense of wonder. You want it to be antique before it hits the page or the screen. Imagine that it was twenty years gone into the future. Just approach it from that perspective.
No longer allow yourself to be hypnotized by the sense of technical novelty. Just refuse to go there. Accept that it is already passe’, and create it from that point of view. Try to make it news that stays news.
Refuse the awe of the future. Refuse reverence to the past. If they are really the same thing, you need to approach them from the same perspective.
‘Recuperating forms of history that cannot be written.’ This is of tremendous interest. I think it escapes the literary traps of history. Just history that could not be written about. History about people who were not the winners, history about people who had no literatures. Pre- history. Human experience before the historical record was created.
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/02/atemporality-for-the-creative-artist/
The ‘pre-distressed antique futurity’. William Gibson wrote about this when we was writing about atemporality, associating it with his ‘Zero History’ novel that he is working on. Gibson was saying that if you have a genuinely avant garde idea, something that’s really new, you should write about it or create about it as if it were being read twenty years from now. In other words, if you want to do this, you want to strip away the sci-fi chrome, the sense of wonder. You want it to be antique before it hits the page or the screen. Imagine that it was twenty years gone into the future. Just approach it from that perspective.
No longer allow yourself to be hypnotized by the sense of technical novelty. Just refuse to go there. Accept that it is already passe’, and create it from that point of view. Try to make it news that stays news.
Refuse the awe of the future. Refuse reverence to the past. If they are really the same thing, you need to approach them from the same perspective.
‘Recuperating forms of history that cannot be written.’ This is of tremendous interest. I think it escapes the literary traps of history. Just history that could not be written about. History about people who were not the winners, history about people who had no literatures. Pre- history. Human experience before the historical record was created.
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/02/atemporality-for-the-creative-artist/
UMaine Museum of Art
40 Harlow Street (downtown Bangor)
6-8pm Friday 19 February 2010
No Ben Stiller, but free pizza to Art and New Media students with MaineCard.
Feb 012010
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I think more of our graduates should be launching startups. While many U-Me graduates end up taking entry-level jobs, we New Media professors don’t deliberately prepare them for the bottom rung of a megacorporation. We struggle to get them to think for themselves.
The conclusion of Paul Graham’s essay on startups versus jobs puts a nice spin on this:
“People just don’t seem to get how different [a startup] is till they do it. Why? The key to that mystery is to ask, how different from what?
“Once you phrase it that way, the answer is obvious: from a job. Everyone’s model of work is a job. It’s completely pervasive. Even if you’ve never had a job, your parents probably did, along with practically every other adult you’ve met.
“Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises. It explains why people are surprised how carefully you have to choose cofounders and how hard you have to work to maintain your relationship. You don’t have to do that with coworkers. It explains why the ups and downs are surprisingly extreme. In a job there is much more damping. But it also explains why the good times are surprisingly good: most people can’t imagine such freedom. As you go down the list, almost all the surprises are surprising in how much a startup differs from a job.
“You probably can’t overcome anything so pervasive as the model of work you grew up with. So the best solution is to be consciously aware of that. As you go into a startup, you’ll be thinking “everyone says it’s really extreme.” Your next thought will probably be “but I can’t believe it will be that bad.” If you want to avoid being surprised, the next thought after that should be: “and the reason I can’t believe it will be that bad is that my model of work is a job.”
http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html
In his response, Bruce Sterling sums up the connection between artistic and entrepreneurial innovation nicely:
“Basically, founding a start-up company almost exactly like winging it in the world of art or literature, except without any art or literature.”
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/11/what-tech-startups-are-really-like/