Featured today on Boing Boing Video is this excellent piece I shot of pals at Interpretive Arson, creators of the fire-in-your-face DDR reimagined Dance Dance Immolation. Charis and Aaron, also pals, prove to be perfect hosts and fire dance guinea pigs.
I’ve had a bunch of fun watching what the producers of German hyper new media & TV show Elektrischer Reporter have done with the footage I’ve shot for them. It’s all in German so I can only guess as to commentary with their copious English references to Twitter, Creative Commons and backgrounds of retro animated mainframes w/reel-to-reels. Lots of fun clips sourced from the Internet Archive help visually create a nice retro future tech mood. My german speaking friends say it’s really well put together and informative in kind of a hip NPR kind of way.
In this segment on nerd culture, you can see Doctor Popular laying on the nerd thickly with his classic yo-yo moves and some speak-n-spell jamming, all while dubbed in German. Yes, that is the Hat Factory where I shot these frames of Doc.
Elektrischer Reporter – Nerds: Weltretter mit Hornbrillen?
I shot an interview with Pandora founder Tim Westergren for this segment:
Elektrischer Reporter – Vorschlagsysteme: Mit den besten Empfehlungen
For this one, I was hired to shoot an interview with EFF‘s Danny O’Brien at their San Francisco offices:
Elektrischer Reporter – Urheber 2.0: Jeder Nutzer ein Pirat?
I’m guessing this segment is about mobile communities, since those words are in English and there’s plenty of shots of mobile devices, location based services and maps. I shot the interview with Tony Jebara of Citysense at Etech in San Jose.
Elektrischer Reporter – Mobile Communities: Unterwegs und unter Freunden
The Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto based nonprofit research group, held a day long research exchange yesterday titled “The Future of Video.” During the Q&A of the “Authorship, Appropriation, and Control” panel, creative genius Ze Frank responds critically to the utility of Creative Commons for guys like him. Ze feels that others rip off his work, make lesser quality derivative works and profit from them at his expense. Panelist David Pescovitz of BoingBoing and IFTF, argues for CC with counter examples and panelist Alexander Cohen, Professor of Film Studies at UC Berkeley, also argues for the utility of CC for remixing & critiquing society. Leprechauns enter the story as well.
Here’s Ze earlier in the day laying the groundwork responding to Mimi Ito at an earlier panel, on the “fundamental split” he sees between how amateur and professional content creators contextualize their work.
I’m in another exotic locale again, this time in Santo Domingo, the capitol city of the Dominican Republic. I’m here working for Howcast, helping them to live stream a townhall that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is conducting on the eve of the Fifth Summit of the Americas. The Townhall takes place here on Friday and you can submit questions to Clinton in advance. The live stream will have two feeds, one in English and the other translated in Spanish, both will be viewable on the State Department’s townhall.america.gov landing page. I know, I didn’t know there was an america.gov site either! I think it needs a bit more google juice. Maybe this event will help with that. Follow me on Twitter to catch the inside goodness as it happens.
UPDATE: The archive of the the Town Hall is now online:
On a recent trip to LA, my Virgin America flight took off from SFO and did a nice, slow loop around the city on a beautiful clear day. Always ready with the Lumix, I grabbed some HD video of the scenery.
Flying around San Francisco from ekai on Vimeo.
Back in December I was lucky enough to be in Vienna, Austria for the 10th annual incarnation of Roboexotica, the conference for cocktail robots. I shot copious amounts of video of the various booze bots in action and Boing Boing has just published a nicely edited, whirlwind tour of the mayhem from my footage.
Last week, I popped by a party for the launch of Timothy Leary‘s digital video archive on Archive.org. Leary, who passed away in 1996, had always wanted to be immortal in “cyberspace”. Now with an extensive video archive available to anyone with an Internet connection and an ongoing project by his estate to digitize all his physical assets, he’s close to achieving that goal.
San Francisco’s historical tripper elite were in attendance including John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Brewster Kahle as well as a long time friend and collaborator of Leary’s from Harvard, Ralph Metzner. Here’s some more photos I took from the party:
Do check out the video archive, there’s tons of fun stuff to be distracted by.
The world watched as regime change finally came to America. I watched from the crowded & cold west front lawn of the US Capitol as Barack Obama was sworn in as our 44th President. People say this is a once in a lifetime event. I think they’re right and very glad to have been there.
Another moment that many people won’t soon forget is when George Bush flew away from the Capitol on a helicopter for his final flight back to Texas, which you can see on this video I shot:
More of my photos are here.
I’m in the DC area hanging out with family through the holidays and for the upcoming historic Obama inauguration. As I was cruising through DC on a rainy Wednesday I came across stopped traffic and knew immediately that it was the Presidential motorcade. If you’ve ever spent any time in DC, you’ll know this is fairly routine. What wasn’t routine was the number of presidents that might have been in those reinforced black limos. This was right after a luncheon Bush was hosting with all the past and future living presidents. Also, Todd over at Telstar Logistics points out the motorcade Wikipedia entry that describes exactly all the vehicles that make up the Presidential motorcade, as can been in this video.
Many moons ago, I was commissioned by the fine folks over at Current TV to do a VC2 piece on RoboGames, the annual event for all things related to robot fight competitions. The piece follows the team behind Beer Bash, a “special” kind of robot, as they prepare it for competition at RoboGames. It’s airing all week in heavy rotation I’m told, so lemme know if you see it. It’s also on Current’s site and embedded below.