s high summer approaches, Stratford-upon-Avon is packed with people on the Shakespeare trail. Thousands descend on the small town every day, eager to discover more about the Bard and, if they're lucky, get a seat at one of the productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The company, of course, acknowledges this and with Midsummer Night's Dreaming, it has enlisted the help of Google in bringing Shakespeare to the Internet - in a variety of forms and experiences.
Online gallery space, s[edition] is the leading platform for buying and collecting contemporary art in digital format. The site features a diverse range of work from the most well known artists to the more obscure. Earlier this month s[edition] launched a new initiative allowing individual artists to directly price and edition their own work (pending acceptance from the s[edition] reviewers). The move gives lesser-known artists a wider audience and offers collectors even more variety in their pursuit to turn their screens into art.
We spoke to s[edition]'s director, Rory Blain, to find out more about this innovative approach to curating and distributing art.
Silicon Beach is a rather wonderful conference which takes place in the late summer of every year, by the sea at Bournemouth. We're delighted to be joining Silicon Beach this year, and are bringing a rather good offer to Imperica readers.
In the light of the recent storm surrounding the US National Security Agency and project PRISM, Limor Fried and the team at Adafruit have developed the Onion Pi, a plug-and-play anonymising device which uses Raspberry Pi alongside the Tor proxy.
A friend of mine mentioned a good idea recently. He was having dinner at a restaurant with a large group, and everyone was made to put their mobile phones in a pile in the centre of the table. Where they had to leave them, untouched. The first person to break the rule and reach for their device footed the bill.
Before we start, let's get one thing straight - YOU CANNOT GET INTO TROUBLE FOR READING WEB CURIOS. The Government does not mind. Your employer might, admittedly, but the Government? They couldn't give a flying one.
Yep, this week's been dominated by PRISM and related things - more on that below, but up here you can see what the internet would look like without PRISM companies, some ways you can hide from it all (PROTIP - THERE IS NOWHERE TO HIDE), the really scary stuff about how people have been spying on you FOR AGES, and the inevitable Twitter parody account. What more could you ask for? What do you mean, 'the ability to freely access information without surveillance?' BURN THE COMMUNISTS!
Had a heavy night out? Arrived home and switched the computer on? Woken the next day to find that it isn't only your head which is slightly broken? Don't worry, we've all done it. Gitdown is a new script that tries to nip these risky situations in the bud.
The concept of an online-only currency is not new. People have tried – and mostly failed – to create a currency which works anywhere (remember Beenz?) After this long gestation process comes Bitcoin, which has caught the attention of many commentators around the world. Its value of 1BTC to over $260 earlier in the year encouraged many to find out more.
Michael Parsons is a qualified Chartered Accountant, was previously a management consultant for KPMG and PWC, as well as CFO to banks in the UK. Now a professional advisor to companies wanting to get involved in Bitcoin, we caught up with him in advance of his talk at the Real Time Club.
For the last month, the Barbican has been running their second Digital Duchamp commission, an homage to the artist and his creations. Eleonora Oreggia’s Dusty Mariee is a work that embraces Duchamp’s groundbreaking 'readymade' approach to creating art. A live camera stream, complete with microphones has been filming through the large glass window of Eleonora's apartment high up on the 19th floor of the Balfron Tower, uniquely capturing East London’s council estates and the harsh but often beautiful sprawl: “a brutalist kiss between the Barbican and Balfron with all the dust and air and magnetism crushed between them.”
Another week, another 7 days to get reacquainted with the feeling that there is simply too much stuff happening all the time and there is simply NO WAY we can keep up and God it's stressful I JUST WANT TO SLOW DOWN FOR A SECOND.
Ahem. Obviously the big thing this week has been Turkey, and assorted issues around the protests there and how they are being received by society and media. It was also the week, though, when we were given a heartbreaking reminder of Bradley Manning's continued existence, we learnt that romance REALLY IS now dead (although perhaps less so if you are an anarchist), that American PSAs really do give the best life advice, that you can make surprisingly effective points whilst wearing a watermelon bra, and that some people are REALLY good at YoYoing.
Art Everywhere is a project which seeks to achieve exactly that: to turn loads of OOH advertising space into canvases and frames for artwork. Given that we cover both art and advertising on Imperica, what's not to like?
Yesterday, we covered Work buy consume die, a film about The Designers Republic from Nicola Paton and Jon Lees. We're delighted to update you with the news that it has achieved its Kickstarter pledge target. Here are two more Kickstarter projects which you might find interesting, so dig deep for that spare change...
