Going against the tide with putting great content I see on fastmedia (FB and Twitter) here. Got stuff you want featured, seen or heard of? Post it to info at planetdamage.com.

  • Ethno Tekh | ethnotekh.com | is a collaboration between Brad Hammond and Chris Vik, in a motion-controlled, A/V act. Our performances are totally live, using the Kinect, Ableton Live and a number of custom tools built in Unity3D and Max/MSP/M4L. (More tech specs on the show on this vimeo page, don’t forget to check ethnotekh.com and their Facebook page.)

Click more for Tyson Wade Johnston’s Seed, Twitter prediction algorithms, the new book of Doug Rushkoff and more unorthodox music making solutions!

  • By surrendering my natural rhythms to the immediacy of my networks, I am optimizing myself and my thinking to my technologies — rather than the other way around. I feel as though I speeding up, when I am actually just becoming less productive, less thoughtful, and less capable of asserting any agency over the world in which I live. The result something akin to future shock. Only in our era, it’s more of a present shock. (Douglas Rushkoff on present shock – his next book about the phenomenon above will be released March 21st, 2013. More on that at Technoccult.

SEED (2012) Short Film from Tyson Wade Johnston on Vimeo.

  • You might remember the Seed trailer a couple of months ago, now director Tyson Wade Johnston sent me the link to the complete full short with a bit of a description I’m going to share with you.

    SEED to me was inspired by 60’s & 70’s science fiction. I’m not happy with how film makers are abusing sci-fi shorts right now with their 2-4 minute CGI porn ‘films’ (I call them clips)… So since day 1 with this film I sought out to make something fresh with a well-paced, 3 act, complete short story. It was genuinely made for the true sci-fi fans!

    Well said!

  • Algorithm predicts next big Twitter trend 5 hours before it happens: A team from MIT has created an algorithm that can predict what Twitter topics will trend hours in advance. Wired reports that Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and his student Stanislav Nikolov from the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems can use the algorithm to predict with 95% accuracy which words, phrases or hashtags are going to trend. It can predict these an average of an hour and a half before Twitter’s algorithm puts them on the trending list, and sometimes as much as five hours before.

  • Dyskograf is a music player that plays paper discs (video). Users can encode discs using a marker—different areas of the disc trigger different sounds and beats. Dyskograf was created by Jesse Lucas, Erwan Raguenes & Yro. It will be exhibited at the OFNI Festival in Poitiers, France, November 14 & 15 and the Visionsonic festival in Paris, November 16 & 17. (via laughingsquid, sent by Dawe

  • This video of the Boston metropolitan area reveals the geographic distribution of political donations made by individuals throughout 2012. We identify two types of temporal bursts of campaign contributions. We call both “moneybombs” because they reveal a temporal clustering. (You know I’m definitely not up for politics, but video infographics just make my heart melt. More on this video at flowingdata.com, thx for the hint to James Robinson!)

  • Way Out From Behind The Laptop: Onyx Ashanti’s Beatjazz-Augmented Body Keeps Mutating: Onyx Ashanti can wail on a computer with no computer in sight, jamming on a virtual horn that has vanished into his cyborg-like live rig. Mouthpiece and head-mounted prosthesis replace what might have been a virtual reality helmet – or sax reed. Sensors in his hands provide more expression. But this isn’t just some flash and theater, while a laptop dutifully plays back loops. It’s really an interface to performance, both surfing samples and providing live solo lines improvised in real-time, in mid-air.