"Founded in 2001, the goal of the Rhizome Commissions Program is to support emerging artists by providing grants for the creation of significant works of new media art. By new media art, we mean projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies and works that reflect on the broader social and political impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. Rhizome defines emerging artist as artists who exhibit great potential yet are not fully recognized within their field. Commissioned works can take the final form of web-based works, works that engage mobile platforms, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, the web or networked devices. Rhizome Commissions awards generally range from $1,000 to $5,000."

"I’m pretty anal about sound, and I’m prepared to admit it. I’m not a super-duper audiophile (I can’t afford to be), but I have spent hundreds thousands of pounds over the years on stereos, headphones, hi-fi separates, portable audio systems, and even (in my more gullible moments) biwired speaker cables and limestone slabs to position my speaker stands on, all in pursuit of the “perfect” sound: slightly more sparkle and physical *ping* in the treble (hearing the stick hit the hi-hat, perhaps, rather than a vague *splash*); a more rounded and tighter bass sound that doesn’t bloom like ugly bathwater and overwhelm the song; more realistic vocals that put the singer right in front of you, spittle-filled lips and all. You know the kind of thing… It’s like when serious wine buffs talk about being able to smell diesel or orange peel in a bottle of Shiraz: it seems like nonsense until you immerse yourself in the sensations of the discipline and find that you too are scrabbling for ridiculous metaphors to describe how something tastes or sounds or smells when you suddenly realise there are more nuances than you ever imagined."

"The digital settles in as background. We remember less and query more. Our identity play would be considered schizophrenic in the last century. We have more friends than ever before yet know new frontiers of isolation. The quantification of our experience haunts us in the form of a persistent history. And we are distracted more than we ever knew possible. These circumstances are paradoxically a description of the near future and a diagnosis of the current state of affairs. The truly timeless is redefined – it has transcended that which is classic; it has become that which is never finished."

"When did TED lose its edge? When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart? (...) What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. What was exceptional and emergent in the realm of ideas has been bottled, packaged, and sold back to us over and over again. The whole TED vibe has come to resemble a sales pitch."

"And there's the key to understanding the often anesthetic effect of the Internet. Decadence doesn't demand great wealth: Decadence is a useful way to understand any situation in which an existing pleasure becomes cheap, and it takes the ingenuity of a Petronius to fight off the boredom. That is now the case with information—the small burst of satisfaction that comes from a refilled inbox or a new text, from connecting with friends, or sharing the meme of the day. Millions of us are now richer in these pleasures than our parents' generation could ever imagine. But our capacity for enjoyment is still finite: We've built up a tolerance to the pleasures of information, just as Trimalchio built up a tolerance to the pleasures of food. Those who experience our constant connectivity as dulling should be able to identify closely with his guests.

In the midst of this excess, a very few of us can be "accomplished voluptuaries." They are the ones most at home online, who experience no disquiet in blogging about life and talking about the Internet interchangeably. I also suspect that they are disproportionate among our own "arbiters of taste," the ones who ensure that the Internet can give us something new and enjoyable and forgettable every day: hungover owls, outrageous hipsters, creative Auto-Tuning, endlessly looping GIF's of Oprah unleashing bees on her studio audience, and on and on. But the talent of taking pleasure in excess, and inventing new pleasures out of excess, is still a rare one: For every Petronius, there are many more Trimalchios who end up bloated, exhausted, wearing a false face of enjoyment."

"The founding fathers of the internet had laudable instincts: the utopian vision of the internet as a shared space to maximise communal welfare is a good template to work from. But they got co-opted by big money, and became trapped in the self-empowerment discourse that was just an ideological ruse to conceal the interests of big companies and minimise government intervention.

The current state of affairs is not irreversible. We still have some privacy left and internet companies can still be swayed by smart regulation. But we need to stop thinking of the internet as a marketplace first and a public forum second. What is long overdue is a fundamental reconsideration of the primacy of the internet’s civic and aesthetic dimensions. It’s time to decide whether we want the internet to look like a private mall or a public square."

"The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has emerged to censure or celebrate it. A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful. When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast undreamed of in the days of burning bread over an open flame; books that told you that the toaster would bring an end to the days of creative breakfast, since our children, growing up with uniformly sliced bread, made to fit a single opening, would never know what a loaf of their own was like; and books that told you that sometimes the toaster would make breakfast better and sometimes it would make breakfast worse, and that the cost for finding this out would be the price of the book you’d just bought."

"Blair’s and Pettegree’s work on the relation between minds and machines, and the combination of delight and despair we find in their collisions, leads you to a broader thought: at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind."

"Jeremy Blachman notices his Pandora recommendations becoming increasingly sinister."

"This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data."

"His notebooks are fascinating items in themselves. There might be a sketch for his screenplay of The Proposition followed by a reminder that one of his children needs to be vaccinated with the address of where he has to take her. The creative and the personal is intertwined."

"I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It's a tool, but it's not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn't seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing Twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day XBox binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it's evil, but because it's too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%."

"I think we should all agree that getting faster at judging things is bad, but I think the real danger in having a super-efficient-filter is that your default mode is exclusion – you reject long enough and you lose the ability to create things that pass your own filter. You stagnate at work for fear of everything you do being judged like every news article or viral video that you view.

So how do you break the power of consumption? By creating your own things."

“Even with something as beautiful as a sunset, forgetting is really important as a mental hygiene,” said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and the author of the book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.”

“That things in our past become rosier over time is incredibly important,” he added. “As we forget, our memories abstract and our brain goes through a cleansing process.” Mr. Mayer-Schönberger said that keeping a perpetual visual diary of everything could slow down our brains’ purging process.

"People often ask me what role technology plays in music, and whether I think there is too much technology in music. Recently, I have started answering by saying that technology in music is a little bit like numbers to mathematics. You can’t really imagine music without technology. Now, as my friend Danny Hillis the inventor said, technology is the name we give to things that don’t work yet. When it works we don’t call it technology anymore. But you have to remember that once upon a time a violin was technology, once upon a time an organ was technology. Those things were all built and created by people who were working at the cutting edge of the technologies of their time."

Depressing (I think).

"They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’, but in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.”
"They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them."
"Real names, they say, turn out to be the names on your driver’s license and your passport and your credit cards so that they can track you. Are you happy to be a product?"

"Derivative cut-and-paste, shareware, mash-up, appropriation, détournement, post-disciplinary network-culture infrastructures; this favela of the intellect no longer has to be valorized. It’s just another way to get results; it’s the way that falls apart fastest."

"I define storytelling as the untangling of, and bringing order to, the chaos of actual experience and packaging it in a way that is usable for yourself and other people going forward."

"I think creating a space that’s more about slowing down and contemplating and being introspective is a prerequisite for getting people to tell stories that have impact. When you design a space that encourages short, reactionary verse, people are going to give you short, reactionary verse. Maybe when you design a space that’s not encouraging that, people will use more depth in their self-expression."

Rob Walker covers Kickstarter for the New York Times.

"What does it mean to be human? Julian Baggini meets with scientists who aspire to take evolution into their own hands ..."

"Everyday Carry, or EDC, generally refers to small items or gadgets worn, carried, or made available in pockets, holsters, or bags on a daily basis to manage common tasks or for use in unexpected situations or emergencies. In a broader sense, it is a lifestyle, discipline, or philosophy of preparedness."

"Triple Canopy is an online magazine, workspace, and platform for editorial and curatorial activities. Working collaboratively with writers, artists, and researchers, Triple Canopy facilitates projects that engage the Internet’s specific characteristics as a public forum and as a medium, one with its own evolving practices of reading and viewing, economies of attention, and modes of interaction. In doing so, Triple Canopy is charting an expanded field of publication, drawing on the history of print culture while acting as a hub for the exploration of emerging forms and the public spaces constituted around them."

Clive Thompson on Khan Academy.

"The launch of Google+ is the beginning of a fundamental change on the web. A change that will tear down silos, empower users and create opportunities to take software and collaboration to new levels.

Social features will become pervasive, and fundamental to our interaction with networked services. Collaboration from within applications will be as natural to us as searching for answers on the web is today."

"There should be a word for that feeling you get when an older person — and not much older, so quickly are things changing — shames him or herself by telling young people how to live. I'd vote for Bedeutungslosigkeitschmach, or "irrelevance shame," (made up with the help of Google translate) or perhaps Rünschmerz, the horrifying gut pain one experiences watching Andy Rooney. Whatever it's called, Franzen brought it in buckets."

"The phonograph killed the player piano; radio, newspapers, and TV happily co-existed for generations. When did you last think fondly on the DuMont television network, or smile in recall of Friendster? This moment of anxiety and fear will pass; future generations (there's now one every three or four years) will have no idea what they missed, and yet they will go on, marry, divorce, and own pets."

"As distasteful as it may sound, the fact is that so many of our heroes: Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, The Beatles, whoever you care to name; generated much of their best art in return for financial compensation. If you take away the compensation, guess what…the art stops."

"I don't like the fact that rappers I worked with five years ago no longer rap because they're not gonna make any money, so what's the point? Not everybody who made great music got into it for the love of art: some of 'em got into it as a means of making a living, and some of the music that they made along the way changed people's lives."

"The artist whose debut, the oft-praised 1996 album Endtroducing…, bore the footnote "this album reflects a lifetime of vinyl culture" has often struggled to navigate a coherent path through the digital world. This is why he is undertaking an almost stubbornly obscure negative image of a conventional marketing campaign – wandering into a handful of charity shops in the West End of London to covertly plant his new music on their shelves, leaving it to be uncovered by fellow musical archaeologists and vinyl obsessives."

"Do you really love listening to the latest Jack White project? Do you really hate the sound of Britney Spears? Or are your music-consumption habits, in fact, not merely guided but partly shaped by the cultural information that Pandora largely screens out — like what’s considered awesome (or insufferable) by your peers, or by music tastemakers, or by anybody else? Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?"

"Maybe because music is so ubiquitous, we respond to it almost like food: sometimes we want to try the new restaurant, sometimes the comfort of a familiar favorite dish."

Pitchfork interviews Björk on her new album "Biophilia" and the many forms it's going to take: music album, series of iPad apps, educational program etc.

10 more conferences (none of which I've heard of!): 1. PopTech 2. BIF Summit 3. DLD 4. BIL 5. PICNIC 6. Conference on World Affairs 7. Aspen Ideas Festival 8. New Yorker Festival 9. Big Omaha 10. Portland Creative Conference.

Good roundup of cross-disciplinary conferences by Kirstin Butler on Brain Pickings: 1. 99% Conference 2. BarCamp 3. DO Lectures 4. The Feast 5. GEL 6. Ignite 7. Palomar 8. PechaKucha 9. PINC 10. TEDx

Other suggestions from readers in the comments section.

"In this event, hosted by The New Atlantis (TheNewAtlantis.com), Alan Jacobs discusses his new book 'The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction' (Oxford, 2011). Jacobs is a contributing editor to The New Atlantis and a professor of English at Wheaton College. He blogs at text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com"

The progression from Logosphere to Graphosphere and finally to Videosphere. From the book "The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books."

"I'm not against e-books in principle but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. (...) The object needs to remain dull so the words -- offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person's internal life -- can sing."

Vintage Joel. How to convince people to work for you.
"Provide benefits which are more valuable than the money they cost"

"Let's say you have invited four people for dinner on Saturday. It’s now Wednesday morning, and reality is setting in. On the guest list: two pescatarians, a “Top Chef” fanboy and a gluten avoider. Also, spring is in the air; local asparagus, arriving now. The challenge, as always: how to find dishes that are reliable, delicious and gastronomically correct?"

WakeMate is a wristband that analyzes your sleep patterns and wakes you up at the optimal time in a 20-minute window you define. Sleep statistics are available through a web application.

Adam Greenfield talks about his time at Nokia and how innovation cannot happen in big, global organizations.

Caterina Fake on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) as social motivator.

"There is a company that sells radar equipment to the police as well as radar detectors to the public. Clorox is one of the world’s worst polluters of water, and also sells Brita filters to get the bad stuff out of the water again. Lawyers create mazes that you have to hire a lawyer to escape. Similarly social software both creates and cures FOMO. If you didn’t know that party was going on, you’d be home contentedly reading your latest New Yorker. But since you do, you hungrily watch each new tweet."

2011 marks the Marshall McLuhan centenary. The website features interviews from 1965 to 1978: Sayings, Prophecies, Understanding Me, Electric Age, Television

Qwiki is an impressive new tool for interactive storytelling. It seems to pull out Wikipedia articles and match the text to images (pulled out of links to other articles in Wikipedia?)

"I enjoyed Hgiyiyi, but the pacing is a bit slow. It doesn't compare to Jjjj's earlier works, like "Kquxiuqx", or "Oooeiaiai", or even "Nyah-Nyah Ptang"."

The largest digital image I have ever seen. Reminds me of Eames' Powers of Ten.

"Sometimes, when I’m in the field, I find teens who have strategies for managing their online presence that are odd at first blush but make complete sense when you understand the context in which they operate. These teens use innovative approaches to leverage the technology to meet personal goals. Let me explain two that caught my attention this week."

-- lovely article by Danah Boyd on the peculiar Facebook habits of two teenagers

Mikalah deactivates her Facebook account each time she wants to log out.
Shamika deletes all photos, likes and wall updates shortly after they are posted.

"Ask for more. Always. Ask for more time, ask for more creativity, ask for more money."

"We’re like the army. We get more work done by 9am than most people do in a full day."

"At some point, someone just has to say: We’re going to do it like this because I want to do it this way. Because, if you don’t, you’re going to be churning out oatmeal. You look at some graphic design today, and you can tell that nobody is in charge."

"Distraction today is this [points to my iPhone, which is recording our conversation]. I believe that these things are killing our discipline, killing our ability for solitude, and killing our ability to be bored. Children need to learn how to be bored. They don’t need to be entertained all the time."

"I can’t do the think-work in the studio. The studio’s for putting stuff together – for work-work. And if we’re not doing work-work, then we leave."

Sad. Funny. True. Did I mention sad?
For more depressing musings on modern life --> Techno Tuesday, Savage Chicken

"The iconic writer [Douglas Coupland] reveals the shape of things to come, with 45 tips for survival and a matching glossary of the new words you'll need to talk about your messed-up future."

Kevin Kelly asks his readers to name the best magazine articles ever.

# The Books We Make embrace their physicality — working in concert with the content to illuminate the narrative.
# The Books We Make are confident in form and usage of material.
# The Books We Make exploit the advantages of print.
# The Books We Make are built to last.

"And who better to unashamedly shill for the brand new Sous-Vide Supreme (on sale now for an "introductory" price of $399) but three-Michelin star, molecular-gastro-uber-chef Heston Blumenthal, also of 30-hour hamburger fame. His flagship restaurant, The Fat Duck, along with its dedicated experimental kitchen, is located in Bray, a small town outside of London. It's widely regarded as one of the top five restaurants in the world, and it's no coincidence 100% of their proteins, and a great deal of their vegetables, are cooked via the sous-vide method."

Sobering documentary about the effects of technology in our life.

Facial makeup against computerized face detection.

"If you are an interface designer, a brand manager or a security expert, your reaction to this incident should be one of deep humility."

"Last spring (...), Asif Ghazanfar developed a computer model of a macaque monkey designed to interact with real macaques. But the monkeys weren’t fooled. Further testing revealed that, much to Ghazanfar’s surprise, his model was eliciting an uncanny valley response from the monkeys. It was the first time scientists had ever observed such a response in a non-human species."

"Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world. Our philosophy is that ideas are NOT selfish, ideas are NOT viruses. Ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life. Our position is that ideas are energy, and should interconnect and re-connect continuously because by linking ideas together we learn, and new ideas emerge.

Our goal is to encourage life-long learning, and we have created this website as a portal of possibilities. A democratic space where people can listen and engage with ideas that inform contemporary history. Ideas that we believe will empower everyone to be a part of today’s cultural conversation."

"This series of vignettes is based on a talk I gave on October 27, 2009, at UCLA, as part of the Mobile Media Lecture Series. It’s mostly about the current state of the digital world (as I see it), and some thoughts about what that world's future could be."

"Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan expound on violence, alienation and the electronic envelope. The clash of two great minds. (1968) www.cbc.ca"