Tag Archives: #popculture

Our Twenty Year Mood Swing

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Interesting entry over on O’Reilly Radar concerning the Supernova 2005 presentation given by Linda Stone. If you’re in the Industrial Design field or familiar with Ms Stone’s background at Microsoft’s Virtual Worlds/Social Computing Group, this may be of interest to you.

The only thing I wonder is if the cycle she describes moves like a wave – with “early adopters” at the leading edge, aso. This might explain what I perceived as a subtle but significant ripple in the social fabric caused by the cinematic release of “Fight Club” in 1999. Seems to me that the movie – and the book on which it was based – might have qualified as early indicators. Guess I have some reading and research to do especially since I see a potential tie-in to some thoughts I’ve had in another area.

Pop Culture Consciousness

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BusinessWeek online has another excellent article. This time on the emerging popularity of videogame music. For old school Quake fans, this will come as no surprise – Nine Inch Nails was doing game music years ago. And although more popular bands like Front Line Assembly get more attention for their game efforts, within gaming circles musicians like Kevin Riepl and Bill Brown have the attention of their fans as well.

What’s more interesting to me is how this relates to other game and virtual world content. There are popular figures within the gaming community unknown to the general public – texture artists, skinners, modelers, aso – who may some day garner the same kind of attention we know reserve for traditional artisans.

(edit – turns out Wired is carrying a similar article today)

Pearl Dolls

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pearldollW

Via Beverly Tang’s blog, I found a curious site called Pearl Children. I don’t read Japanese, but it appears to be part of a handmade doll movement (hey, I noticed that obvious “handmade doll webring” thing on the bottom; nothing gets past me). Though I’ve not heard of this before, it’s not surprising given the explosive popularity of niche items like the underground “designer” vinyl toy industry (just check out a site like www.kidrobot.com to see a good cross-section of that stuff).

What really has me wondering is whether this set of dolls is inspired in any way by the “suicide clubs” or whatever they’re called in Japan. I forget where I first heard of them, but given the zombified look of these dolls, it seems plausible. Makes me wonder what hybrid fusion of industrial design, art and anthropologic recorder we’re creating with all this technology. More importantly, it seems like an uncomfortable decision might sometimes have to be made: profit from something like these suicide clubs, or try to draw attention to them (in order to end the practice) and kill the cash cow. Interesting situation. And this site probably has nothing to do with that trend.

Wasteful and Enchanting

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Metropolis photo of exhibit

Metropolis is carrying an interesting piece on an exhibition titled: “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture”. When I went to Japan a few years back to work on a project, I was surprised to find the topic of conversation – during my initial meeting with my Japanese design partner and a company sales rep – to be World War II. From what I heard and observed, the war still has a hold on many Japanese. I attribute that to a culture where the family is more tightly knit than what I see in the U.S.; we increasingly put our elderly in nursing homes, the Japanese children apparently care for them in a… how to say this without taking a position… more intimate and perhaps respectful way. That proximity might explain my initial, bewildering conversation. And this exhibit.

(note: image above from Metropolis credited to Sheldan Collins)