Pick One: Hipsters Take on Culture, By Way of Helvetica

Start Trek vs. Russia, the 1970′s vs. Christmas, or why death is better than Uggs.

If there ever were a formula for cool, it wouldn’t be far from simplicity + social statement + Helvetica. And Pick One is just that. Part social experiment, part art project, part brilliant head-scratcher, it’s artist Ben Nyberg‘s clever stab at getting your priorities straight — and it’s as playful or as serious as you want it to be.

All you do is go through pairs of cultural items — from Google to guns to God, and everything in between — and pick the one you prefer within each pair, which gives it a score of 1 point.

After a couple of hundred clicks, we lost patience in trying to reach some sort of end — we suspect it’s an infinite loop that randomly pairs each item with every other, then starts all over again — and voyeured over to the Top 10 and the Bottom 10, based on the crowdsourced cumulative score of each item.

It’s a sign of the times when The Internet ends up amidst the most fundamental of human needs. Then again, if it were up to us, it would even rank four positions higher.

And a note to all the budding social psychologists and ethicists out there — you may want to rethink your career path: Morality, which appears in the pick-pairs, didn’t even make a cameo on the Top 10. Neither did art — ironic, in the context of an art project.

Pick One is also a testament to its own hipsterness — there’s no question about the psychographic composition of a crowd that hates Uggs more than hate itself, George W, or death.

HT @BBHLabs

Heart of a City: BioMapping

Why skin is the new heart and how your neighbors can change the way your feel about your street.

On the trails of yesterday’s fascinating exploration of cities as living organisms, today we look at another piece of high-concept urban portraiture that harnesses the power of art, sociology and technology to a brilliant end.

Since 2004, Christian Nold has been orchestrating Bio Mapping — a crowdsourced community mapping project, which wires people up to Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) devices, detecting their emotional arousal, and sends them on their merry way around the neighborhood. These states are then mapped onto people’s geographic location, creating a visualization of communal emotion.

Participants — over 1,500 of them to date — also annotate the data with personal observations, memories and thoughts they associate with each location, painting a rich emotional portrait of the social space of a community.

Perhaps most fascinating about the project isn’t the mere documentation of collective emotion, but how that awareness would change our perception of our community and environment.

Those who have been with Brain Pickings for some time may find Bio Mapping reminiscent of Swedish artist Erik Krikortz’s Emotional Cities project. But, as researchers, we love the idea of measuring emotional states via biofeedback rather than self-reporting.

After all, there’s often a gaping disconnect between how we publicly broadcast emotion and how we privately experience it.

via Very Short List

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Collaborative Cinema: The Hunt for Gollum

The new age of cinema has officially arrived.

These days, there seems to be an ongoing cultural contention that anyone, armed with a cheap little digital camcorder, can make a movie. Being filmmakers ourselves, we have received it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

But a group of Lord of The Rings fans and enthusiast filmmakers showed us that anyone can indeed make a Hollywood-like movie in their backyard.

Well, sort of.

The Hunt for Gollum is an unofficial, collaborative prequel to the Peter Jackson trilogy. Directed by Chris Bouchard, the film is completely independent — meaning it was produced solely by the fans, and no one got paid. In Bouchard’s words,

We made this purely for the enjoyment of the material and the experience of making a high quality low budget film.

And don’t let this “experiment in low-budget filmmaking” fool you, because watching the trailer makes it very, very hard to believe it isn’t an authentic Peter Jackson prequel to the trilogy.

Then there’s this admittedly hilarious teaser.

The Hunt for Gollum premiered yesterday. The best part: Besides innovating on this new culture of collaboration, the film is also distributed for free online, where you can watch it in HD.

And we think that’s the freeconomic future of the entertainment industry.