Quakebook: Twitter-Sourced Anthology for and by Japan

What Yoko Ono, William Gibson and Kings of Leon have in common.

The March 11 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan are among the greatest natural disasters in modern history, affecting thousands of lives in unspeakably gruesome ways. While we’ve been skeptical of designers, writers and other creators flacking their work as a way to “help” Japan by donating a small portion of the proceeds while trying to sell large volumes of posters or t-shirts or novels — such schemes tend to feel like piggybacking on tragedy, disaster-washing, if you will — a new ebook by and for Japanese earthquake survivors tells a beautifully different story.

2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake, also known as the #quakebook project, was put together in a little over a week by a team of professional and citizen journalists who met on Twitter and set out to raise money for the Japanese Red Cross earthquake and tsunami relief efforts in a thoughtful way that puts their strengths and talents to use. They collected essays, artwork and photographs from people all over the world — from ordinary people, from victims of the disaster, from journalists who covered it, from prominent writers like William Gibson, Barry Eisler and Jake Adelstein, who created original work for the book, and even from Yoko Ono, who captures the tragedy and turmoil of the moment in a poignant essay titled Awakening — and published them in an anthology the full proceeds from which benefit disaster relief efforts in Japan.

The idea for this book came out of desperation, desperation to do something for a country on its knees. As I write this, intense aftershocks still force me out onto the street with my daughter in my arms, even though we live far from the hardest-hit areas of the country, and far more comfortably than the thousands in refugee shelters.”

The book features 87 narratives, eyewitness accounts and essays covering — with raw and moving candor of lived experience — beauty, bravery, distance, escapism, God, morality, harmony, remembrance and everything in between.

Those of us who live in Japan are in a state of war. But not a war against a nation, or even nature. We are fighting defeat, worry and hopelessness. The question is: Are we strong enough to overcome? [F]or the many people around the world who care deeply about Japan, this book is a snapshot of a nation in crisis, told by the people affected, in their own voices.”

Besides the beautiful story of how the book came together and the profound bittersweetness of its goal, what makes the project unique is that 100% of the $9.99 you pay goes directly to the Japanese Red Cross Society. It’s the product of the sheer creative altruism of those involved, and of those choosing to support it — we urge you to join us amongst them.

via The Domino Project

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SubMap: Visualizing Subjective Urban Patterns

What Twitter in Finland has to do with villages in Hungary and the solipsism of urbanity.

Maps, cities and data visualization are among our sharpest points of interest, so when the the three converge, we’re swooning all over. SubMap, which we stumbled upon on the excellent new ArtsTech News aggregator, is a visualization project that flies in the face of the traditional conception of maps as static and objective representations of the public world, and instead maps the subjective personal experiences of a city’s residents.

From locals’ favorite places in Budapest to Finland’s real-time Twitter chatter to a subjective map of the city plotting the cartographers’ homes as the epicenter, the maps are living abstractions of civic sentiment, part Hitotoki, part ComplexCity, part We Feel Fine, part something else entirely.

The project’s latest iteration, SubCity 2.0: Ebullition, captures 12 years worth of data patterns from origo.hu, Hungary’s leading news site, not only visually but also through a sonic representation.

In the 30 fps animation, each frame represents a single day, each second covers a month, starting from December 1998 until October 2010. Whenever a Hungarian city or village is mentioned in any domestic news on origo.hu website, it is translated into a force that dynamically distorts the map of Hungary. The sound follows the visual outcome, creating a generative ever changing drone.”

SubMap is the work of Dániel Feles, Krisztián Gergely, Attila Bujdosó and Gáspár Hajdu from Hungarian new media lab Kitchen Budapest, a hub for young researchers and experimenteurs looking to explore the intersection of mobile communication, online communities and urban space.

via Creators Project

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YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011

What 101 classical musicians have to do with honoring the past while appreciating the present.

Nearly two years ago, Google initiated the world’s first online collaborative orchestra, which we featured as one of three fantastic examples of orchestra innovation. They invited the world’s best amateur classical musicians to audition for 90 spots on the YouTube Symphony Orchestra.

Last year, the YouTube community, with the help of leading orchestras around the world, selected 101 musicians from 33 countries to perform in an extraordinary concert at Sydney Opera House, streamed live on YouTube. The complete concert, running close to three glorious hours, is now available online and is an absolute force of collaborative magnificence.

On the project page, you can explore the global winners by instrument and location, and play with Experiment — an innovative augmented-reality musical instrument. (Get the marker here.)

Combined with Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir, the YouTube Symphony bespeaks the incredible potential of technology-enabled collaborative creation, one of those things that make us thrilled to live in the era we’re living in.

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Lost Roll of Film Finds Its Way Home, Virally

On lost film, found friendships and the stories we all want to believe could be true.

In January, a man named Todd Bieber made waves with his story of finding a lost roll of film while skiing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and his quest to find the strangers to whom it belonged. The original video, seemingly engineered for it, went predictably viral:

This week, six weeks after his quest began, Bieber has miraculously found the film owners — lifted by its viral wings, the video apparently made its way to them. In Paris.

Turns out the real photographer was never the two men in the pictures at all. It was their sister — a quiet young student, who was visiting the states, which is the European word for America. Camille’s ex-roommate in New York recognized that several of the shots were taken right outside their apartment, so she sent Camille my video.” ~ Todd Bieber

Admittedly, somewhere between Bieber’s day job as writer and director for the Upright Citizens Brigade, the forced hesitation of his voiceover tone, the all-too-hipster choice of analog film, and the Seinfeld-loving German hostess, we had to wonder whether the whole thing is a hoax. But a big part of us wants to believe it isn’t. And whatever the case, it’s still a beautifully told story of what we all secretly wish to believe: That human kindness makes the world go around, and that we’re all connected in more ways than we could possibly imagine.

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