My parents (of all people) filled me in on this graffiti/street art project which took place in Bristol. Had no idea but good on Bristol Council for making this happen. I’m sure they must have seen the success from the Banksy versus Bristol Museum thing last year, and thought lets embrace it. It must be great for tourism and to be frank that street was pretty dire, so this is going to be a great new face lift.
Tag: banksy
And even more films you may have missed…
Inception – Everyone knows I love this film. Actually the clip above came to me via the inspirational which is imran ali. The reason why I love the film is because frankly its amazing to watch and enjoy, but also I got the idea for mydreamscape.org after watching inception. Some people have said its the matrix of this generation, I’m not so sure but I can certainly see why people would say that. Its breath taking from start to finish and theres a healthy amount of background mythology to keep us all guessing. I can’t wait to own a copy of my own, so I can watch it at home with my home cinema.
4, 3, 2, 1 – This is the Urban version of Sliding doors and although I wanted to not like this film, I actually enjoyed it. Theres pace and a clever storyline which overlaps its self when it makes sense. Noel Clarke has really worked hard on this one, once again staring in it and co-directing it. All the stars from the Adulthood and kidulthood are in this one and its slightly weird to see them play a different role from there other films. The woman are the centre stage in this film and they play there parts to the maximum, but the killer role for me has to be Kevin Smith’s role as a American courier. What I can’t work out is if it was before or after the no fly incident.
Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut – When I first saw this version of Donnie Darko I turned my nose up at it. I felt it gave away too much. Now although I’m still glad I got the original version, I found this version in retrospect a interesting twist on the tail. It does spell out a lot more whats going on but then again, it brings a more informed discussion about the ethics of time travel.
Exit through the gift shop – This is a film very few people saw in the cinema but I did watch it with a friend. Its basically the story of Banksy and street art. I can’t really say much about the movie without giving away the plot but I will say its not about Banksy exactly, its more a story about street art which was never told. In actual fact its about a guy called Mr Brainwash or Thierry Guetta who started to film street artists doing there work and promised to make it into a documentary. He did but boy oh boy was it bad. He went on to do Madonna’s next album cover. Anyway, this must be watched specially because it seems so unreal but in actual fact its actually mainly true.
I love this quote at the end of the film by Banksy – I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don’t do that so much anymore.
The social network – Just watched this one in the cinema in Digital projection and to be honest I didn’t really want to like it but I found myself warming to some of the characters in the film. I know its not the exact story of how facebook started but the general story is all there. Zuckerbergs (played by Jesse Elsenberg) clever wit shows through but you can’t help but feel sorry for Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield) who gets shafted on a share deal by Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) and Zuckerberg. To be fair he may have killed part of the idea with the advertising but hey we will never know. I guess at the end of the day, I do think the woman in the film are almost laughable and thats a big problem but Zuckerberg is a nerdy guy and the opposite sex is simply another lifeform for him.
If you liked these recommendations, theres even more dotted around my blog. [1][2][3]
Taking back the internet and our cityspaces
I bought Banksy's Wall and Piece book today (24 Dec 2005) while doing a last minute christmas shopping run in Bristol today. I've already seen quite a lot of the Banksy's work but its great to have most of it in one book which can be easily leant to people who I know is pretty good. Anyhow I was flicking through the book and I started to check out some of these quotes, specially this one.
Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt lika a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it's wet.
Its interesting because this is exactly the same vision of the internet Tim Berners-Lee and others had from day one. You know every part would be rewritable by anyone. Cant find the quote, but I did find this from the BBC. Damm I forgot to link to How the read/write web was lost. Which talks about how Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a read/write web was slowly edged out of the picture.
Well in some ways. The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.
For years I had been trying to address the fact that the web for most people wasn't a creative space; there were other editors, but editing web pages became difficult and complicated for people. What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple.
When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.
Just like Banksy's vision the internet slowly moved away from its core slightly utopian vision and started to become like the cityscapes of what Banksy pushes against. Although web 2.0 gets a lot of stick, the main thurst is about people. And thats a positive thing.
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There's also been a long running meme that a website should not be a set thing which is delivered to the end browser. HTML is intreperated by browsers and always will be. We should expect every browser to do the basics correctly, like the box model in CSS should be apply in the same way to all browsers but for a site to expect there site to be displayed with the style they have set is unreasonable and not a good thing. Anyone should be able to change the style, remove the style and even extract the sections there really after without resulting to haxor techniques. You could say these techniques are the same ones applied by Banksy because things have got so bad in our cityscapes. The internet has luckly not got that bad yet. Actually with the advent of Firefox and its huge selection of public generated extensions the opposite is actually true. Then if you go one step further you have Greasemonkey which then allows you to alter any page in anyway you see fit and save the results to share with others. And now we have Flock which is browser which is made from day one to foster the vision of the read/write internet. Yes it all seems pretty much a bolt on for now, but that will change.
I have not really mentioned it on this blog yet, but Microsoft's SSE (RSS Simple sharing extensions) could close the feedback loop in the RSS space. Even if that fails, I can certainly see a tighter trackback type mechinasm or an annotation mechinasm growing in popularity. Jon Udell talks up the read/write web. I mean even today, the mainstream media are falling over themsleves to have user (hate that word so much) public generated comments and feedback, even if there implimented in odd and unsatficatory ways.
Although this is no biggy for most people reading this, its in the same way as Napster (and of course Bit torrent) have as default the option to share your downloads. Making you a supplier as well as a consumer, is a fundamental shift. The likes which Banksy can only wish for in the cityscapes of the analogue world. We need to keep this at the forefront of the web 2.0 dash and where ever we go from there. Parciptation of people is key.
Interestingly at the same time I bought Wall and Piece I was looking for We the media for my sister. She's got quite old fashioned views about the internet but rather than me trying to convince her, I thought as shes studying Fashion Journalism the book would be a ideal read on two counts. However it never quite happened because I simply could not find Dan Gilmor's we the media anywhere in Bristol on Christmas Eve. But what took me and even Sarah back was the fact that the books on offer in the Computer sections of Blackwells and Waterstones were so boring. I hate to say it but they were so web 1.0. The only saving grace was the new Search and Amazon books which were present at Waterstones. But generally they were about how to create HTML pages using Dreamweaver, how to program using PHP, ASP, etc, etc, etc… Nothing web 2.0 ish in the slightest. Nothing about blogging, wikis, podcasting, public parciptation! Its such a shame because it puts across such a different view of where the internet is today.