"The Ira Rennert Entrepreneurial Prize of $50,000, which is made possible by a gift from NYU Stern alumnus and member of Stern's Board of Overseers Ira Leon Rennert (MBA '56), was awarded to the founders of Socialbomb, Inc."

http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/berkley/bpc.cfm?doc_id=100165

www.socialbomb.com

w00t!

(left Mr. William R. Berkley, Adam Simon, Scott Varland, Michael Dory, Mihir Dange)

Seriously, the conference and game demo went so well it was like we planned it. We were even interviewed by Veronica Belmont [gushes]. Here's my Flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottiev/sets/72157604042766034/

As soon as I have a minute to post video clips, they will be located here: facecast.tv

More ITP show photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottiev/sets/72157603493552740/

Two players
Alternate reality
Three Houses of Mana-hatta

by me and eight other puppet masters.

The development of this game began with discussions of magic, and how we wanted to create an environment where people could experience magic in their everyday lives. Many long hours of deliberation led us to the following decisions:

"In a world where buildings go missing, ...

A 2 player ARG that takes place over 3 days in which players move through parallel narratives, independently, in opposition, and eventually collaboratively, to uncover the narrative.

A game that about mystery, intrigue, and deception.
A game where players deliver boxes.
A game that is NOT cyberpunk, does not have DRAGONS or ALIENS or VAMPIRES...

- independent - oppositional - cooperative

Frank thought that this structure sounded like a love story. Romeo & Juliet, the ARG? Having not considered this possibility, we began off in this new direction of thinking (one of many) and eventually settled on the game as it was played, here:

http://wiki.prophecyboy.com/index.php?title=Magic

By the close of 2007, there will be few people who have not at least heard of Facebook. With more than 49 million active users and a current exponential expansion rate averaging 4 million new users per month, it is the fastest growing social networking phenomenon on the web and is ranked seventh in pageviews ( @ 15 billion /month; MySpace holds on to the first position). One stand out, and increasingly important, feature of the site has been the friend news feed. This is a scrolling inventory of short ‘headlines’ that capture the goings on within your network, allowing Facebook users to promote and maintain the hundreds of loose connections formed through the technology.

From the mundane to the exotic, and triumph to calamity, the news feed has become a highly valued and important feature on facebook. - Your friend Diane added new photos, Addie removed "bittersweet irony" from her interests, and Martin added the My Purity Test application. My goal, though somewhat tongue and cheek, is to create a news network out of this content.

The ‘studio’ consists of a small chair, desk, teleprompter, camera and network connection in a container that loosely resembles a photo booth. The station captures your news feed from Facebook, parses the data into a readable format, and alerts nearby ‘anchors’ that new news is ready to be produced. As the user takes their seat, the friend feed is delivered to a teleprompter, images are overlayed, audio is cued, and a camera records the broadcast. After each segment, the anchor is given the choice to automatically upload the broadcast to YouTube; resulting in a nearly live broadcast.

Click To Play

Among the more unique projects of the week...

Carl Jung coined the term in a 1952 paper entitled "Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle.” Borrowing ideas from the field of Quantum Physics, Jung believed that mind, matter, past, present, and future exist in a meaningfully connected continuum. He outlined three types of synchronicity:

- The meaningful acausal coincidence of a psychological event and an external observable event, both taking place at or around the same time.
- The meaningful acausal coincidence of a psychological event and an external observable event, the latter taking place outside the individual's range of sensory perception.
- The meaningful acausal coincidence of an internal psychological event with an external observable event, the latter taking place in the future.

For this project, we loosely embrace some of these Jungian concepts to create a performance. Although we lack the ability to produce a “psychological event” in the minds of others, we are able create an organized and observable series of connected external events. We would need three elements:

- A large coordinated group of casually informed performers / observers with mobile phones
- An Asterisk server (an open source telephony system and toolkit) (http://www.asterisk.org/)
- A meaningful event

For our performers, we tapped the usual source of willing participants: the ITP student listserv. However, turnout was so poor on our first attempt that we had to reschedule and cast a wider net by posting a message to Craigslist. Our participants were given as little information about the project as possible. Directed to http://www.mysteriousevocativewebsite.com they were told to be at Washington Square Park at a specific time and that they would then be receiving a phone call asking them to repeat a simple phrase and answer a simple question. In the end, we had roughly 20 willing subjects.

The asterisk server would provide our (meaningful) synchronized event. The plan was to call all of our participants at exactly 5:30 on 10/10 with a prerecorded message; hopefully, they would be in the park on schedule – resulting in 20 people answering their phones at the same time within the same space. We also configured the system to record each phone call. We choose a relatively simple and benign instruction. The message played:

“Hello, welcome to project V. Please repeat after me: OK, I’ll see you on 11/11. Good. Now, make a wish out loud when you hear the tone. [beep]”

In numerology, 11 is considered a master number and represents impractical idealism, vision, refinement of ideals, intuition, revelation, artistic and inventive genius, the avant-garde and, androgyny (among other things). When broken down into the equation 1 + 1 = 2, we have the two of duality. The combination of 11 and 11 (or 11:11) is thought by numerologists to appear more often in our lives than can be explained by chance or coincidence. Self proclaimed physic, Uri Geller is an outspoken proponent of the mystic powers held in 11:11, and so the notion has been largely adopted and entertained by New Age community. At any rate, the combination was more meaningful to us if only because of this cultural pretext. The theory was that people would be more likely to hear this combination of numbers and form associations.

In the end, perhaps all of our hocus pocus and shameless exploitation of numerology served to curse us. As you will note in our documentary video, no one actually received and calls because we broke the Asterisk server. This was really too bad - because I was getting excited. Hopefully, our stars will align and we will have another go at this or a similar project in the future.

11:11

11:11

11:11

Download MP3

Download file

Adapted from a template by Jamie Allen.

Cut Piece is performance in which Yoko Ono allowed members of the audience to cut off her clothing with scissors. She began alone on stage, still and silent, with a pair of scissors lying next to her.

In succession, the audience approached and cut away sections of clothing. Some discretely removed small pieces, others boldly carved off large swaths. Some left their Yoko fabric on stage and others took it with them. With each cut there was a response from the spectators; a laugh, a gasp, a comment to a neighbor. Yoko seemed content to allow people to perform as they would, and only briefly responded by covering her chest when one man painstakingly removed a large and revealing section, and finished by cutting her bra straps.

Yoko’s piece is about vulnerability, the loss of self, and of control, violence, and trust. Cut Piece feels like an intensely personal experience. She must trust the individual wielding the scissors to respect her body and her person. Do they offer the same respect and care for her as they would have done for themselves? Or do they approach it as an exhibitionist display the body, an opportunity indulge some erotic fetish? Ironically, it only takes one person from the latter persuasion to put Yoko in a very vulnerable and lonely position. She has created an environment that almost guarantees this result, revealing a very negative opinion of humanity.