street art

Apologies that may or may not be in order

From StreesideSF.

Life has been so busy lately that it would make many a good blog update but rarely do I seem to have the time, or maybe the patience, with bashing out a proper post at the moment. Part of this is just the raw hours I’m working across three major projects. Part of it is that so much of all these projects takes place on m computer my eyes get tired and I crave time away from this particular screen.

I’m not sure I should feel very guilty about this – I never have been a terribly serious blogger – but I do. At least some of the time. It feels like a goal I’m failing at, even if in many ways it’s been sacrificed so I can achieve the more important goals of the moment. But it’s easy to pick apart our own behavior I think, to be more critical and less forgiving than we would be with a friend.

The truth is I am actually blogging quite a lot at the moment – more than ever before – but just not here very often.

Over the past 9 months I’ve set up a couple of visual and short-form blogs on posterous. One, Bits & Bytes, features my favourite bits of media, information and ephemera I find online. The other, StreetsideSF, is a shared blog with K featuring the street art we see all around us in San Francisco. IF you haven’t checked them out yet please do and consider subscribing.

In addition I currently run two blogs for HopeLab – our main Sticky Notes blog on HopeLab.org and the blog at the JOYcampaign website I manage, both of which I regularly contribute to myself – and I try to write for the StartSomeGood blog whenever I can manage.

We are also eight days away from leaving for Burning Man, and it’s been another epic organizational challenge to pull together a theme camp primarily of first-timers from all around the world. I can’t wait to move beyond the organizing phase, hit the desert and get dusty with my family (literally, my sister is coming) and friends.

Despite all this busyness I'm having a lot of fun, challenging myself to get a lot done and feeling extremely fortunate to be able to work on such exciting and meaningful projects with people I admire. There's nothing I would rather not be doing. I would like to post here more often however :)

I hope everything is great in your world and that life is full of joy.

Favourite Videos This Week

I love online videos. This is a semi-regular column of my favourite recent finds, whether they are artistic, political or data visualizations. You can see the previous collection here. COMBO: A collaborative animation

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/6555161]

An incredible street art/video collaboration. It's almost mind-blowing to think about how much work went into this, the animation is created by a sequence of graffiti artworks painted  inside an abandoned building. They have painted and re-painted and re-painted, a true example of the transient nature of street art, here captured by thousands of photos put together to create a wonderous and surreal animation.

NY gets Pixelated

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcXtT3rZcqg]

A very cool video of space invaders and other early computer game characters invading New York City.

World Air Traffic Over a 24 Hour Period

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1US_4uf4YE]

An amazing data visualization of all airplane flights over earth in a 24 hour period. I love data visualizations - for the visual learners amongst us it can convey a huge amount of data (in this case, flight patterns) in a gorgeous and visually-stimulating format. Very sticky.

16 Deaths a Day

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pssw5bnjnr4]

Given the recent deaths of 29 miners killed in a West Virginia coal mine disaster and, last week, another 11 workers being lost, presumed dead, after an offshore oil rig explosion, I wanted to share this important video from the ever-productive team at Brave New Films.