Anything Goes Remix
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"A Size of Tragedy, The Evening Post, August 6, 1945.", by Asumi Mizuo
This is a work of appropriation of a ready-made/found object. An article published on the Evening Post (Wellington), 6 August 1945, is reproduced and presented in its simplest form of a newspaper clipping, as people would prepare for scrapbooks. The article talks about a death of a young child killed in an accident in Melrose day before. On 6 Aug, several hours after the paper was printed, first atomic bomb was dropped onto the city of Hiroshima. Blissfully unaware of the fates of some 80,000 people in Hiroshima, the death of the 6 year-old was headlined bigger than an accident that claimed lives of 5 men in Napier. This work raises age-old issues on significance of life/death of different individuals; Does one life more important the other? Does one death is less significant than death of 100? Do we really care about strangers? foreigners? people you have never met? As well as initiating a debate on the obvious, it also opens up a conversation on the historical and present indifference on the "other's" pain and suffering. Or in other words, curiosity and enthusiasm over tragedy of particular cases often shaped by what's offered through media (TV, magazine, newspapers, news websites etc.) 'A Size of Tragedy' is a sophisticated remix of a historical material and an investigation that asks what role a news medium has in the creation of common sense of acceptable and unacceptable death, against a background of unprecedented scale of devastation in Hiroshima.
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"Contra", by Golda Matthias and John Bellville
‘Contra’ is an a/v mash-up that functions as an environmentalist critique of some of the more dubious values marketed to the masses by capitalist culture. However, the film also functions as a music video. The piece has been created in hopes of denaturalising some recurring imagery/symbology/tropes that now seem commonplace in our media saturated society, as well as entertaining and satirizing through a music video that exemplifies this same sort of media saturation. ‘Contra’ is influenced by the likes of Bruce Connor, Negativland, Guy Debord, Omer Fast, Ron English and other practitioners of re-contextualization. It recuts old U.S. propaganda films to deliver different, often clashing, messages from what they originally intended. Then there are some elements that are purely included for nuance or eye-candy. The real power of this film is it’s open-endedness. The song, ‘Contra’, by Dunedin musician Mixdoctor Dog is the mainstay of the piece. The video takes the ideas of VJing and DJing and engages them in a dialectic that adds a mesmerising quality to the piece. Sometimes the music subordinates the video and sometimes the video overtakes the music: it’s constant an interweaving exchange.
Selected judges' comments
"Contra is striking, taut, almost hypnotic in its dizzying array of visuals. It's a mashup of carefully chosen imagery and audio, some of which users will recognise and engage with, referenced and repurposed as a cultural and environmental critique that maintains tension throughout."
"Enjoyable and well executed audio/visual mashup with images, audio and video clips sourced from a number of creative commons resources."
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"Fairy-ridden Isle of Man and other poems", by Jen Stubbs and Roland Lomas
About the Poetry: The five poems in this collection were created using a digital version of the blackout technique heralded by Austin Kleon: www.austinkleon.com/category/newspaper-blackout-poems/ About the Mix & Mash: The two main subjects of focus are Maori fairy folk stories (as recorded and presented by James Cowan) and the detailed layouts of medieval manuscripts from the Sir George Grey Special Collections. Notions of “sacredness”, both poetical and visual, are explored in this collection.
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"Kura", by David Milne
Kura is a mash-up between the Science Learning Hub and Wikipedia. The hub is a carefully curated collection of teaching resources that showcases New Zealand research. It features some great content, but like many document collections it has grown to a point where it is difficult to navigate. Kura uses the structure and content of Wikipedia-as well as slick use of animation and visualization-to enrich the hub and make it easier and more engaging to explore. Behind the scenes, all of the hub’s content was automatically cross-referenced with Wikipedia, to detect the topics discussed within it. These topics provide many opportunities to improve navigation and understanding. Kura uses them to make your queries more accurate, to help you navigate from one query or document to the next, to visualize the information available, and to define and explain the topics that documents discuss.
Note that this entry was withdrawn from the competition judging because of some eligibility issues, but we've included it here so you can check it out.
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"New Zealand's Great Walks. ", by My Tours (Natalie Ferguson, Glen Barnes, Oliver Clarke and Glen Barnes)
New Zealand's Great Walks won the Anything Goes Remix category sponsored by DigitalNZ
New Zealand's Great Walks is a mobile app to promote the Great Walks and to encourage more people to explore some of the best New Zealand has to offer. We've taken information from DOC, Te Ara, Radio NZ, Wikipedia and Flickr to create an app with a lot of extra content that you don't get on a single website. We've also tried to use a lot of interpretative content - A lot of the time people think of open data as images, spreadsheets but we wanted to showcase what can be done if government opens the content of their websites as well. Hopefully apps like these will encourage departments to license their website content under a simple CC-BY license. The app is currently iOS and we may have a Windows Phone 7 version out within the next couple of weeks. Unique features of the app include full offline support including maps so there is no expensive data to use once the tours are downloaded, audio tracks of NZ birds, routes downloaded from the DOC GeoPortal and tons of photos from Flickr and Wikimedia. Demo video of the Application: http://vimeo.com/28901342/http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/new-zealands-great-walks/id464655672?ls=1&mt=8
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"Oakura", by Andrew McMillan
Driving around Mt. Taranaki earlier this year I was completely taken by the delightful font used for the "Oakura Hall" and snapped a quick picture. My remix entry is the font which is inspired by the seven letters presented on that sign. All software tools used in the design process are free "open-source" software - right from getting the photo off my digital camera, building the outlines of those seven original characters, designing each of the 50 or so new glyphs, and finally producing the font as an installable unit for other people. No font is ever complete, and "Oakura" is a work in progress. At this point it has glyphs for a full uper & lower case, digits and some punctuation. Good enough for a "version 1.0" release, but it will be an ongoing project and one that I hope others will also be interested in contributing to. Screenshot of font
Selected judges' comments
"I like this new font by Andrew McMillan, inspired by a photo of the vintage font on the "Oakura Hall" sign near Mt Taranaki. All software used to create this font is open source, and Version 1.0 of the 'Oakura' font is available for installation with a full uper & lower case, digits and some punctuation."
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"Plague(iii). Year: 2011. Artist: Isla Osborne. Dimensions: 750mm diameter. Materials and Techniques: Lampworked glass, acrylic; constructed. ", by Isla Osborne
Plague(iii) is a visual exploration of the spread of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic in the Pacific Rim. Geographical Information System (GIS) technologies are used to structure data about the transmission of the H1N1 virus. This data is then plotted on the artwork, becoming spatial once again. Part of a series 'The winter of my discontent', in Plague (iii) the virus acts as a metaphor for the distribution of ideas through communities. There is an underlying interest in the appreciation of everyday wisdom and decency and an exploration of how this philosophy fits into today’s object-driven world. "It may seem like a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency" - Albert Camus, 1947.
Selected judges' comments
Plague (iii) is exceptional because it challenges us to think beyond data visualisation and consider the power of data materialisation.
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"Rich Man Poor Man, video film clip, is produced by my website designer Murray Hill from Gr Productions 2002.", by Paula's Literacy Charitable Trust
I believe that my entry is unique because it portrays the beauty of the Waikato, filmed at the lovely mellow manor wedding venue in Tamahere. It combines my original poem with the scenery Rich Man Poor man , and the result is very inspiring. I also intend to produce these scenic poetry DVds for primary school childrens education as a teaching resource, with Murray Hill, being the videographer in Hamilton. As Murray ,also shares the same vision and passion that I have for making my project a success
