Did you ever wonder how much - or little - attention is being paid to your credit-card signature?

Full-time prankster John Hargrave asked himself the question and decided to investigate just how crazy he could make his signature before someone would notice.

Hargrave performed the prank with the intellectual assistance of his online readers at comedy-site Zug.com and got away with making funny scribbles, drawings and more cynical signatures like: "I Stole This Card".

Pranks like this will soon be history when ID verification systems go biometric - so, express yourself while you can!

• The Credit Card Prank

In collaboration with MTV, Volkswagen is about to launch a 3 week-long lifestyle event in Copenhagen to promote the newest and youngest member of its family - the VW Fox.

The event, which is called 'Project Fox', brings together young hip designers, artists and cooks who have been invited to develop and implement their creative ideas at three 3 unique locations: a hotel, a factory building and an old warehouse. These locations will form a collective gastronomic and artistic stage for the public introduction of the VW Fox. 800 European journalists have been invited to witness the event that kicks off on April 2nd.

One of the more interesting aspects about the event and the locations, is the hotel, which has been totally redesigned by 21 different artists. Each of the 61 rooms will be a unique artwork in itself. Somewhat like Hotel Winston in Amsterdam.
The plan is that Hotel FOX will live on after the event is over.

• www.project-fox.org • Hotel Fox

NameVoyager is a playful interactive web tool that visualizes baby-naming trends.

The underlying database contains 5000 names of babies born in the Unites States since 1900, as reported by the Social Security Administration.

You can either type in a name, or merely a single letter to see how it has been used over the past century in relation to similar names and letters. The visual volume reflects its changing popularity and if you find a name that intrigues you, simply click on it get more detailed statistics.

Namevoyager is a dynamic supplement to a book by Laura Wattenberg called 'Baby Name Wizard's', which is a field guide to soon-to-be-parents who are searching for the perfect baby name.

• NameVoyager via theyrule.net

In 2002, the Dutch rock band Coparck released a music video for their song 'Into Routine'.

The video was created by Margit Lukacs & Persijn Broersen and slightly resembles 'Eple' by Royksopp (the transitional photo-in-a-photo-in-a-photo video). 'Into Routine' is also made of still-images, but in contrast to Eple, the images are not taken from the band member's own photo albums but from a collection of stock-photography CD's borrowed at the public library in Amsterdam.

The duo manipulated and remixed the material and - voila! A music video containing professional models and exotic places - but made with a production budget close to zero.

Broersen and Lukasc's website contains lots of documentation of everything from art-installations to commercials for Siemens Mobile.

• Into Routine

GUI / Graphical User Interface is a re-presentation of the Adobe Photoshop interface within 3-Dimensional space. The illusion is created by using carton, photocopies, glue and sewing thread.

The humorous artwork is made by Joel Swanson who is a digital artist, writer, and researcher investigating the interconnections of literary theory, art, and technology. His work involves the creation of multimedia narratives that exist within digital space (and sometimes within carton space too).

• GUI / Graphical User Interface

Last year the Swedish Social Ministry launched a web, print and video campaign called Flicka (girl) that attacks the moral of mass media.

A survey shows that every 4th girl feel under pressure by the media's beauty ideals, and the aim of the public campaign is to educate young girls about the techniques and effects of advertising and thus help them to think critically.

One of the campaign's video ads is shaped as a sexist music video featuring semi-nude women washing a car. Suddenly, one of them confronts the camera and asks "what is this, why do most videos look this way?". The viewers are then invited to pick up the phone and call the CEO of Universal Music in Sweden and ask him the question. His name and phone numer is shown on the screen. The local commercial broadcast stations TV3 and TV4 have refused to air this and another similar video.

Additionally, a recent interactive web ad illustrates the other (real) side of magazine-covers. The front side of a Metropolitan cover shows a typical photo of a young girl but by clicking the image it gradually reveals how it has been retouched and manipulated in order to meet the standard media beauty ideal. One of the headlines read: 69 clicks from sexbomb to normal.

The videos can be seen by clicking the link at the bottom of the page.

• www.ficka.org

In case you run out of LSD, or just want a real-time experience of how TV-graphics looked like in the 80's, you can now equip yourself with a virtually reality set that transforms the boring looking world into something more abstract.

The Super-i® goggles, designed by ViewStation™ changes the real world around us into a virtual one by applying different effects to the video input in real-time. The wearable system is assembled inside lightweight goggles that fit any head.

Algorithms, similar to those used in professional systems of image processing (such as Adobe Photoshop) are embedded into Super-i® and the quality of the camera and micro-displays is so great, that not only you'll be able to explore the wonderfully altered reality, but also to get around easily.

The standard effects available for Super-i® are : Invert color, Psychedelic colors, Emboss, Inverted emboss and Line-through and - the more contemporary - Matrix.

• www.super-i.com

With the advent of digital media the act of taking, storing and displaying photographs has become a lot easier and thus more appealing to more people. Several web sites are specifically devoted to systematic diary-like photo projects, such as Ten Years of my Life and The Daily Photo Project that both are following the basic rule of taking and publishing a photograph everyday.

Although, this documentation-meme has flourished with digital cameras and web publishing software, it is something that has also fascinated people before the digital age.

A classic example is On Kawara's date paintings, which is a conceptual art project following other principles than just the engine of time. Another example, that in many ways anticipated the self-publishing trait of the web, is Arrow of Time, which is a family project that began in 1976 and has continued online. Every year, on June 17th, the Golberg family goes through a private ritual: They photograph themselves to stop a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by.

Arrow of time does not explain whether June 17th is a random date or loaded with personal emotion or meaning.

• arrow of time

Grafedia is text, written by hand onto a physical surface, that links to rich media content via SMS.

A Grafedia hyperlink is characterized by being blue with an underscore, possibly a tribute to the classic defualt HTML hyperlink. When recognizing such a link on a surface people can *click* on it via their cellphones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" and they will get the content behind the link delivered to their phone.

Grafedia authors can make hyperlinked text in three easy steps: 1. Choose a word. 2. Send a media file from your cell phone to that chosen word + '@grafedia.net'. 3. Write that word anywhere in the real world in blue with an underline. That word will then be linked to the media file the author sent to grafedia.net, and viewers will be able to retrieve the file. Files can be uploaded from a computer directly to the grafedia.net server.

Grafedia was created by John Geraci at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU.

• Grafedia