Just before Christmas POKE London came up with a snow-cannon installation that allowed people to trigger a snowfall using their smartphones.

Posters in Rivington Street in Hackney encouraged pedestrians to make a call or check in using Foursquare. Those curious enough were rewarded with a snowfall to the tunes of ‘Let it Snow’ by Dean Martin.

• Making Hackney Sparkle

ZYX is an iPhone app that turns the user into a performer.

The app instructs users to do slightly bizarre things with their iPhone, like jumping with it, pushing it, turning it and shaking it.

ZYX is created by the legendary art-duo and interface-experimentalists JODI. When they first submitted ZYX to the App Store it was rejected, because the user-interface was not of "sufficient quality", according to Apple's standards.

Quote:
--

Please evaluate whether you can make the necessary revisions to improve the user
experience of your app.
---

• ZYX on iTunes App Store

Between 1988 and 1991, Comme des Garçons explored the sixth sense through photography, illustration and artworks in a magazine called Six.

Now, they've created a small poetic iPad app that allow users to swipe, tilt and scroll through six audiovisual chapters based on selected images from the magazine.

Moving Six feels slightly like early-days explorative CD-rom art, when digital experiences was not all about functionality and usability. The app is designed by Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo in collaboration with digital agency Meri Media who has previously created apps for fashion heavyweights Gucci, Stella McCartney and Vogue Homme.

• Moving Six on iTunes App Store

Back in May the National Gallery of Denmark invited seven progressive musicians to create a piece of music based on their interpretations of an art work in the museum's collection.

The musical interpretations have been released one at a time, and now they are all available as an app that allows users to listen to the music, either at the museum or at home while exploring high-res photos of the art that served as inspiration.

Museum goers without smarthphones can borrow a handheld device at the museum. The app is in Danish but given the limited amount of content it should be possible for anyone to navigate and enjoy.

Music Made by Art features:
Giana Factory (painting by Abildgaard)
Stoffer & Maskinen (painting by Ejnar Nielsen)
Kasper Bjørke (painting by Valdemar S. Møllers)
Darkness Falls (painting by Casper David Friedrich)
Turboweekend (sculpture by Niels Hansen Jacobsen)
Thulebasen (painting by Jørgen Valentin Sonne)
Trentemøller (painting by an unknown artist)

• More info at The National Gallery of Denmark + Get the app on iTunes

The Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T) has created a series of 100 QR stencil designs that can be used to provide directions, information, and warnings to digital nomads in urban space.

The project - called "Hobo Codes" - is inspired by the Hobo signs developed by 19th century vagabonds and migratory workers to cope with the difficulty of nomadic life.

QR codes usually direct users to a URL, but the digital Hobo Codes contains simple information, such as an advice or warning. Scanning the codes reveal messages like "vegans beware", "those aren't women" and "it's fake".

The stencils are made using the "QR Stencil Generator", a utility which converts QR codes into vector-based stencil patterns suitable for laser-cutting. The stencil generator is developed by Golan Levin and Asa Foster III.

• QR Stenciler and QR Hobo Codes

If you are in Denmark, you can follow the life of a homeless man called Allan via an SMS service.

Allan lives on the streets of Copenhagen and subscribers to the service will receive three text messages a day, for two consecutive days.

One of Allan's messages reads: "I just woke up. Slept on a bench behind Flintholm Metro Station with my dog Little Piv".

The service is called 'SMS from the streets' and the idea is to offer a bit of insight into the life of a homeless person.

The fee is 20 DKK (4 Euro) and all proceeds go to a magazine for homeless people (Hus Forbi). The service is provided by SMSpress, which is a small publishing house specialized in providing text based stories via SMS.

To subscribe, text "SP HUSFORBI" to 1277.

• The story on Hus Forbi (in Danish)

Rambler is a physical publishing format for the obsessive microblogger.

The format consists of a pair of sensor and bluetooth enabled sneakers connected to a Twitter account. With each step taken, the shoes automatically transmit a message to Twitter made up of the word 'tap' and punctuation marks.

A message - or tweet - generated by Rambler will typically look something like this: . . tap . tap tap . . . tap tap . . . . tap . . . tap tap . . . . tap . . tap . . . tap tap . . tap tap tap tap tap tap.

Rambler is developed by designers Ricardo Nascimento and Tiago Martins. The project is a witty critique of our need to share trivial information on social networks such as Twitter.

Related:
One-word blogging: Wordr
Freshly baked tweets: Bakertweet
Tweeting plant: Botanicalls
Tweeting from the womb: Kickbee

• Rambler Shoes on popkalab.com and on Twitter.

Selfpromotion: Here follows a description of a project I recently designed for a cultural festival in Spain.
---

Urban Cursor is a GPS enabled object designed to facilitate social interaction and play in public space.

The object, which is shaped as an oversized 3-dimensional computer cursor (pointer), was placed on a square in Figueres, Catalunya during the cultural festival Ingràvid.

Here, people could touch it, move it around and sit on it as an alternative to the benches.

Despite being removed from its normal screen based environment, the cursor was still in touch with the digital world. Via an embedded GPS device, the cursor transmitted its geographic coordinates to a website. At the website, the coordinates were mapped in Google Maps thereby documenting the cursor's movements in the physical world and making it possible for participants to see how they collectively helped move the object around.

• www.urbancursor.com

The Danish music-poetry duo Bo hr Hansen & Nils Lassen has come up with a novel - and potentially very time consuming - way to promote their latest CD "Hvem er jeg?" (Who am I?).

Those buying the CD are offered a free private concert - via telephone.

In order to qualify for the concert, you need to send them an MMS (a photo via mobile phone) of yourself holding the CD, preferably with the receipt. Upon receiving the documentation, the duo will do their best to find a concert date and time that suits all of you.

Thanks Mogens for the link.

Related: Bubble Star At Home

• Private Telephone Concerts (Danish)

'Goodbye Privacy' was the theme at this year's Ars Electronica festival and perhaps not so surprisingly, there were a handful of projects and exhibitions dealing with the presence of web and surveillance cameras in public spaces.

One of them, 'Self Portrait With Webcam' by the Austrian artist Josef Klammer, is a series of photographic images seen through the eyes of webcams at different Austrian locations.

Klammer himself appears on every image with his laptop, which he used to position and capture himself. Each self portrait in the exhibition is accompanied by a photograph of the webcam along with information about its physical location as well as its webadress.

Related entry: Surveillance Camera Players

• www.klammer.mur.at