Demonic Justin Bieber, Hackable Wardrobes And The iPhone As Prison

All that and more in Rob Walker's weekend link-down

Rob Walker, Yahoo News
·Rob Walker
The iPhone as prison, from Go Outside magazine.

by Rob Walker

Looking for ways to kill time productively this Friday afternoon (and beyond)? Here’s my week-ending list of suggestions.

Hackable Wardrobes: The PBS online series OffBook has a useful and nicely done episode on wearable technology, touching on Google Glass, conductive yarns, body-monitoring devices, DIY wearables, light-up neckties and more, all in less than six minutes. Featuring supercool Becky Stern, among others. A great crash course in one of the most gloriously geeky trends going.

Snappy Images: In a series called “Time Travel,” photographer Flóra Borsi inserts herself into a variety of familiar 20th century scenes — from an Elvis concert to a Warhol party to Civil Rights action. Her amusing twist on this Zelig-esque conceit is that in every scene she’s taking pictures with her cell phone. After all, we are currently over-photographing scenes and landmarks in the present — if only we could over-photograph the iconic past! Via PetaPixel.

A Toast To Technology: An app called BeerMapper taps into data from RateBeer.com to help you create “a heat map of your preferences over the ‘beer space.’” A data visualization project with a practical payoff: how refreshing. Via MetaFilter.

Demonizing Bieber: Evolver.fm’s Eliot Van Buskirk, the all-out king of comprehensive music-app coverage, highlights a funny hack-day creation called “Brutalize Me.” Basically it converts standard vocal tracks into a super-demonic, screamo-metal style. The proof-of-concept clip brutalizes a snippet of a Justin Bieber song into pure demonic menace. The motive seems to be catharsis: “Do you hate Justin Bieber or pop music in general?” the creators write. “Here is your chance at revenge!”

Your Devices Are Your Prison: BuzzFeed has a few images of “stunning” magazine ads from Brazil that imagine grim and massive prisons based on the form of tech-shapes that are familiar to us all these days, such as the iPhone and a computer mouse. Make this your last stop before quitting time — if this doesn’t make you want to power down and spend a little time in the non-digital world, nothing will.

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