ThingsAmongMany

via

You probably have; it’s been all over the interwebs for the last 36 hours or so. But, it’s freakin’ awesome, so I’m going to post it anyway:

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

Click on an image to advance or hover at the bottom of the viewing area for thumbnails:

via @evalottchen

Chinese artist Chen Wenling critiques the global financial crisis in What You See Might Not Be Real, on display at a Beijing gallery. The bull is said to represent Wall Street, while the man pinned to the wall represents jailed financier Bernard Madoff.

via BBC & @meat99

Sitting somewhere between tongue-in-cheek and overtly serious is newcomer to the social web, Be Fucking Awesome. Enter every awesome thing that you do and everyone else in the system can vote on it, creating your “Awesome Quotient”. You have 150 characters to enter each deed (no idea why they opted to make it 150 instead of 140 for easy Twitter integration, but I digress). You can then sort your own (and everyone else’s) deeds by “most recent” or “most awesome” and sort by everyone, or just your friends.

Useful? Eh, maybe not. Fucking awesome? Yeah, gettin’ pretty close.

and they’re AWESOME!

Perhaps they have something to do with the design contest from January?

How can you possibly not LOVE this??

We all know and love Craigslist by now (especially here in NYC where it trumps even eBay for finding…anything). And, of course, one of the more humorous aspects of the old Cl is the Missed Connections section. Unfortunately, if you want anything further than a humorous respite from your day, you’re probably relatively SOL on Missed Connections. It’s a jumble of difficult to navigate listings that are poorly described and lack much chance of making any real connection.

That’s what newcomer Blinka.me aims to fix. While they try to bill it as a bit more, Binka.me seems to be - at its heart - a more robust version of Craigslist’s Missed Connections:

blinka.me helps you meet people you’d like to meet again. By sharing your moments on blinka.me you get a second chance to connect.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If Missed Connections had a better shot at working, it’d actually be a pretty cool savior for all of those moments when we can’t stomach up the gumption to speak to the person we’ve been eyeing for the last fifteen minutes of our commute.

The site seems to be in its infancy and is still collecting “moments” from around the world - for example, I was surprised to find that there’s nothing in NYC. But as it grows, it certainly has the potential to start connecting people in ways that only dumb luck might have managed before. It would be nice to see them integrate data from Craigslist as well since (despite its humorous nature) it’s still the de facto dumping ground for these moments. Between it’s own robust system and everything being sucked in from Craiglist, they might well have a winner on their hands.

Seems photo projects are the theme around here for the moment. The newest one that I’ve stumbled across is called Before I die, I want to…. Artistic duo Nicole Kenney and ks rives each carry a Polaroid camera with them at all times, stopping to snap a shot of the interesting people they come across. And, for every shot they take, they ask the person what dream they’d like to accomplish during their lifetime. All of the photos (and dreams) are collected on their site http://beforeidieiwantto.org for the world to see.

Their hope is to reconnect with all of their subjects in a few (read 10 or 20?) years to see how they’re coming with their dreams.

Seeing online that other people are fulfilling their desires will motivate participants to complete their task and write a story of their own.

They’ve also taken this hobby/project on the road. The two recently spent three months traveling through India, Polaroids close at hand, asking the locals the very same question. Those dreams are also collected on a separate section of the site.

If you want to share with Nicole and ks your personal dream, they’re taking submissions from around the world as well. Just follow the directions here to share with them.

Well, it is exactly what it sounds like. All said, however, it’s a pretty interesting project being conducted by photographer Jacob Pritchard. Pritchard helps his subjects get all set for portraits in in their own bed, then lets them have at it with the remote for a few takes to see what comes out of it. And the results are pretty compelling.

For the moment, it seems, Pictures in Bed lives on its own Tumblr account. I’d presume it was left off his portfolio site for ease of updating. Regardless, there’s something intriguing about delving into people homes/lives to see how they sleep/hang out in bed. It has a voyeuristic quality that’s paid off safely. And apparently the participants are having fun too:

I felt like a cross between a professional model, a porn star, and an artist—it was titillating. -Kelly

For me, my bed is a magical place I dream about when I’m drunk, exhausted and somewhere far, far away—like the East Village. -Tanveer

If you want to participate, you can drop Jacob a line. His info is here. Have fun, and let me know if your shot turns up there!