Park's work explores the "increasing banalization of plastic surgery." Judging from her YouTube, it's only a matter of time before freaky body LEDs end up in Halloween costumes, horror movie wardrobes and, who knows, maybe in some sort of cosmetic body implant. People are talking these up as a Halloween costume, but Park's personal website is down, so you may be out of luck — this year.

"Welcome back from Burning Man," tweets Gregory McGarry. "You smell. Go get your car washed and reevaluate your life. We'll wait."

Or not! After all, burner, your friends have been bashing your festival for days:

• Violet Blue said sex was better in your absence, since the mating pool was free of "hippies and vaudeville hipster performers... ravers and... wealthy tech industry wonks."
  
• Environmentalists like SFGate's Cameron Scott are still complaining about the driving, generators, bottled water and, well, fire associated with the festival.
  
• Civil libertarians are incensed at the festival's policy of owning your pictures for third-party licensing purposes.

Plenty of participants sound stoked on Twitter, to be sure, even those coping with morning-after headaches like backlogged emails. And even those people are stoked they have a job to come back to, unlike some participants:

UPDATE: Original photo removed at photographer's request.

(Pic: Burning Man 2009, by affinity1 on Flickr)

Hilton says in the attached Time video that he works alone, with only "a little bit" of help from his sister. But when Guanabee ran 24 of the gossip blogger's recent photo scrawls past a handwriting expert, three of them looked like they were written by someone else.

Writes Cindy Casares:

We've had people come forward to tell us exclusively that they ghostwrote for Perez Hilton as far back as 2006.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.>So don't be fooled. You might like to think all of Hilton's erudite posts are written by the dashing young man who sounds so erudite on your television. But really they're probably just done by some sweaty, hyperventilating loudmouth whose mom still cleans up after him.

[Guanabee]

When we posted about Bilal's "Domestic Tension" project, plus his more recent project where he inserts himself into an anti-George Bush video game, reaction among io9 readers was definitely split, with several people lambasting Bilal for cheap sensationalism.

So it's interesting to read Bilal's own account of his creative process, which starts from his feelings of constant trauma. Imprisoned by Saddam, Bilal managed to escape to the U.S., but his family stayed behind in Iraq. He writes about running for his life on several occasions, but also reading the news about Iraq with a punch-in-the-gut feeling. He also talks about his guilt about living in the "comfort zone" of the U.S. while his family and friends suffered, and his desire to bridge the "comfort zone" and "conflict zone" somehow. He also was inspired by the U.S. Army using video games as a major recruiting tool.

In the book, the story of Bilal's art installation is interspersed with his account of growing up in Iraq and feeling constantly surrounded by madness. He talks about his father going insane when he was a child, and how his father was abusive or psychotic even when he wasn't pretending to be a sheep. Later, an "epidemic of insanity" hits his town of Kufa later, as young people pretended to be insane to get out of fighting in the Iran-Iraq war. How can you tell the difference between a real insane person and a fake one? For those who are faking insanity, it's an act "born out of desperation," he writes. Later, Bilal's brother kills a man who raped him, and Bilal's family has to flee their town or face revenge killings.

As the book goes on, Bilal's project gets more and more famous, and the book becomes more of an exploration of cyberculture and gaming culture. After about a week, the site runs out of bandwidth, and the project almost grinds to a halt — but a Chicago web developer steps in and donates a dedicated server, becoming one of the project's main sponsors. The constant stress, loneliness and grief starts to take a toll on Bilal, who hides his tears from the webcam. And then there are moments like this one:

A tall, fresh-faced young man with a crew cut ambles into the gallery. His name is Matt Schmidt, and he tells me that until recently he was a U.S. Marine. He saw the YouTube video where Estonia killed the lamp, and how upset I had become. He holds out a plastic bag. "I got you a new lamp and some light bulps," he tells me. "I figured you can use all the help you can get."

Matt says he never thought much about the consequences of killing in war. He says he and his fellow Marines were always too busy trying to survive to be worried about their targets. But the paintball project has made him see things in a different light, enabled him to see his adversaries as human beings. He wishes his Marine buddies could visit the gallery.

In general, the onslaught is furious, traumatizing and overwhelming — and that's before Bilal's site hits on Digg. "I survived Digg day," Bilal writes. People spread rumors the site is a fake and Bilal is animatronic.

If you want to see just how surreal online culture can get — and get a taste of where confrontational art is heading in the future — you should totally pick up a copy of Shoot An Iraqi.

But throw enough money around and you, too, can pretend to have taste! Worked for the Gap's Donald Fisher, who's opening his own ironically named Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio (or "CAMP") because he didn't want SFMOMA to meddle with his precious collection. No wonder Google chose the Gap building with its godawful Richard Serra sculpture for the company's newly opened San Francisco office. (Original photo by Steve Rhodes)

"So have you seen that nine-minute video of the guy fucking a giant Cheeto that's made out of a bunch of little Cheetos?"

"OMG, yes! What was that all about?"

"I don't know. The internet is weird."

Yeah, we don't get it either. But to be fair, he's not really fucking the Cheeto so much as he's making sweet, sweet love to it. It's kind of romantic, actually. Even if it is completely and totally out-of-this-world insane.

. . .

· I LOVE YOU CHEETOS (YouTube, via uniquedaily.com)

Click to expand all the images, including "MyDoom." If you dare.

18-year-old Sven Jaschan of Germany wrote the Netsky worm, which first appeared in February 2004.

Phishing scams trick users into thinking their giving private information to someone they trust.

A worm called "Russian" from St. Petersburg, Russia, which some call the Storm Worm.

Ever read: "GROUPSeX SeXDATiNg NiKkErThuMPER CUTIEZ" ? Bad news. That was this SexDating virus.

Some times you think software will perform one function, and then it takes over your computer. That would a Trojan attack, here pictured.


(Images by MessageLabs)

The heavy Internet users of Digg, YouTube, Fark, and StumbleUpon have little background in the usual experience of art: a rich education that lets viewers appreciate a work in context. They get their news as a stream of unrelated stories. (While the rest of this story concentrates on Digg, the same rules apply to many other sites including Fark and StumbleUpon. Stories on these sites trickle out to millions of Internet users through blogs, e-mail, and IMs. Plus I've already ripped YouTube apart for its own aesthetic.)

Right now, Digg's front page includes election news, iPhone tips, clips from last night's Conan O'Brien, a video of a panda, and the story of a drunk driver who put a seat-belt on her beer and not her baby. Art is presented the same way: One story at a time, usually focusing on a single work, surrounded by unrelated items.

This format has encouraged five aspects of the Diggbrow aesthetic:

The Lowest Common Denominator
Most of Digg's favorite items are, well, crap. The all-time top Digg item described as "art" is just a composite photo of a tree:

It's pretty, but it's more "cute photo illustration" than "high art." Still, over five thousand Digg users voted for the item (headlined as "1 Tree, 1 Picture, 4 Seasons. (Pic)" and described only as "A beautiful piece of art work"), and over 240 thousand people saw it on Flickr.

The second-favorite artwork is a gallery of desktop backgrounds. The third-favorite is this custom-painted Lamborghini:

This barely even works as a paint job, much less art. And Digg commenters hated it. But 3800 of them still voted for it, driving tens of thousands of people to look at it.

So far, Digg fails at appreciating and promoting art. But the fourth all-time favorite art on Digg, while nowhere near highbrow, at least demonstrates an artist's attention to craft and an appreciation of artistic tradition. It's the work of three sidewalk chalk artists, Edgar Mueller, Julian Beever, and Kurt Wenner. Wenner particularly seems to transcend the medium's trompe l'oeil novelty:

Accessibility and Novelty
Of course, those are just the crowd-pleasers. Plenty of worthier art gets onto Digg. But just like Clinton makes it to Digg news not for her fiscal policy but for crying, art gets onto Digg not for its value to traders and artists but for novelty reasons. A recent link featured this YouTube video of a sculpture that makes eerie noises in the wind:

It's not that Digg rejects the traditional measures of good art, but it focuses on the novel bits. Duchamp could make it here if an author focused on the "he put a toilet in a museum" aspect. Art stories from online newspapers come from the "offbeat" section of the news as often as "Arts and culture." The work must have an immediately catchy effect, as above, or a "what'll they think of next" quality in its creation, like the photo-realistic drawing below, composed freehand in ballpoint pen:

Artist Juan Casas told the Daily Mail that his ballpoint drawings "started off as a joke," and though he's now serious about them, he worried that serious art competitions would write him off.

Post-post-modernism
The Diggbrow crowd also appreciates a good prank. Art with a populist, ironic meaning has an advantage, which helps post-modern artists with stunt-like work.

This playful recontextualization of Damien Hirst's "For The Love Of God" made Digg as "Prank on Artist Who Created $100 Million Diamond Skull." Diggers appreciated the turnaround and criticized Hirst's work.

Among household-name artists, the most obvious Diggbrow hero is Banksy, who, while lacking nuance and arguably not worthy of canonization under traditional terms, is still a Digg favorite for his lucid messages and his reputation as a renegade. This street cred puts his work on the same scale as the Lamborghini art and "Hammer time" stickers on stop signs, though at the opposite end.

Personal expression
Diggbrow has a low barrier to entry; while some works earn their place in its canon because they represent hundreds of hours of labor, others make it despite minimal effort because of their novel concept. One encouraging aspect of that thirst for novelty is how Diggbrow appreciates the artistic value of personal expression.

At first, the work below (linked on Digg at one of the site's favorite sources, Neatorama) might seem worthless: some kid drew on herself. But here Diggbrow shows an unexpected appreciation for the context of the work, showing that sometimes these kids can actually read a paragraph instead of flicking through an image gallery.

Artist Ariana Page Russell explains:

My own skin frequently blushes and swells. I have dermatographia, a condition in which one's immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin's surface is lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw patterns and words on my skin, which I then photograph.

Diggers might even click through to Russell's web site, which shows she's not just screwing around but an artist whose work ranges far beyond these skin drawings.

If Digg readers can follow stories past the initial link, they may learn about an artist's entire body of work, its themes, the movement into which it fits, and about the tradition that gives context to every wind sculpture and skin drawing. Which leads to Diggbrow's final redemptive theme.

Piecemeal Art Education
The Internet is a tough place to learn about art. There's little structure, and there are too few high-quality images. The online galleries of major museums only carry as much explanatory information as the real-world exhibit. Serious guides to art are hard to search for.

But piece by piece, blogs are picking out art history and explaining it, so that reading enough could amount to a skim through an art textbook. One great example from Digg is this exploration of Frank Gehry's first deconstructivist building. Diggers are also particularly fascinated with scientific advances in art, such as a new device to detect painted-over paintings.

Internet culture isn't the end of art. It's not exactly a classical education, but it's instilling some artistic value in viewers. And after enough time figuring out what the hell Damien Hirst's point is, I can appreciate a little Diggbrow.

Thankfully Flickr user paulthewineguy has annotated nearly 50 masterpieces, translating them into geekspeak for the less artistically inclined. For instance, the angel in Caravaggio's Inspiration of St. Matthew has been lovingly reworked as Clippy the Office assistant, Jasper Johns' Map has a Google Maps overlay, and Leonardo DaVinci's helicopter sketch is still in beta. (Illustration by paulthewineguy)

Commenter rheiser says:

Google occupies buildings that Adobe once occupied when they were in Mt. View across from the Amphitheater parking lot. I haven't looked to see if the statue we used to call "Gumby" is there anymore in front of the green buildings.

Those certainly look like the acrobat sculptures that used to be outside the Adobe buildings — I used to pass by them every day when i worked at Sun in the early 90's. I had always assumed that Acrobat was named after the sculptures ....

A potentially interesting factoid: The statues referred to in #10 are holdovers from when Adobe occupied these buildings, and are why it's called 'Acrobat'.

Total coincidence. No relation to Acrobat the product. However, like most big tech companies Adobe has an agreement with it's local government (now city of San Jose) to provide some level of public art in its environs. Adobe now has a couple of rusty sculptures in front of its San Jose HQ. And that funny light thing on top of its building. Funnily enough Apple has a similar agreement with Cupertino. But Steve Jobs took down the art (it was a collection of big software icons in front of Infinite Loop) because he didn't like it.

I don't know whether or not that building was ever Adobe, but I do remember when Bldg 45 was owned and occupied by Sun, back when the Google Campus was SGI. I used to work for SETI (yes, *that* SETI), which was in the building just on the other side of Landings from the one marked marked "1965 Charleston" on your map at that time, and drove by those statues every day. I always thought they were a bit odd, since Sun isn't in the habit of littering their campus with giant kids. Except for the executives, of course.

You forgot to mention Scott Drave's Electric Sheep installation in the main Google lobby. Also, where can one find Larry & Sergey's gallery of Burning Man photos? I know they exist somewhere in the halls of the 'plex.

I remember those sculptures of acrobats outside of an Adobe building. Perhaps building 45 used to be used by Adobe, and the artworks remain? I had wondered at the time if there was a correlation between the name Adobe Acrobat and the sculptures.

It appears the news we broke last week of Slamdance removing the Columbine game from their lists of finalists and why has created quite the shitstorm, for lack of a better word.

Ian Bogost reports over on Water Cooler Games growing list of reactions to the decision:

Kelee Santiago pulled Slamdance finalist and future PS3 title flOw from the competition in protest.

To hear that the game had been pulled was deeply discouraging. As a group, our opinions on the quality of the game itself range, but we can all agree on one thing: it deserved to be there.

We also agree that the act of pulling SCMRPG is one we cannot condone. But how best to protest this action? Going to the festival, at which prizes are awarded, only to criticize its organizers seemed unfair at best, and hypocritical at worst. Therefore, we have decided to withdraw flOw from the competition. We agree with Jonathan Blow:

Jonathan Blow, creator of finalist Braid, has also pulled his game from the competition.

The game lacks compassion, and I find the Artist's Statement disingenuous. But despite this, the game does have redeeming value. It does provoke important thoughts, and it does push the boundaries of what games are about. It is composed with more of an eye toward art than most games. Clearly, it belongs at the festival.

So, in protest of game's expulsion, I have dropped Braid out of the competition as well.

Raph Koster has spoken up on the subject.

Dismissing the game "on moral grounds" essentially argues that it is exploitative; yet we do not necessarily consider clearly issue-driven films or books as exploitative. Rather, the sensitivity of the subject seems to be what is pushing the needle here. Can games, which some allege caused Columbine, then comment on Columbine without being regarded as exploitative?

SCMRPG is no great shakes as a game in its own right. It doesn't even try to do something new on that front. Instead, it's incurring controversy based on artwork, content, and most importantly, the medium that it happens to be in. Were its RPG plot excised and written out as a book, would anyone raise an eyebrow? Probably not.

As has Slamdance Game Fest sponsor Greg Costikyan, of Manifesto Games. Costikyan, while continuing to support the fest, has created a permanent place for the game on Manifesto's site.

As gamers, and those who love games, our reponse to this game, and to the criticism of it, should not be to hide, or run away, or hope that it goes away. Instead it should be to say: You do not understand, nor are you attempting to understand. This is not a glamorization of the murderers, nor yet a trivialization of the tragedy; it is a work of serious artistic intent and accomplishment, based on considerable research, that in fact illuminates and reflects the horror of that day. Just as there are novels of the Holocaust, there can be a game of Columbine, and neither need trivialize a tragedy.

Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas, winners of last year's Slamdance Grand Jury Prize, have written an open letter to the festival, asking for the reinstatement of the Super Columbine Massacre RPG.

We give no judgment here about how successfully "Super Columbine Massacre RPG!" addresses its topic. However we feel it is extremely important that the game community, including high-profile festivals such as Slamdance, support such experimentation. Games, as a medium, are as fully deserving and appropriate as film and other more established media forms, to deal with such subject matter.

And how can we forget Newsweek's N'Gai Croal.

This is a recipe for the continued infantilizing of a young medium whose potential, for all of the compelling works already released, still remains largely untapped. We haven't played Super Columbine Massacre RPG, but from what we've read, it strikes us as a fairly serious and well-intentioned attempt to grapple with the shootings and suicides through an interactive medium. And while we certainly recognize that many will see SCMRPG as ghoulish, offensive and trivializing of a horrific event, we reject the premise that it is inherently so—any more than Art Spiegelman's "Maus" or Pablo Picasso's "Guernica"—and any attempts to paint Ledonne's game as inherently so should be firmly and loudly repudiated. For those of us who care about the future of videogames, this is a time to stand up and be counted.

If you have any interest in gaming besides the playing of them, you must read all of these links. Seriously. Artistic expression in video games is the most important topic that will likely be faced by developers, perhaps ever. The fact that the game that seems to be bringing this topic to a head happens to be one that many find repugnant is incidental to the bigger issue here.

To be clear: This is not about SCMRPG. This is about whether video games will forever be relegated to the position of mindless entertainment and child's play or whether gaming as an industry can make that final leap into artistry, expression and tackle topics that evoke something more than fun.

This is why I finally decided to become a games journalist. I enjoy writing reviews, but what finally pushed me to make that leap from police reporting to features writing is the chance to be covering a medium at the cusp of becoming something so much greater. Brian Crecente

Update: Jan. 9
Three more finalists have dropped out of the festival. Bringing the the number of finalists no longer in the competition to five, six if you count SCMRPG, or nearly half.

Once Upon a Time withdraws from the finals.

"We are very saddened by the news of Super Columbine Massacre RPG being pulled from the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemakers competition due to loss of financial backing.
Regardless of the merit of SCMRPG being a finalist in the SGG competition, having chosen the game and then only removing it when pressured by outside influences brings the impartiality of the competition as a whole into question. Who is truly judging these games: the Slamdance judges or their financial backers?
We unfortunately feel that we cannot be part of a competition that does not rank artistic expression and free speech as priorities and would therefore like to withdraw our entry of Once Upon A Time from the competition.
We thank you for your support of our game and wish you continued success."

Finalist Toblo withdraws from festival.

We cannot condone removing Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from the Slamdance Festival on moral grounds. Along with the developers of Braid and flOw, we are pulling our game from the Slamdance Festival. In the unlikely event that Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is re-admitted to the festival, we would be happy to participate.

Fest finalist Everyday Shooter withdraws

As you may have heard, Peter Baxter, the president of Slamdance, decided to pull Super Columbine Masscare RPG! from the competition.

I do not agree with his decision. His action is part of a the ball and chain that continuously represses the games medium from advancing beyond superficial entertainment. Because the Slamdance games competition now carries the sharp undertones of this sad repression, I am withdrawing Everyday Shooter from the competition.

Grand Text Auto Publishes Letter of Protest from Finalists

We object to this decision and strongly urge the festival organizers to reinstate the game in the festival. It is legitimate for games to take on difficult topics and to challenge conventional ideas about what video games can do. No game should be rejected for moral or other reasons after a panel of judges has found the game to be of artistic merit and worthy of inclusion in the festival. We find it very unlikely that a similar decision would have been made about a jury-selected film, and see this decision as hurting the legitimacy of games as a form of expression, exploration, and experience.

Grumpy Gamer Calls for Finalists to Put Up or Shut Up

Apparently some people in the game industry are pretty upset by this, but my question is: Why haven't the other finalist pulled out in protest?

Seems like it's for one of two reasons:

#1 - They agree the game should have been pulled.
#2 - They don't want to lose the chance of winning the award to stand up for something they believe in.

Lastly, but not leastly, our formerly very own John Brownlee breaks down the argument for both sides and asks for help writing his Wired piece on the subject. Go... help.

It's bleak just to look at those questions: perhaps I'm too cynical, but for me, it's clear that the progression there signifies the complete death of art as a medium of deep personal expression.

I need your help. I'd like you guys to help me brainstorm and bring alternate perspectives to the table. Questions and viewpoints I haven't considered. Maybe you can try to answer some of the questions and give me a better idea on what people besides me think the logical progression is. The intention is that you guys will help me think about this n a wider and more three-dimensional complex, which will hopefully make my story at Wired News richer and better thought through.

What do you guys think? Hit our comments and let us know.

Human Browser gallery [Christophe Bruno]

The Portable Cell Phone Booth (embedded vid), pictured above, ups the chance of yelling "Buy! Sell! Buy! Sell!" by 90%.

CellBooth is a toteable fabric curtain with a weirdly serious writeup: "Ultimately, I desired to recreate the illusion of privacy and stillness afforded by oldschool, 4-walled phone booths, but also to update the booth as a portable object that would fit into a modern life."

But the most telling: Not only is a company selling cell booths for restaurants, but last fall it earned a Wired News story. Shoving public cell talkers into a little wooden box is no longer just a dream.

The Portable Cellphone Booth [cowboygirlproductions]
CellBooth [Jenny Chowdhury]
C.P. Booth LLC [Official site]
Booths Silence Cell-Phone Boors [Wired News]

Google this afternoon:

Google buckled under pressure from the firm representing Joan Miró's family, who threatened a copyright suit over the holiday logo. Google just wanted to celebrate the surrealist artist's birthday with a tribute — and one would guess they have enough lawyers to defend an obviously non-infringing work. But hey, no problem — someone else can go defend creative rights.

Artist's family asks Google to take down Thursday's `painted' logo [Mercury News]
Earlier: Google Miro: Brilliant or toddler? [Valleywag]