Saved a quick blog post draft about the The Johnny Cash Project back in April of last year when I first learned of it. The collaborative project site describes it:

Working with a single image as a template, and using a custom drawing tool, you’ll create a unique and personal portrait of Johnny. Your work will then be combined with art from participants around the world, and integrated into a collective whole: a music video for “Ain’t No Grave”, rising from a sea of one-of-a-kind portraits.

Strictly Global just aired he the ever evolving video of “Ain’t No Grave” on regular old TV and it is high past time to blog it.

The video itself as of 9/30/10 starts around the 2:45 mark.

Toxoplasmosis at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 12/28/10 by divvied

Put my iPhone on the table at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, fired up the SoundCloud app and recorded this Toxoplasmosis performance.

To describe the duo badly: experimental noise.

Doc Pop wears many digital hats: iPad musician,  visual experimenter of mobile apps, blogger, yo-yo madman, game developer/designer, painter, illustrator, etc. etc.

He’s was also my first follower on the (primarily) iPhone (only) social photo app http://instagr.am.

The good doctor does a Daily App Experiment where he takes an images and applies manipulations using different iPhone apps.  He used a photo I shot and posted to Instagr.am yesterday to make #48 in the series.

Daily App Experiment #48: “Nettled Birds” – Saw this pic in @dippold’s instagram and asked if I could play with it. Using TypeDrawing, I added one trillion birds to his original image. I’m really happy folks are willing to let me alter their images. (Taken with Instagram at Daily App Experiment) ~Doc Pop

Make the jump to see my original image and read more about Doc Pop and Instagr.am

My original Instagr.am image, the starting point in his Daily App Experiment #48.

If you don’t have an iPhone, or aren’t ready to download the free app yet, Doc Pop feeds his Instagr.am photos and images into a Tumblr for general viewing.

Another noteworthy and recent project of his is the electronic-pop-ish record “Beats and Smudges,” recorded exclusively with mobile applications.

A CD laser lens scrapped from a CD drive of an aged laptop

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Quick and nastily taped onto a iPhone 3GS

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iPhone macro lens

Close up of an Arduino board

Close up of the back side of a one hundred dollar bill

After the jump, a write up about this hacked-up/modded iPhone camera rig and a gallery of some shots taken with it.

This contraption is a discovery by my brother Aaron, came across while dismantling an old computer and popping off the lens — or covering — to the laser on a CD drive and placing it over the iPhone’s camera.

He suggests using different washers of varying thickness to act as spacers between the CD lens and the iPhone to achieve more magnified, better quality images.

This entire home-brew innovation is born from attempting to replicate the more legit and interchangeable Fisheye, Macro, and Wide Angle Camera Phone Lenses from PhotoJoJo that mount onto a magnetic ring you affix to the body of the iPhone.

Other DIY iPhone macro lens projects abound.  Most use other camera lenses, cases and mounts. But this CD lens method seems the least expensive and most novel macro lens photo method for an iPhone thus far.

Side note: a different CD lens used for the photos below was somehow magnetized and stuck to the iPhone without the tape job shown in the recreation above.

Central Park

[via BuzzFeed]

I hate billboards.  Trash advertising trash, blocking scenery.  Interstate 70 in Missouri is particularly infested.

This art installation, Non-Sign II by Seattle-based art collective Lead Pencil Studio, is made up of small steel rods.  It creates a blank/negative space, framing the natural landscape where it looks like a billboard should be.

It could just make people think about what billboards do and don’t do badly.

While already ancient in Internet years, these three stood out after a recent video viewing catchup binge:

Sport:

If this hasn’t been on repeat on ESPN can anyone really even utter the word “sport” anymore?

Meatspace:

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

Video Projection Mapping for the 600th anniversary of the Astronomical Clock in Prague — it’s a video of video projected on the clock itself.

Art/Architecture/3-D computer modeling/Music Video/Or something like this:

(via BoingBoing)

Jeremy Wood makes digital marks — drawings if you will — by walking around with a GPS.

From his site GPSdrawing:

Jeremy Wood is a multidiscipline artist and map maker whose diverse work is an expression of the poetry and politics of space and reflects upon how we treat our travels and interact with location.

The New York Times mentions Wood and his tech:

Mr. Montelongo shares his maps on everytrail.com. The iPhone is the fastest growing GPS tool of the site’s user base, according to Joost Schreve, the site’s founder. “But if you look at the quality of the maps, the best trips still come from traditional GPS devices,” he said, noting that the iPhone tends to draw less precise lines and to lose its signal under trees and near large buildings.

Jeremy Wood, an artist based in London, coined the term “GPS drawing” nearly a decade ago and continues to maintain gpsdrawing.com, a Web site compiling his and other GPS-produced images from around the world. Whenever he leaves his house, Mr. Wood takes his GPS device with him. He has mapped all of his movements since 2004 and views GPS drawing as an extension of a long-standing human tradition.

“People have been doing this for centuries, making big drawings so they could be seen by the gods,” he said, citing the ancient Nasca geoglyphs in Peru as an example.

A digital zoom into the hand-covered breasticles portion of Sandro Botticelli’s, “The Birth of Venus,” from haltadefinizione.com

Full zoom into the high res photo of Sandro Botticelli’s, “The Birth of Venus,” at haltadefinizione.com

Boing Boing offers this quote about the famous photo-goings-ons-of-famous-paintings at haltadefinizione.com:

Their more recent image of Botticelli’s La Primivera consists of 28 billion pixels, about 3,000 times the resolution of a consumer digital camera. The pixel density (pixels per inch, or ppi) has also increased, from 580 to 1,500ppi (magazine and book printing are typically 300ppi).

In contrast to the “gallery view” afforded by the online Monet exhibit (in which you can see individual brushstrokes wonderfully), these images are more like a “conservator’s view”, allowing you to zoom in to a level as if observed under a magnifying lens.

You need to be patient with the image as it loads, but once loaded, the interface is remarkably responsive as you zoom. The images are watermarked, but that’s a small quibble considering what they are offering, and you can work around the watermarks by altering the magnification level and scrolling a bit.

My free painting of Cheif Tyrol from Battlestar Galactica by Ali Spagnola

Ali Spagnola will paint you an original painting for free, no stings.  Even the shipping is free.  With such an offer you can imagine how many requests he gets.

He emailed:

hi!
i finished your painting!  sorry it took so long. i had to get through over 1,200 requests to get to yours! you can see it here:

www.alispagnola.com/Free/tyrol.jpg

it’s cheif tyrol from battlestar galactica. what do you think? if you’re happy with it, just let me know your current address and i’ll mail it to you right away :) thanks for offering to take whatever. seriously though if you dont like it just let me know and i’ll offer something else!

ali

http://www.alispagnola.com/Free/

Extremely solid to say the least.