La vie des marques from Materialiste Paris on Vimeo.

Wow. Now this is a nice piece of work. But damn is it scary in all of it’s pointed truth and fabulous fiction. Thanks to @hess777 for passing it along. Wonder what happens if you watch it backwards.

Thanks to @foursquare and some nifty folks over at Where Do You Go, you can now with a few quick clicks create a heatmap of YOU in and around NYC (or whatever city you happen to live and playfoursquare.com in). There’s something to this personalization of data visualization. More to come on this note as I do some free thinking over the holiday break about these converging trends.

Now this is my kinda convergence: Quality Marbled Meat + Design Innovation + Social Media Savvy. Thanks to my POKE London partner @hostler for sharing via likecool.com and of course the steak loving artist/photographer/steakshaper himself Dominic Episcopo.

I’ve been following Aaron for sometime now. His work is truly amazing and he’s charting a new path for all of us. I’ll shutup now and let him speak for himself. A must watch. Click here now.

Classic. Just frackin’ classic. Nuff said.

Thanks to @neonarcade (my business partner and friend Aaron Rutledge) for bringing the amazing digital/installation artists Apparati Effimeri to my attention. Their latest work Tetragram for Enlargement is stunning. And certainly moves the whole world of mixed media creative work and live art forward.

Check out http://snckrz.com. A little friendly brandjacking of a new Snickers campaign we liked. Enjoy! And check out what others are saying about it on Twitter and across the Web.

This week we launched the beginning of the new online experience of Performa. And what an amazing experience it’s been partnering with such a passionate and creative organization! Having been involved in the world of performance art for a number of years now with J. Mandle Performance, I had the great pleasure of meeting RoseLee Goldberg at several Performa events in ‘07. And I was hooked. So this year, with a theme of Futurism giving rise to the next Biennial, I convinced the crew at POKE to get involved as well. Riffing off of RoseLee’s description of the organization as a “museum without walls” that “uses New York City as a canvas” we began our collective mission to bring Performa and all of their amazing artists and work way into digital culture, up close and personal. Performa was created to encourage and support artists from around the world expressing themselves through live performance art. And are on a mission to push all forms of living and breathing creativity and artistic expression far forward. We thought and they agreed to spread the creative love we needed to create an interactive, command performance of works (that were created and performed in NYC) but now and always open to the world. Experiences that begin right in front of you online, and will continue offline as Peforma 09 hits the Big Apple again in November. And this is only the start. POKE is continuing work in partnership with Performa in the coming months in preparation for Performa 09. So keep an eye out for more digitally-driven, futuristic creative collaboration from POKE and Performa in the coming months. Here’s to the future!

Today at POKE we launched KideoPlayer. A fun and safe way for families and kids to “channel surf” YouTube. The brainchild of my POKE partner Tom Ajello, KideoPlayer is based on POKE’s UPL8.TV framework, allowing for easy video surfing by using your keyboard (spacebar) to “skip” forward to the next interesting thing. KideoPlayer works the same way. KideoPlayer also searches the “Safe” areas of YouTube right from the URL bar, like this: www.kideoplayer.com/babyeinstein. That’s it. Just by typing that you’ve rolled your very own “Baby Einstein” channel. Neat huh?! From there, you can keep using it like the regular KideoPlayer features, and use the spacebar to get to the next Baby Einstein video (in this case). Enjoy! And remember parents – watch with your kids and slap the spacebar for the next clip!

Damn proud to say she’s my “cousin in-law.” She’s at Joe’s Pub—425 Lafayette St.—Feb. 6 @ 9:30pm. From the New Yorker: The evocative singer and violinist Theresa Andersson was born in Sweden, but she’s lived half her life in New Orleans, where she moved when she was eighteen. And like many other musicians from that humid city she’s absorbed a lot of influences. They are not necessarily the ones that first come to mind. She engages in no soul singing, hardly any R. & B., and just a touch of jazz. Instead, the songs on Andersson’s latest album, “Hummingbird, Go!,” are a keen hybrid of spacey folk and psychedelic pop. She recorded the album in her kitchen, playing her regular instrument along with soda bottles and wineglasses full of water. Check her out on YouTube also.