Katie Covington at the 2013 South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin Texas
DIY API open source
For Makers. #futureDIY
Katie Covington quit her job and started Open Source for Makers (http://www.opensourcemakerlabs.com/ ), where makers gave designs away for free. She explained how those interested in developing the project figured out how to share their designs for physical things, while still generating revenue.
By sharing ideas for projects, she generated a demand for source materials through sharing the knowledge. She realized that makers wanted to create and, once inspired, they want good sources of raw materials for their creations.
Covington explained how the makers jumped in with suggestions on new projects and products – and then they bought materials through the website from advertisers to use in the making.
Katie Covington quit her job and started Open Source for Makers.
Open Source for Makers works with suppliers, such as companies in the New York fashion district, offering materials that makers can order online. Her “tribe” helped her build the Open Source for Makers brand. And she connected them with unique materials that can’t be found at more traditional suppliers, such as Hobby Lobby or Michaels.
She described the way the website “takes away the friction” of hunting for materials by offering materials online in a way that is pleasing and useful for her website makers.
Covington’s advice for how to start your own company:
Go where your customers are (for her, this was Instagram and Pinterest)
Create content for that medium
Keep it fresh
Go offline
Work with users and test quality of tutorials, materials, etc.
Jody Culkin, artist in a variety of media, speaking at South by Southwest Interactive 2013 in Austin Texas
Lasersaurs, science geek comics, comic book how-to’s on lasers, creative uses of IPhone cameras, hacking, soldering, coloring books on electronics, rapid development of instructional manuals using photo-comics—Jody Culkin brought many (pardon the art pun) graphic examples in a slide show presentation on DIY comics to a South by Southwest Interactive Conference audience.
Jody Culkin, a teacher in the Multimedia Program at CUNY’s Manhattan Community College, is an artist in a variety of media, including comics, photography, mixed media, installations and much more. She’s shown her sculptures, photographs and new media pieces at museums and galleries throughout this country and internationally.
Culkin suggested the use of comics, with their straightforward images and text, to assist with the development of an idea from a prototype to a finished product. And why not use comics for product—hardware or software— documentation?
Making your own fun
Tools: if you have the money or access via work or school, it’s certainly possible to use professional, expensive tools like Adobe’s Illustrator and InDesign for comics, there are plenty of no- or low-cost tools that can be applied to DIY comics. Comic Life, while not open source, integrates well with photos and is wired in with IPhoto if you use it to organize images.
Gimp, an open-source tool similar to Photoshop, can be used for pixel-based, as opposed to vector-based art and it’s available for Mac, PC, and Linux. Gimp has a lively community of users. Find out more about Gimp at http://www.gimp.org/
Perhaps the best way to experience what the artist brought to the audience would be to review her event slides, which she posted in SlideShare. What a great idea, eh, for a DIY comics outsider artist, to give us an easy way to take in the ideas and images? Bravo, Culkin! http://www.slideshare.net/jodyhc/culkin-diycomicssxswi2013
The Hatsune Miku demo booth at South by Southwest Interactive 2013. #sxswmiku
The creators of Hatsune Miku, the virtual singer software, discussed how the vast collaborative effort that is expressed via Miku blurs the perceived boundaries between audience and star at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival 2013 in Austin, Texas.
Miku is singing synthesizer software that is virtualized as an anime of a young female pop star with an abundance of ponytailed blue hair. The full name, Hatsune Miku roughly translates as “First Sound from the Future” — and it is a welcome sound, one that is incredibly popular, with millions of fans worldwide and hundreds of YouTube fan-based music videos.
Many of the Miku fans — not all of which are young Asian females — create songs and share them within the Miku community, where they are vetted. The user of Miku creates lyrics and a song: the Miku vocaloid software sings and performs the song. Fans vote popular songs up. Songs that make it to the top in the eyes of the fan community have a chance to be selected for a virtual digital performance.
A virtual singer, projected as a hologram animation to sold-out venues, performs digitally for a live audience who respond with the same enthusiasm they would exhibit for a live performer. But the audience cheers as much for each other as for the virtual singer, because the fans create the music: the boundary between performers-artists and audience-fans is blown away like digital dust.
Crypton CEO Hiroyuki Itoh. MIKU Participatory culture, boundaries vanish between fan, artist.
Crypton Future Media CEO Hiroyuki Itoh and his creative team tried to explain to the Austin audience, most of who had not experienced a Miku performance, how Miku, the virtual singer avatar, provides creative collaboration as songwriters create and post songs, which are enjoyed and voted upon by fans.
Each song comes with a unique copyright, with variable copyright options available to the creator who uploads the image for sharing with the community.
Revenue for Crypton may also come via mobile games and advertising. Interestingly, Miku fans seem to enjoy it when the company partners the Miku image with large corporations. When they see Miku’s image coupled with a popular food or drink franchise, they see her success as their success.
Although the software is mostly sold and used in Japan and other Asian countries, it has international appeal. Miku has crossed beyond Japan and is now an international phenomenon, as the software has been bootlegged into Thai, Russian, Spanish, and other languages.
There is also a virtual interface—Miku dance software. Downloadable Miku skins are also available to overlay onto the singer, making changes to the singer’s appearance for the users. All of the skins and other options are free to users.
Itoh observed that Japan’s fan culture appears to be much more coherent and organized than in the US. This may be a factor in the success of the product. But Miku is not a human idol such as a real-life singer: Hatune Miku is a symbol of an idol, and one that evolves and mutates through mass audience input.
What is fascinating about the Miku project is its participatory culture and vast complexity: users’ content freely contributed, collaborative creation, celebration of the idol at conventions, in games, in role-play, at live concerts.
The music software and the music created with Miku software is profoundly misunderstood by the US media, where journalists have sometimes described Miku as a “fake” singer. The user of the word “fake” has angered Miku fans worldwide, and has led to death threats made by fans towards journalists. Fans activities have been denigrated in racist and simplistic tones as “one more of those weird things Japanese people do.” Judgmental and naïve descriptors such as “fake” fail to describe Miku. A more enlightened understanding recognizes that Miku music is participatory and collaborative.
Hiroyuki Itoh, Cryton CEO, Tara Knight, Kanea Maraki, and Alex Leavitt were the panelists at the Miku presentation at South by Southwest 2013.
Itoh said that part of Miku’s success could lay in the fact that she has no back story. Miku just is: the fans overlay their own stories onto the avatar. Although the software is not open source, the creation is open-ended and invites user input. Miku is a crowd-sourced character. And the crowd controls the image, punishing those who push the boundaries defined by the majority. User generated content, fan generated content define Hatsune Miku.
The original Miku image is of a 16-year-old girl singer. Fans create artwork of their idol. Hatsune Miku is evolving visually as an animé image as well as musically. The fans spin off the original “no story” girl singer into extreme creations. Abuse of the image happens. Porn images and slasher fantasies of Miku pop up on the web. Fans swarm onto anything that is not canonical and kill it on YouTube, with thumbs down votes and vitriolic comments. What is wanted, what is not wanted, is managed by the fans.
YouTube’s up or down votes affect the algorithms that determine which videos will be offered when users search for Miku content. Fans check in every few weeks and rank new Miku videos. They curate and compile evaluation videos about Miku music videos. The things the fans like get pushed up and those characteristics enter the canon.
As the creator fans create the content, they evolve Miku into what they want her to be. The fans are in control of the Idol they are creating.
Creators and artists are often captured by their creative games. There could come to pass a future where Miku evolves into something more sentient, with perhaps an AI element.
The Miku software sales team at the 2013 South by Southwest Interactive this spring, bringing something completely different to an event that thrives on invention.
Corruption Garden – English & Chinese Sub – Megurine Luka. Classic, early example of the use of Vocaloid singer
“decadent flowers, bloody memories lamentations of flowers, graven miseries silence that will never return please lead the mistakes of this world to a rotten end now before this world is over what’s left in my hand are the ashes of a flower”
Newosity: future report 