twigged.net

The American underworld on video at Weird America.com

Weird America.com is the brain child of Chuck Cirino, director, composer and artist extraordinaire! The site’s tagline says it all: “A journey into America’s crawlspace” - this is not a collection of your average youtube videos ladies and gentleman, this is Chuck’s intrepid foray into the lives of some of North America’s unsung heroes. It’s the contemporary equivalent of a latter day freak show.

Some personal favourites amongst the huge archive of titles are: Francis Gabe’s Self Cleaning House, Alessandro Thompson’s Difficult Things to Say as a Man and the Ghost Town Shake Down. After half an hour of visual onslaught, I’m left wondering how on earth Cirino comes across these people? Is this the fruit of research or just luck and a lot of travelling around?

Biology and Medecine in Performance: Autoimmune

Autoimmune is a black and white flash film that explores the autoimmune disease through a participatory performative medium. Autoimmunity “is the failure of an organism to recognize its own constituent parts (down to the sub-molecular levels) as “self”, which results in an immune response against its own cells and tissues.” (source)

We follow the actor through a series of intricate movement based scenes, each one presenting a new physical dilemma in this person’s existence; we are called to ‘intervene’ and reconnect the actor with his body. This is a fascinating experience which challenges our position as passive viewers and raises awareness to a little known disease.

For anyone thinking this is just another ‘artsy-fartsy’ load of rubbish, thing again because this may well be the most enthralling 15 minutes you’ll spend on the web this year!

David Airey’s Big Blog Prize Bonanza

Logo designer and blogger David Airey has recently launched an awesome $4000 prize draw on his logo design blog to celebrate the one year anniversary of his site. Prizes range from a Custom WordPress theme design from Nate Whitehill, a signed copy of Lorelle VanFossen’s Blogging Tips, $60 of books from Amazon courtesy of Darren Rowse, a blog review and email interview published on Make It Great! and a 2gb memory stick courtesy of Jamie Clague at Terinea Weblog. There are a number of ways in which contestants can take part in the draw; either by signing up to David’s rss feed or writing a blog post such as this one and including some links back to his site and the sites of prize contributors.

This is by far the most extensive blog prize draw that I have seen in more than 4 years of blogging. The sheer range and number of prizes combined with the number of people David has managed to get involved in the idea are astounding. Once again it just goes to show that given the right level of determination you can achieve pretty much anything on the Web. So if you’ve got a blog and you’re feeling lucky go check out the full details of the competition on David’s site now! Good luck to all the participants!