“Earthship n. 1. passive solar home made of natural and recycled materials 2. thermal mass construction for temperature stabilization. 3. renewable energy & integrated water systems make the Earthship an off-grid home with little to no utility bills.
Biotecture n. 1. the profession of designing buildings and environments with consideration for their sustainability. 2. A combination of biology and architecture.”

Los Angeles Times — May 27, 2007

Now showing very near you …

Everywhere consumers go, there’s a TV screen playing commercials. In a fast-forward era, ad firms seek new outlets.

By Alana Semuels, Times Staff Writer

The ad industry is redefining “public” television.

With people fast-forwarding faster than ever through TV commercials at home, advertising companies have taken their campaigns out into the open.

Perhaps you’ve noticed: Flat-panel screens filled with spots plugging cars, orthodontists and face-lifts are everywhere these days. They greet you at the grocery store, the coffeehouse, the bank and the service station.

Most recently they’ve popped up in restrooms, mounted on hand dryers.

And no, you can’t change the channel.

“Consumers want control,” said Eli Portnoy, founder of the Portnoy Group, a brand strategy consultancy. So naturally, “marketers are trying to wrestle control away.”

It’s another round in the cat-and-mouse game between Americans with disposable income and the advertisers more desperate than ever to reach them, now that the digital video recorder has become so popular. Estimates are that about 20% of U.S. households have DVRs, which allow program-watching at the expense of ads, because ads can be zipped through with the simple pressure of a finger on a button.

“Everybody’s flipping the channel,” said Kristine Hernandez, a director of ImpressionAire Media, which made the hand dryers with built-in digital screens that were installed in Huntington Beach and Newport Beach restaurants, where they promote rental cars and drink specials. “You have to capture their attention.”

In this new world, the risk is that TV screens in public places will fade into the background if they show nothing but boring ads. So in many cases, promotions are rotated with local news, weather and entertainment.

That way, advertisers can say they’re providing a service.

“For better or worse, we live in a time-crunched society,” said Mike DiFranza, chairman of the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau. “If you’re waiting in line, it’s a waste of time. But if you can look up information about what’s going on in the world, you’re kept informed.”

Interestingly, some people are buying it.

“It’s nice to have something to look at,” said Amanda Bender, a 50-year-old social services worker, about the screen mounted on the wall of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf she frequents in Los Angeles’ mid-Wilshire district.

On the other hand, ad omnipresence is pushing some over the edge.

“I’m just so overwhelmed by it,” said Kendra Miller, a 26-year-old business manager who felt assaulted by a flat-panel TV staring down at her from the wall of Albertson’s in Culver City as she was getting ready to check out.

Miller is a person the industry wants to reach. She has stopped going to movie theaters because she can’t stand the ads they run before the film starts. Pop-up Web ads pester her at work — and now, annoyingly, she’s got TV commercials in her supermarket.

“They put them in places you can’t escape,” she complained.

No kidding. The amount spent on the “alternative out-of-home media” advertising category, which includes digital screens in stores, movie theaters and elevators (but not roadside billboards), grew 27% in 2006 to $1.69 billion, according to PQ Media Research.

“Everyone is saying this is the next frontier,” said George Wishart, global managing director of Nielsen In-Store, which began measuring the audience for these sorts of ads earlier this month.

The boom has been fueled in part by technology. The price of flat-panel digital screens has fallen more than a third in the last two years, according to iSuppli Corp., an El Segundo-based consulting firm.

And the software used to create on-screen ads has become more reliable. Advertisers can remotely change the messages displayed depending on the weather, special promotions or the popularity of certain items.

At Best Buy, Costco and other major retailers, most of the ads on the “in-store screens,” as they’re called, are for items that can be bought right then and there. The spots are produced by Premier Retail Networks Corp., a San Francisco company that has installed 200,000 screens in 6,500 stores around the country.

An ad on a PRN screen might go like this: “Wondering what to make for dinner tonight? Think about lemon pepper halibut….” Then the recipe and ingredients will be listed, and the viewer, hopefully, will buy those ingredients.

PRN claims success, saying research shows that 42% of shoppers can recall a brand they’ve seen on in-store screens — about double the rate that studies have found for TV commercials. And, the company says, the cost of reaching 1,000 customers through in-store screens is about $12 — roughly the same as it would be to advertise on premium cable.

In any event, “in-home isn’t effective anymore” for advertisers, said Mike Quinn, senior vice president of marketing, research and new product development at PRN. “They want to advertise where their products are sold.”

As for the flat-panels in places like Jack in the Box and Jiffy Lube — which are installed by Ripple Networks Inc., an El Segundo-based provider of digital entertainment and news — they target people waiting in line, not shopping. So on these screens, ads for local real estate agents, the Hollywood Bowl and even national companies like Orbitz are inserted between clips of celebrity news from E!, horoscopes, snowboarding videos and sports highlights. Ripple charges $100 per screen for a month’s worth of ads. In these cases, part of that revenue usually goes to the retailer.

Last year, Dean Dunlap, now the associate media director for DGWB, bought time on screens in several Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf stores for Southern California Land Rover dealers through Ripple.

“We felt that it was another way to get people to think about Land Rover as they start their day,” he said.

Younger Americans are quicker to embrace ad-filled digital screens in public places, said Stuart Fischoff, professor emeritus of media psychology at Cal State L.A. They’re accustomed to having digital music players, PDAs and cellphones at their fingertips, and they “don’t want to be alone with their thoughts.”

Well, other people do. Troy Davenbaugh, 42, of West Los Angeles is one of the elusive consumers trying to hide from advertisers. He doesn’t own a TV. When he does watch a show on his roommate’s set, he can skip through ads with TiVo.

The digital screens that popped up in his local Albertson’s ticked him off.

“They’re more annoying than anything,” he said. “When I come here, I come here to shop. I’m turned off by anything being constantly blasted at me — it just becomes too much.”

For some, it’s less than that.

As Jeffrey Weiner browsed through Albertson’s, he was asked what he thought about the food ads blinking on the screen suspended above the produce section.

His response: “What screen?”

alana.semuels@latimes.com

From Kati London’s blog…

“Here I am invoking political scientist Michelle Micheletti’s quote: ‘We Must Shop to Survive,’ in the video of my thesis presentation of The In(ter)ventions Festival. A festival designed to provoke critical inquiry on the part of consumers about the impact of their behavior. It’s about connecting mundane tasks to their impact on the greater systems that we facilitate, enable and support. I’m still working on this project which will hopefully take place in the Fall of 2007 in New York City…”

KINDERTOTENLIEDER
Created by Gisèle Vienne
Texts and dramaturgy by Dennis Cooper
Music by Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg
Lights by Patrick Riou
Make up by Rebecca Flores

In your dreams… Via Boingboing.

METAGEUM ’07: EXPLORING THE MEGALITHIC MIND

Inter-disciplinary international conference
on approaches to understanding the origins of our megalithic legacy

The Caraffa Stores, Birgu, Island of Malta
3rd – 11th November 2007

“Metageum ’07: Conference This event is an international, inter-disciplinary conference on different ways of approaching the thinking and imagination of the Neolithic people who built the megalithic temples in Malta and elsewhere in the world. Speakers range from archaeologists (both academic and independent), through psychologists and artists, to researchers in esoteric subjects.

“This conference is intended to encourage debate and discussion and does not hold any particular position on the interpretation of the temples. It is accompanied by an art exhibition, experiential workshops, and musical performances, all themed in significant ways on the megalithic temples. There will also be daily guided tours to the megalithic temples of Malta.

“So, after the morning plenary sessions, attendees can choose to stay for more presentations at the conference venue, or go on field trips to the temples, or go for one or other of the workshops. …

“Malta is a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, with an unusually rich heritage of megalithic structures, generally designated as ‘temples’. It has the oldest free-standing megalithic structures in the world, dating back to 6000 years ago — a thousand years before the Egyptian pyramids were built, and five hundred years before Stonehenge.

“For some background on the themes of the conference, please see the article written by Peter B. Lloyd in the Malta Independent on 18th March: Metageum ’07: Exploring the megalithic mind.

“Although several of the presentations will be specifically on the Maltese temples, the conference encompasses megalithic temples and ritual structures from around the world. England and Europe are richly endowed with a range of types of megalithic structure. Each country and culture has its own heritage, and the Maltese megalithic tradition was specific to the island.

“Although now ruined, the above-ground megalithic temples in Malta were originally huge, closed-in, multi-chambered buildings, with a single entrance. Malta also possess the uniquely Maltese underground temples or hypogea…”

link courtesy Erik Davis!

Tuesday May 29 – 8 PM at the Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York

An evening with
Nick Stillman and Alan Vega

Two transistor radios
an American flag
and the records that made Suicide Suicide

Free entrance

Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art
495 Broadway, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10012
t + 212.925.2035
f + 212.925.2040
info@swissinstitute.net

“The Man in the Cube” was written and produced by Jim Henson, prior to his Muppets productions. It was broadcast on NBC’s “Experiments in Television” series in 1969.

Link courtesy Douglas Rushkoff, who writes:

“I saw this television program when I was six or seven years old. It was a Sunday morning thing – they did experimental and religious stuff on Sunday mornings. I saw it with my dad, who probably understood it better than I did at the time.

“But it always stayed with me. It was a really strange, haunting experience for a kid. My introduction to existentialism, I suppose. I didn’t remember that much of it – only that I had seen it, and felt it had changed me: that the person I had become was informed by this little television film.

“At Princeton, more than ten years later, I found out that two of my very best friends – Tom Burka and Walter Kirn – had been obsessed with this little television show, as well. They, too, felt the drama had somehow warped their entire perspective on life. That perhaps we had even been damaged by this little show – that it was responsible for a sadness and confusion we just couldn’t shake…”

The Future of America Has Been Stolen

By Jeff Diehl
May 24th, 2007

Investigative reporter Greg Palast says 4.5 million votes will be shoplifted in 2008, thanks largely to the “Rove-bots” that have been placed in the Justice Department following the U.S. Attorney firings. Being the guy who uncovered the voter “purge lists” of 2000 that disenfranchised black voters, he’s worth listening to, even if the mainstream press chooses not to.

This time around, he claims to have the 500 emails that the House subpoenaed and Karl Rove claims were deleted forever. They prove definitively, says Palast, that the Justice Department is infested with operatives taking orders from Rove to steal upcoming elections for Republicans and permanently alter the Department.

The “clownocracy” of Bush and Rove is criminal and even evil in its attempts to steal past and future elections, according to Palast, and can only be stopped if “Democrats…find their souls and find their balls.”

In an updated new version of his best-selling book, Armed Madhouse, Palast lays out the case for the future theft of the presidency, along with lots of other Executive malfeasance. I chatted with him about the role of the Justice Department in this scheme, and what it means for the viability of our “democracy.”

JEFF DIEHL: First off, the “lost” emails. I guess you’re confident those 500 emails aren’t themselves a hoax? Considering the source? [John Wooden, the man behind the spoof site, whitehouse.org, forwarded them on to Palast after someone accidentally sent them to Wooden’s georgewbush.org domain.]

GREG PALAST: Oddly, the GOP verified their authenticity to BBC. I almost fell over dead when they did that.

JD: How did they do that exactly?

GP: We asked them on camera. They did not deny they were the party’s internal emails — just disagreed what the “caging” lists were. Saying, for example, they were “donor” lists. Men in homeless shelters?

Remember, there’s no First Amendment in England. I’m wrong, I’m sued, I’m broke, I’m toast.

JD: Let’s move on to former Justice Department counsel (and Regent University graduate) Monica Goodling’s recent testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee, since it’s so fresh…

GP: The blondeling underling of the Police State. The lady was trying to tell us something important, but the dim bulbs of the U.S. press and the committee dolts wouldn’t listen. She began by accusing her bosses of perjury. The issue was her allegation that they knew all about “caging.” And no one asked her one damn question about it. Like what is “caging” and why would they commit perjury to cover it up?

JD: Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) asked, and Goodling said, “It has to do with direct mail.”

GP: And that was it. D’oh! It’s not about “direct mail.” Direct mail has to do with Victoria’s Secret and stuff like that. This was all about stealing the 2004 — and 2008 — elections. That’s why she wanted immunity. She was afraid it would all unravel, the caging game…but she had nothing to fear.

JD: Well, it is a direct mail term, but it’s also a voter supression term. Do no senators know that, not even Committee Chair John Conyers?

GP: Conyers knows — and he knows me. He’s keeping his powder dry. The others are clueless.

Caging works like this. Hundreds of thousands of Black and Hispanic voters were sent letters — do not forward. Letters returned as undeliverable (”caged”) were used as evidence the voter didn’t live at their registered address. The GOP goons challenged these voters’ right to cast ballots — and their votes were lost.

But whose letters were caged? Here’s where the game turns to deep evil. They targeted Black students on vacation, homeless men — and you’ll love this — Black soldiers sent overseas. They weren’t living at their home voting address because they were shivering under a Humvee in Falluja.

JD: As you put it in regard to election rigging, 2000 was about “purge lists,” 2004 was about “caging,” and 2008 will be about “verification.” Can you briefly explain the difference between these?

GP: Sure. In 2000, I cracked the computer disks (CD-ROMs then) from Katherine Harris’ office showing 56,000 names of voters “purged” from voter rolls as felons who aren’t allowed to vote. In fact, every one — every one — was an innocent voter, though most were guilty of VWB — Voting While Black. That was the 2000 “purge.”

In 2004, it was nearly identical. Except, instead of calling voters “felons,” they called them “suspect” voters, fraudulently using a false voting address. The effect was the same: the voter would lose their registration; or their vote on election day when they showed to vote; or, in the case of soldiers, their absentee ballot would be challenged and tossed.

JD: You claim the reason for Democrat inaction in election scandals is because of racism, that the white caucus is bigger than the black caucus. But don’t Democrats gain by making sure black people are enfranchised?

GP: Which Democrats? The huge purge and block of voters in Georgia [were done by] reptiles like Zell Miller in control of the Georgia Democratic Party. There’s an awful lot of Democrats who would not win primaries if dark-skinned citizens could just vote any time they pleased.

JD: My mind goes back to Conyers. What did you mean earlier by “keeping his powder dry?”

GP: We talk. ‘Nuff said.

JD: Fair enough. So you’re working also with former U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, David Iglesias, yes?

GP: Claro que si.

JD: I was watching Chris Matthews’ TV show — “Softball,” as you’ve called it — and he asked Iglesias what his long term plans were — if he was writing a book. Iglesias indicated that he was, and also, that he wanted a TV show similar to Matthews’ at some point, and seemed to be totally serious. Given that Iglesias has been willing to go “along with the game” in the past, are you concerned that his recent turn might be motivated by opportunism?

GP: I don’t care if he’s motivated by a love of Barbie dolls. He’s been pushed by the Rove-bots to expose the game. I’ll take it anyway I can get it — the facts, ma’am.

JD: Do you have a wide-angle view of the current Administration’s strategy with the Justice Department, and if so, give us the summary. Is it about election theft, or is it mostly about stocking the lake for future conservative judge appointments?

GP: Yes. First, it’s elections. They don’t want the voters making any foolish choices. Specifically, while the attention’s been focused 100% on the firings, no one is talking about the hirings. That’s what Goodling was trying to get across.

The key: at the Pearl Harbor Day massacre, they replaced one of the prosecutors with Rove-bots, a sleeper cell of anti-Constitutional saboteurs who will explode in 2008, led by the new prosecutor for Arkansas, Tim Griffin.

JD: Talk a little bit about the relevance of Tim Griffin — the perp who became prosecutor — and Arkansas in 2008.

GP: It was Griffin who directed the “caging” ops for the GOP. Caging, by the way, is illegal. Law Professor Bobby Kennedy pointed out it violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and I’d add, as a former racketeering investigator, mail fraud statutes. So Griffin’s a felon — now U.S. Attorney.

JD: Is Kennedy still actively publicizing this?

GP: Yes. The incriminating email is reproduced right in Armed Madhouse. That’s why Griffin and Goodling were high-fiving over the fact that no one’s picked up the investigations of that “British reporter” Palast.

The key thing is, Griffin is not just “involved,” he is directing the scheme. His denial was confidential — had to be subpoenaed. Remember, as Goodling testified, the line of the Bushies is that Griffin had nothing to do with caging.

JD: So is Congress eventually going to get to all this? Is that the end game with the Justice Department investigation?

GP: No, Congress won’t do squat. Did anyone do anything about the felon purge? It went backwards: Bush signed the Help America Vote Act. God forbid.