At Pop!Tech 2007, five-time Grammy award-winner John Legend moved and motivated Pop!Tech participants, weaving stories from his Show Me Campaign—a movement he launched to help eradicate extreme global poverty—in between each soulful song.

Now in a February 2 release, John joins ranks with Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and director Jesse Dylan (son of Bob) in their new celeb-studded music video in support of Barack Obama. The video is a musical performance of Senator Obama’s Yes We Can speech, his “concession” speech following Senator Clinton’s win in the New Hampshire Democratic Primary.

In spite of the fact that we live in controversial times, today’s North American music scene increasingly emphasizes music that’s materialistic, sexually charged or violent, over and above music that’s politically controversial. This moving example of musicians coming together and speaking directly to their audience in order to have a positive influence, is a reversal of that trend, and regardless of one’s politics, this reversal is important.

Check out the video, and read about the backstory here.

John also recently shot and released a music video in Tanzania for the Show Me Campaign to introduce his fans to critical global issues. Watch this story of a young boy overwhelmed by the weight of the world who is asking questions and searching for answers.

The character in the video is inspired by the real life story of two young boys, Yaguine Koita (aged 14) and Fodé Tounkara (aged 15), stowaways who froze to death flying from Guinea to Belgium, on 28 July 1999. The boys were carrying plastic bags with birth certificates, school report cards, photographs and a letter to the world asking for solidarity and kindness in providing relief to Africa. Check out their letter on John’s site under the “music video & explanation” tab here.

Bill Shannon brought the house down at Pop!Tech 2007, reminding us that anything is possible. Armed with a set of rocker bottom crutches, at times a skateboard, and two legs compromised by remnants of Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease, Shannon danced, jumped and glided effortlessly across the stage. Now, after many years of performing his distinctive style of dance, Shannon, aka the Crutchmaster, has begun systematically cataloging the components of his style.

In a new YouTube video, Shannon demonstrates various grips of the crutches, transitions used to move about, and describes the position of the body in relation to the floor. Shannon seems to defy physics, which is exactly the point.

Superficially his performance could be seen as eye candy, but Shannon’s practice goes much deeper with roots in performance art and his explorations of popular perceptions of disability. For more about this, check out his amazing online project “what is what” commissioned by Creative Time in 2003.

by Peggy Shea Andrews

outside of the opera house
she asked me “if poptech
were a poem what kind of poem would it be”
and i said it would be a bridge poem
a poem of hands and hearts and blood and connective tissue
reaching across the distance wide and long
it would be
a reaching-out-to-touch poem
an imagine-that poem
a lookit-what-i-did poem
an open-mouth-in-awe poem
an open source poem

it would be
a 20minutes on the clock poem
a slow down poem
a prayer to the infinite joy of dr. victoria hale poem
a van jones for president poem
a medicine will heal poem
an andrew zolli was meant to do it poem
a where are alla the black people in camden poem
a tell the story poem
a kiss yo’ kids and call yo’ mama poem
an electricity of joy poem
a this is not a dream
but i dreamt it and here it is poem

a poem for a young lily in the arms of her father

poem in the shape of heidi’s smile
bright and wide and beautiful
as a song on the lips of the sky
even at midnight after 12 hours
on her feet in the heat of the
proverbial kitchen poem

it will be a you poem
an us poem
a we together poem

it will be
a human contact poem
a yell it out from the balcony of the opera house poem
a my gratitude is but the seed of the edge of a sea of gratitude poem
a you changed the world and i saw it poem
a one-person-at-a-time poem

it will be a risky poem

a love poem
a power of love poem
a lookit-what-love-did poem
an i-took-my-students-to-the-ocean-poem
an ah-ha poem

if poptech were a poem
it would be a poem with toenails.

24 Hours, 7 Continents, 9 Cities, 2 Billion People: the Live Earth Concerts for a Climate in Crisis are coming your way this July 7, 2007.

Part of a global campaign to promote awareness of the current state of climate change, the concerts feature more than 100 music artists from The Police to Snoop Dogg to Metallica to Smashing Pumpkins (for the full and quite impressive list click here). Watch with the world at www.LiveEarth.MSN.com.

And be sure to check out Live Earth’s official guidebook: The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate Change, written by long-time Pop!Tech participant David de Rothschild, founder of Adventure Ecology.

The entire book, from conceptions took 7 months, with the project finding its legs at Pop!Tech 2006. David met publisher Charlie Melcher in the “dungeon” of the Camden Opera House (aka Pop!Tech’s Screening Room). He had just been commissioned to do this book, turn-around time was super short, and Charlie offered to help. They went straight at it in February and were finished by April.

Which tip in the survival guide does David take most to heart? “Number 32: Get lost in nature. .when was the last time you took your shoes off and walked about in nature? It’s important to get yourself outside and re-engaged. In the epic scale of Live Earth, it’s worthwhile to ‘get lost in nature’ in order to remember why we need some new guidelines for living in a changing world.”

For a peek at some of survival tips from the book and a look at the great illustrations, you can visit the Live Earth site at http://www.liveearth.org/crisis_solutions.php.

Mark your calendar and set your Tivo to watch Chef Homaro Cantu on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, at 3:00 p.m. CST this coming Tuesday, April 10. This will be an incredible pairing of one of the world’s most creative chefs and one of Hollywood’s most creative comic personalities.

For more information and air times, visit Ellen’s website: http://ellen.warnerbros.com/

(and that’s a picture of Chef Cantu when cooking with Class V Lasers were but a sparkle in his eye. It was too tempting to post that picture from his website - it had to be done.)

Motion graphics studio and beloved motion designer for Pop!Tech (and our forthcoming podcast) Trollback + Company has recently created a stunning video called Moonlight in Glory. It’s a really cool treatment using light and typography.Moonlight in Glory comes off the 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno (Pop!Tech 2006 Speaker) and David Byrne.The albums was one of the first non-rap albums to heavily feature sampling techniques.

Between every Pop!Tech session we show some of the coolest video interstitials as a mental sorbet of sorts. We look for music videos, advertisements or video art pieces that have caught our eye for their stunning visuals, social commentary or just plain hilarity.

One group that we consistently turn to for video fodder, and often meet all the above criteria, is the Paris collective, Pleix. They are relatively well known now, (Their piece, Birds, circulated like made around the web) but the individuals behind Pleix remains a mystery to many.

At the recent ENSAD conference in Paris, Eric Augier, one of the artists of Pleix, took the spotlight to share their personal and commercial work. An overview of some of their works is given here.

Here is a description of the Netlag project which we showed at the 2006 Pop!Tech.

In 2004, they created another project especially for the Ferme du Buisson: Netlag. The first step was to develop a custom-built software that grabs on the internet movies from surveillance webcams all around the world (up to 3000 webcams because of the limitations of the program). One frame every 10 minutes was then recorded during a 24-hour span in January 2004. The films were then mapped on a representation of the world, the images were accelerated to give a better feeling of their night/day evolution and the result is pretty impressive: the African continent is nearly invisible while certain European countries and the US appear to be very active because, as we know it, surveillance is pretty well developed there.

What makes the work even more fascinating is that it was conceived before the launch of Google Earth.

The idea attracted the interest of the commercial world. Adidas bought the right to reproduce the concept for a year. They used the money to finance other “personal” projects.

via:: We Make Money Not Art

During his presentation at Pop!Tech 2006 on Emergent Arts, Will Wright (Creator of The Sims) discussed his feeling that complexity is achieved by the accumulation of very simple, basic elements. That is the premise behind his much anticipated game (about 3 years worth of anticipation) Spore.

Popular Science has an in-depth interview with Wright where the gaming innovator discusses Spore , Wii, Second Life, the value of failure and getting back to the metaphorical “sandbox”.

On Spore as an educational tool, Wright says:

“I think more in terms of deep lessons of things like problem-solving, or just creativity–creativity is a fundamental of education that’s not really taught so much. But giving people tools…what it means to be human is to learn to use tools to basically expand your abilities. And I think computer games are in some sense a fundamental tool for our imagination.”

There is also a quote that stood out in the article that resonated with the Pop!Tech ethos. Wright discusses his plans for a more “relevant” gaming experience in his next endeavors–games that play on cultural parameters such as:

“politics and economics and environmentalism, all these things as these horrendously complicated things with a million variables. But yet there is a limited level of understanding of the climate, of politics, of economics, that we could take anybody and make them five points smarter in any one of these dimensions. And just making everybody in the world five points more educated on each of these dimensions I think would have a tremendous impact on the system as a whole.”

If you missed the sneak peak of the game presented at Pop!Tech, you can see more images here at the Spore Image Gallery.

The game is slated to be released in the Spring of 2007…(fingers crossed).

AND

Don’t miss the Popular Science Podcast with Pop!Tech’s Official Balladeer Jonathan Coulton and Spore designer Chaim Gingold here.

Pop!Tech 2006 favorites, Rodrigo y Gabriela have been playing the late night circuit recently with performances on Leno and Letterman.

The Dublin-based Mexican duo combine lightening fast finger picking and string thrashing strumming to create a mix of Rock, World and Hispano musical genres.

You can watch the Leno clip here and the Letterman clip here.

But when are Rodrigo Y Gabriela coming to MY town, you ask…

Well, your prayers are answered as they have announced 2007 tour dates.

They will be playing in the US until May. Here are some dates:

MARCH
11 Mar - Sunrise, Florida, Langerado Music Festival
13 Mar - Boston, MA, US Paradise Rock Club
15 Mar - Austin, Texas, SXSW Stubbs
20 Mar - Washington, D.C. Grosvenor Auditorium, National Geographic Headquarters
21 Mar - New York, NY Bowery Ballroom
22 Mar - Philadelphia, PA Electric Factory

APRIL
14 Apr - Los Angeles, CA - KCRW Charity Drive Gibson Amph
23 Apr - Portland, OR Aladdin Theatre
24 Apr - Seattle, WA Showbox Theatre
26 Apr - San Francisco, CA Grand Ballroom at Regency Center
29 Apr - Indio, CA Coachella Festival, (Stage to be confirmed)

MAY
01 May - Denver, CO - The Ogden Theatre

and you can see more European dates on their website at www.rodgab.com

A few nights ago in Carnegie Hall, David Byrne curated the “Perspective” Series. On Sunday night, the show explored music based on a single note. One of the artists on the bill was Pop!Tech 2005 alum and jaw-dropper Haale. Haale brought the Pop!Tech crowd to its knees with her entrancing mix of American rock and Iranian-inspired music.

Her performance was also picked up in the New York Times:

“Underlying the songs of Haale, an American singer of Iranian descent, was the trance-inducing drone of Sufi devotional music, here assigned to a violinist, a cellist and occasionally an electric guitarist. Three percussionists provided driving rhythms on hand drums, shakers and clacking karkaba, over which Haale’s warm, supple voice unfurled like a curlicue of smoke. Her band’s amplified rumble served as a reminder of the extent to which rock bands like the Doors and the Velvet Underground turned to the East for their most hypnotic efforts; here their borrowings were reclaimed with interest.”

You can read the full story here.

Congratulations Haale on bringing down yet another house!