April 22, 2007: The Cultural Blender Movie page is online. The image above is from the animated title sequence of the video. Completely animated in my new Vegas movie editing software by Sony, the movie is a "flash animatiion" type video, in which 16 of the "icons" pictured in the Cultural Blender image (at left) "come to life", jump out of the Blender, and are "celebrated" with images, video, music and soundbytes. A complete "history" of the conception and execution of the video is included on the Movie page, as well as a high quality stream of the movie, links to the YouTube and Google feeds, plus, for a limited time, a download of the full 256MB mpeg 2 file, which is crystal clear, and can be seen in full screen on your computer once it is downloaded. Other similar "Cultural Blender" movies feauturing the other icons are already in the planning stage.

This website first went online in 2001. The "mission statement" is in the box in the left hand sidebar. New sections have sporadically appeared over the years, but recently, plans have been made to completely update and revitalize the site. The first section of the Cultural Blender to be updated in a long while, the new "Cultural Iconography" section is moving ahead in the construction phase. The original image of the "Blender", also first created in 2001, has been "re-created" for the just released MikeVideo Internet Movie showcasing the "Cultural Blender". On the "Cultural Iconography" page, each of the "icons" in the blender index the pages with info about that particular icon. The links will become active as the pages are added online. Pages about Shirley Temple, America's Sweetheart, the number one box office star in the U.S. from 1933 to 1935, John Wayne, the archetypal "western hero" and Marilyn Monroe, the "blonde bombshell" and sex goddess are online alreayd.A page about Elvis, "the King" is partially completed. The page is online. The plan is to create a page for each "icon" in the blender image, and link them from the image itself on the Icons page. UPDATE: April 20: The "Cultural Blender Movie Page" is now online and features both a streaming version and a downloadable high quality mpeg2 version of the 9minute 16second "Cultural Blender" internet movie, the latest MikeVideo project.

 

I finished an essay I started in 2001 and the TeeVee page of the Cultural Blender includes an essay entitled "The Cultural Significance of Television, the Electronic Babysitter". It weaves a historic and personal tale of televsion's impact and importance, and why this seemingly simple device is responsible for the future of entertainment technology. Television has morphed with computers and the internet, and possibly not too far in the future, virtual reality. The 500 channel universe is rapidly evolving into the 500,000 channel universe with the addtion of internet sites like YouTube. which allows users of the site to become in effect, their own programmers.

Didn't you know? The ROBOTS are here. And they have their very own website on the Cultural Blender. For the first time anywhere, the Cultural Blender gathers robotic lore, cultural images from the collective consciousness of the world population, and history of the "real robots' and mixes it all together including of course the famous composite artwork by Michael F. Nyiri, the webmaster. This special website was not only a labor of love to create, it came about in only 48 hours. Beginning with a google image search for "robots" at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 13th, 2006, and FTPing six sections, four completed and two incomplete, but with more content in their unfinished state than most websites that have been up for almost a decade. Robots is, like all the websites in the Cultural Blender, and on the AllThingsMike Universe, an electronic experiment in art. Experience the art of the Robot, exclusively on the Cultural Blender.

The first "Blender Image" and site navigation tool, from 2001