Arcade Fire certainly had an impressive year as far as videos are concerned, making Spike Jonze look like the least inventive in the trio of directors employed to promote 2010’s grand third album The Suburbs. Embracing the Internet as the new medium to distribute music videos rather than fighting it, their first promo for The Wilderness Downtown, albeit a little shakily, integrated Google Earth in real time, whereas their latest effort for Sprawl II, directed by Vincent Morisset offers an interactive version of the video above, which is kind of amazing.

Not that this hasn’t been tried before, but without the editorial flair that Art Berlin has to offer, where also bars, hotels and weekends find their place – this being Berlin after all, with its nightlife being the other great cultural asset of the city. Alas, Art Berlin is only in German, which feels kind of old-fashioned in a city that attracts a young art clientele from abroad like no other.

This might all change now that I noticed Bernd Kuchenbeiser – the man who signed our popular issue #26 on ECM and the accompanying app for iPad – and his A Book A Day Tweet, where he, quite literally, proposes one art or design book a day. Now trust us, this is someone who really knows what he is talking about – Bernd is an avid collector and connoisseur as far as design is concerned – after all, he was the first subscriber to mono.kultur, long before we were offering any such thing. So if books are your poison, you might want to make this a daily stopping point.

Oh, the speed of the internet. A condition of Ai Weiwei’s recent release from Chinese custody was his silence on Twitter and the blogs, but the Chinese government said nothing about this new Google+ (at least for now). Seemingly in conjunction with a wonderful new show just opened at the Asia Society Museum  in New York, Ai has posted on (presumably) his Google+ account a huge file of the New York photographs from the  1980s and early 90s. Taken while he was a ’starving artist’ living in the Lower East Side and studying at Parsons, they are an indispensable document of a city now long gone. Ai was there for the infamous Tompkins Square riots, which marked the rapid rise of the East Village’s gentrification. One of the most whimsical and fascinating aspects of these photos  is how many ex-pat Chinese artists there were during those years in New York; indeed, some of the best images are Ai’s contemporaries (then and now), like Xu Bing and Tan Dun, sitting on top of taxis and clowning around outside seedy Times Square porn theaters.

Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983-1993
The Asia Society Museum
June 29-August 14, 2011

Photography by Ai Weiwei

while we’re busy promoting our current issue as well as already putting the finishing touches to our next, we have not forgotten that we still have a promise to keep: on the back cover of our issue #26 featuring Manfred Eicher of ECM Records, we hinted at an app for iPad ‘coming soon’. Soon is now, and we’re kind of chuffed to see our very first app available on iTunes as of now.

Manfred Eicher, you might remember, is the highly passionate mastermind behind the prestigious German jazz and classic label ECM Records. mono.kultur #26 featured a high-minded and challenging conversation, where Manfred Eicher talked with Bernd Kuchenbeiser about sound, silence and everything in between.

Our first mono.app features of course the same interview with the same impeccable layout, but even better: you can listen into excerpts of all the music that is being talked about, as well as view footage from films by Heinz Bütler, Manfred Eicher and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as documentary behind-the-scenes footage. All this beautifully translated into the digital environment by Atelier Bernd Kuchenbeiser and developed by Serum Network, with audio/visual material courtesy of ECM Records.

Even better still: since it’s our first, it’s entirely free.

Needless to say, it’s a sort of experiment for us – and will depend on your feedback whether mono.kultur makes sense in a digital format. We look forward to hearing your comments!

All our best,
mono.kultur

>> Free Download

PS: Please note that, since we believe in maximum reading pleasure, the app is for iPad only.