Valerio Spoletini has two loves, vjing and scratching, and as a student at the University of Art & Design Lausanne was given the opportunity to combine the two in his diploma project, V-Scratch. As opposed to scratching pre-produced video in unison with sound, V-Scratch utilizes the elements of scratching to generate completely original visuals in real time. By applying an optical mouse device in the center of the record, V-Scratch allows “visual transcription of every element used for scratch composition including speed, volume, and audio spectrum, as well as the physical back-and-forth movement of the record.” Check out the videos or catch Valerio live at Sonar on June 15. Via WMMNA

Our friend Jesse Hora is a man on a mission and from the looks of things, it doesn’t seem like he’s planning on slowing down anytime soon! Jesse, one of the artists responsible for bringing us BLAME Clothing, has showcased his works of design, illustration, photography and more on his new site, JesseHora.com. The self-proclaimed “glueman”, probably for his knack to bring amazing things together, will be joining forces with MODE, a collective of designers, animators and artist, this summer to add motion design to his bag of tricks. His site is constantly being updated and with so much new stuff to come, it is definitely worth a visit!

One of my favorite sneaker shops I found while hunting through Tokyo was Pistacchio. It’s located in Daikanyama, on a small back street called Sarugaku-cho just across from the Onitsuka Tiger store. The shop was primarily full of obscure Nike and Puma sneakers. I picked up a pair of these Puma Limited shoes I’d never seen before called “WAKE“–the blue color apparently a Tokyo exclusive. They feel like a slip on with a neoprene sock and a surprisingly comfortable hard-shell molded heal. They were available in 3 colorways, and if you look closer, each camo-eqsue pattern is actually made up of the signature leaping puma. If you speak Japanese or just like looking at pictures, Pistacchio has a stellar online shop with dozens of great sneakers to choose from.

We hustled around Guanghua Market and the surrounding streets for a few hours before our flight out of Taipei. Electronics were definitely less expensive, laptops, monitors, audio equipment, etc. We spent a lot of our time in shops looking at cell phones. All the shops were cash-only, and as a ‘white guy’ it was pretty clear I was a foreigner and they raised there prices noticeably so. A little bit of bargaining and things were back down to reasonably good deals though. Everyone was armed with calculators to show shoppers prices–which made it easy to punch in a few numbers and bring it back to American dollars for sanity purposes. The real deals for electronics seemed to be on the no name products, the knock off mp3 players, iPod look a likes and Asian branded cell phones I’d surely never heard of (nor could I read). Shops were mostly divided into new and second hand equipment. I almost picked up a remarkably cheap unlocked Nokia 8800, but lost my chance when I opted to keep searching for a better deal and ran out of time. We did grab a few nice GSM phones and if we had a longer time there I think we probably would have gone crazy exploring these affordable markets!