L.A.-based artist and interactive art director Yoffy has previously astonished us with his refreshingly clean and colorful pop art images. His paintings of cultural icons such as the Olsen Twins and vibrant nature-ish sculptures have a stylishly sleek neatness to them that add an air of sophistication to any surrounding. Yoffy brings that same sense of suaveness to his brand new site, providing an immaculate interface to navigate through the wonder of his creations and even access his blog or take a gander at his giant tape ball. It’s a beautiful site, and well worth the visit.

If you’ve been in the right place at the right time, you might have seen Italian graf artist Blu’s super-large-scale paintings on a wall near you, including the Tate Modern (until August 28, anyway). But you haven’t seen how extremely talented this dude is until you check his stop animation videos. They’re made on public walls and are so well done they will blow your mind. The latest one, Muto, is a 7.5-minute chronicle that starts out with a beast of a creature that wanders from wall to wall, to the inside of someone’s house and on, all the while morphing and sneezing and walking and rolling. A book featuring Blu’s paintings from 2004 to 2007 is out now. It is the only way you can make sure his work stays permanently close to you.

I know for a fact that I’m not the only person on Earth who’s always harbored secret dreams of starring in my own cartoon adventure. The idea of bopping funny-looking animals on the head, or being bopped myself until I’m flat as a coin and then springing back to normal size–that stuff would be more insane that going out to a nightclub in the real world and doing tequila shots.

It’s not entirely the full effect, but a team of three artists are bringing us that experience halfway with their novel Oups interactive video installation project. A participant gets in front of a screen, and through pre-programmed animation that’s divided into three layers, follows the person’s movements and becomes the star of the show. The sample videos on their site show people strapped to rockets, being electrocuted or chased by spacecraft. The artists just closed their requests to designers to help add to the Oups library, and will be showing some of those submitted in the showcase at Sao Paulo’s and Rio de Janeiro’s animation fest, Anima Mundi 2008, happening at the end of this month. I’d take this over a free open bar any day.

Sometimes sitting through a movie can be a torturous endeavor. You leave the theater saying there was too much of this plotline and not enough of another. You tell your friends that you could do a better job editing. Well here’s your chance, hotshot. Even if you’ve never touched an Avid or Final Cut Pro program, the innovative movie makers behind Late Fragment an interactive DVD film, allow you to control just how much you see with the click of a button. Using your remote you can control which parts of the non-linear plot you see first and which characters you get to know better. Or you can just sit back and watch it straight through. If you don’t like the way things went the first time around, change it up the next time. And if you still don’t like it ... well, that’s your fault.

Ben Kaufman wants you to work for him. And you. And you. And all those people in that building next to you. We told you about his ever morphing business of crowdsourced product development called Kluster. Now it has landed on something new: Knewsroom, a user powered daily news feed. Of course, Kaufman doesn’t expect you to power his enterprise for nothing. That’s why every day, if you’ve submitted or bet correctly on the winning stories, you get cash. It’s kind of like a headline horse race, and you’re the one feeding the pony anabolic steroids. No, wait. It’s kind of like CNN meets American Idol. Well, it’s not quite that either. Here, Ben can explain it better. Oh, and he’s also throwing a party with Mashable at Webster Hall on Friday. Just tell him we sent you. When that doesn’t work, pay for a ticket.

If you run a website, odds are you probably have at least some semblance of knowledge regarding how many hits your site is getting and where those hits are coming from. You can also get answers for how long people are spending at your site and at which content they are looking. What all of those numbers don’t always tell you is why people are clicking on what they’re clicking once they’re there. There’s a good chance it has to do with your visual presentation, so if you’re not arousing interest once people view your space...perhaps it’s because you’re not visually drawing them in. Thanks to Feng-GUI Lab, a group of visual scientists and interactive designer, now you can figure out what you’re doing wrong. Feng-GUI analyze your site’s feng shui by creating a heat map of your site that “is a composition of several algorithms from neuroscience studies of Feature integration theory, Salience, Visual Attention, eye-tracking sessions, perception and cognition of humans.” In short, Feng-GUI can help you figure out if it’s time you redesigned your page.

Via Core 77

The ability to watch our favorite shows on the Internet has been a blessing to many folks who don’t have the time to catch their stories at the regular time they’re on. Anyone with the Internet can watch an episode of 30 Rock at their leisure, but unlike DVR, the Internet doesn’t always offer viewers the opportunity to skip those pesky commercials. The folks at Overlay.TV have come up with a solution for this promotional problem. Instead of getting rid of advertisements altogether, The interactive media startup out of Ottawa’s alternative is to integrate them into the program, via clickable product placement and information within the video player’s real estate, which appears throughout the course of the video. The site allows for ‘internet users, content owners and e-commerce sites to monetize and customize their video assets by overlaying contextual information directly onto online video content and linking to external websites.’ For instance, if you like a character’s backpack, you could click on it and find out where to buy it. If that’s not friendly to viewer and corporate behemoth alike then what, pray tell, is?

These past few years, when it gets to be around the holidays (no matter how inconsequential) and my birthday, I admit I feel kind of nostalgic for all the cheesy/lame/insert-your-synonym-here Blue Mountain or Shockwave e-cards that used to fill up my inbox. Hell, I was just as guilty at times as the sender. Nowadays there are only people interested in selling me pills to better my sex life, no thank you, and the occasional virtual gift I receive from a friend on Facebook just isn’t the same. But Shift believes in the power of a greeting. They’ve got a sweet archive of e-cards that you can personalize for any occasion. A handful of artists contributed their graphic design and drawing work for these virtual cards, which are non-specific enough that they can be used to wish happy birthday or thank someone for how rad they are. You could use them also to declare how much you hate someone’s guts, but that’s not the spirit. Go ahead, don’t be afraid to send an e-card. Be responsible for someone’s smile today.

As promised, Information Architects just released the poster version of their super-sexy Web Trend Map 3. For $50 plus shipping, you can have your own map of Web 2.0 on your wall; for free, you can visit their site for downloadable versions appropriate for wallpaper and printing, as well as an interactive variant, updated daily.

You've come a long way over the past year as evidenced by the fact that you shaved your goatee and stopped using a nightlight. However, we know that sometimes you get nostalgic for the days of yore when your face fuzz was all the rage and soda pop only cost a nickel. If only there were some kind of time machine or time capsule to take you back to that precious time in your life. Well, we might have just thing and while it's no Delorean or time traveling phone booth, it'll certainly allow you to relive your sordid past. Our old friend Amit Gupta and his team at Photojojo has created a photo time capsule. The new feature digs through your Flickr page, selecting the most intriguing selections from a year ago and sends them to you in a weekly email. The application chooses the most worthy images based on views, comments, and favorites, so you won't get any of those artsy nudes of yourself that you've blocked out of your memory. The best thing about the time capsule is that you don't need 1.21 Gigowatts to activate it, just some photos and a Flickr page.

One look at the WHITEvoid homepage and you can understand why it was FWA's site of the day this past Friday. The Berlin-based interactive art and design firm gives you the total package in a matter of speaking; they only ask that you click to open that package before a veritable Pandora's box featuring their top-notch creative work is unleashed. The outstanding interactive installations and products the company has created for exhibitions, trade, festivals, events, concerts, and clubs are offered up on visually stunning platter and arranged neatly into seven categories and twenty items overall, that seem to just be floating in what else but a white void. Their creative genius is no secret as WHITEvoid counts both The BMW Group and The Jewish Museum of Berlin among their wide range of past clients. Maybe it's time you entered the White Void and discovered a new dimension of creativity for yourself.

Paper just got a little more obsolete. A week after Orange and UK ad agency The Alternative debuted a much buzzed about no touch interactive phone menu in the window of its Carnaby Street store, NYC's legendary St. Regis Hotel has taken the new-age menu up a notch.

The St. Regis is home to celebrated chef Alain Ducasse's Adour Restaurant and, despite the opulent old-skool feel of the sheepskin covered gold wine bar, ordering a drink is decidedly high tech. Created by Potion Design, an electronic touch sensitive menu is displayed onto the bar from a built-in projection system in the ceiling. Foodies can check out Adour's extensive wine list just by tapping their hands on the interactive menu before them. Once you've narrowed it down to a specific wine, a flower icon appears displaying info about the bottle on each of its petals; country, vineyard, grape varietals, and all that fancy sommelier stuff is displayed, literally, right at your fingertips.

Are you a currently unattached singular being? Maybe you've got your eye on someone but you're a little too shy to ask them out? Have you thought about being a secret admirer? Sure, we know that sounds a little fifth grade, but the act of cherishing covertly has just grown up and entered the information age. The new site HadToSay modernizes the secret admirer letter by allowing stalkers potential mates to create an anonymous message of mutilation adoration online and print out a notification card, which can then be discretely given to the object of obsession affection in question. Once your target sweetie gets the card, they then have the choice of logging on to the site where they can receive and reply to the threat message or just plain ignore it. If the latter happens, don't be sad, they weren't good enough for you anyway.

List views are so 2007; next up in the growing line-up of visualization interfaces is a new service from Youtube that lets you visually search related videos.

Looking perhaps a little too much like (and moving noticeably slower than) digg labs' swarm, related videos move around your current choice in multi-coloured bubbles. As you scroll into the other topics, the recs shift based on your preferences and the bubble colours change to help you keep track of which themes you've chosen and those you've steered away from. Click on any bubble to watch the vid. A white line, giving you a nifty trail of breadcrumbs to find your way back to where you started, instantly connects the videos you decide to watch.

Currently only available in full-screen mode and not yet on all videos, the search takes a little bit of time to get used to. Once you're in the groove and let your right brain take charge, it's easy and fast to intuitively move around and find a whole treasure trove of videos you probably wouldn't come across by search alone.

My mind is jumping right now, and the culprits are South Korean internet art collective Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (aka, YHCHI).

Taking Flash animation to a totally visceral level, their breakneck text-based works move so fast they look strobe-lit. Swinging from styles as diverse as gumshoe spy stories to sex-induced political upheaval (one of their most interesting works is called Cunnilingus in North Korea), the text drives the narrative while the original soundtrack and wordplay bring every mood to life without a single colour, voice, or picture.

Exploring the trove of work on their site, the constant visual and sonic barrage creates an almost physically hypnotic sensation. The relentless black and white lettering takes you on it's own pace: sometimes you're given time to take it in and sometimes it almost subliminally, Clockwork Orange-style, just speed flashes it's meaning into your brain. Once stirred, it's up to your imagination to complete the visual — instead of reading a book, it's a lot like having one hurled into your face.

Their latest project, BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING, is a temporary installation in the lobby of the New Museum of Contemporary Art on New York City's Bowery. This time they've upped the game from their regular one-screen format to a sensory-assaulting seven. Each separate story weaves together to tell different accounts of one violent abduction and assassination.

Like any worthwhile film noir, these are all best viewed alone in a dark room. But be forewarned, their site's as addictive as whatever pill you'll need to get to sleep once the thought-inducing onslaught is over.