I'm attending the Pop!Tech conference here in Camden, Maine. There are many remarkable speakers here, like Steven Pinker and Daniel Pink, but what I am most surprised by is the "human renderer" who sits in the upper-right balcony of the proceedings.

The artist paints images that convey the spirit of each talk in real time with color and words. I think the fact that each image is not a literal interpretation of the speaker's presentation feels fresh. Very iki.

At a chic hotel in Minneapolis recently, I was perusing the hotel's impressive collection of contemporary artwork by Damien Hirst when my eyes rested upon these wonderful pewter crackers for sale. These crackers are of course inedible, although they come in clever easy-to-open packaging, which made the distance from package to stomach seem eerily close. Hirst's cracker is exactly the same physical scale as a regular cracker, and it has a wonderful heft in terms of its weight: each single silver cracker is about as heavy as an entire box of conventional crackers. The artwork has a hidden digital nature--a tracking-number scheme so that the owner's relationship with the object can be forever preserved on the Web. If you're looking for a good gift for a slightly off-kilter friend, I can't recommend a better item as food for thought about the nature of art in the digital and physical worlds.

While visiting retail giant Target's headquarters in Minneapolis, I saw enough red concentric circles to last a lifetime. On chairs, carpets, walls, I saw red everywhere. This was my favorite--a wall with over a thousand individually cut red dots hand-glued to it.