Illegal Art is hosting what sounds like a very interesting example of annotated art: Wizard People, Dear Reader. The work is an alternative audio track for the film version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone:

To experience it, viewers need to get a copy of the first Harry Potter movie and watch it with the sound off, replacing Neely's narration with the original soundtrack.

Sounds easy, but you have to download (straight-up, no .torrent) about 140 MB of data, burn two standard CDs and then carefully start them to synch with the video. Why can't DVD players make such annotations easier? Oh, that's right, Hollywood doesn't like creative innovation they can't control.

In related news ... read on.

Infoworld's Jon Udell has an interesting column on the dead tree media version of annotations, aka marginalia (Filling in the margins). According to Jon:

The fuzzy intersection of official and unofficial data has never been a comfort zone for information technologists. In chapter 4 of Klaus Kaasgaard's Software Design and Usability, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) alumnus Austin Henderson says that “one of the most brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin.” There was always space for unofficial data, which traveled with the official data, and everybody knew about the relationship between the two.

He calls for all documents to support marginalia, or annotations. Although he is mostly interested in cool new apps instead of cool new creative works, the principle is pretty much the same.

via Waxy.org Links