TRIBUTE, the series of short films about youth selected and produced by cult rising film directors AG Rojas and Vince Haycock's firm MAINLINE, has been debuting on Dazed for the last two months. Featured so far have been the films of Matt Lambert and Focus Creeps, and debuting this morning is the work of AG himself.

Shot in Taft, California, AG's Cody continues his vein of lyrical, poetic and complex narratives about youth outsiders. This time, though, it's an all too real tale of youth and reticence he documents, and you can watch it exclusivelyabove, and let us know what you think on Youtube.

Interview taken from the February issue of Dazed & Confused:

A mathematician’s son, Ivan Poupyrev left his homeland following the collapse of the Soviet Union and divided his time between Washington and Japan, where he earned a doctorate from Hiroshima University. After an eight-year stint with Sony’s Tokyo labs he moved to Pittsburgh to take up a senior post with Disney Research, where he dreams up the interfaces of the future. Poupyrev works in physical computing, making responsive interfaces out of unexpected objects. His Botanicus Interacticus transforms ordinary house plants into touch-sensitive musical instruments through the magic of Touché sensing technology. Mathematical wizardry enables Touché to add gesture control to any object that conducts electricity – so secret gestures can unlock doorknobs too. Revel was a similarly lo-fi stroke of genius; by manipulating our bodies’ electrostatic fields, it lets our hands feel computer-generated textures. An image of a ball can feel rubbery, sand gritty and pebbles smooth.

What drew you to touch-based technology?

We can completely control data and conjure any image or sound we want from it; there are no limitations to what we can create visually. But the sense of touch is really lacking from these creations. You can’t really feel it, touch its texture, wrap your hands around it. That’s a huge lack – touch is an important part of how we experience life. So my idea is to bring the virtual into the palpable realm. Maybe you can shape soundwaves with your hands, feel light falling on your hands, or grasp objects you can’t normally see with your eyes.

What’s the difference between physical computing and ‘the internet of things’?

They all refer to the same vision of the future but come at it from different angles. The internet of things is focused on objects talking to each other over wi-fi, for example. Whereas I approach this vision of the future by making the world an interface. I did my PhD in virtual reality – I was fascinated by creating completely artificial environments you become immersed in, where anything is possible. Physical computing brings qualities of the computer into physical reality.

If you could only use storytelling or technology to enhance reality, which would you choose?

The original storytelling pretty much used narrative alone. A narrator takes you through the story step-by-step and you are essentially passive. But computer games opened storytelling right up. With video games you are an actor in the story unfolding in front of you. A compelling story will remain really important but technology gives you a greater sense of immersion. Your actions have consequences, and that fosters a far stronger emotional connection.

What other things extend the technology of storytelling?

If you imagine what the ultimate game could be – with no limitations on your imagination – then it would be your own life. If you could live your life, then load it from level one (i.e. your birth), that would be awesome! We can approximate elements of this ultimate game with wearable technology: as you go through your day, it changes your experiences according to a certain narrative, and this narrative becomes part of your real life. This idea of thinking about the ultimate experience first, then stepping back and approximating it with what we have to hand, is how I work.

So what’s the future of entertainment?

Entertainment used to be a confined experience, one-on-one with a book or sat in front of a TV. It was bound to one particular place: the theatre or cinema. Mobile devices changed the game, so the next step is to connect to the real-world environment, and the next step after that is to enhance your real-world environment. I think the next technological revolution will be in merging the physical and the digital. Simplicity is key to this. Back in the 60s, if you wanted to own a car you needed to be a part-time mechanic to maintain it. Now cars just work, they’re simple. I think that same transition needs to happen with the technologies that connect the real world to the digital.

Augmented reality is technology that merges the digital with the physical. Kevin Slavin famously criticised its visual bias and said ‘reality is augmented when it feels different’. Do you agree?

I can see both sides of the argument. Realism, by itself, is boring. When the artist can inject their very personal view of the world, morph the world and objects within it in a way that reflects how they feel about the world, that’s when things become interesting. That’s why cartoons are compelling. The resurgence of 8-bit graphics is also related to this. Bitmapped graphics enable a purity of expression: when you’ve got a limited palette, every pixel matters. Things become interesting when you can create experiences you cannot experience in the real world. That’s what fascinates me.

Brian Eno famously complained about the imprisoning nature of computer interaction. he said, ‘how does one Africanise, or Brazilianise, or otherwise liberate a computer?’

I’m with Brian Eno 100 per cent on that! Liberating yourself from the screen was exactly why I got into virtual reality in the first place. But computers themselves are a culture. For the original supercomputer designers, the idea that you would use a machine of that power to play games on would be outrageous! That way of thinking about computing as a serious tool to do serious business is still very strong. It’s less about west vs east, but it’s a historical legacy of how computers came to be.

Where do you look for inspiration?

I’m always looking at trends. I want to see the seeds of what is happening, not the results. Printed electronics really interest me at the moment. Printing is a very old technology but it’s seeing a reinvention right now. We’re printing things which were not supposed to be printed. The big shift is we’re printing things that can do things themselves. We printed an optical sensor that senses input, using LEDs and light pipes printed inside the object! These technologies will let us create previously impossible things. It’s going to be hugely significant.

Where will the next tech revolution happen?

Well, the revolution happens from all quarters. I think that the enthusiasts are the ones on the forefront but it’s when there’s big business to be had that things accelerate fast. Even with lots of stupid money being wasted on projects during the first dotcom boom, it was that swell that made the big companies wake up to the internet. But the maker community around (open-source tools for creating interactive environments) Arduino and Processing was eye- opening for me. They are tools that lower the entry bar, and the community that’s emerged bucks the trend of passive consumers. When entry barriers are lowered, people get involved. Curiosity is wired into us: the excitement of making and creating something new.

As the inimitable Radiohead and Atoms For Peace frontman Thom Yorke landed on the cover of our February Issue this month, we launched our highly prestigious music school with huge names in new electronic music, including the likes of The Gaslamp Killer, FlyLo, Pearson Sound and Actress enrolling.

Now we're calling all art students and illustrators to get involved in the University of Yorke's brand new art department for an exclusive Atoms For Peace competition. This month, the supergroup will be releasing their debut album, AMOK, so we're inviting you to put your artistic hats on and design the most mind-blowing, inventive and trippy cover artwork for the mixtape Thom Yorke made us using the cassette tape template above - taking inspiration from the mix itself and/or the AMOK art (featured in the gallery below).

The artist and longtime Radiohead collaborator, Stanley Donwood, on the AMOK artwork:

"I’ve recently been reading about the Anasazi people, an ancient Native American civilisation that existed in the American Southwest from about the 1st century CE until the 13th century.They built the biggest structures that are known to have existed until the construction of 20th century, massive buildings consisting of hundreds of rooms, which were part of huge cities, and home to hundreds of thousands of people.Theirs was a very sophisticated culture; complex, long-lasting, technologically advanced and evidently very successful.

Although it’s difficult to be certain, it’s clear that many things contributed to the sudden downfall of the Anasazi: overpopulation, resource depletion, deforestation, pollution of waterways, climate change.It’s likely that some people could see what was happening, and equally likely that the great mass of people refused to acknowledge that their way of life was becoming rapidly unsustainable.In the end, nothing could prevent the collapse of this highly-developed and venerable civilisation.It appears that social structures broke down very quickly into a kind of holocaust.Human remains indicate violence, killing, dismemberment and cannibalism.Other evidence is arguably best interpreted as ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Whatever happened, it’s clear that the disaster that overtook the Anasazi people has many parallels in history.It’s a very ‘human’ disaster.We pay a lot of attention to kings, conquests and wars, but more often it is environment and geography that determine the fate of a civilisation, however complex and technologically accomplished it may presume it is.

Strange weather we’ve been having lately, don’t you think?And it seems that we’ve been reduced to fracturing bedrock for oil, rather than it just squirting up out of wells.Doesn’t that seem a bit… desperate? It’s probably all okay though, because we’ve got ‘technology’.Just as well, really, as our civilisation is global.And there’s only one globe."

The prize: An exclusive Thom Yorke-signed 12" vinyl copy of the Atoms for Peace debut album, 'Default', and an issue of the new Dazed & Confused magazine.

To enter: Tag us in your submissions onFacebookor by using #uniofyorke onTwitter.

Deadline: 6pm, Tuesday 5th Feb 2013

See the gallery below for some ideas to get started...

Last week, Prada released four sketches from Miuccia Prada’s collection of over 40 dresses for Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby. True to Luhrmann and Prada form, the dresses aren’t an obvious rehash of twenties style, but rather an idiosyncratic take on the period. Dreamt up in collaboration with Luhrmann’s wife, Oscar-winning costume designer Catherine Martin, the dresses take their cue from pieces from the Prada and Miu Miu archives: AW11’s vaguely sixties fur-collared fish scale dress makes an appearance in a new twenties guise, and SS11’s graphic, vibrant stripes have been re-imagined in sequins and plastic trimmings.

“In the same way Nick Carraway reflects on a world that he is within and without, we have tried to create an environment that the audience will be subconsciously familiar with, yet separated from,” Catherine Martin noted on the collaboration with Miuccia Prada. Obstructing any straightforward analysis and forgoing obvious style and era references is of course textbook Prada, making the designer the perfect choice for Baz Luhrmann’s time-travelling universe and the tale of Jay Gatsby – the man who hasn’t only constructed his own reality, but also his own history. While we wait for the film’s May release, here are our top five Baz Luhrmann costume moments.