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Analyzing Political Graphic Design

Ward Sutton takes a graphic look at what posters say about candidates for the U.S. presidency. NYT

Originally from Archinect.com Feed
reBlogged by michael

Universal Avatars Bestride Worlds

“A virtual character, or avatar, for all the virtual worlds in which people play is the goal of a joint project between IBM and Linden Lab. - The computer giant and the creator of Second Life are working on universal avatars that can travel between worlds.

The project aims to open up virtual worlds by introducing open tools that work with any online environment. The companies hope to boost interest in virtual worlds as well as make them easier to navigate. At the moment every virtual world requires a player or user to go through the process of creating an avatar that will act as their proxy in that online environment. Typically, an avatar created for one world, be it a game or a system like Second Life, cannot move between these different virtual spaces. The project started by IBM and Linden Lab aims to create a universal character creation system so people only have to create a digital double once.” Continue reading Universal Avatars Bestride Worlds, BBC News.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Oct 12, 2007, 3:53PM

WikiCity, an MIT project

How can a city perform as an open-source real-time system. Although the approach of this project seems to be driven quite a lot by a cultural engineering mindset, there are some interesting people-focused elements in it: In the past decades, real time control systems have been developed in a variety of engineering applications. In so doing, they have dramatically increased the efficiency of systems through energy savings, regulation of the dynamics, increased robustness and disturbance tolerance. Now: can you have a city that performs as a real time control system? This is the aim of the WikiCity project at MIT. Let’s examine the four key components of a real time control system: entity to be controlled in an environment characterised by uncertainty; sensors able to acquire information about the entity’s state in real-time; intelligence capable of evaluating system performance against desired outcomes; physical actuators able to act upon the system to realise the control strategy. A city certainly fits the definition of point 1, and point 2 does not seem to pose particular problems. As an example, the Real Time Rome project used cellphones and GPS devices to collect the movement patterns of people and transportation systems, and their spatial and social usage of streets and neighborhoods. But how to actuate the city? Although the city already contains several classes of actuators such as traffic lights and remotely updated street signage, a much more flexible actuator would be the city’s own inhabitants. Consequently, we are creating a new platform for storing and exchanging data which are location and time-sensitive, making them accessible to users through mobile devices, web interfaces and physical interface objects. This platform enables people to become distributed intelligent actuators, which pursue their individual interests in cooperation and competition with others, and thus become prime actors themselves in improving the efficiency of urban systems. The project vision, which is driven by Carlo Ratti’s SENSEable City Lab, is currently being implemented in Rome, Italy. Visit project website

Originally from Putting people first by PuttingPeopleFirst
reBlogged by michael on Oct 7, 2007, 9:14AM

Turning museums into places where people interact

Print Magazine is reporting on Local Projects, a company that is turning museums into places where people interact with information—and each other. When Jake Barton, the 34-year-old principal of the interactive design firm Local Projects, thinks about what an exhibition can do, he often considers the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. The museum documents the forced removal of more than 60,000 residents from a mixed-race neighborhood declared a whites-only zone in 1966, and tells the stories of those displaced. In the early ’90s, when reclaiming that land was still not an option, the museum kept the issue in the public eye through exhibitions and debate; subsequently, the museum’s sister organization helped residents apply to have their land returned. Transforming and healing a community through inclusive storytelling is, in Barton’s eyes, the mandate for museums of the 21st century. These days, he has ample reason to meditate on it: In April, he and his seven-person firm received the commission to codesign the permanent exhibition for the World Trade Center Memorial Museum.” By choosing Local Projects, the memorial’s directors cast their lot with a new kind of museum that prizes interactivity over top-down presentation. Local Projects insists on a plurality of voices—the exhibitions it creates function as a kind of conversation rather than as repositories of authoritative fact. “Museums are starting to evolve into agents of social change,” Barton says. “That’s being reflected in the numbers of people who are going to museums and the ways museums are functioning as spaces for community dialogue. We [are] trying to make diverse people visible to each other through a storytelling space.” Read full story

Originally from Putting people first by Experientia
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 7:25AM

Jenny Holzer at the Venice Biennale

I knew Jenny Holzer as the artist whose light light projections sex up the facade of the Palazzo Madama or Palazzo Carignano each Winter in Turin. I was therefore quite surprised to see how different and politically–charged her contribution to the Biennale is.

Protect, Protect, 2007

Her work in Venice is one of the many that the artistic director of the Biennale, American critic and curator Robert Storr, had selected to remind us of the values that his country has always stood for but has also more than once betrayed in the past few years.

Holzer’s Redaction works (redaction in this case means to edit and or black out text before publication) are enlarged, painted version of declassified government and military material obtained from the American National Security Archive, including issues of prisoner/detainee abuse in Guantánamo Bay and other detention camps, and the ongoing tragedies of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. You can rest your eyes on cold autopsy reports (the “manner of death” of some prisoners being disturbingly registered by doctors from the Armed Services Institute of Pathology, as “Homicide.”) and witness statements given to the FBI.

Homicide

As the title of the series suggests, parts of the texts are censored. But all those dark or blank rectangles that hide words have the effect of grabbing your attention. The documents let understand that the treatment reserved to some prisoners included heads wrapped in duct tape, whacked with phone books, low voltage electrocution, hooding, the use of drugs, suspensions, shackling and gagging, ligature injuries and pierced lungs (via.)

And suddenly small painted words remind you of those awful images that you had almost forgotten about because they are not making the headlines anymore…

More about the series of paintings in The Phoenix and Big, Red & Shiny. My pictures and better ones from the Cheim & Read Gallery and Sprueth & Magers gallery.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Aug 8, 2007, 11:49AM

Forrester’s new Social Technographics report

Social Technographics
Mapping Participation In Activities Forms The Foundation Of A Social Strategy
by Charlene Li
with Josh Bernoff, Remy Fiorentino, Sarah Glass

Forrester just released a new report, titled “Social Technographics“.

Executive summary
Many companies approach social computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed – a blog here, a podcast there – to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes social computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term “Social Technographics” to describe analyzing a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other company pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers’ Social Technographics first, and then create a social strategy based on that profile.

Author Charlene Li provides us with some more insight into the report:

“We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.

For example, 13% of US online adult consumers are “Creators” meaning that they have posted to a blog, updated a Web page, or uploaded video they created within the last month. […]

The value of Social Technographics comes when it’s used by companies to create their social strategies. For example, in the report we look at how Social Technographics profiles differ by primary life motivation, site usage, and even PC ownership.

The report also lays out how companies can create strategies using Social Technographics. For example, I’ve used the “participation ladder” to help figure out which social strategies to deploy first – and also how to encourage users to “climb up”, so to speak, from being Spectators to becoming more engaged.”

- Read full story
- Related blog post (by Ross Mayfield)

Originally from Putting people first by Experientia
reBlogged by michael on Apr 28, 2007, 2:02AM

We am what you eats

A Japanese friend has drawn my attention to Amupurin, the website of a husband and wife who’ve gone “back to the land” after working as graphic designers in Tokyo. They’ve built a wooden house in Hokkaido and made a “pudding factory cottage”, selling the resulting puddings online. Their nearest town has no stores, not even a vending machine, but they do have a pretty solid DSL connection and update their site frequently. They also have a separate blog, The 3 Points Supper, which is a simple record of the food they eat each day (one photo per meal).

The visual poetry of the Amupurin food blog is complemented by beautifully stilted English labels. “Sardine’s plum tree dry boiling, Japanese yam, Wheat meal, Miso soup, Tokyo, 15.04.2007″ reads yesterday’s entry. Friday’s lists “Leek natto, OKAHIJIKI, Pickled Chinese cabbage, Leaf red pepper, The miso soup, The cereals rice, Tokyo, 13.04.2007″. Sometimes it might be something as simple as “Beer, Salmon’s canned food, Potato salad & onion, Hokkaido, 04.04.2007″.

The formula isn’t new. Cornelius is the first person I’m aware of to have maintained a strictly food-only blog, but keitai cameras make it a commonplace today. In fact, it’s considerably easier to see the food a Japanese person eats each day than to see representations of the person herself. This is because it’s considered bad etiquette in Japan to push yourself forward for admiration. But cooing over food is not only okay, it’s more or less obligatory. Japanese TV, for instance, is at least 50% filled up with people cooing over food.

Mulling the meaning of this, I happened to be watching Michael Wood’s epic TV series “Legacy: The Origins of Civilisations”. In the film on China, Wood says “A cuisine is a whole way of seeing the world. It’s one of the simplest and most direct ways in which people can enjoy life — a mark of civilisation. And the Chinese excelled in it. As they still do.”

One of the ways you can tell you’ve passed from one civilisation to another is that the binaries no longer work the same way. Things you took to be natural opposites suddenly no longer are. And it occurs to me that the food blog is a beautiful tool with which to slice and dice Western binary oppositions. Let’s try it on a few of the best-known.

Body / Soul (a specifically Christian binary): I’ve often heard Japanese people say that, in the Japanese conception of what a person is, the stomach is the absolute centre of things — a very tangible and worldly equivalent to the nebulous, otherworldly centre Christians are likely to designate “the soul”. But of course Japan’s fusion (via Shinto) of spirituality with the seasonal agrarian cycle means that to oppose the tangible and the spiritual is a false opposition; stomach and soul are the same thing (the nearest equivalent we have in the West is the black American expression “soul food”). That’s why a portrait of what a Japanese person ate might be a much better depiction of who they are than a picture of their face.

Individual / Collective: We can also perhaps collapse the Western binary between the individual and the collective if we think of a blog showing the food an individual consumes daily as a kind of self-portrait which acknowledges dependence on others. Japanese preface eating with “Itadakimasu!” — I will receive! It’s an acknowledgment of interdependence and of the collective nature of food-making. But without that collectivity (of seeding, planting, growing, of trading and purchasing, of preparation and serving), and without the belief system that binds all this together into a spiritual as well as a logistical whole, no individual.

The idea of food as a portrait isn’t a purely Japanese one, though. The 18th century French philosopher Jean-Anthelm Brillat-Savarin said “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”. It’s a line Tucker Shaw quotes in his book “Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth” (2005).

High / Low: And Tucker puts his finger on another key Western binary — high / low — when he criticizes the way Western food is usually presented: “Food magazines are like fashion magazines: They celebrate what’s beautiful, new, or unusual, but very rarely report on what people really wear or eat.” His demotic, documentary approach is more “Japanese” in the same way that a street fashion magazine like FRUiTS challenges the standard high / low binary of the top-down fashion industry. FRUiTS (much like Fumi Nagasaki’s Street Life video report for Flasher) is a grassroots documentary approach to what people are actually wearing, rather than what celebrity fashion professionals like Karl Lagerfeld or Hedi Slimane would like them to be wearing.

As if to prove he’s an American after all, Tucker Shaw justifies the demotic grassroots sociology of his food blook with a bit of paradoxical bragging: “This project is a shameless bid to make history. I want my pictures to show up in anthropology textbooks 200 years from now. Some day, people are going to wonder about what people ate in New York City around the turn of the century. Maybe I’ll be the one of the guys they talk about.”

He da man! Well, da mankind.

Originally from Click opera
reBlogged by michael on Apr 16, 2007, 5:50AM

[-empyre-] Brooke Singer: Thoughts on the topic

TechnoPanic: Terrors and Technologies

“… In the last several years I have seen the rise of work termed “Locative Media” and my own work is sometimes grouped in that category. I usually ignore labels but this one is particularly bothersome to me because there is a trend here to collapse this ever-growing field of terror technologies into infotainment objects. This gets to the issue of what Tim calls the “ambivalent attraction to technologies of terror” and, as Horit questions, “what is the relationship between the production of art by means of digital technologies and the production of terror by the same?” Locative Media (as with the term Web 2.0) is deceptive in its appearance of being simply shiny, fun and new. Yet, do we question computer art for its use of the digital computer, originally designed to quickly crunch numbers to project missiles more accurately — wherein lies the difference? Is it only distance from inception?…” — Brooke Singer, empyre. Read the full post >>

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Apr 11, 2007, 7:52AM

one million image masterpiece

“world’s largest artistic collaboration” celebrating the diversity of global society through art. 1 million ordinary people from all around the world are invited to work on a single picture together. people of all ages & abilities are allowed to squiggle, doodle, in any shape, color, word or sketch in a large collaborative mosaic of small squares.

see also wallright & collaborative visual mosaic & pixelfest & gridlove & kollabor8 & infoscape.

[link: millionmasterpiece.com]

Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on Mar 6, 2007, 2:43AM