b l a s t u l a reblog++

Finally some time to put order in my brain and write a few lines about the 5th edition of Seoul International Media Art Biennale, aka media_city Seoul.

With some 70 artists showing their work, the biennial is a very satisfying but also very overwhelming experience, especially because the event features so many pieces that require time and reflection, and so many artists whose work i had never heard of. Thank god and the curators, there were very few of those installations that look more like entertaining gizmos than art. Most of the time they require the audience to wave their hands or move around so that whatever is projected on a screen will move. Or will perform some magical trick like spitting out smoke. Apparently some visitors have seen this kind of work too much: i saw a few people flapping their arms in a desperate attempt to ‘interact’ with a piece which was perfectly happy to function without human help, thank you.

Sorry Miss, this installation is good but it won’t interact: Hello World by Yunchul Kim

I saw some great pieces of media art in Seoul and they put the emphasis on ‘art’ rather than ‘media’. media_city Seoul is the only major biennial i’ve heard of that is entirely dedicated to media art. It doesn’t take place in a gallery or in one of those ueber-trendy disused industrial spaces outside the city. It is located in a very official, big, and bright art institutions: the Seoul Museum of Art.

Visitors trying on Electroboutique’s virtual reality goggles

The thing that puzzles me is the existence of a media art biennial. Not because i am per se unconvinced by the idea of applying the structure and vocabulary of ‘traditional’ contemporary art onto media art. Not because of all the discussions about the overflow of biennials all over the world and the obsolescence of their concept. I love biennials, any celebration of art is good for me. No, what perplexes me is that, once again, media art is treated like the odd kid who has to be separated from the others. If on the one hand it’s fantastic that a city has the guts to dedicate two month to media art and host the event in a museum, i wonder how long it will take until media art is regarded as ‘art’ and integrated into other contemporary art events without anyone finding it extraordinary, brave or strange. We’re getting there i know but, damn! it’s slow. Anyway, not sure this French expression translates well in english but i’m going to stop ’spitting in the soup’ and just rejoice in this opportunity i had to see so many great works.

Starting with 2 examples taken from Marie Sester’s Exposure series, an artwork which started as videos that explores how X-ray imagery was used for surveillance, before 9/11.

Exposure, Marie Sester

One photo shows an X-rayed truck containing what are very probably smuggled items. In another one, an X-rayed horse trailer is elegantly juxtaposed with a house, which eventually overtakes the entire screen. The horse trailer has a luxury car hidden inside. The house was scanned by laser as well. Today, Exposure is a work stronger than ever. Marie Sester has also noted that today, as an artist, she would never have access to images like the ones included in “Exposure” due to the levels of control that entities, which she approached in the past, have placed on their surveillance technologies.

Exposure, Marie Sester

When walking in the museum lobby, you might be startled by the sound of an aircraft flying overhead. Up there above you, the gigantic shadow of an aircraft is passing quietly and menacingly over the ceiling. The only on-going attack I-Chen Kuo’s work Invade the SeMA (SeMA being of course the Seoul Museum of Art) refers to is the one that sees artists invading art institutions, with or without their consent.

Invade the SeMA by Kuo I-Chen

One of the best art pieces i saw at the biennial is Life Writer by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. An old type writer rescued from the era of analogue text processing and normal piece of paper become the vivarium for a swarm of artificial life creatures. The letters that you type appear as projected characters on the paper. When you push the carriage return, the letters turn into small black creatures that creep or fly over the paper. The creatures are based on genetic algorithms where text is used as the genetic code that determines the shape, behaviour and movements of the creatures.

Life Writer Machine, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau

The creatures need to eat text to stay alive and when they will try to snap up the new characters you type. Once they have eaten enough text they can also reproduce and have off-spring.

By connecting the act of typing to the act of creation of life, Life Writer deals with the idea of creating an open-ended artwork where user-creature and creature-creature interaction become essential to the creation of digital life and where an emergent systems of life-like art emerges on the boundaries between analog and digital worlds.

The interesting part was to hear and see how the young people behave in front of the typewriter. They never had to use it so they tend to type using very soft and light gestures as if the keyboard of machine was as sensible as a the one of a cell phone.

For his project Adam Smith: a million of good reasons to become millionaire, Damián Ontiveros Ramírez asked students of economy and accounting to help him draw the figure of Adam Smith, an 18th century Scottish philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, an essay regarded as the first modern work of economics.

A view from Damián Ontiveros Ramírez’ installation

The artist’s objective is to total 1,000,000 drawings that show Adam Smith performing different actions. Each of them suggests a way to make money, as the Scottish economist had claimed that the source of wealth is labor. For media_city Seoul, the artist is showing digital animations of some of the drawings.

Damián Ontiveros Ramírez, Adam Smith: A Million of Good Reasons to Become Millionaire

Herwig Turk is showing two works which question the standards of perception. The first part of the installation, Uncertainty, takes its cue from Austrian physicist Dr. Manfred Drosg who stated that ” A model can never be a perfect portrayal of reality, and there can never be a part of reality perfectly mirrored by a model”.

Herwig Turk, uncertainty

In this two-channel video installation, which Turk developed in collaboration with Paulo Pereira, a camera registers the movement of a fluorescent solution set on top of a shaker. The camera is supported by a similar shaker, set to move at the same speed, in an attempt to reproduce the solution’s exact motion. In a precisely controlled experiment the solution would not move. This, however, is impossible since the movement of both shakers can never be perfectly synchronized. This impossibility is represented on one of the screens, whereas on the second screen the movement has been artificially synchronized through post-production, so that the solution no longer moves. However, on this screen the whole stage begins to move. The artificial immobilization of the fluorescent solution results in an apparent shaking of the white background, making the stillness of the vibrating solution distressing. A small black border occasionally appears on the screen’s periphery, dissolving yet another reference: the frame of the screen.

Herwig Turk, DNA film

The second part of the installation, DNA film, consists of an animation of DNA separated in an agarose gel. The pulsating black and white structures are an artistic translation of DNA-sequences, which are interpreted as the twilight zone between being and nothingness. By measuring the average luminance within the single frames, a structure was found to generate the sound that is directly referring to the picture. The artwork refers to the constant need for translation within science and art and just like uncertainty, it focuses on the manipulation of scientific image.

To be continued…

media_city Seoul runs until November 5, 2008 at the Seoul Museum of Art.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

Originally by Regine from we make money not art

Posted under reblog art

Multinational Monitor: You argue that expanded copyright protection is harming cultural production and expressive life. Why?

Bill Ivey: [...] To me, copyright has become too long and too wide … For example, back in the fall of 2004, a federal court decided that even a tiny amount of musical material couldn’t be used in a new work without securing a license from the original copyright owner. The specifics of the case involved rap and hip-hop recordings sampling elements of earlier performances. But the implications are very broad, affecting any artist involved in what would be called collage art-making, whether clipping images out of magazines to make a new work of art, or assembling old film clips into a new documentary. So today there’s no minimal use; every little snippet of someone else’s intellectual property has to be licensed. We’ve got a very locked-up system when it comes to creating new art out of old …”

[...] “MM: Besides copyright, you raise concerns about corporate gatekeepers in the cultural marketplace. What do you mean by the idea of gatekeepers?

Ivey: Culture appears to exist everywhere and seems to be readily available, but it really comes to consumers through a complicated system. And that system contains toll booths and exhibits places where the gates are narrow and places where the gates are really wide. A healthy cultural system is one in which artists can find their way in and one in which their work can be widely disseminated. It’s also a system in which consumers have broad access to lots of work by lots of different kinds of artists. What we find today, in a market-dominated cultural system, is that there are corporate gatekeepers who not only affect how much art gets through to consumers, but also shape the very character of the creative process …” From Arts, Inc: The Corporate Control of Culture - An Interview with Bill Ivey by Multinational Monitor.

Bill Ivey is the former chair of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, a federal cultural agency. He is the author of Arts, Inc: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights (2008). Ivey serves as director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, an arts policy research center with offices in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. He also directs the Center’s program for senior government, the Arts Industries Policy Forum.

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo

reBlogged

on Sep 25, 2008, 8:08PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on September 25, 2008, 10:08pm

Posted under reblog art

Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller - Some years ago, Lev Manovich called for “software studies” to be established as an interdisciplinary field capable of re-thinking programmable media at the interface of cultural theory and computer science. Conceived partly against so-called speculative accounts of virtual reality and cyber-identities, this suggested re-orientation aimed for a denser materiality by foregrounding the technical composition of digital systems. Here, engineering documents were as likely a source of inspiration as Gilles Deleuze or Marshall McLuhan, resulting in a ‘material turn’ constituted by highly engaging work such as Alex Galloway’s protocological network theory or the more recent forensic hard drive analysis of Matthew Kirschenbaum. Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, should be considered as explicitly positioned in relation to this transition and its concerns. In a sense, the collection represents a broad mapping of those next generation programmer-theorists who have worked to establish this newfound rigor and sophistication. According to Fuller, there are two main reasons behind the title: it takes the form of a series of short studies, geared toward the stuff of software “in some of the many ways that it exists, in which it is experienced and thought through, and to show, by the interplay of concrete examples and multiple kinds of accounts, ‘the conditions of possibility’ that software establishes”. Secondly, it does so by applying perspectives from fields or disciplines that have traditionally had little concern with software directly, like philosophy, history or visual cultural studies. Comprised of dozens of entries around keywords (i.e. algorithm, codex, function, glitch, function, loop, variable), this lexicon provides a fascinating overview of an emerging field. With contributions from Jussi Parikka, Wendy Chun, Florian Cramer, Warren Sack, Adrian McKenzie, Nick Monfort, Friedrich Kittler, Olga Goriunova, Alexei Shulgin and Graham Harwood, Software Studies is an excellent and timely reference for artists, programmers or theorists who regularly work on or through the everyday code of digital machines.” - Michael Dieter, Neural.

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo

reBlogged

on Sep 25, 2008, 9:12PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on September 25, 2008, 11:12pm

Posted under reblog art

The exhibition Net Art in Colombia: It’s Ugly and Doesn’t Like the Cursor curated by Juan Devis consists of online projects developed by Colombian artists who approach the Internet as a medium worthy of aesthetic exploration, as well as a tool of dissemination. While some members of online new media communities in different parts of the world might consider the term “net art” historically and geographically specific, as it becomes obvious in this exhibition, the term is still at play in online culture with diverse interests, and it need not be considered part of the past. Devis contextualizes the exhibit as an expanding discourse driven by conceptual preoccupations closely tied to political interests…” Continue reading Review of Net Art in Colombia: It’s Ugly and Doesn’t like the Cursor by Eduardo Navas, newmediaFIX.

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo


reBlogged

on Sep 25, 2008, 9:26PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on September 25, 2008, 11:26pm

Posted under reblog art

“Since the late 1980s, researchers have been working on a “post-desktop” paradigm for human-computer interaction, known as “ubiquitous” or “pervasive” computing. Combining any number of mobile, networked and context-aware technologies, pervasive computing involves the embedding of computational capacities in the objects and environments that surround us. When this research began to spread from university and corporate labs to the popular imagination, there was an almost immediate and negative reaction, marked by anxieties around the idea of technologies penetrating into everyday life. In North America and Europe in particular, privacy concerns came to the fore as commentators envisioned a world of absolute surveillance. Conversely, the more recent emerging research agendas in “urban computing” and “locative media” present a strongly utopian vision.

Following urban computing and locative media and their accompanying visions from labs, conferences and classrooms to journal publications and popular media accounts, this dissertation presents four case histories in corporate, academic and artistic design practice. An analysis of the Mobile Bristol, Passing Glances, Sonic City and Urban Tapestries research and design projects draws out the idea that everyday life in the future city is expected to become more expressive, engaging and meaningful. The increased extensibility and transmissibility of the city itself, along with an increased ability to be socially embedded within it, is seen to be a fundamental promise inherent in these projects. The dissertation argues that such spatial and cultural potentialities can be productively understood as involving temporary, selective and mobile publics, where creative and playful interactions emerge as primary means of social innovation.

The dissertation builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape our experiences of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. It contributes to methodological innovation through the use of data bricolage and research blogging 1, which are presented through experimental and recombinant textual strategies; and it contributes to the field of science and technology studies by bringing together actor-network theory with the sociology of expectations in order to empirically evaluate an area of cutting-edge design.” From A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media by Anne Galloway.

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo


reBlogged

on Sep 25, 2008, 10:06PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on September 26, 2008, 12:06am

Posted under reblog art

This article was written by Jeremy Faludi in January 2008. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Are you a designer just getting interested in eco-design and are looking for a place to start? Are you a designer who already knows the big-picture view of sustainability, but wants to actually apply things to your designs today? Either way, the Okala guide by the IDSA (Industrial Designers Society of America) is for you, and your office. It is a primer on green design written by designers for designers, and while it is short enough that no one in the office has an excuse to not read it (fewer than 70 pages), it has enough activities in it that it can be an 18-week university course. In fact, it was designed as a course by Philip White, professor at Arizona State and current chair of IDSA’s Ecodesign section, as well as design professors Louise St. Pierre and Steve Belletire (with some influences by Worldchanging ally Wendy Brawer and others). The Okala guide is not an in-depth theoretical tome like Natural Capitalism, but it is a good workbook for applying sustainability to your product design practice today, right where you are.

Almost no green design guides exist that are practical and textbook-worthy. This is not to disparage works like Cradle to Cradle, The Green Imperative, or other great green design titles; it’s just that most books on sustainability are very abstract, talking about the problems we face and the general principles to think of when trying to deal with them. They give you a very clear picture of what the problem is, and a vague picture of how to solve it, but without many real nuts-and-bolts-level tools. They often list examples of good practice, but don’t give an exhaustive list of ecodesign strategies or provide a way to balance the pros and cons of different strategies, which is key to creating your own good designs. Occasionally a book will overflow with good examples (like Alastair Fuad Luke’s ecoDesign, almost a catalog of green consumer products), but these are also of limited use, because they fail to connect the examples to enough theory, leaving you in the same place as overly-abstract books.

To be a good textbook, you need to provide four things: understanding of the problems and solutions at a big-picture level, a toolbox of strategies for the day-to-day level, examples of success, and the connections between these three. Okala, simple as it is, does these four things. The only other book I would strongly recommend for practical how-to instruction is Design + Environment, written in 2001 by professors at the Centre for Design at RMIT University in Australia. Longer and more technical than the Okala guide, it is a great reference book and learning guide. (In fact, Okala references it several times.) Okala’s guide, on the other hand, is a great workbook: it is meant to be actively engaging, getting you to try things out, do your own analyses and redesigns. It aims at average designers, and gives them a solid foundation without overwhelming them with the complexities of detail. If you want those details you’ll have to go elsewhere, but it does have several suggestions for further reading. It’s also highly visual, like designers are, which should make it more accessible to the right people.

The first section of the guide (nearly the first half of it) introduces you to the concept of sustainability in all its ecological, social, and financial aspects; it gives overviews of the Natural Step, ecological carrying capacity, different arenas of ecological impact, and so on. It also points out how eco-design fits into a larger view of stakeholder needs, and talks about balancing different needs against each other.

If you already believe in the importance of green design and understand the basic goals, you can skip to the later modules–the rest of the guide is divided into three sections, “lifecycle strategies”, “assessment”, and “practice”. These are your toolboxes for green design, from the initial strategic phase through design development and material choice, product usage, and end-of-life. It even discusses green marketing and business strategy. While most of these subjects are not covered in depth, each one gets a mention, and several activities are suggested for you to deepen your understanding through your own research and/or theoretical designs. I would like to have seen more detail for each strategy, but the brevity does make it an easy read, and a quicker reference. For example, their Ecodesign Strategy Wheel is great for reference, listing dozens of strategies in the seven life-cycle stages that each one is relevant to. Their table of connector designs for manual disassembly is especially good, since this is an easy strategy to employ but one that nobody talks about in detail. On the other hand, there are areas where the guide could be improved. The module titled “Strategies In Depth” only talks about two strategies (biomimicry and product longevity), whereas it should describe all strategies mentioned in the Strategy Wheel. Several of the other strategies in the wheel get described in more detail in other parts of the guide, but in no particular order; I would prefer to have the pamphlet organized by the seven regions on the Strategy Wheel, so that it is easier to navigate to the strategies you are interested in. I disagree with their example of Velcro as a green material–it is indeed biomimetic, but as a petroleum product requiring high temperatures and pressures in extrusion, it’s not any greener than plastic buttons or zippers. One subject that I would like to have seen which was not covered at all is persuasive design–affordances, interfaces, and whole devices that change user behavior for better sustainability. I can’t fault Okala for this, though, since no one has really written well on this subject yet; and they do mention persuasion for lengthening product lifetime, by designing objects users will become attached to and not want to throw away. The one eco-design tool that Okala covers in real depth is well-chosen: life-cycle impact assessment.

The single most useful feature of the guide is the list of “Okala Impact Factors” for doing back-of-the-envelope life-cycle analysis. These are single-figure scores for the ecological impact of common materials and manufacturing processes, derived from the US EPA’s TRACI system. Single-figure scores are often called oversimplified and misleading, and rightly so: a product’s life cycle impacts fall into wildly divergent categories, from fossil fuel use to water acidification to human toxicity to mineral depletion, just to name a few. Trying to normalize these against each other and lump all of them together into a single score is comparing apples to oranges. And yet, when I have given a presentation to a client showing the impacts of their product in all the various categories, it all boils down to comparisons: comparing the product’s manufacturing to its packaging, or comparing the usage part of the product’s life-cycle to the manufacturing or disposal parts of the cycle, or comparing one design to another possible design. For comparisons, in the end you always want the choices to be as simple as possible, A vs. B. You always end up lumping things together into a single score. Trusting a single score to adequately represent the complexities is mostly a matter of trusting the people who decided how to weigh apples and oranges on the same scale–the score’s normalization and weighting algorithm. The most widely trusted system for weighing life cycle impacts is probably Pre’s Eco-Indicator, but it is for European data, and the IDSA’s audience is primarily American; hence the preference for TRACI, which uses US data. (Although arguably everyone should be using Asian data, since most manufacturing happens there nowadays; unfortunately, hardly any Asian data is available yet.) Okala’s list of impact factors also has the advantage of being free and simple to work with, while Pre’s software costs thousands of euros. Few companies are willing to spend this kind of money on eco-analysis, and even fewer individual designers are able to. So although single-score life-cycle assessment is oversimplified, I think it is valuable for designers and design firms to use as they start off on the road to sustainability. Any quantitative life-cycle thinking is an improvement over guesswork and intuition, which is what most people work with today. We need to avoid letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. We need as many people as possible getting on the road to good work; once they’re on that road, they’ll continue on towards the perfect as their skills and successes improve.

In the end, I recommend the Okala guide to designers looking for an introduction to sustainability, and those who are already versed in green design but are looking for a handy desk-side reference. I also recommend it to those who would like to use life-cycle analysis but cannot afford LCA software. While many other sources go into greater depth, Okala is immediately practicable, which is something very few books on sustainable design can say for themselves.

image credits: Okala Guide

The Okala Guide to Green Design is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 12:22 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment, reblog innovation

I wouldn’t consider myself a tree hugger or environmentalist by any means. However I do see their point. I bent my bike tire the other day and when I had it fixed I discovered it was twenty dollars cheaper to buy an entirely new bike. Oh, speaking of bikes and natural resources, I don’t ride mine these days for the exercise.

This waste is affecting business as well but going green isn’t the only problem keeping CEOs up at night. The list also includes:
1-    Boomers retiring, leaving an inexperienced group to take over the business
2-    Hard competition to attract and retain the new Net Gen
3-    “The need for speed”. Companies are seeking to innovate to stay ahead
4-    The need for trained workers quickly

The Eco-Patent Commons initiative that Dan Herman highlighted earlier this week demonstrates another example of businesses opening up to the masses. Crowd sourcing has leveled the playing field in research and development demonstrating that ideas don’t just come from specialists and experts. In fact, in greenbiz Julie Sammons highlights a few more initiatives that are tapping into a younger crowd.

Schools like the Presidio School of Management that has interdisciplinary teams of students work with business to solve problems. From their website: The Better World Project’s mission is: to promote public understanding of how academic research and technology transfer benefits you, your community and millions of people around the world.

What better way to attract the Net Gen then to involve them and give them a cause? Interdisciplinary teams create innovation and break through silos. Project oriented curriculum keeps students interested and gives them experience. Empower the younger crowd and somehow technology will find its way into the project.
What kind of internship program or other student programs does your company maintain? What are the students doing? What kind of relationships do you have with the local universities? To investigate this further the article gives some other valuable resources:  U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, the business portal for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, and Net Impact, the professional association for socially-minded MBAs.

I’ll end with this: my university flew me out to talk with executives on Wall Street. At one of the huge Investment banks we visited they explained to us that around 80% of their interns were hired upon graduating. What does that mean? Probably an even higher portion came back asking them for a job. In the competition for talent collaboration is vital. Think about it.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Caleb Love


reBlogged

on Sep 26, 2008, 2:51AM

Originally by Caleb Love from Wikinomics on September 26, 2008, 4:51am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

A few months ago I wrote about the mobile banking solutions I found while travelling in Africa – essentially a series of PayPal-like systems for mobile users. Given the limited nature of financial services in the region, and the overall paucity of infrastructure, these innovations make sense.

But do they make sense in more developed markets? That’s still very unclear.

RBC (Royal Bank of Canada for non-Canadians) recently rolled out a trial for their own mobile banking solution. RBC Mobex is billed as an “innovative payment solution designed for use with your existing mobile phone to make life more convenient for you. Just imagine, you already use your mobile phone to access friends, family, work and play: now you can use it to access your money too. Use it when you don’t have cash in your wallet, there isn’t an ATM nearby or cheques and/or debit / credit cards are not accepted forms of payment.”

The value of such systems comes with scale. I may want to pay someone using this system but if the receiver isn’t signed up then I can’t. And getting this scale isn’t necessarily easy. Projections for the growth of the mobile banking section range from the objective to the fantastic:

• Gartner has forecast that there will be 33 million mobile payment users worldwide in 2008, with the Asia Pacific taking the lead. Gartner expects this number to triple to 103.9 million users in 2011.
• IMS Research sees the combination of contactless mobile payments, mobile banking and over-the-air payments pushing the number of mobile banking users to 884 million in 2012.
• And finally, Juniper Research predicts said in April that 816 million consumers will use mobile devices for banking services by 2011.

So somewhere between 100 million and 1 billion people will be using these platforms by 2011… helpful.

Perhaps more interesting is the geography of usage, this from Gartner’s research on the topic: “Asia Pacific has the most mobile payment users with a projected 28 million users in 2008, accounting for 85 per cent of the worldwide total. Western Europe is expected to have 499,000 users in 2008, and North America is projected to have one million users.”

While there are certainly markets in Asia / Pacific whose usage and demand for such solutions stem from infrastructural deficiencies (for example, India and China), other markets such as Japan and South Korea are big users despite having dominant bricks-and-mortars financial services players. So what makes them want such services? This links back to Naumi’s recent post on why North American consumers seem to demand less than their East Asian bretheren. Perhaps we’re just technology luddites, satisfied with what serves our needs, and less willing to try new services that, while cool, may or may not add value to current activities.

And within that lies a much deeper cultural and sociological analysis of what makes different people tick - and the subseqent incentives for companies to innovate for them. Has the East Asian model of state-driven development embedded a greater sense of confidence or trust amongst people,  or perhaps even a  greater willingness to fail given the backing of the welfare state? And conversely has a more free-market oriented system which pushes competition and failure actually produced a populace that desires stability rather than constant change?

I’m full of questions rather than answers but nonetheless it would make for an interesting thesis on the link between the path of economic development and the subsequent impacts on culture and innovation.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Dan Herman


reBlogged

on Sep 26, 2008, 3:08PM

Originally by Dan Herman from Wikinomics on September 26, 2008, 5:08pm

Posted under reblog innovation

Aaron Koblin is a data visualization geek. He believes that “data systems tell stories about our lives”, and he’s in the business of building beautiful, poetic images that tell those stories.

Some of his earliest works looked at mapping georgraphy in terms of the use of infrastructures. The image above is a map of North America drawn by tracing the paths of planes in flight. As this map moves through time, you can see the East Coast wake up and get on the road, followed by the midwest and into the West. “You’re able to intuit the system without knowledge of any geography.” He’s built similar maps of traffic accidents, of email flow, and a visualization of data coming into and out of New York City called the New York Talk Exchange.

Recently, Koblin is fascinated by Mechanical Turk - both the historical wooden figure that allegedly played chess (it didn’t - a man sat inside the machine and made the moves) - and the contemporary data outsourcing service offered by Amazon. Most of the tasks people are asked to do with Mechanical Turk are extremely boring and repetitive - Koblin offered a much more human task: Draw a sheep, facing left. If you did this, using his online tools, he’d pay you $0.02. Over forty days, more than 7000 people drew 10,000 sheep. They took 105 seconds, on average, to complete the task, which makes this not an especially good way to make money, but a lovely way to make art.

Why sheep? They were, perhaps, the first industrialized animal, an animal we used to produce industrial materials.Sheep symbolize following. They were the first animal humans learned to clone. And it’s a reference to Le Petit Prince, where the character asks the narrator “draw me a sheep”.

But the real purpose of Mechanical Turk is making money. So he launched a project called Ten Thousand Cents. It invited Turkers to draw a very small part - a ten-thousandth - of a hundred dollar bill. Everyone who participated got a cent… and producing a hundred dollar bill cost one hundred dollars… and the sales of prints supported One Laptop per Child, the former Hundred Dollar Laptop project. It’s interesting to see how many people rebelled, drawing something other than the section they were assigned. When you put ten thousand small images together, that rebellion basically disappears and becomes invisible.

More recent works have included a music video for Radiohead and a visualization of Amsterdam in terms of SMS messages sent. Whether it’s visualizing Thom Yorke or the human structure of a city, Koblin brings an artist’s eye to a data-rich world.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent personal blog, My Heart’s In Accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 10:18 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by Ethan Zuckerman


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Ethan Zuckerman from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog art

Talk one of four at PICNIC was a small seminar for the European Journalism Center. Their part of the PICNIC experience was hosted in a geodesic dome tent within the “club” - the noisy public space where attendees are eating, drinking and having fun. So it felt a bit like giving a seminar in the anteroom of a dance club… not the easiest experience.

The talk after mine came from the founder of Zemanta, Jure Cuhalev, an interesting plugin for bloggers. You install Zemanta on your browser, it watches what you’re writing as you author a blogpost, and it sends your text to a server, which does natural language processing analysis, and suggests videos, photos, hyperlinks and tags for your content. The media suggestions appear in a window, and you can drag and drop them into your post - they’ll appear with appropriate attribution, ensuring that you follow the “rules of the road” of the internet. Related articles can optionally show up in a section at the end of a post, and the page will be tagged for optimum findability from search engines.

I love the idea - and especially some of the features, like entity extraction. When I type a name - Jure Cuhalev - I’m usually going to look up that name on the web and link to that person’s webpage or blog - Zemanta promises to this automatically. Looking forward to trying it out on my blog soon. And here’s a good video from G4’s attack of the show which introduces the tool.

Chatting with a journalist after my talk, I ended up showing up late for Adam Greenfield’s talk, coming in for one of his more gruesome examples. Adam’s specialty is ubiquitous computing, and he’s done great work thinking about what happens when computation makes it into every aspect of our lived environment. This ubiquitization happens a little bit at a time. In European cities, it’s become common to fence off spaces with retractable bollards - metal posts that rise out of the ground to block spaces to unauthorized traffic. When an RFID-enabled vehicle with the right permissions passes by, the bollard retracts and gives one access to a street.

When a system like this crashes, things go badly wrong. Adam shows an example of a car - properly authorized - which was assaulted by a misfiring bollard, killing a passenger. “Who do you call for tech support when a system like this fails?”

As we transform our urban spaces, we’re starting to see spaces that are “stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery“. Here Adam is borrowing terminology from Steven Flusty at USC. Stealthy spaces can’t be found; slippery ones can’t be reached. Prickly spaces can’t be occupied comfortably; crusty ones are armored and can’t be entered. Jittery may be the most interesting to Adam - they can’t be used without being under surveillance.

map from cabspotting.org

He adds “foggy” to this list of spaces - spaces that can’t be mapped - they don’t exist on your GPS, you can’t plot routes to them. This may become increasingly important as we start visualizing urban spaces in terms of data, offering a network overlay to help us understand our places better. These overlays might look like the map of San Francisco drawn by GPS in taxi cabs. Or a map using Zillo’s information of real estate value. Increasingly, we’ve got information about a place in that place, made local and actionable. We might choose how we move through a city based on the air quality of the areas we plan through, or the traffic we might encounter. “Networked overlay closes the loop, changing how we interact with urban space.”

As spaces become addressable, scriptable and queryable, we can start doing very weird things. What happens when billboards in Times Square start warning individual pedestrians that they need to catch a cab right now if they want to make their flight to Jamaica. Or letting you know that the NYPD knows that that guy is carrying a gun, and that they’re watching him. “I don’t expect these spaces to be pleasant,” he tells us, but they’re coming.

The more hopeful version is a world in which we move from browse urbanism to search urbanism, where we find ways to reach out to the different experiences waiting out there in the city.

I’m not really doing Adam’s work justice here - I’d recommend reading his blog for lots more of this stuff.

My friend Bruno Giussani leads a session introducing nominees to win the Picnic Green Challenge. This is a big prize, funded by the NL Postcode Lottery, and awards 500,000€ to the winning project. Out of 235 nominees, we see four finalists:

routeRANK - a website that looks for the best travel route, both in terms of time and environmental impact.

Greensulate - an insulation that works like extruded foam, but is grown on locally available byproducts, like rice and cottonseed hulls. The result is like styrofoam but produced with a far lower carbon footprint.

Smart Screen - a window glass that reflects solar energy away from warm spaces and opens to absorb solar energy in warm spaces.

Veranda Solar - Easy to install solar panels that sit on your windowsill and plug into existing electric outlets.

We’ll know in a few hours who wins the big prize - I’m pulling for Veranda, because I want to buy some of those as soon as they’re available.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent blog, My Heart’s In Accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 2:02 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by Ethan Zuckerman


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Ethan Zuckerman from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation