Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Endpapers are the inside covers and facing pages of books. Today, endpapers are almost always blank. But our more sophisticated forebears made good use of endpapers by adding thematic illustrations to them. Amy Crehore alerted me to this nice gallery of endpapers. (Shown here: The Junior Instructor, Book 1 reprinted in 1962 but originally from 1923.) Link
Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)Navy officials say the shape of the buildings, designed by local architect John Mock, was not noted until after the groundbreaking in 1967 -- and since it was not visible from the ground, a decision was made not to make any changes...
"I don't ascribe any intentionally evil motives to this," Casuto said, referring to the design. "It just happened. The Navy has been very good about recognizing the problem. The issue is over."
16,000 (yes sixteen thousand!) hyphens have gone missing. And it’s not as if they were there one minute and gone the next, but rather the natural evolution of language forced them into exile.
This week the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed hyphens from 16,000 of its words. Search Daylife for “hyphens” and take a peak at the interesting angles already developing.
Angus Stevenson is the editor of the Shorter OED, and had this to say:
“Lovers of the hyphen, look away now: it seems to be on the way out. Drawing on the evidence of the Oxford Reading Programme and our two–billion–word Oxford English Corpus, we removed something like 16,000 hyphens from the text of the Shorter. So it’s double bass, not double–bass, ice cream not ice–cream, makeover instead of make–over, and postmodern rather than post–modern. Other spelling changes made as part of the updating of the text include cafe for café, fetus for foetus, kaftan for caftan, and raccoon for racoon.”
But don’t worry hyphen-o-philes! The hyphen is not fully extinct; we need only craft some smart-sounding compound adjectives to keep the hyphen in view.
Burble London: September 16, 2007, Holland Park, London
If your in London, make sure you don’t miss this. I’ve heard from the guys working on this, that its even better than Usmans 1st flight of Burble at the Singapore Biennale in 2006 (See picture above)
Artist Steve Lambert closes every McDonalds in Manhatten and then blames Ronald McDonald, nice
Not that you've probably ever given it any serious consideration, but how would you feel about owning a piece of the Titanic - to tell the time? Yes, taking the principles of reuse and recycling to new heights, a Switzerland-based watch company - Romain Jerome - is planning on using steel taken from the actual vessel to craft a set of 2,012 limited edition Titanic DNA Watches. Furthermore, the watches' dial faces will be coated with black lacquer paint - whose main ingredient consists of coal from the ship.
They will be made available on (conveniently enough) 2012 to coincide with the centenary annive...
"The project was based on the theory of magical thinking, looking at belief systems and idol worship, and creating an intervention that like other work I have installed, plays with the viewers perception and with any luck(;-)) creates a pause for thought!
The 'headstones' were made from polystyrene, plaster and spraypaint.".. Laura
(Note from Wooster: Laura is the artist behind the amazing Damien Hirst Skull prank that we featured on the site a while back. Until now she's gone uncredited and we're thrilled to let you know who was behind it)
Laura Keeble
Last Friday was Park(ing) Day - the day where San Franciscans and sprawl-fighting citizens around the world reclaimed parking spots to turn them into green spaces! What started as a few grassy plots of sod occupying metered parking spots in San Francisco has blossomed into a world-wide event, and this year was a HUGE global success. In San Francisco alone, over 55 parking spaces were occupied by volunteers, government offices, and local businesses. While the parks were a nice divergence from the usual cars that occupy their space, the park that got the most attention was constantly on the move.
a powerful, visual time-travel interface, devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. the core of the project consists of a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. most of the photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, & Los Angeles over a timespan from the late 1990's to the present.
[link: otherthings.com (application) & otherthings.com (blog)]
a cheap & Italian-style matrix display 23 by 1.8m large, consisting of 250 boxer shorts & some robotics. the "Wäscheleinen-Display" project highlights the connection between the textual & the digital, & the increasing presence of advertisements in public space.
[link: acar2.org (German only) & persoenlich.com & flickr.com|via we-make-money-not-art.com]
see also kinetic mirror display & induction house & ping pong ball display & water droplets, air bubbles, water splashes, fire flames, LEDs & illuminated ping pong balls.
Found via Kottke, this Wired article covers "The Secret Cause of Flame Wars". Actually, not such a secret -- anyone who deals with email constantly, and in delicate situations, knows that it's much to easy to be misinterpreted.
The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.
Nice to put some research and numbers behind it. It's interesting that the study focuses on email, and not instant messaging. It's easier, in the fragments of discussion that pass in IM, to get across details of expression...that plus the fact that I'm much more likely to toss in a smiley in IM whereas I won't in email.
One of the highlights of the Goodbye Privacy symposium at ars electronica was a talk given by Graham Harwood. The Mongrel artist demonstrated several strategies developed by Mediashed in reaction to surveillance.
MediaShed is a "free-media" space open to the public in the east of England. Free media - "as in free speech not free beer"- is a means of doing art, making things or just saying what you want for little or no financial cost by using the public domain, free software and recycled equipment. It is also about saying what you want "freely", using accessible media that can be taken apart and reused without unnecessary restrictions and controls.
It's not just a matter of allowing artists, hackers, activists, etc. to use these free tools but also those you would not expect to find in this art context.
For example, Mediashed involved a group of kids who usually hang around in the streets to engage in Video sniffin' activities and turn CCTV into a free broadcasting system for their own use. "Why would you want to buy some video equipment when there are already so many cameras around for you to use?" They bought in a high street store some relatively cheap and small devices which can sniff out the street for signals broadcast by wireless CCTV networks. Using the surveillance images captured, the kids then created their own movie.
Next their video sniffing adventures were invited to Futuresonic, as part of the festival's Art for Shopping Centers selection. This time the film, called The Duellists, combined free-media with free-running. Inspired by the parkour sport, free-running involves fluid uninterrupted movement adapting motion to obstacles in the environment. Like free-media, free-running makes use of and re-energises the infrastructure of the city.
Futuresonic 2007 presents The Duellists by MediaShed ft Methods
The performers were professional parkour breakin' crew Methods of Movement and their acrobatic choreography was filmed in the shopping centre over three nights. The film was shot using only the existing in-house CCTV network of 160 cameras operated from the central control room, with a soundtrack created entirely from the found sounds and noises recorded during the performance. Sometimes the quality of the camera is incredibly good, elsewhere it is just b&w and grainy.
The movie was projected on a big plasma screen inside the Manchester Arndale Shopping Centre where an average of 6000 people shop every day. On the second day, they had to take the movie off, some people were not too happy at the idea that performers were messing up with a space meant for shopping activities.
The project was the first official UK implementation of GEARBOX the free-media video toolkit developed by MediaShed with the Eyebeam Studios in New York. Comprised of “how to” step by step examples, Gearbox shows people how to record footage using combinations of found resources (such as CCTV Video Sniffin’ or Spy Kiting which allows you to get images that -sort of- look like they were taken from helicoptor but using cheap wireless cctv technology and a kite instead) and low-budget methods of reproducing professional film making techniques (for example, achieving a crane shot using a fishing pole).
Related: Michelle Teran's Life: A User's Manual and Manu Luksch's Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers.
Possibly the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan’s 29,000-square-foot estate near Chicago features a basketball court (of course) as well as a tennis court and putting green. Loads more info and pictures here.
Bill Gates’ 40,000-square-foot mansion in Washington is a constantly requested sight, but is in fact quite boring to look at from above (apparently it’s mostly underground). Loads more info and pictures here.
George Foreman’s Texas home is still being constructed in the satellite photo, but he’s so proud of the finished building that he’s put his name on it. The large building on the East side is the 64 car garage.
Muhammad Ali’s Michigan home is currently for sale but for your $3,200,000 you only get a measly 2 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. However, the 81 acre plot does feature a gymnasium, steam room, tennis & basketball courts and full size boxing ring. More pictures on the Real Estate listing.
The Californian coastline mansion with a tear shaped swimming pool is home to Barbara Streisand who famously tried to sue an aerial photography website which featured her house in the middle of 12,000 photos of coastline (she lost the case). Loads more information and the offending photo here.
Thanks: MisterKen, randy phillips, Dennis, Pete, IvyMike, Matt, Ivan, Lois, Mile, Andrew, Heath, greg, Chris Blackwell, Andrey, mark, MC, Thomas van Longerich, Nelson, Slugs On Toast & Wifey!
In the waters of Shatt al-Arab in Basrah, Iraq, lie the wrecks of several ships, some just lying there floating on their sides, others half-submerged and seemingly covered in rust (or perhaps it’s actually damage from explosions?)
They look like oil tankers (at least I don’t think they look like military craft) but I guess that these shipwrecks are a litle different to the ones we usually post. However, they’re still fascinating to look at from up here.
There’s actually loads of these ships lying around in varying states of decay. In fact it’s all a bit creepy…
Thanks to Serge Lyubomudrov, Ian Luria and James.
If Monument Valley isn’t on your life list of places to photograph, then it should be. Really! The austere beauty of Southern Utah/Northern Arizona is truly a sight to behold.
Photo from Tampen. See more photos in his Red rocks set.
The announcement came yesterday that the NYC Metropolitan Transportation Authority has made a deal to bring wireless phone services to 277 of its underground stations. The picture above from the New York Times report of the announcement describes: When flooding hit the subways last month, many New York City riders were frustrated in their attempts to use cellphones. The New York Times continues:
All 277 underground stations in the subway system are to be wired for cellphone use, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced yesterday.
But riders may have to talk fast, because the subway tunnels will not be wired, out of consideration for riders who do not want to be stuck in a subway car full of chattering cellphone users.
The company that won the right to wire the stations, Transit Wireless, will pay New York City Transit a minimum of $46.8 million over 10 years, the agency said. The company will also pay the full cost of building the wireless network in the underground stations, estimated at $150 million to $200 million.
Under the agreement, cellphone providers would pay the company a fee to carry their signals on the network.
The cellphone network will start in six downtown Manhattan stations in two years. Once it is shown to be working properly, Transit Wireless will have four more years to outfit the rest of the underground stations.
Last week, the LOOK campaign, which aims to prevent collisions between motorists and cyclists by educating the public about bicycle safety, was launched in Union Square. In an unprecedented collaboration, the NYC Bicycle Coalition, the City Departments of Transportation, Health & Police, the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, the Triple AAA, and the Office of the Public Advocate all endorsed the campaign.
StreetFilms Nick Whitaker covered last Tuesday's press conference at Union Square.
»More Than a Feeling«, 2001. »Punchline«, 1999. Performances by DAMP.
»It’s a World full of Hurt«, 2007, papier mâché piñata collective performance. The 74 and continuing members of collaborative art group, DAMP, have been working togeather since 1995.
“What happened to the science-fiction future?” by Katherine Mangu-Ward is a very good piece from Reason. The article is about sci-fi futures that never happened, technological innovation and user’s pragmatism. Some excerpt I liked:
“Fanciful futurist visions can obscure all the neat stuff we’ve accumulated, once-wild innovations that are far cooler and more functional than jetpacks. (Microwave ovens, anyone?) They also make it easy to forget that the ultimate responsibility for choosing which technologies fill our lives lies with us, the ordinary consumers, more than any rocket scientists.
(…)
Small boys everywhere will always doodle Ferraris with wings when they’re bored in class, but the actual lived “future” is not something that leaps off an engineer’s drawing board or from a novelist’s visions. It emerges from complex, unpredictable interactions between visionary inspiration, technological limits, and consumers’ insistent pragmatism.
(…)
In another recent book, The Shock of the Old (Oxford University Press), the British historian David Edgerton posits that technological innovations don’t matter as much as we think they do. We tend to consider scientific and engineering breakthroughs themselves as the important thing, he says, when what really matters is how we fit them into our lives. Edgerton disparages our high hopes for each new innovation as “futurism,” a disease that led us to believe in a new world birthed by engineers, where electricity would be “too cheap to meter,”“
Why do I blog this I definitely like this topic, and working as a UX researcher in a tech school makes really buying the things that are described here. The article gives intriguing examples (skyscrapers, jetpacks, roads-that-must-roll and underwater dwellings) about techno-push futures that have troubles finding their way to users acceptance… and it’s not because there is a tech breakthrough that a product is there, acceptable, usable and successful. The last bit about the role of science-fiction is also interesting considering the recent books/short stories by Bruce Sterling or William Gibson:
“we—shouldn’t read science fiction to get a sneak peak at as-yet-unseen innovative technologies. Rather than as a blueprint for what should happen, we should read it to imagine the ways humanity will figure out how to use whatever shows up, or to tweak the impressive tech that’s already lying around.“
I have now uploaded documentation of my project Out of Bounds, a commission for Designers in Residence at the Design Museum, part of the London Design Festival. Open until 14th October. Video.
From the exhibition guide…
There is a childlike quality about wanting the ability to see through walls with x-ray vision like a superhero character. This memory is something Chris O’Shea wants to capture in the interactive installation Out of Bounds. The work encourages visitors to bore through the walls of the museum and engage in a ‘behind the scenes’ experience with an x-ray torch. This playful interaction encourages childlike curiosity in young and old alike, and opens up a portal into the Museum’s forbidden spaces.
Shine the torch at the wall to reveal the secrets hidden beneath. Pay an anonymous visit to the staff office, collection’s store, workshop, roof hatch or plant room. “As adults, we spend less and less of our time engaging in playful activities. Our daily life and careers often get in the way. I’m interested in how play can enrich our lives. I aim to take concepts of interaction design, toys, video games and playgrounds, and bring them into our everyday objects and spaces”.
O’Shea’s work often incorporates alternative uses of technology to encourage people to relinquish the learnt behaviour of adulthood and reconnect with the wonderment of youth. Through his reprogramming and reassignment he hopes to give audiences fresh new perspectives, allowing them to re-evaluate their everyday surroundings. Just as a torch shines light into a darkened space to bring things into focus, this work uses the torch as a way of looking into the workings of a modern museum.
Dezeen has much more coverage of the exhibition here.
PICK
East Village / Lower East Side
Diane Barcelowsky
curated by Tracy Candido
Diane Barcelowsky, Dana Carlson, Kate Clark, Jennifer Coates, William Crump, Leslie Miller, Naomi Reis, Saviour Scraps, Jessie Rose Vala
We are experiencing a wave of culturally creative individuals that are projecting notions of fantastical, dream-like narratives upon their social communities. Wild imaginations translate waking life into hidden psychedelic worlds, leaving behind consciousness and diving deep into the metaphysical landscape. Gone, but not forgotten, are the days of Dungeons and Dragons. Contemporary artists Jessie Rose Vala, Leslie Miller, Dana Carlson, Kate Clark, Jennifer Coates, William Crump, Diane Barcelowsky, Naomi Reis, and the artist collective Saviour Scraps are forgoing the ten-sided die and instead creating their own personal escape into rich environments that use mathematics to invoke beauty, images of nature to confront human consumption, and monsters and hybrids to illustrate co-existing layers of non-reality.
"Meta-Majesty," curated by Tracy Candido, suggests that perhaps this curious channeling of all things magical is a very real response to our current earthly chaos. This form of escapism is proposing a spectral reflection towards a nation diseased with war, ignorance, and environmental disregard. Jessie Rose Vala describes her installations and drawings as having themes of health including the vitality of the planet which she juxtaposes against the reality of living as an American; a predator to the environment, living amongst a garble of information. Her therapy is performed through fabricating the antithesis of these current conditions, by sliding into a landscape made purely of the fantastical.
Jennifer Coates' vividly colored, metaphysical paintings utilize the conventions of landscape as an anchor for hallucinatory visions that reference the mind and the body simultaneously. Expanses of sky or sea coalesce into pools of thought-like reflection, clouds of geometry warp into an ecstatic vortex, and horizons fissure and swell like skin.
Kate Clark's surreal taxidermy sculptures study the tension between personal and mythical realms by creating figures which synthesize the human face with the body of wild animals. The disruptive alignment of the intimate face and animal body asserts that human experience is mostly contained, a mask which is incomprehensible and psychologically complex. A single life, with its private and unique history, gazes back at us, seemingly frozen in a magical wild wood.
Dana Carlson's mark making method is employed to create paintings of puffy pink clouds, cats floating in a space-y seascape, and owls peering from a transcendental rainbow. Otherworldly landscapes are used to exhibit macabre images of death and destruction that are coupled with objects of life and vitality. The viewer is pulled through a psychedelic portal down a warped road to the intricate puzzle of Mother-nature. Saviour Scraps is a Brooklyn based art collaborative that works with donated and reused fabric to create fantastical environments in immersive site-specific installations. Because fabric contains powerful personal and collective memories, it serves as a medium through which the artists can explore the cycle of creation and exchange.
William Crump's new body of work, titled "The Mountain of Fire and Miracles" draws from an odd sign for a Christian ministry William noticed at the top of a mountain while in Korea. He interpreted this sign as a promise of some higher world, an exit from a world below that is at odds with it's own identity. Diane Barcelowsky's intricate drawings weave together psychedelic folk tales that blur the boundaries of time, space, and reality. Diane's collage of characters, constructed with paint, marker, watercolor, and ink create a vibrant color palate, morphing into freaky patterns that shed a glimmer of blacklight on the artist's dreamy mind-trip.
Naomi Reis presents a nostalgic nod to dreamers of yesteryear, imagining a modernist building gone wild - proliferating, multiplying, spinning -stacking itself up into the sky, teetering dangerously close to the edge of ruin. The resulting monolith hangs vicariously in a see-saw act between our desire to create a better world, and the knowledge that reality will always render these dreams imperfect. Late capitalism has run its course and the world is braced for what may come next -another world war, the destruction of the environment, widening gaps between rich and poor. Our collective dreams stack up in protest to our role as consummate consumers.
Leslie Miller, a graphic artist, conjures forth phases of the moon, dream states, and romantic transcendence to lift us from an earthly realm and into the divine. As humans, we pursue and explore definitions of control, awareness, and escape from the world. Mere mortals are we who seek to rise above the everyday by finding meaning in the stars, our dreams, nature, and mystical divinity.
Mere mortals are we who seek refuge from the fear of a dusky future. By engaging in notions of politics-as-play, the artists in "Meta-Majesty" recall notions of Dada and Japanese animation; they avoid being directly critical of the shadows within the fabric established by the system. They instead present dreamy landscapes, whimsical characters, crystals, domes, and portal-like tunnels as metaphors for their frustration. Through a projection of hope and a desire to reinforce the harrowed promise of "a better tomorrow," these artists raise their fists by using fantasy as a form of protest for change.
A special event for META-MAJESTY will take place on Friday, October 12th at 8pm featuring a live music performance by FOREST FIRE and GOODBYE THE BAND.
Image from Tracy Candido.
PICK
Chelsea
On the heels of the summer's popular Source Code exhibition, Eyebeam is pleased to present Interference, the second in a series of three group shows commemorating the organization's unique role in supporting artists experimenting with, and critically examining, the impact of new technologies in creative endeavor.
The show will feature eleven artists and collectives whose projects tackle the ever-shifting boundaries between public and private space and consider the ways in which these limits are understood, utilized and represented. Employing a diverse array of media and strategies including data visualization, performance, community engagement and intervention, the artists address issues of autonomy and access, in some cases becoming actors within the very environments they describe. All current or past Eyebeam artists, residents and fellows, the artists featured in Interference are: Angie Eng, Jill Magid, Forays (Geraldine Juarez and Adam Bobbette), Carrie Dashow and Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg, Trevor Paglen and the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), Robert Ransick, Yury Gitman, Carlos Gomez de LLarena, Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), Caspar Stracke, neuroTransmitter, and Eyebeam's R&D Lab with Jonah Peretti and Michael Frumin.
The opening reception will be followed by a live VJ performance as collective montage by Angie Eng, Benton-C Bainbridge and Caspar Stracke.
In the Eyebeam spirit of open source and DIY, the gallery exhibition will be supplemented by workshops, public actions and interventions for the duration of Interference, including live demonstrations and tours with the show's mobile pieces: Carlos Gomez de Llarena's interactive communication balloon, Urballoon (2002-2004) GRL's Laser-Tag equipped Mobile Broadcast Unit (2007) and Yury Gitman's wifi-delivery vehicle Magic Bike (2003).
The concurrence of surveillance, authority, intimacy and trust are at the heart of Jill Magid's Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy (2006-2007), a multi-part account of 5 months spent shadowing a NYC police officer on his night shift. For Interference, Magid will display L.O.V.E work as an audio and video installation.
Urban Attractors, Private Distractors (2007), Angie Eng's collaborative, cross-continent video blog takes as its subject cultural conventions in the definition of private and public space. Together with groups of teens in New York City and Ho Chi Minh City, Eng probed the psychogeographies of place through a series of actions documented and shared on the video blog.
Forays' (Geraldine Juarez and Adam Bobbette) piece entitled Field Notes...(2007), addresses the ways in which the delineation of interior and exterior or private and public space can be used towards political ends. Turning to the naturally occurring form of the cocoon, which has been adapted by community garden activists as a means of colonizing trees, the artists propose open source architecture and hacked materials as forms of grassroots activism.
Caspar Stracke, who as a 2003 Eyebeam Resident developed the work Points of Presence (2005) - a rotating screen projection of footage from NYC, Mexico City, Berlin and Shanghai - now presents Urban Particle Supercollider (2007), a collective urban image project shown as three linked animations of street objects from Seoul, Tehran and NYC.
Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen, who received a 2006 Eyebeam Production Commission, partnered with the IAA, an anonymous collective of artists, designers, activists and engineers, to develop Terminal Air (2007) a project that explores complex interconnections between government agencies and private contractors involved with the United States Central Intelligence Agency's extraordinary rendition program.
Robert Ransick's Casa Segura (Safe House) (2007) is a small public access structure in the Sonoran desert of Southern Arizona, just north of the Mexican border. Located on private property and equipped with a dynamic bilingual web space Casa Segura acts as a temporary haven to Mexican migrants crossing the border, providing a means of communicating across national and state lines by logging their journeys in virtual space.
Artist Carrie Dashow and shape note singer Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg present The 13th Screen (2007) an installation of community-shot video, original shape note songs and ephemera from the Route of Progress tour, part of the touring community art, video, and music project, the Subliminal History of New York State (SHNYS) (2007), which traveled to six towns and cities along the Erie Canal this past June and July.
Also on display will be documentation of neuroTransmitter's The FM Ferry Experiment (2007) a mobile radio station aboard the Staten Island Ferry during September, as well as FundRace, which lets you track people's political contributions by name, address or neighborhood. The interactive web application will be shown in its original (2004) and current iterations, and is a project developed by Jonah Peretti, Michael Frumin and Eyebeam's Research and Development Lab. FundRace 2008 was updated by and is hosted at Huffington Post.
Image from Eyebeam.
»Somatolyse«, 2005 by Bettina Khano
Luke Lamborn received a BFA in Digital Media from the University of Colorado, and an MFA in Computer Art from Syracuse University. Lamborn’s residencies include Skowhegan, Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His current work uses video to create unique visual situations that question perception. http://lucidstraw.com/
Amanda McDonald Crowley from Eyebeam had invited inspiring artists and designers for a Conflux panel to discuss the visualization of environmental data and their potential to foster social change.
The event also launched Eyebeam’s Ecovisualization Challenge, a competition to heighten environmental awareness through creative data visualization projects. Group sign-ups will coincide with the panel, and the challenge is scheduled to run from October-November, 2007. Winning projects will be included in Eyebeam’s upcoming exhibition focusing on environmental and sustainability issues.
The Eco-vis Challenge invites artists to collaborate with technologists and redefine what the future of tracking and visualizing the environment could be.
The competition is two-fold:
- an eco icon contest to design a graphic that can be used for tattoo, stickers, etc to make visible environmental/ecological concerns. Deadline is Nov. 5th.
- an Eco-Vis that brings to life ecological information that is not necessarily obvious. Deadline is December 8.
First panelist, Tiffany Holmes focused on her project 7000 Oaks And Counting. The goal of this eco-visualization research is to show that daily visual feedback can elevate understanding of consumption patterns and possibly increase conservation behavior in resident populations.
The project makes use of the existing building control system typically found in large institutional buildings. These systems provide central management and monitoring for air conditioning control, lighting control, and electrical and chilled water status monitoring, as well as providing energy management services. Typically, data from such systems is available only to a select audience of engineers and facilities personnel. The eco-visualization software focuses on the electricity consumption and its purpose is to make the data accessible and easy to understand for everyone through a website, a kiosk animation and a model tree sculpture. Ultimately, Holmes hopes that the project will stimulate people to adopt a more eco-conscious behaviour.
Tiffany Holmes is aware of both the advantage and challenges of any eco-viz experiment:
- on the plus size: dynamic feedback can be very motivating; potential to reach a broad audience, re-visualization of an old problem using new technique can re-vive an old discussion,
- minus points: no way to engage the accuracy of a given asset, difficulty to reach broader audience, sometimes users are asked to install a custom software which might put off some of them.
She ended her talk by recommending everyone to read her blog, Ecoviz.
Next came Michael Mandiberg with a presentation of his projects: Oil Standard and Real Costs.
Oil Standard is a web browser plug-in that converts all prices from U.S. Dollars into the equivalent value in barrels of crude oil.
When you load a web page, the script inserts converted prices into the page. As the cost of oil fluctuates on the commodities exchange, prices rise and fall in real-time.
Real Costs is a Firefox plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel related e-commerce websites. The first version adds CO2 emissions information to airfare websites such as Orbitz.com, United.com, Delta.com, etc. Following versions will work with car directions, car rental, and shipping websites. Think of it like the nutritional information labeling on the back of food... except for emissions.
Eyebeam’s Ecovisualiz Design Challenge panel (part 2)
Find plenty of free or cheap cardboard boxes for your next move at U-Haul's box exchange forum. Their forum is pretty basic, divided regionally into sections for finding free used boxes or for buying and selling boxes—though according to the Cool Tools weblog, there are plenty of people on the forum happy to give away their boxes for free. For small moves, I've always found my local supermarket to be a great resource for finding free boxes, but the supplies are normally limited. There's also Craigslist or previously mentioned UsedCardboardBoxes.com, but both are normally looking to sell instead of give away (though the latter actually delivers the boxes to your doorstep, which is nice). If you've got a favorite resource for free boxes, let's hear it in the comments.
…AM NOT 4 KOCOA!
photo by: ?
capped and submitted by: sinic
[Image: Another freakishly beautiful photograph by Siologen. This was taken in St. George – but don't miss another recent shot called Buttressed, the underground hall of vaults. For more subterranean ins and outs with Siologen, check out BLDGBLOG's Urban Knot Theory – then take a detour through our recent, and related, interview with Michael Cook].
