Ning: cultural implications of the new social networking
Ning is a website designed to help us to build our own social
networks. It launches officially next week. It’s the work of Marc
Andreessen (pictured) and Gina Bianchini.
Ning looks promising on three dimensions:
1) the business model
Ning
allows for "revenue access," let’s call it. If we have basic
membership, Ning will place ads on our sites and keep the revenue. For
a fee, we can run ads of our own and keep their revenue. (MySpace has
no revenue access opportunity.)
Revenue access and revenue
sharing are pressing issues, and this is the clearest leverage point
that will supplant first generation social networks with subsequent
ones.
YouTube makes clear that consumers are happy to supply
content for nothing. They consider themselves well paid by the
opportunity for exposure and the intrinsic pleasure of content
creation.
But this will not endure. Eventually, the internet
mediators are going to have to pay the content provider just as surely
as the old mediators now do.
Ning may eventually be obliged
to compensate even those who use the basic package, but that remains to
be seen. We shall see where the YouTube experiment ends up on this
one.
The anthropological angle: when content providers have
access to revenue, how will they use it? There’s a good chance that
some providers will hew to the middle of the market, in order to
increase their revenues. This will narrow the world that the internet
represents. But it is also true that some content providers will use
the revenue to free themselves from their "day jobs" and pursue their
innovations with new enthusiasm. As a result, the internet will become
more innovative and more various.
2) the user model
The
user model looks right as well. Ning will allow user customization and
control. (And there is of course a powerful anthropological impulse at
work here. The DIY movement is one of the great transformative trends
of our times.)
Other social
network sites ask you to join their world. We are about people creating
their own worlds. (Gina Bianchini, Ning CEO)
But
Ning doesn’t merely allow customization and control, it has the good
sense to allow us to scale up into this customization and control.
True there are some internet users like Steve Rubel who are just all
over the technology and the opportunities this technology opens up.
But most of us are more like me, poor schlups who are just one new
feature or one fat manual away from a terrible headache and long term
memory loss.
For these people, "keeping it simple, stupid" is
the order of the day. Google gets this. Marissa Mayer is the high
priestess of simplicity and one of the reasons the Google search engine
is a thing of beauty while Yahoo and eBay websites leave me with the
strong feeling that a bomb must have just exploded in my dog’s
breakfast.
Ning has taken a page from the Google handbook:
The
whole point of providing customization and freedom is that you want to
give people something super simple at first but then, as they get more
sophisticated, you want to give them the ability to get more creative.
(Andreessen)
There is another way to put this. All of
us want all of the expressive and pragmatic advantages that come with
all of the new technologies, but none of us has an additional ounce of
intellectual processing power to spend on them. It’s not actually that
we’re stupid. We’re are overextended.
Starting simple removes every piece of extraneous intellectual effort.
And scaling up allows us to recoup that effort over and over. Now we
may use what we know to acquire new knowledge. Most of the wayfaring,
the pondering, the "how does this work, again?" has been removed. The
"fog of technology" has been made to lift.
And once schlubs like me have access to the expressive potentialities of
the new technology, we may expand the internet and the worlds now suspended from this internet to expand extraordinarily. Once civilians can be as
inventive as the experts…wow. And this is what the the new technology does
so well. It creates solutions for one generation which it then learns to automate for the
next generation. Second Life has yet to make it easier for the novice
to build on line. Once it does so, that little world, already so stuffed with design experiment, will expand remarkably.
So there is an anthropological angle here too. Once Ning and other sites
help to empower the ordinary user, the web will become still more fecund. Andreessen
has contemplated this future.
To get philosophical for a minute, I
believe (as Milton Friedman says) that human wants and needs are infinite. There
are no limits to the things and services that people want or need, so there are
no limits to the number of new technologies, companies, and industries we can
create. The questions are: how many people worldwide are able to contribute, how
much capital is available to them, and how free are they to pursue new
ideas?
3) the cultural model
As
it stands, social networking doesn’t actually sort very well. And this means social networks on the web don’t make
social connections very well. (I have met lots of people through the
web. Some of them are now my friends. But I have yet to make a friend
thanks to a social network site. How bout you?)
This has got to be a temporary problem. If there is something that the web
should be good at, it is helping me to find all but only the people I
find really interesting. But really good networks, networks with very high "friend potential," are small networks, and
small networks have hitherto failed to attract the resources to make them go. Ning appears to change all that and we
may now expect to see online networking take on new significance. .
There is one further anthropological note to offer here. When there is
a network for each of my enthusiasms, what happens to those enthusiasms?
I think it is probably true that each of them will broaden and deepen, and I think
this tells us that each enthusiasm will make an even greater claim upon the self.
Or, let’s put this another way. Let’s say my self now consists of
several quite distinct creatures. At a minimum, there’s a blogger, the
ethnographer, the consultant, the person interested in Elizabethan
England, the anthropologist, movie buff, and so on. Once there is a network for
each of these selves, and once each of these selves becomes as a result
more robust, I think the diversity of my selfhood multiplies and the
absolute space of this selfhood expands. We may expect better social
networks to create cloudier selves.
Welcome, Ning.
References
Anonymous Reuters. 2007. Ning allows DIY social networks. PC Magazine. February 27, 2007. here.
McCracken,
Grant. 2006. France after France. This Blog Sits At The Intersection
of Anthropology and Economics. March 28, 2006. here.
Tischler,
Linda. 2005. The beauty of simplicity. Fast Company.com. Issue
100. here.
Steve Rubel here.
Webb, Cynthia. An interview with Marc Andreessen. Washington Post. June 10, 2004. here.
Originally from This Blog Sits at the by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 27, 2007, 10:17PM
Second Life: the new Disney or vaporville?
Is Second Life the future? Or a cul de sac? At this point, it’s hard to say.
Clay Shirky put a cat among the pigeons when he asked whether the Second Life
numbers were reliable. The SL website now claims 3,350,286 residents
with something like a third of these having actually made an appearance
in the last 60 days. Shirky called earlier estimates "methodologically
worthless." He figures 5 out of 6 new users abandon their accounts
before the first month is up. After 90 days, 9 of 10 "residents" have
disappeared.
Shirky’s skepticism forced a reframing of the
question: "ok, if we can’t prove this argument by the numbers, is there
another way to make the case?"
Shirky is skeptical here too. He believes Second Life
will
remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be
of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try
it. Such niches can be profitable…but they won’t, by definition,
appeal to a broad cross-section of users.
Both Henry Jenkins
and Beth Coleman beg to differ. Coleman says that SL gives us an
important "amplification" of the virtual world possibility. Whether SL
is the virtual world that takes, there can’t be any doubt that some virtual
world will. SL matters, she argues, because it represents a "tipping
point" that releases virtual worlds from their niche status.
Henry
Jenkins calls SL is a "test bed for innovation" for business,
government, education, civic, nonprofit, and amateur media makers. He
suggests SL offers virtual worlds a kind of "proof of concept" (my
term, not his) For all its failings, SL is perhaps good enough to help
install the possibility (the idea and the potentiality) of virtual
worlds in popular culture.
It’s a niche play, Shirky says. No, say Jenkins and Coleman, that’s precisely what it just ceased to be. Numbers aside, they say, SL just cleared the bar. It is now part of our culture.
I hear both arguments.
an argument for Second Life
I
agree with Jenkins and Coleman. SL makes this much incontrovertible:
it is now technologically possible for a very large number of people to
gather and interact in a visually rich and responsive virtual space.
Incontrovertible and astonishing. It is hard to think of a real world
correlate. It’s as if another Disney empire (Disneyland, Disney World,
Disney Resorts) just dropped from the sky. Um, that doesn’t go nearly
far enough. It’s as if a Scandinavian world was just lowered onto the
planet. At a minimum, we’re obliged to say our culture and our
marketplace just got vastly larger. We would be unwise to dismiss or
diminish it.
We might also risk a bit of filmic wisdom: if you
build it, they will come. Whatever else they are, human beings are
relentlessly curious. Give them a social space to occupy it and they
will fill it en masse. And fill it they did, three million of them.
But
that’s the issue, isn’t it? Yes, they came, but did they stay? Are
they "residents" as SL likes to call them, or the most capricious kind
of tourist? The fact of the matter is that SL churns like crazy. This
could be yet another technology that cannot find a problem to solve.
Yet another hammer looking for a nail. Still, Coleman’s point is a good
one. These are early days. Indeed, television took several years to
find a place in our lives. Why should Second Life be any different?
I have another colleague at MIT who believes he knows exactly what Second Life
can be. Ilya Vedrashko says it is, among other things, the new mall.
All of us shop on line but we can’t drift from store to store, observe
the shopping choices of other people, or enjoy the effects of
serendipity. (We didn’t know we wanted another gadget from Sharper Image the last time, but there it was…at the mall.) Second Life
can duplicate all of this even as it makes it possible to try things on
without the privations or indignities of a changing room. Click on
something and look in the mirror. (Vedrashko makes a larger, more
interesting argument than I can here. Catch it if you can.)
Second Life
also has the potential to change tourism, working like a time machine
in space, as it were. Let’s suppose that someday, the virtual
Lindentown will someday be as different from my usual virtual haunts,
as Miami is from New York City. If I wish to go to Miami, it will cost
me money, time, effort, and inconvenience. But an afternoon in Lindentown costs me nothing more than the click of a mouse.
Second Life could serve as a magnificent platform for the new global university or b-school. Now all that fund raising would be about intellectual content and content providers, and hiring good teachers. Not a penny need be spent on bricks and mortar. Even the reunions can be held on line.
For all we know, Second Life might be the place that consumers go to help create the brands they care about. It would be easy to create open air laboratories equipped with tools for developing concepts and changing prototypes. And this will
matter as marketing moves from "see" to "be." (My "see to be"
model: if you want me to see the marketing you will have to have given
me a chance to be the marketing. (But see my doubts noted yesterday.
It is necessary that I had a chance to be it.)
These are not
small claims. Changing the nature of retail, adding new terrains to
the world of tourism, inventing the new university, creating the products and brands of the future, these would
make Second Life something more than a cul de sac. By
this reckoning, SL not merely part of the future. It will be one of
the things that makes the future.
an argument against Second Life
I’ve done my due diligence as an anthropologist. I signed up for Second Life.
I spent some hours trooping around, poking my head in where it was not
always welcome, pestering people with annoying questions. And on
balance I must hear agree with Shirky. So far there is more smoke than
fire. When people bang the drum of enthusiasm for SL, they cannot be
talking about the present SL.
For most of my visit, Second Life
felt like a ghost ship. I admired the ingenuity of the architecture,
the skill of the coding, the homes on the water, the view from some
properties. But very often I found myself in a world without people.
Lindentown is vaporville. There are lots of buildings. Just no
people. It’s a little like downtown Detroit on the weekend. You can
walk for miles and see not a soul.
Then it dawns on you. (It
always takes the anthropologist longer.) No one lives here. It is fun
to build these spaces but all appearances to the contrary, you can’t
actually live in them. No one goes to their Second Life pied-a-terre
for the weekend. (Pied-a-vapeur?) No one rushes there to stage a
dinner party, welcome the kids home for the weekend, or curl up in
front of TV.
This problem creates a problem. Second Life
is frequently a stage without actors. What is missing isthe small
murmur of activity, the gentle dynamism that other people bring to our
lives. This may be what we mean by "perfect strangers." These
are the people who create movement, visual stimulation, a steady
current of minor commotion without actually ever impinging on our lives
in any irritating way. Second Life has no perfect strangers.
The absence of this dynamism means, among other things, that SL cannot create a new tourism. The existing world of Second Life
fails to capture us for the same reason that Celebration, Florida (the
instant town build by Disney) originally disappointed. The place was
well appointed but it lacked perfect strangers. There was a stillness
to both places that made them unfit, or at least uninteresting, for
human habitation. I am told that Celebration addressed this problem.
We shall see if SL can do the same.
No people, no
anthropology. I ported to places where there are lots of people, to a
dance party or a club. Yikes! I would end up talking to people who
are so preoccupied by political power or sexual congress, so limited in
their vocabulary, syntax, and dramaturgical interests, they might as
well be bots.
This is not a well world. This is a deeply tedious world. No wonder people sign up only then to wander away. Sexual motives can create social universe, but finally, and I think I can risk this assertion,
virtual sex is always going to be a pale imitation of real sex. And
conversation preoccupied with power, well, this is uninteresting in the
real world. And Second Life removes the contexts and consequences in which power plays out. So who cares?
What
I need to make SL interesting is a coffee shop or a restaurant where
people just happen to congregate and just happen to give off those
streams of sound and sight that make life interesting. I need people
to "happen" around me when I am in a virtual world. (And I am
perfectly happy to reciprocate by "happening" around them.) The thing
is I will never go to a virtual Starbucks for coffee. I will never go
take my wife out to dinner at a virtual restaurant. I will go for
person to person interaction and at the moment, this is just not very
interesting.
The other big hit against Second Life is
that it sorts very badly. I haven’t actually met anyone I find
illuminating. I am not asking that my SL network feed my real world
network. I am not as pragmatic as all that. But I don’t want to step
down my standards of conversation and curiosity just because I am on
line. That’s, surely, not what the virtual world is for. If anything
it should allow me to reach out to more people in the world and
increase the chances that I will like the people I meet. But this
never seems to happen. I would like to hear about this one from the SL
supporters. How many interesting people have you met in-world?
I
did have one happy encounter. I stumbled into a magic garden of some
kind. Eventually, I was approach by a rabbit who very kindly gave me a
tour of the garden and an introduction to the actual and social physics
of this world. Blimey, now that’s the way to an anthropologist’s
heart. Here was a nascent culture, that might someday become something
capable of supporting. Who knows what might spring from these
beginnings. It might just be a Pookie festival, but what if Second
Life were someday as productive as New York City in the 20th century?
Right
now, Second Life is not helping me sort. In fact, there is even less
sorting in the virtual world than there is in the real world. When
someone presents themselves as flaming cloud or a bunnie, I have some
measure of their imagination, but all other information is denied me.
summing up
On
balance, there is in Second Life lots to like and lots to loathe. But I believe two
things are clear. We now have proof of concept. And as Second Life supplies
real opportunities for engagement and sorting, this social world will
expand at pace, supplying in the longer term, every kind of cultural
innovation and commercial opportunity.
References
Anonymous.
Economic Statistics. Second Life. Last Updated: Sunday, February 4,
2007. here.
Coleman, Beth. 2007. Second Life backlash: Clay Shirky blows up the spot. Project Good Luck. January 5, 2007. here.
Coleman, Beth. 2007. Beyond Second Life Toward V-Economy. Project Good Luck. February 1. 2007. here.
Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Second Thoughts on Second Life. Confessions of an Aca/Fan. here.
Shirky, Clay. 2006. Second Life: What are the real numbers? Many2Many. December 12, 2006. here.
Shirky, Clay. 2007. Second life, Games and Virtual Worlds. Many 2 Many. here
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Pat Crane for getting me started.
Originally from This Blog Sits at the by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 10, 2007, 4:27PM
Follow-ups: 02-07-2007
Follow-up for The Minority Report Interface
Follow-up for Innovations in Search Result Pages
Follow-up for Social Web Application Design
Tags: search, social software, innovative UIs
Originally from Functioning Form: Interface Design by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 31, 1969, 11:59PM
Interactive Manhattan
[Image: Via Interactive Architecture dot Org].
New Yorkers! Be sure to stop by the Eyebeam/Interactive Architecture dot Org event tonight in Manhattan:
- Organised by Ruairi Glynn of Interactive Architecture dot Org, Eyebeam is pleased to co-host, with the Bartlett School of Architecture, an evening of presentations on interactive architecture. Presenters will include Phil Ayres of Sixteen Makers, Eyebeam residents Carmen Trudell and Jennifer Broutin, Marek Walczak of MW2MW and David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang of the NYC architecture firm, The Living. Presenters will discuss their work for 15 minutes followed by a panel discussion moderated by Professor Stephen Gage of the Bartlett with a reception from 9-10pm.
It’s all going down at 540 W. 21st Street – if you go, tell Ruairi I said hello.
[Images: More info on the event; more info on architecture at the Bartlett.
Originally from BLDGBLOG by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 26, 2007, 6:53PM
Shades of Online Community
The topic of online community has come up a lot on a recent project. I’ve heard some powerful stories about Yelp, Gay.com, Craigslist, Tripadvisor, Citysearch, Amazon… and more. It occurred to me that there is more than one way to engage with users and foster a sense of community online. Here are some ideas on the shades of community.
1.The Inner Circle
Two common characteristics this type of online community seems to share are 1) the presence of a strong point of view and 2) clear values that people can align with and use to identify themselves in the world. Unlike strong corporate brands, the values of this type of community are created by and evolve with the ebb and flow of the community. Credibility is created through users contributing relevant content that aligns with the values. It seems to be less about numbers and more about relevance. Users here have editorial control of the content. This is where the zealot-like participation happens – as it should since users here own and shepherd the brand.
2. Word on the Street
From rating an experience with a product to seeking retribution for bad restaurant service, folks love these online mechanisms that surface user opinion. Not really sure if this constitutes community since it’s more about people taking ownership of their experiences and using those experiences for self expression than providing the mechanisms for a dialogue. Users get the “real story from regular people like me†here. The power and credibility comes from the timeliness of the information. This is where numbers start to matter.
3. Co-existence
This flavor of community is where user feedback co-exists with an editorial position – Citysearch and Amazon are good examples. Users enjoy a good degree of anonymity – it’s less about ‘who’ is contributing and more about numbers. A funny thing starts to happen with opinion here; variance is good if not required for credibility. A review that is “too positive†could have been bought or the negative reviews were edited out.
4. Brands that Resonate
This is the “I am the brands I buy†– where people appropriate brands to express themselves in the world. This is a top-down kinda place where it’s less about expressing your own unique perspective and voice and more about aligning with the brand values that have been determined by somebody else. Credibility is created by the brand having strong characteristics that resonate with people. Here is where brand shepherding and management at the corporate level is important.
Make sense? Off the mark?
Originally from Adaptive Path by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 26, 2007, 9:18PM
Avatars in the Flesh
The logic of sites like Second Life comes to bear on the ‘first life’ in The Girlfriend Experience, a project by Martin Butler and his Liminal Institute. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings from January 26 until March 9, four members of the group, who have been styled to look like avatars in a virtual community, will inhabit a web-monitored space at Amsterdam’s Mediamatic space. Online players are invited to command the ‘flesh and blood’ avatars as they would their more common digital counterparts, using the borrowed bodies to interact with other users. Taking its title from a prostitution-related term for well-fabricated intimacy, the project creates a caricature of the personal yet anonymous desires underpinning relationships formed in virtual communities. For example, the control fantasy implicit in molding a detached, idealized second self becomes embarrassingly obvious when the avatars are humans who can resist a player’s will. Players can request any action they want, but the avatars ultimately decide where they go and what they do. Inevitable comic scenarios aside, the experiment offers a chance to find out what happens when we start to force the rules at play in our online social lives back onto reality. – Bill Hanley
http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-13553-en.html
Originally from Rhizome News
reBlogged by michael on Jan 26, 2007, 8:00AM
Web App Summit: Learning from Social Web Applications
At the UIE Web App Summit in Monterey, Joshua Porter walked through what designers can learn from the success of Social Web Applications:
- Most people tend to focus on visual design when evaluating the quality of Web sites. However, several highly successful Web sites (My Space, Craig’s List, & Amazon) are not designed well from a visual or interaction design perspective.
- These sites, while lacking in visual & interaction design, have great social design.
- When conducting a large-scale e-commerce study, UIE found that users often went to amazon.com before buying something on another e-commerce site to research their purchases. They called this the “Amazon Effectâ€.
- The content people used on Amazon was highly social: user reviews, recommendations, user-generated shopping lists, and more. In fact, Amazon had 11 social features on each & every product page.
- Sites with good social design model the social lives, goals, and interactions of their users.
Design Elements: the lowest-level building blocks of design that can be used to form higher-level structures.
- Visual Design: line, size, color, shape, texture, pattern, light, value
- Interaction Design: button, input, link, screen, navigation, cursor, check box
- Social Design: messaging, sharing, collaborating, rating, reviewing, gossiping, recommending, voting, arguing, networking
Design Principles: higher-order guides that deal with the relationship between elements.
- Visual Design: contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity
- Interaction Design: anticipation, autonomy, consistency, readability, learnability, metaphor, explorability, etc.
- Social Design: motivation, identity, control, independence, privacy, authority, gaming, community, emergence
- Motivation: identify primary motivation & create a golden path to achieve it. (del.icoi.us bookmarking)
- Identity: let people manage their identity online like they do offline (MySpace profile)
- Control: Users want control though they may never take advantage of it (Facebook news feed)
- Independence: a necessary part of enabling the wisdom of crowds. If achieved, then popularity is valuable.
- Privacy: different for everyone but a key consideration for application design.
- Authority: built up over time based on agreement on who is right or in charge.
- Gaming: it is human nature to compete and a site can benefit (digg)
- Community: it is not a feature set. It is a feeling people get with shared interests or experiences.
- Emergence: effects over time & effects at larger scales.
- Personal benefit always precedes social benefit: the Delicious lesson.
Tags: social software, web2.0, interaction design
Originally from Functioning Form: Interface Design by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 31, 1969, 11:59PM
Interview with Art Orienté objet
Very few artists have intrigued me as much as Art Orienté Objet, a French duo concerned with issues of environment and animal experimentations. Art Orienté Objet means “art oriented object” but it can also be read as “art oriented by objects.” The projects of Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin aim to raise the debate on what’s going on behind the closed doors of laboratories and in our society.
Their work, deeply grounded in current research, explores the inter-related fields of science and art. On some occasions they use the same tools as scientists. For one of their most iconic works, Culture de Peaux d’Artistes, they asked researchers of the MIT skin production laboratory in Boston to take biopsies of their epidermis. Then they got samples deposited on a pig’s dermis which they tattooed with animal motifs, mostly of endangered species or those used in biology. The skin became the site of a symbolic alliance and a questioning of the ‘species barrier’.
However, Art Oriente Objet’s work also demonstrates that, when engaging with biotechnology, the most challenging artistic metaphors do not necessarily require bio-reactors, sophisticated instruments and hig-tech procedures. The main component of Rabbits were used to prove, for example, is the taxidermied body of a white rabbit found in trash. Its insides have been replaced with entrails knitted out of wool obtained from the Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to have been cloned from an adult somatic cell. The piece questions the relationship between ethics and aesthetics and comments on the correlation between certain aspects of art and science.
Their series of doll museums recall Box in a Valise –Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum of favourite works– and the cabinets of curiosities so popular during the Renaissance. The em>Museum of Natural Horrors
, the Museum of Mental Horrors and the Museum of Human Horrors look like adorable doll houses but expose upsetting scenes of vivisection, animals in bell jars that are delivered electro-shocks, pets in cage, battery hens that have some human characteristics, etc.
The fact that the house and its inhabitants are tiny and cute makes the reality that the objects evoke even more disturbing. One of the artefacts displayed in The Museum of Natural Horror is the “Wire-Mesh Surrogate Monkey Mother” that recreates one of Harry Harlow‘s experiments on the “science of affection.” In the ’50s, Harlow separated infant monkeys from their mothers. The young animals were “raised†by surrogate monkey mother machines, both equipped to dispense milk. One mother was made out of bare wire mesh. The other was a wire mother covered with soft terry cloth.
Another striking project is Pioneer Ark, a hanging mobile inspired by a visit of the Pioneer Farm. This Australian center collects animals victim of mutations due to human activity (toxic chemical and radioactive pollutants) or naturally occuring factors. The artists were granted the authorisation to visit but not the right to take any picture. After their visit at the Farm, AOo gathered all the descriptions of mutant animals they could find into scientific publications and made a gigantic Noah’s ark inhabited by transgenic porcelain species.
AOo was formed in 1991. Did you have the objective to explore issues raises by biotechnology, experimentation on animals and ecology right from the start? Did your objectives and approach evolve over the years?
We decided right from the start to work on the manipulation of the living, the vegetal, the animal and the human, by society and science. As we were very involved in ecological groups, it seemed only logical to engage with issues realted to biotechnology and experimentations on animals.
In fact, we never strayed from those issues, we just broadened the approach according to the fields of experimentation we immersed into in order to make arise visionary images and processes. I use this term on purpose as it expresses adequately the logics of our work: let the vision emerge after having dived into knowledge.
What is your background? Has either of you been trained as a scientist?
At the beginning, i was the only one who had made scientific studies, for family reasons, i have a master’s degree in physics-chemistry, which i earned in paralled with art studies and later on i studied ethnology and clinical psychology jusqu’au troisieme cycle. Benoit’s background is more in literature. He studied scenography, theatre, literature and history of art.
When dealing with research centers how open can you be about your motivations and the fact that your perspective is one of artists? I’m thinking in particular about the project “Cultures de peaux d’artistes”. How did you convince researchers to help you achieve your goal?
It is very difficult to find research centres open to artistic approaches… We are artists first and foremost, the research proposals we suggest are extremely astonishing compared to the protocols they establish. Besides, our proposals have to meet with a particular curiosity they might have. In fact, the research is a bit of a boot camp and the result of a long negociation. I narrate in detail the story of “skin culture” in an article published in the Fall 2006 issue of the Canadian magazine “inter art actuel”.
Culture de Peaux d’Artistes
How do the works Museum of Natural Horrors and the Museum of Mental Horrors respond or are related to a previous project called Museum of Human Horrors?
The initial project involved the creation of an anthology of the three research fields on manipulation that motivated us: the ecological field (Musee des horreurs naturelles/Museum of Natural Horrors), the biological field (Musee d’horreurs humaines/Museum of Human Horrors), and the psycho-scociological field (Musee d’horreurs mentales/Museum of Mental Horrors). The three museums were put together at the request of galleries and collectors who wanted more coherence from us. We reacted by showing them how our past and upcoming works could co-habit with ease.
What could artists and scientists gain from more frequent collaborations?
Artists present original approaches which scientists may not be able to follow due to the logics of productivity of current laboratories. Quite often such approaches meet with desires scientists might have to experiment the “in-experimentable” and the artist becomes the medium that opens up heavy protocols. However, it’s often a difficult process. From the artists’ point of view it’s a win-win situation. That’s if they want to enter the scientific codification… which might seem quite heavy.
Could you explain us what you were trying to achieve with Pioneer Ark? What was the impetus for this project?
Pioneer Ark is a revealing work, it presents a scientific reality well-known but which hasn’t been documented with images, because images generate polemics. This reality is the rise of spontaneous genetic mutations and aboratory hybridization. Because there wasn’t any proper images of such realities well-known by the scientific press, we have created a kind of gigantic Noah’s Ark. Animal figures belonging to this genetically modified reality are walking inside its tubes. The work is meant to be both revealing and fascinating so that each person can freely decide what is his or her own position in a world in perpetual mutation. However, it is a disturbing work. The complete installation has only been exhibited once…
I remember reading in a magazine that TC&AP‘s Victimless Leather Jacket disturbed the public. Some would rather wear the skin of a slaughtered cow on their back than imagine that one day they could donne such leather coat even if it didn’t require any animal to suffer. I suspect the Roadkill coat, a garment made with the fur of dead animals found on the road, generated the same kind of reaction. How did the public react to it? Do artists need to shock and disturb in order to get their message through?
Reactions to the Roadkill Coat were more in the order of fascination than horror. The work has been interpreted as a finger pointed to the damage that the urban world is causing to the natural world. Everyone was trying to find out which animals the coat was made of. They seemed to admire it.
The coat was more political than horrifying and its shape highlighted the beauty of a sacrified wild world. People tended to interpret it more as a call for increased awareness than as a provocative object, and that’s exactly what it was. In reality, what shocks us most of the time is not provocation but the fact that provocation leaves one indifferent… It’s the pure message of reality that disturbs most. That’s why we’ve always worked with it, producing objects embedded with a fundamental antagonism: repulsion and fascination.
Who are the artists whose work you find particularly inspiring?
Talking about inspiration would take us too far back in time… *grin*
We work in a very autonomous way. However we like plenty of artists. They range from Chris Burden to Jeffrey Vallance, Jun Takita and many others.
Are you working on new projects or preparing exhibition?
Yes, we never stop. We are working now on ethological delusions, on vegetal biotech works and smells, on architectures of the physiological memory and i write… I’m the author of a novel about creation, “Premiere peau” (“First Skin”) which has been published in Germany, under the titled “Dreigestirn” at Piper Verlag.
Merci Marion.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 8, 2007, 7:50AM
UmNyango Project
Women Fight for Rights with Cell Phones
In South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, a project is helping rural women use mobile phones to report on violations of their human rights as well as to assert other constitutional rights. OhMyNews reports.
“… The UmNyango Project will use SMS technology for rural women and men to access information and report on incidences of violence against women and children, as well as violations of women’s right to land. Through simple text messaging, women will be able to report any violation of their constitutional rights. The project will also enable women to produce their own radio programs. The programs will be made available to local community radio stations, and distributed over the internet as “podcasts.”
“This is the first time in KwaZulu Natal that we know of, where SMS technology has been used to directly empower women in this way. What makes the project unique is that women will be able to assert their constitutional rights using accessible and sustainable technology,” said Anil Naidoo.”
From Women Fight for Rights with Cell Phones by Shibuya Epiphany [posted by Emily Turrettini on Smart Mobs]
Originally
from networked_performance
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Jan 17, 2007, 1:50PM
Stuart and Your Gallery
If you missed the launch last year of powerful art collector Charles Saatchi’s foray into the online networking, don’t worry you are not the only one. We only recently learned of the growing phenomena that are the Saatchi Gallery’s two online spaces for artists, Your Gallery and Stuart. Realizing the potential of tapping into the MySpace format, Saatchi started Your Gallery to provide a free online platform for artists. A New York Times article last month reported that since launching in May the site has, “contributions from about 20,700 artists, including 2000 pieces of video art. Everything there is for sale, with neither the buyer nor the seller paying a cent to any dealer or other middleman. About 800 new artists have been signing up each week.”
Capitalizing on this instantly successful format—that demonstrates artists’ need for self promotion and to communicate with other artists—Saatchi launched a sister site in November called Stuart (student art) to cater for the worldwide student art community. The result? In one month 1300 students created web pages for themselves there. They now have upwards of 6 million visitors a day.
It’s not only the students and professional artists who are benefiting from these online galleries, Saatchi himself is fascinated by the opportunity to see so many artists’ work from all over the world in one place. He says he spends hours each day looking at work on both sites, though for now he is leaving it to others to snap up the creations. As the rest of the art industry, dealers, gallerists, museum directors and collectors, gets involved, Saatchi is just enjoying the spectacle.
Originally
from Cool Hunting
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Jan 11, 2007, 4:24PM
