Pixelated Pulse Art Fair
A prominent motif at the Pulse art fair in NYC last week, pixelation was evident in a number of works in various mediums. From afar, these works can be read as a whole, but close up, the image starts to break down and the individual elements of the composition become more dominant. Here are a selection of some of our favorites. Click on any of the images for a more detailed view.
The buzz around the Catherine Clark Gallery booth had a lot to do with “The Morning After Portraits” by Andy Diaz Hope. Made of gel-caps, the series shows images of people in front of their medicine cabinets or in their local pharmacies with hangovers, headaches and other illnesses self-inflicted or otherwise. (Pictured above right.) A more literal comment on our pill-popping culture than Damien Hirst’s similar work, Hope comments, “We are no longer a sum of our natural history, but a sum of our natural history plus our self selected recreational and medical regimes.”
At first glance, the installation by Devorah Sperber presented by the Marcia Wood Gallery, looks like randomly arranged different colored spools of thread. However, a clear acrylic sphere placed in front of the work shrinks and condenses the thread spool “pixels” into an easily-read image of a masterpiece—in this case Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring”—and the convex shape flips the imagery 180 degrees. A mimicry of how the brain and eye process visual data, Sperber’s work plays with ideas about the past, craft, visual theories and art itself. Check out more of her work at the Brooklyn Museum until 6 May 2007.
Referencing cubists like Picasso and other early 20th-century painters, Isidro Blasco, recently exhibited at DCKT Contemporary, turns the 2-dimensional media of photography into a 3-dimensional experience by piecing together multiple photos. Using board-mounted photographs, he combines multiple angles and architecture to explore perception in relation to physical experience. Blasco’s sculptures draw the observer into the piece, so that the experience of it feels new rather than a straight portrayal of the scene. The photographic sculpture pictured (right), “Side Building,” measures 107 x 120 x 72 inches . See more of his work here.
More of a dot-matrix than pixels, William Betts of the Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, re-creates surveillance camera images by carefully dripping acrylic paint onto canvas. Using digital information, he creates work that is abstract, organic and realistic. Again, a macro view (above right) becomes an abstraction but a step back (above left) reveals a realistic surveillance camera shot. Also on Cool Hunting, Betts’ work from last years Scope art fair uses digital information (and in this case techniques) to create graphics. See more from this series of work here.
Carlos Estrada-Vega, presented by Margaret Thatcher Projects, exhibited sculptural works made of small canvas-covered blocks. Estrada-Vega considers each square as its own distinct painting, hence show titles like, “4000 Paintings/14 Compositions.” Given the modularity of the pixel-like pieces (they’re attached with magnets), the mini-paintings have the potential to be rearranged infinitely into new compositions. The colors, inspired by the artist’s Mexican heritage, look somewhat monochromatic from afar. Only up close do the ultra-saturated colors reveal themselves, an aspect further accentuated by the topographic nature of the blocks. Maceo (far left) is composed of wax, oleopasto, oil, limestone and pigment on canvas and measures 18 x 18 inches. More effective in person, these photos do not do the works much justice.
Originally from Cool Hunting by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 1, 2007, 9:07PM
The knot driver
Northern Baltimore’s I-95/695 highway interchange is a “topological masterpiece,” and its superb “mathematical aesthetics” might just save it from being destroyed.
[Image: “I was in a web of braided highways." New Scientist].
“In the spring issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer, Michael Kleber, a topologist at MIT, waxed enthusiastic about [the interchange's] ‘non-trivial braiding‘: while it is possible to just lift I-95 up and away from I-695, the northbound lane of I-95 braids both over, and then under, the southbound lane, making it impossible to pull them apart without cutting one of the lanes.”
However, those simultaneous right/left exits don’t seem to be helping with traffic flow, and the system’s moving circular symmetry may soon be traded-in for something far simpler.
“I don’t want to encourage more cars onto the roads,” the New Scientist writes, “but if topology and beauty mean anything to you, get out there and enjoy I-95/695 now. It may soon be too late.”
This leads me to wonder, of course, if you could take-over the U.S. Department of Transportation, and rebuild the nation’s highway infrastructure as a massive textbook in driveable knot theory.
Seattle to Chicago, you drive achiral knots; Los Angeles to Phoenix, trefoils; New York to Miami, Brunnian links; while the most complicated ones are saved for a private highway system built between Washington DC and Denver.
All the tunnels of Manhattan, recurved and cross-torqued through themselves, with some so maddening only postgraduate researchers can find their way out of the city.
A new Olympic sport: driving the New York knots.
(Earlier: BLDGBLOG’s Wormholes).
Originally from BLDGBLOG by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 1, 1970, 12:00AM
Interchange Tiles
[Image: Four tiles by Jim Termeer].
“This is a set of 25 ceramic tiles,” artist Jim Termeer explains. “The patterns are based on satellite imagery of major highway interchanges that have been built worldwide.”
So you can decorate your bathroom with the freeways of Barcelona.
[Image: The Barcelona tile, by Jim Termeer].
(Discovered via Mason White, thanks to a tip from Theresa Duncan. If you like these images, meanwhile, be sure to stop by BLDGBLOG’s Return of the Knot Driver and, of course, The Knot Driver).
Originally from BLDGBLOG by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 1, 1970, 12:00AM
A brief critique of 31 Days in Iraq NYT Infographic
Over the past few months, the New York Times has produced a series of graphs illuminating different aspects of the Iraq conflict. While most of these graphs are straightforward presentations of the information, the most recent infographic on the past 31 days of the Iraq war represents an highly editorial standpoint, and uses poor design, [...]
Beauty and the death of zero sum
Virginia Postrel has a great post today on Dove’s "real beauty"
campaign (pictured). In her clear eyed way, she takes issue with the notion that
we should consider everyone beautiful. She insists that it is more
accurate, more sensible to see that differences of beauty exist and
that these differences confer relative advantage in the world.
I think this is right, and that it has the corrective effect Postrel
intends. Some heart felt notions about the world render us incapable
of thinking about it clearly. This is bad for many reasons, and
especially because it frustrates our efforts to understand the
operation (and interaction) of factors anthropological and economic.
Advantage and a certain social capital is apportioned according to
relative beauty, and culture decides, to some extent, what this beauty
is.
On the other hand, I think that we may be seeing a general shift here.
If we are rethinking beauty, I think this might be because we are
rethinking value. Our culture is changing.
There are three propositions at work in the world of beauty:
1. beauty contest
The old fashioned one, the beauty
contest notion, says that beauty is distributed with almost perfect
clarity. Relative beauty makes for a single, steep, zero sum
hierarchy. There may be some points of contestation, but generally
speaking, we could line up all the women (and men) in the world, from
the most beautiful to the least.
2. many kinds of beauty
The second proposition says there are "many kinds of beauty." In this
case, we suppose that there many dimensions of beauty and that each of
these may be used to fashion a different hierarchy. If it’s all about
elegance, then one hierarchy results. If it’s all about voluptuousness,
another. And so on.
I think in the real world we oscillate between these propositions.
Ideally, we think of beauty as something absolute. Practically, we are
hard pressed to show why Penelope Cruz should be considered more
beautiful than, say, Aishwarya Rai or Audrey Hepburn. We end up saying
things like "well, it depends, you see, there are different kinds of
beauty."
There is a strong form of proposition 2. In this case, we all agree on
a universe of beautiful women and then we organize this universe into
different hierarchies according to the dimension in hand. Cate
Blanchett takes one contest. Oprah takes another. Angelina Jolie, a
third.
The weak form of proposition 2 says that there are many, many
dimensions, and that it is possible to use them to give most women a
claim to relative beauty. This expands the universe of women
with a claim to beauty, and it expands the number and the kind of
dimensions that may be used to find them so. I hope this is not
demeaning, but I find that women who sell cosmetics in drug stores
often fall into this category. Quite often, they have a feature or two
that are remarkable, and they are otherwise unexceptional. Hippie
beauty seemed to turn on this principal as well.
3. every woman is beautiful
The third proposition says that every woman is
beautiful. I think this is a question of using evaluative dimension in
new ways or adding evaluative dimensions if necessary. The defining
phrase here is "every woman is beautiful in her own way."
And I think this says that if there is no evaluation dimension, we will
make one up. Finally, if this doesn’t work, the proposition resorts to
the notion that all women are beautiful because they are women. The
attack on zero sum hierarchy is absolute and complete.
I like the inclusiveness of this proposition 3. It’s now up to all of
us (and especially every male) to discover the beauty in a female
companion, and this is an interesting, generous and generative way to
proceed. But I agree with Postrel. The notion that "everyone is
beautiful" violates the law of non-vacuous contrast according to which
no assertion may refer to everything in its universe of discourse.
More simply: if everyone is beautiful, how can anyone be beautiful? If it isn’t relative, it isn’t real.
the death of zero sum
But here’s the thing. Zero sum is dying in our culture. The notion
that there is one single hierarchy of any kind is now in question. No
one knows this better than Virginia Postrel, whose pioneering work on
dynamism helps us understand why this should be so. Ours is a
splintering culture. Some of our new social species, punks and hippies
say, arose precisely to take issue with conventional notions of beauty,
and these groups leave in their wake new evaluative standards.
The death of zero sum is especially evident on the internet where it
turns out crowds matter more than elites. The new media emerge and they
create a multiplication of value, a new superfluidity of admiration.
This may be because people are prepared to "pay themselves" in
admiration they do not deserve…but if it works, it works. There is nothing in the
anthropological rule book that says that a culture may not make every
individual an arbiter of his or her own value. (And indeed the American
psychological and therapeutic communities have been insisting on this
approach to self esteem for some time.)
Of course, we have all by this time seen enough delusional American
Idol contestants to know how tragic the outcome of this cultural
approach can sometimes be. Still, it is possible for a culture to
equip individuals with the right of self invention and self evaluation,
and that is precisely what our culture has done, from the avant garde
artist who perseveres with the conviction that some day that the world
will see what he sees to the lonely entrepreneur who insists on her
vision of the world in the face of an overwhelming indifference from
the rest of world. Our culture of creativity depends upon the
destruction of zero sum evaluation. And the more dynamic we become,
the more surely we will and must move away from absolute hierarchies.
As a Canadian coming south to Chicago in the 1970s, this struck me
forcibly. Americans were much more demanding of effort and
accomplishment than my Canadians friends, but they were also much more
prepared to expand the competitive domain to give everyone, or almost
everyone, a place to play. Being the best at something was important,
but it was ok if you were merely taking gold at an obscure bowling
tournament in the rural Midwest (which I am proud to say I did on
several occasions. Kidding.) And that’s when I came to understand the
penalty of being good at nothing at all in America. I sometimes wonder
if this is the unexamined motive of self destructive behavior (drug
abuse, etc.). In Canada it’s ok to be unexceptional. In the US, God save you if this is so.
America has always been relatively generous in supplying extra
competitive domains and evaluative dimensions with which individuals
could pursue the self esteem and social capital that success makes
available. And this was true before the advent of the plenitude and
dynamism made possible by the new expressive domains (zines, blogs,
home made music, transmedia, self made movies) that emerged in the 1990s. But
again Postrel knows this perfect well.
The death of zero sum and the expansion of social capital has potentially explosive consequences for our culture.
Elizabethan England makes this case quite well. The likes of
Shakespeare, Bacon, Sydney, Raleigh, Elizabeth herself made the world vibrate
with new ideas. There are lots of ways to explain this explosive
cultural moment, but I wonder whether it was largely because Elizabethans had
access to a sudden superfluidity of status. There were new ways and
new dimensions for claiming rank. The (relative) decline of a zero sum
social hierarchy had the effect of flooding the world with novelty. Ours is a new Elizabethan age.
summing up
Here’s my argument. The Dove campaign for real beauty and new ideas of beauty may be
seen as a reflection of a larger culture shift. In every domain of
taste, we are seeing a willingness to expand the tools of judgment and
the size of the winner’s circle. Zero sum is dying as the logic of our
evaluative activities. As a result, our culture is entering a new multiplication of
capital and creativity. This is not to say that zero sum is dead in all sectors of our world. It is just subject to new cultural forces here and there that blunt its prevalence and power.
References
Postrel, Virginia. 2007. The Truth About Beauty. The Atlantic
Monthly. March. here.
[this link is good for 3 days beginning February 13, 2007]
Postrel, Virginia. 2007. Beauty is. Dynamist Blog. February 13, 2007. here.
for the Dove campaign for real beauty, go here.
Note:
I promise to get back to the pet post tomorrow.
Originally from This Blog Sits at the by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 13, 2007, 6:00PM
cartographic flow map layout
a method for generating flow maps using hierarchical clustering given a set of nodes, positions, & flow data between the nodes. flow maps aim to show the movement of objects from one location to another, such as the number of people in a migration, the amount of goods being traded, or the number of packets in a network.
the advantage of flow maps is that they reduce visual clutter by merging edges. most flow maps are drawn by hand & there are few computer algorithms available. this particular technique is inspired by graph layout algorithms that minimize edge crossings & distort node positions while maintaining their relative position to one another.
see also pivotgraph.
[link: stanford.edu]
Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on Feb 20, 2007, 5:27AM
Die Stadt
When I worked at Manchester Institute for Popular Culture in the mid-90s, our research papers were generally adorned with images from Franz Masereel’s Die Stadt, a quite beautiful book of woodcuts from 1925, and the choice of then Director, Justin O’Connor. It’s a haunting tableaux, hovering between gothic expressionism and modernism, and has stayed with me ever since. A current resident of Manchester, John Coulhart, on his great blog Feuilleton, pointed at an online reproduction of Die Stadt the other day. I now realise my attraction to similar drawings in some of my favourite comic books on the city such as Tardi, Igort, Hergé, Lutes and Tatsumi. Interestingly, it also reminds me of recent animation Kapitaal, particularly those scenes which expose the richness and density of commercial information in the early modern city.
Originally from cityofsound by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 18, 2007, 2:55PM
7 Branding lessons from the Dove campaign
Marketing can be a lot like surfing. The brand surveys contemporary
culture as if it were the surf off Australia’s Gold Coast, looking for
the perfect wave.
In the early oughts (probably 2003), Unilever made an extraordinary
discovery. A global research project told them that of the 3200 women
they had surveyed, only 64 of them (or 2%) were prepared to call
themselves beautiful. Seventy-six per cent of the respondents wanted
the idea of beauty to change.
Unilever decided to make itself that change agent:
The Dove mission is to widen the definition of beauty. The Campaign for Real Beauty is based on a belief that beauty comes in different shapes, sizes, ages and that real beauty can be genuinely stunning. (Verkade in Lichti, below)
The Dove campaign for Real Beauty launched in 2004.
Yesterday, I talked about the Dove campaign…because Virginia Postrel
had done so. But in truth I had wanted to talk about this campaign for
a long time.
After all, the Dove campaign for real beauty is a great example of
marketing that works with contemporary culture, not against it. Dove
was prepared to capture the tremendous energy coming off a trend that
many brands just looked through or tried to work around. In point of
fact, ideas of femaleness had been "under review" and deeply contested
in our society at least since the ideas of Susan B. Anthony. The tide
had come and gone several times by 2003 and now it appeared to be
prepared to transform our culture’s most fundamental ideas of what
beauty is.
Brands that surf culture have to choose their moment with exquisite
timing. If they are a moment too soon, they look like reckless "kooks"
way out ahead of the trend. The brand will pay for it. The brand
manager’s career will pay for it. On the other hand, if they wait too
long, they are going to look like johnnies-come-lately playing me-too
marketing. March can be too early and May too late. April is the sweet spot between ridicule
and scorn.
We can’t know what was going on within Dove, but we may assume that
Unilever marketers were monitoring several diverse developments in
contemporary culture, everything from the Boston "our bodies,
ourselves" collective founded in 1970 to Anna Nicole Smith, the
voluptuous celebrity who died tragically in 2007 through the TV show Sex in the City. (We can’t say that
the head’s up came from the 2003 research project. Something had to inspire the project.)
But the moment that Dove decided to get on board was the moment that
the trend took on an extraordinary ally. Using the creative talent at
the brand’s disposal and the deep pockets at Unilever, there was now a
mainstream champion of a new definition of beauty. At some point,
Oprah came on board. The fitness studio Curves was established.
Special K got in on the action. (We must hope for a clarifying
history here.) And before very long, the beauty hegemony of Vogue and
the Hollywood Studio was being challenged. A nascent, distributed, but
deeply unofficial unhappiness with beauty concepts suddenly was given a
voice and a profile.
There is a bargain at work here, a trade. In order to get access to
the power and the authenticity of the new beauty movement, Dove makes
available its marketing cunning and check book. To get access to Dove’s cunning and check book, the trend makes available its power and authenticity. Intellectuals are fond of talking about how capitalism corrupts culture, but this bargain looks like a pretty good one. Both parties prosper.
Seven branding lessons of the Dove campaign
1. Survey the world. Get to know the culture.
2. Discover the trend or the impulse that could serve the brand.
3. Assess the downside risks to which the brand is exposed.
4. Establish a time table that shows the growth of the trend.
5. Establish the moment to get in.
6. Partner with the enthusiasts of the trend.
7. Make your move (repeat steps 1 through 6)
References
Anonymous. n.d., History of Our Bodies Ourselves and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. here.
Clegg, Alicia. 2005. Dove Gets Real. Brandchannel.com. April 18, 2005. here.
Lichti, Shirley. 2006. Dove Campaign reflects a beautiful strategy. The Record. June 21, 2006. here.
McMains, Andrew. 2007. $70 mil. Weight Watchers in Play. Adweek. February 14, 2007. here. [The Watchers went into play today, with $70 million at stake, and WPP Group's Young and Rubicam the incumbent. Dove will has changed the landscape in which the winning agency and this brand must work.]
Piper, Tim, Yael Staav, Mark Wakefield, Sharon MacLeod, Stephanie
Hurst. 2005. Dove Film. as posted on YouTube, September 5, 2005. here. [This short film appears to compile clips from ethnographic interviews
with girls 7-17 roughly. Captures the pressures on young women to lose
weight.]
Traister, Rebecca. 2005. "Real beauty" — or really smart marketing.
Dove has a worthy new ad campaign that tells women to embrace their
curves. Too bad they’re hawking cellulite cream. Salon. July 22,
2005. here.
Originally from This Blog Sits at the by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 14, 2007, 10:00PM
Churches of remathematization
[Image: "Adams in Saint Flour Cathedral," a 360°x180° panorama by Seb Przd].
Flickr user Seb Przd has been re-mathematizing his photographs of French cathedrals, using a program called MathMap.
The results are delirious whorls of rock and decoration, space folded onto itself and circled round again to match up with itself at the beginning. All very M.C. Escher-esque – but nonetheless exhilirating.
[Images: "Saint Etienne Two Times," taken inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris; another view of Saint Etienne du Mont; inside the same church; and a final view inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris. All photographs by Seb Przd].
Further clicking took me through to an entire Equirectangular Pool on Flickr, and further still to a specific Equirectangular set by another Flickr user called HamburgerJung. In particular, I like his shot “Treppe.”
However, even then I found myself clicking back to look at images by Seb Przd, including “On the side of the cathedral,” “Don’t drink and pray,” and “Notre-Dame de Reims.”
If you look at enough of these, though, you begin to see that specific styles of architecture are better than others when it comes to this sort of optical distortion. The old stone cathedrals of Europe are fantastic, for instance, but modern – even art nouveau – structures look pretty lame, frankly. I also think meadow shots, or straight-up landscapes, just look really gimmicky.
So perhaps we should send Seb Przd, armed with a camera and loads of film, on a six month trip through Europe, photographing every Gothic cathedral from within…
A kind of optical encounter between Christianity and mathematics.
[Image: "The Ceiling and Columns of the Cathedral" by Seb Przd].
(Discovered via MetaFilter).
Originally from BLDGBLOG by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 1, 1970, 12:00AM
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
