The new Pepsi can and old marketing orthodoxy

We learned today that the Pepsi can is changing.  Cie Nicholson,
Pepsi’s chief marketing officer, says the Pepsi can will now change
every 3 to 4 weeks.  There will be 35 new designs this year, with more
to come next.

The Wall Street Journal speculates that the new designs will help Pepsi
"connect with the sort attention span of teens and young adults."  And
this is partly right.  Attention spans are now brief.  Familiarity
comes faster.  Boredom descends ever more quickly. 

But the more pressing issue is sustaining Pepsi’s brand visibility
in a turbulent culture.  Stillness and consistency were once a virtue.
The old style marketers insisted on keeping things simple and repeating
themselves endlessly.  Sameness was the name of the game.

New school marketing says the brand must meet change with change.  It
must stream with dynamism to stay in touch with dynamism.  Thirty-five
designs in a year.  This is precisely what the new school of marketing
has in mind. 

The new can will help.  But by itself it is not enough.  Pepsi is going
to have to build in dynamic tastes.  Now this really contradicts
marketing orthodoxy, but I am prepared to wager that Pepsi will be
varying its formula by the end of the decade. 

The old marketing is built into the big brands so deeply that it is
almost impossible to see.  This is the challenge for the brand stewards
inside the corporation, inside the agency, inside the consulting
world.  How quickly can we change?   And how many of the now great
brands will end up pulled down to the ocean floor by the
weight of orthodoxy.

You think I’m kidding.  Pepsi lives in a declining category and it is still possible for the WSJ to offer this risk analysis:

By changing designs so frequently, Pepsi runs the risk of confusing or
alienating consumers who rely on familiar visual cues to find their
favorite brands among a change sea of products, some marketing experts
say. 

Ah, if only doing nothing were still an option

References

McKay, Betsy.  2007. Pepsi’s New Marketing Dance: Can Can.  The Wall Street Journal.  January 12, 2007.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Gary Beene for the image.  For his excellent website on Pepsi history go here. 

Originally
from This Blog Sits at the

by Grant McCracken


reBlogged

by michael

on Jan 12, 2007, 11:56PM

Fictional ruins from fictional worlds

[Image: Science Building, London, England, 2003, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

In two beautifully realized and conceptually fascinating projects, Canadian artist Carl Zimmerman creates “architectural utopias, fictional ruins from fictional worlds.”

[Image: Archives, Leeds, England, 2002, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

Zimmerman’s Landmarks of Industrial Britain, for instance, is “a photographic series of fictional public buildings derived from small scale architectural maquettes.”
As the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia explains, the series “envisages a worker’s state in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution.”
Zimmerman himself writes that his work preys upon “the apparent willingness of the viewer to accept a fabricated past.” In the process, the lost industrial utopia he’s created – a false history convincingly rendered through the use of immense landscapes and architectural monumentalism – comes to look like a world designed entirely by Etienne-Louis Boullée.

[Image: Museum, Birmingham, England, 2002, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

Zimmerman’s earlier series, Lost Hamilton Landmarks (referring to Hamilton, Ontario), apparently kicked off the artist’s ongoing interest in “Greek and Roman [architectural] prototypes.” This “neo-classical architectural language,” Zimmerman writes, attains much of its aesthetic power by “appealing to state authority and to instinctual desires for permanence and stability, security, sense of place, or even to the desire for the guidance of a parent.”

[Image: Mount Hamilton Sanatorium, 1995, by Carl Zimmerman. From Lost Hamilton Landmarks].

Zimmerman thus uses the authoritative language of neo-classical architecture to help convince his audience that these buildings once actually existed – and that they now stand ruined somewhere, cavernous, sublime, and empty.

[Images: Mausoleum, Woodlawn Cemetary, 1996, and Mount Hamilton Hospital, 1996, by Carl Zimmerman. From Lost Hamilton Landmarks].

After all, these are not real buildings.

[Image: Public Baths, Manchester, England, 2000, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

Quoting the justifiably enthusiastic reviewer Meredith Dault at some length:

[Carl Zimmerman] makes photographs of imagined architectural spaces. He builds models, photographs them, and then digitally manipulates the photographs, creating vast, impossible spaces. Sepia-toned and laid out flat on tables in the gallery space, the photographs read, at first glance, like historical documents – they feel very much like 19th century architectural engravings – until you realize they can’t be because they’re all dated in the present. A closer look reveals that the buildings are set in huge, almost surreal, bleak landscapes – their titles want you to believe, however, that these buildings are plunked down in ordinary cities like Manchester and Leeds.

Zimmerman’s show at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia appears to be over – but if it is still up, I would strongly recommend stopping by. Zimmerman’s models were on display alongside the photographs, and the exhibition sounds like it was well worth seeing.
What seems particularly interesting, to me, is that Zimmerman achieves a sense of near-total ruin, but he does so not through the depiction of structural collapse – he simply shows us grandiosity and silence.

[Image: War Memorial, Leeds, England, 2004, by Carl Zimmerman. From Landmarks of Industrial Britain].

If you’re feeling well-heeled, meanwhile, consider buying yourself some full-size prints of these images; you can do so at the frankly named buynewart. You can also see more deeply colored versions of Zimmerman’s work by visiting Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery.

(Thanks, John Devlin! See also BLDGBLOG’s earlier look at the work of Oliver Boberg and Thomas Demand).

Originally
from BLDGBLOG

by Geoff Manaugh


reBlogged

by michael

on Jan 4, 2007, 7:34PM

Pornography and Technology

My notes from Tina Lorenz’ talk at 23C3 in Berlin: Pornography and Technology.

I wanted to comment on what the presentation was like in general but Polas has done it already and i can only agree with just everything he has written (and will therefore remove from the title of my talks any term that might put off the audience, such as “art” or, well… “art”). I enjoyed the talk a lot. I just wondered if there was any point in blogging it because the content looks a bit like a wikipedia entry on, say, the History of erotic depictions but that doesn’t make it less fun, at least for me. ‘k, now the talk:

1. History of media until the birth of “modern porn”

Porn emerges with the first ability to abstract. Representation of sex first created for religion and later for arousal. Porn becomes mainstream only when the media is cheap enough to distribute sex representations widely. The cheaper the media the more porn copies can be distributed.

Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type printing. Shortly after that erotic literature started to appear even if it was illegal to distribute or even to own it. The situation was quite different in Asia, they have a longer tradition of erotic representation and literature.

The first porn engravings appeared in the 16th Century. I Modi was a kind of Kama Sutra, an illustrated book of 16 “postures” or sexual positions. Their objective was to arouse but it was also a social commentary on the situation of Catholic Italy at the time.

In 1839, Louis Daguerre invented the Daguerreotype, an early type of photograph in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor. It was the first commercially viable photographic process. However the material used was very heavy and required very long time of poses for the model of a portrait. No possibility to take any “action shot.”

The realism of photography made the authorities quite uneasy. So erotic photos or nude portraits were only authorised as “painter’s aids.”

The only way to reproduce a daguerreotype was to photograph them again which made them rare and priceless. Besides, they were quite fragile. The first erotic photographs and the first experimenters in stereo photography utilized daguerreotypes.

Etude

Stereoscopy made the technology more popular. Only problem was the rigid poses of the models.

William Fox Talbot patented processes which made it easier to reproduce photography and thus spread images to the masses. One of the patents shortened the posing time.

During 19th Century, the Postal Service became more reliable and safer to use internationally. Porn producers could then send erotic pictures to clients worldwide.

The Kinetoscope, developed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892, suddenly gave some movements to these images of erotic scenes. This early motion picture exhibition device was designed for short reels to be viewed individually through the window of a cabinet housing its components. It created the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter. Viewers could listen to the soundrack through headphones. It was developed as an attraction for fun fairs.

Kinetoscope and Carmencita

While reading the wikipedia entry for the kinetoscope, i found out that shortly after its launch came the first recorded instance of motion picture censorship. The film in question showed a performance by the Spanish dancer Carmencita who “communicated an intense sexuality across the footlights that led male reporters to write long, exuberant columns about her performance.” When Kinetoscope movie of her dance, shot at the Black Maria in mid-March 1894 was screened in the New Jersey resort town Asbury Park, the town’s founder, James A. Bradley was “so shocked by the glimpse of Carmencita’s ankles and lace that he complained to Mayor Ten Broeck. The showman was thereupon ordered to withdraw the offending film, which he replaced with Boxing Cats.”

Lorenz later explained that early movies were not an attraction on their own. They were part of a circus show or screened at the end of a theatre play representation. Reels had to be bought, there wasn’t any effective rental system.

The first erotic films date back to the beginning of the last century. Given the usually clandestine nature of the filming and distribution, many of them are lost. Most of what remains has been archived at the Kensey Institute for Sex Research. Europeans were pioneers in erotic films. She mentioned the first German erotic movie: Am Abend in 1910. Germans became quickly known for their fetish movies. And France “of course” (that’s how she put it) was fast to jump on the erotic movie bandwagon.

The first erotic movies were also called “stag films”. Their main audience was made of men who belonged to closed societies. As the entry fees to belong to those private societies were high, only rich men got to watch the films. The films were also shown in brothels to arouse punters. The stag films didn’t have any real plot. The novelty of seeing naked women was enough to make the gents loose their head.

The first erotic movies were better produced than shooted which might indicate that they were done by professional producers from Hollywood who wanted to make extra money on the side. Narrative elements were then introduced to eliminate repetition.

Erotic movies reveal a lot about the culture that produced them.

For example, Free Ride, believed to be the oldest surviving porn film made in the US (and haha! directed by Will B. Hard and A. Wise Guy), was made at a time when cars started to be “affordable”, they were a symbol of freedom.

In times of war, while women were working in factories and their men were soldiers, erotic movies depicted women as passive and submissive. They looked bored during the intercourse.

The introduction of sound allowed for the development of more complex plots. “Yes, there ARE plots in porn!” explained Lorenz.

The narrative brought even more morale and references to the culture of the day. According to Lorenz, pornography has always been more interesting than sex to get to know about our world.

1968: Denmark is the first country to legalize pornography. Copies were quickly smuggled out of the country.
1969: First sex expo “Sex 69″
1970: first modern porn, Mona, the Virgin Nymph that was the first porn film with a plot that received a general theatrical release in the U.S.

Porn wanted to go mainstream and merge with the Hollywood industry. So they increased the budget, put more effort in writing better plots and hired professional technicians.

2. Definition of pornography

Difficult to define. What is obscene and perverse for one person, say a feminist, might be acceptable for a philosopher. A common criteria is that porn seeks to arouse customers. But then again, what is arousing for you might be disgusting for me.

Lorenz believes that porn has to fill some technical criteria:
– porn is media-bound. It’s all about the layer of abstraction;
– porn is fictional, imaginative, iconic. Porns are staged, have a scenario. Grey area: house porn;
– porn is produced for an audience. If my friend organises an orgy and films, edits and credits it but doesn’t show it to anyone else than the “actors” and their close friends, the degree of abstraction is lessened. But if the video is uploaded online and seen by net surfers who don’t know any of the actors, then it becomes a porn movie. With an informed audience, it can even become art.

VHS vs Betamax. An urban legend wants that the format war was won by VHS because of porn. It fact the battle might have been won by something as simple as the length of the tape (2 hours for VHS and 1 hour for Betamax.) Porn adopted VHS to lower production costs. In its quest to go mainstream, the porn industry wanted to make feature films and thuus needed longer tapes. VHS allowed people to watch porn at home. They didn’t have to face the humiliation of buying tickets to see a smut movie.

The rise of the internet has allowed for an even larger and swifter distribution.

Stats: 60% porn in p2p now. In 2006, about 1% of random sample websites were sexy.

3. Teledildonics and Interactive Porn

Second Life: avatars programmed to have virtual sex. Sex in Second Life happens through a combination of poses, animations, scripts, and typing. The main ingredient is known as pose balls, objects with scripts in them that trigger a user’s avatar to play certain animations or poses. For sex, poseballs are placed close together, with titles above them that say the position the user will take.

Just out when she made the talk: Wiibrator, a Python application that interfaces the Wii’s Wiimote and the PS2’s Trancevibrator.

Lorenz concluded by saying that we’ll see more and more of these gadgets that mediate virtual and real life sexual activities. “And remember, porn is not bad!”

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

by michael

on Jan 2, 2007, 8:00AM

interactive visual skyscraper

an impressive interactive full-building facade on a 145m high tower in Brussels (Dexia Tower, Belgium), on which 4200 windows can be individually illuminated by RGB-colored LED bars.

at the bottom of the tower, an installation allows people to interact with the visual tower display via a multi-touch screen. both static (touch) as dynamic (gesture) input is recognized to generate an abstract graphical language consisting of points, lines & surfaces combined with physical behaviors (growth, weight, …). once a composition is created, a live snapshot picture, taken from a distant location, can be sent as an electronic postcard.

ideal end-of-year decoration.

see also blinkenlights & spots animated facade & colors by numbers & LED mesh facade.

[link: dexia-tower.be & lab-au.com (author)]

Originally
from information aesthetics

reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 28, 2006, 1:03AM

Rules of space

Originally
from BLDGBLOG

by Geoff Manaugh


reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 17, 2005, 3:03AM

visual acoustics

an online canvas to paint reactive music & visuals as a real-time artistic performance. different brushes can be painted causing visuals & sounds to appear. the mouse position determines the instrumental note while the further the mouse is moved, the more strokes are painted.

[link: ampledesign.co.uk]

Originally
from information aesthetics

reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 26, 2006, 6:27AM

Book: Audio-Visual Art and VJ Culture

Audio-Visual Art and VJ Culture, edited by Michael Faulkner/ D-Fuse.

Editors’ blurb: A major change has taken place at dance clubs worldwide: the advent of the VJ. Once the term referred to the video jockey who introduced music videos on MTV, but now it defines an artist who creates and mixes video, live and synced to music, in clubs or at concerts. This book is an in-depth look at the artists at the forefront of this amazing audio-visual experience..

Let’s be honest: i bought this one because of the sleek cover. I’m not much of a clubber and i’m not a huge fan of screen-based art. Well, at least that’s what i thought before i opened the book and started to recognise the name of artists whose work i’ve enjoyed over the years, at concerts or events such as Club Transmediale.

The term VJ was used for the first time at the end of the ’70s in the Peppermint Lounge. However, the chapter dedicated to the history of VJing spans a period much longer than one might expect, tracing back the influences on the discipline to Joseph Plateau (the inventor of the phenakistiscope) and talking about the key-role that silent movies has paradoxically played in helping VJing develop its language. Silent film directors had to construct a narrative using mainly visual elements and the connection with VJing is further increased in the case of the screening of films accompanied by improvised music. Apart from cinema and videos, VJs’ work engages also with (graphic) design and interactive art.

DJ Spooky- ReBirth of a Nation

Over the pages, i’ve discovered several amazing projects that should convince anyone that VJing is not just clubland/underground entertainment, but a vivid art form. Just one example:

D-Fuse’s Small Global is a multichannel video/motion gfx installation that uses animated images and vector maps of the planet to explore environmental and immigration issues. Small Global juxtaposes visualizations of pairs of data sets to highlight relationships that often go unnoticed by mass media. For example, the mining and price of coltan (the metal used in mobile phone chips) in Congo is mapped against the human death toll and expertmination of Congo’s highland gorillas.

One of the biggest bonus of the book lies in the 150 interviews with artists at the forefront of the scene. Grouped by geographical region, each set of VJs’ portraits opens with an intro to the VJing scene in that particular location. They talk about who’s inspiring them (the usual suspects such as Bill Viola and the graffit culture but also Picasso, Burrough, the qatsi trilogy, etc.), how they deal with copyrights, their relationship with the advertising industry, how they financially sustain their work, the equipment they are working with, and the growing influence of their work on other industries and music video. Some of the interviewees are “wo/men of few words”, others have compelling stories to share.

Last chapter of the book deals with VJ’s resources: the hardware, the software, the set-up. With tips from the VJs.

I enjoyed the book a lot which came as a surprise as i’m fairly ignorant of VJing. The illustrations are amazing and the fact that the pages have been written mainly by practioners makes the reading absorbing (that’s if you like the “insider view” style.) An expert in VJ culture might be more critical (and appreciate better than i did the chapter dedicated to the tools used by VJs) but i’d say that i’m a very satisfied customer.

As you might expect, a 130 min’ DVD is hiding under the cover. It combines documentaries, videos and images from live performances by some of the most respected VJs such as The Light Surgeons, Actop, D-Fuse, UVA, 8gg, Elliott Earls, Coldcut/Hexstatic, Visual Kitchen, etc.

Pingmag recently interviewed Mike Faulkner.
Related: 8gg Big, In the mood for clubbing, Colder, Big tanks, Video printing.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 25, 2006, 9:42AM

Interview with Mark Shepard

Donning headphones, city dwellers and commuters have been re-shaping the urban soundscape ever since the arrival of the Walkman. A few years ago, Mark Shepard suggested to go beyond this egocasting attitude and share those sounds with the people who might pass by the same spaces. His project is called Tactical Sound Garden and has been presented at festivals and events all over the world, from Sonar in Barcelona to ISEA 2006 in San Jose, from Futuresonic in Manchester to Conflux in New York.

However, the TSG represents only a small part of Shepard‘s activities. His cross-disciplinary practice draws on architecture, film, and new media in addressing new social spaces and signifying structures of emergent network cultures. His research focuses on the impact of mobile and pervasive technologies on architecture and urbanism. He is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where he is a co-director of the Center for Virtual Architecture.

Your bio say that you’re “an artist and architect whose cross-disciplinary practice draws on architecture, film, and new media in addressing new social spaces and signifying structures of contemporary network cultures.” Do you regard architecture, film and new media as three different fields or does your work encompass them as one?

My work moves between these different fields. I come from a background in architecture, which I’ve studied and practiced (intermittently) over the past two decades. After becoming fed-up with the state of the architectural “profession” in the early 90s, I returned to graduate school and began to work with film as both a medium and a conceptual model to address aspects of spatial experience that elude conventions of architectural representation.

What began as a naive interest in working with time and duration as “material” (qualities of sound, light, movement) led to broader questions concerning how perception is conditioned through the technological apparatus. I was interested in conditions of vacancy as a limit condition within urban environments, and the challenges involved with modeling the forces producing this condition. The work explored the limits of empirical representations, and the political ramifications of the fact that what architects and urban designers perceive and value about a specific site was to a certain extent limited by their ability to represent it. Between Now and There and unfoproject are two examples. Moving between film and architecture (and by extension, cinema and urbanism) provided a means to analyze and critique the techniques by which the built environment is projected and shaped, and in turn, shapes those who inhabit it.

unfoproject

At about the same time, I began to work with new media, mostly as a means to explore non-linear temporal structures and interactivity. A little later, I founded a new media design studio called dotsperinch, together with Carlos Tejada. What started out as as a means to support independent art projects (by freelancing for other artists and designers) grew into a collaborative network of artists, architects, programmers and technologists developing new media environments for primarily non-profit organizations in the arts, design and education communities in New York. Much of the early work with dotsperinch involved designing and programming online digital archives and interactive exhibits for museums. Projects such as 360degrees.org, SonicMemorial.org and CrossingTheBLVD.org provided a pretext to investigate both conceptual design directions and fairly pragmatic development issues involved with creating digital archives and open content systems. Later work, such as Mitosis: Formation of Daughter Cells, an installation by A.M. Hoch at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, explored notions of a “habitable cinema” and involved the integration of sound, the moving image and a mobile observer with things like proximity sensors, mechanical actuators, and embedded microcontrollers.

My current work is more preoccupied with understanding computing as an environment than seeing it as a tool or a set of techniques. When computational intelligence becomes embedded in (or distributed throughout) the built environment, the basis of architecture and urbanism is radically altered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the major cities today. Looking at the impact of mobile and pervasive computing on architecture and urbanism involves rethinking received categories of public/private, individual/mass, interior/exterior, attention/distraction, virtual/actual. I find I’m constantly having to move between different fields to get at the key issues at stake.

You’ve been working on the Tactical Sound Garden for a few years. How did the project start and evolve?

The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit began in 2004 as a conceptual mashup of sorts. The idea of participatory sonic environments was something dotsperinch touched on with Sonicmemorial.org, which launched in 2002. Following that we were working with location-aware technologies on projects such as The Rosemary Initiative, which explored the affects of contemporary location tracking technologies on social interaction. In the spring of 2004, I had just finished a proposal with Fiona Murphy for the Maya Lin Plaza at the University of California at Irvine. Maya Lin’s plan for the plaza involved elaborate landscaping combined with various sculptural elements, lighting treatments, and public benches that had audio speakers embedded within them, for example. We were invited to propose a set of scenarios that would augment her plan with a layer of embedded technologies. The idea of “planting sounds” came directly from this proposal.

Early on, I got in touch with Marc Tuters who was working on a project called “Where-Fi” that used 802.11 (WiFi) wireless access points to calculate the location of a mobile device in physical space. Marc pointed me to Placelab, an open source API developed by Intel Research in Seattle that aspired to much of Where-Fi’s design goals (and had a funded development team!). From there, the technology development involved hacking together an application that fed the positioning information from Placelab to a 3D audio engine in order to output a realtime audio mix based on the geographic location of the participant in physical space.

The current interaction model evolved through low-tech studies using handheld transistor radios with small logbooks attached. From these early studies we were able to get a rough idea of how people were inclined (or not) to interact through placing sounds in a “public” space, and some of the parameters that influenced that interaction. While the project draws on the metaphor of actual urban community gardens, virtual sound gardens don’t need to be constrained by the same parameters. For example, physical community gardens are often structured around the idea of the “plot”, where urban public space is spatially partitioned for private cultivation by designated members of a specific community. Given the immateriality of the TSG, and its open participation model, spatial partitioning is one of many possible parameters by which a TSG may be structured. These parameters are being explored through the creation of a series of sound gardens in collaboration with local communities. The idea is to work with communities defined by the shared use of a specific public location – an airport, a park, a street, a plaza – rather than one defined primarily by common property, place of residence, shared interests or beliefs. In this sense, the project seeks to build a sense of community that cuts across demographic divisions, one rooted in the diversity found in the everyday life of urban public space.

Tactical Sound Garden requires users to show some respect for other people’s planted sounds. How do you deal with the networks’ vulnerability? How do people usually behave? Do they modify the sounds planted by others? Are there some turf wars? Or are they more ready to collaborate?

This really depends on the community of people involved and the time-scale of their interactions. Interactions within a TSG are best measured in weeks or months (years?), not minutes or hours. For example, when we exhibited the project as part of the ISEA 2006 | ZeroOne San Jose Symposium and Festival, we found the format of the week-long exhibition problematic in that it forced a “demo” mentality on the people who chose to participate. Most people were more inclined to sample the project to see how it works, rather than pursue sustained interactions through it. In this case, people were generally less invested in the sounds they planted, and not that concerned with how others were pruning them. As more Sound Gardens evolve over extended periods of time, we’ll be in a better position to report on how people actually interact within them. They’re still a bit thorny, to be sure!

Are urbanists giving enough attention to the aural layer of the city landscape? If yes, could you give some example? If no, do you think it might change in the future and how?

Sound in modern cities is notoriously difficult to control. Normally, urban planners are concerned with how loud and disruptive cities are, and try to control their sound through codes and legislation. Car horns, police sirens, car alarms left blaring by negligent owners, super-sized car stereo subwoofers, construction workers repairing a water main wielding jackhammers at dawn, or elderly neighbors who are hard of hearing and listen to the television at high volume – each in some way has been regulated by a code or environmental impact study (or occasionally by local intervention of other neighbors…!). So think its less a question of if urbanists are giving enough attention to the aural layer of the city, more one of how they think about sound in cities in the first place.

Mobile audio devices like the iPod have offered the average city dweller alternate modes by which the aural landscape of the city can be augmented and manipulated. The popularity of the iPod points toward a desire to personalize the experience of the contemporary city with one’s own private soundtrack. On the bus, in the park at lunch, while shopping in the deli – the city becomes a film for which you compose the soundtrack. These devices also provide varying degrees of privacy, affording the listener certain exceptions to conventions for social interaction within the public domain. As Michael Bull notes in his book on the subject, donning a pair of earbuds grants a certain amount of social license, enabling one to move through the city without necessarily getting too involved, and absolving one from some responsibility to respond to what’s happening around them. Some people use earbuds to deflect unwanted attention, finding it easier to avoid responding because they look already occupied. Others remove earbuds when talking to someone to signal they want to engage. In effect, the iPod is a tool for organizing space, time and the boundaries around the body in public space.

So today, I think it is more in the hands of the individual to shape her aural experience of the contemporary city than those of the professional urbanists. Without doubt, this contributes to a long-standing retreat or withdrawal of people in cities from urban public space and forms of social interaction found there. And this is the dilemma. One way urbanists might become more involved is to focus on developing new technologies and infrastructures that reconnect people in ways that strike a balance between providing privacy and facilitating openness throughout the social space (which is not always “public” space) of everyday life.

You were one of the organisers of Architecture and Situated Technologies, a “symposium bringing together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of “situated” technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary metapolis.”One of the issues that the event was addressing was “How do the social uses of these technologies, including (non-) affective giving, destabilize rationalized “use-case scenarios” designed around the generic consumer?” Did the event make the question any clearer? Can you give us an idea of the participants’ view on this?

I organized the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium together with Omar Khan and Trebor Scholz. The symposium was a co-production of the Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed Creativity, and the Architectural League of New York, part of the League’s celebration of the 125th anniversary of its founding.

We were interested in identifying new research vectors, sites of practice and working methods for the confluence of architecture and situated technologies. How might we begin to think about these in a post-disciplinary context, with people coming from related yet different fields? If the point of ubiquitous computing was to make the computer recede to the background, to become invisible, in order to focus attention on the social space of everyday life and the encounters that transpire there, then what kinds of techno-social assemblages are possible or even inevitable? Where will we find them? How will we access them? Who will design them, and based on which criteria?

We began with two usages of “situated” to work with:

1. Situated: located: situated in a particular spot or position; “valuable centrally located urban land”; “strategically placed artillery”; “a house set on a hilltop”; “nicely situated on a quiet riverbank”

2. Situated Action: every course of action is highly dependent upon its material and social circumstances focusing on moment-by-moment interactions between actors, and between actors and the environments of their action.

The first clearly relates to architecture in that architectural design often begins with the site (a specific place or location) as a primary force shaping the act of building. The second stems from a critique by sociologist Lucy Suchman of assumptions about purposeful “human” activity common to artificial intelligence research in the ’80s, which tended to think of this activity as a something that proceeded by an a-priori plan that was perfunctorily executed. Both invoke context (a site, an action, other people) as determining factor in trying to understand the object or event in question.

The question of how everyday social uses of different mobile, embedded and pervasive technologies destabilize rationalized use-case scenarios designed around the generic consumer was addressed by a number of the participants. Eric Paulos, director of the Urban Atmospheres group at Intel Research, presented Objects of Wonderment (video): a DIY technology platform for mobile phones that enables users to create their own applications around scenarios specific to their wants/needs/desires given a particular situation.

Usman Haque‘s talk “Technology and users in public space: what’s wrong with this picture?” argued that the very language often used in talking about the problem of designing techno-social assemblages is itself problematic. He presented a series of projects that recast the user as participant, technology as instrument, and public space as the commons, and opened up a larger discussion about the need for a better vocabulary. We’re currently in the process of placing podcasts of the presentations online. We’re still waiting on a few, but if you view what’s there I think you’ll get an idea of the range of perspectives that were brought to bear on this and other questions.

A&ST also invited artists to give their point of view on the various aspects of situated technologies. How important is the artist’s contribution to technological issues in general? What can their work and views bring to ongoing discussions? Is their voice really heard and listened to outside of the art world?

I think the role of artists in technology development is essential.
They address questions concerning technology that often aren’t asked within conventional corporate research labs, and they do so in ways not obvious (or at least apparent) to computer scientists and engineers. This is by no means new. Artists have been contributing to the development of technology for decades, and places like Xerox PARC and Paul Allen’s Interval Research Lab are just two examples of big players in the tech industry looking to artists to help them think in more inventive and/or relevant ways about future technologies.

Whether their voice is really heard is another matter. Natalie Jeremijenko–whose project Live Wire (aka the Dangling String) was developed while she was a researcher at Xerox PARC and was cited by Mark Weiser and John Seeley Brown in their 1995 essay Designing Calm Technology –remarked during one of the panel discussions that the lab director succeeding Weisser considered the project “an embarrassment” and had it removed from the lab. In her presentation she argued that while artists are adept at developing scenarios for computing that couple physical and social situations, without some form of quantitative measure to evaluate the performance of the scenario, it is unlikely to have influence beyond the art + technology world: ie: the computer scientists, venture capitalists and other business interests that drive technology development.

One of your projects Industrian Pilz is quite intriging. It examines industrialization in East Germany through the lens of mycology – the botanical study of fungi. Can you gives us more details about that project? How do you get the idea?

Industrian Pilz began in 1998 with an invitation to propose an installation for Areale99 – an electronic arts festival set within a robotic manufacturing industrial zone located outside Berlin, Germany in a former East German agricultural region. The project has two components. The “pilzcontainer” installation was conceived as a form of Verpflanzen (grafting), investigating the re-circuiting of industrial production and distribution networks via a site-specific, computer-driven installation that reacted in real-time to the flow of traffic on a nearby autobahn. The “pilzfilm“, a digital video-film exploring the flotsam and jetsam drifting in the wake of West Germany’s absorption of a decaying East German state, documents the context of the industrial zone through a schizoid narrative splicing original investigative footage shot on location with archival film clips, scenes of cultural globalization from popular media, and samplings from the music and musings of pioneering myco-aesthete, John Cage. It premiered at the Viper International Film and Video Festival, Basel, Switzerland in November 2003 and was later screened at Anthology Film Archives in New York.

The initial idea came while I was making site visits to the industrial zone in the fall of 98. I was staying in the next town over and rode by bike through the woods to the industrial zone each day. As I passed through the woods, I kept seeing people moving about seemingly aimlessly, heads bent down, scanning the forest floor. It wasn’t until after a fews days of this that I realized they were foraging for mushrooms. So I thought I’d try it myself. The interesting thing about hunting for mushrooms is that you have to develop a keen eye to locate places in the forest conducive to fungal growth. The average mycophyte also relies on visual cues to determine which mushrooms are safe to eat, and which ones are poisonous. They can be a tasty and nourishing food source, but they can also make you very ill if you are not careful. Mushrooms have no use for the sun. They feed of the dead and decaying matter in the woods. And of course there is a rich mythology surrounding them – toadstools and fairy rings and so forth.

Screenshots from Pilzfilm

I found this an intriguing metaphor for describing the conversion of the former east’s agricultural sector into islands of robotic manufacturing zones feeding the (then) current (re)construction boom in Berlin. In this context, mycology became a device to torque a by now overly familiar opposition between a benign and creative nature and a ruthless culture. As capitalism’s claims to absolute naturalness gain rhetorical momentum, the mycological lens allows models of ‘the natural’ both as the agentless conversion of decaying matter and as a parasitic, potentially toxic, and deeply site specific process – one whose odd position in the economy of matter does not allow easy romantic identifications. Better watch what you eat.

What are you currently working on?

After a number of great discussions this fall in Helsinki, Weimar and New York, it’s back into the studio for me. Usman Haque recently sent some code for his environmentXML project to play with. So I’m digging into that a bit. It’s Flickr for your datastreams… I think creating open, participatory infrastructures for large scale interactions–across physical space–is one of the more interesting vectors to pursue right now. An enabling infrastructure for the other part(s) of urban life. I’m also working on another iteration of the TSG, which will be presented through a series of workshops next spring and summer. Other than that, getting back to that sweet spot where you wake up in the morning, work on an idea you had the night before, and (hopefully) have some results to reflect on at the end of the day…

Thanks Mark!

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 19, 2006, 8:26AM

Typotecture: Typography as Architectural Imagery

Acquired: at the Museum Bellerive in Zürich recently, the catalogue for Typotecture: Typography as Architectural Imagery, an exhibition at the Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich, 2000 . Great collection of posters, wide-ranging in provenance and subject matter but all concerning typography "being able to subject itself to gravity and acquire a physical presence, to expand into a space and come closer to architectural form". Includes an essay by curator Andres Janser. Features work by Max Huber, Michael Bierut, Ivan Chermayeff, Mihaly Biró, Claude Luyet, Tomoko Miho, Mirko Ilic, and many others. Ten representative pages below [click for close-ups, at this Flickr set].

Related: Kapitaal; Alex Gopher’s The Child

Originally
from cityofsound

by Dan Hill


reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 3, 2006, 5:48PM

White board animation

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/u46eaeAfeqw"][/gv] Take just a few minutes to watch Kristopher Storm’s great new animation — makes great use of the whiteboard. Shows that there is still a lot that can be done with stop-motion.