CPD-BLOG

Behind the suface

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:15:00 +0000

Underwater ballet, photographed by Nadia Moro.

AMNH films

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:52:25 +0000

I defy anyone not to find this series of films from the American Museum of Natural History inspiring. This film is basically the top half of Powers of Ten complete with a few decades more learnings.

No fly posting

admin — Wed, 19 May 2010 11:22:10 +0000

There’s something perverse about saying something, sticking it on the wall, and expecting a predefined response from it. I don’t really know the statistics that prove the effectiveness of billboards and print ads, I don’t really care. But it does feel that when you do that you’re engaging in the kind of behavior that a parent would with a child. Saying something is true, demanding they believe it, and expecting no critical response. There’s also something perverse about a society that has to invent its way out of the situation it created for itself. No one likes being shouted at. It’s also uplifting that a small group of people can innovate on a platform that has been under the control of moneyed organisations for a hundred years.
Artvertiser is a system for replacing these proprietary images with a community platform for anyone to display their imagery, messages, stories on top.
The concept becomes more exciting when you think about the growing smartphone user base. Anyone with one of these devices will be able to use it as a lens to scrub these owned messages from their world and create an alternative cityscape. To empower the people that live there to communicate to their neighbours. The idea of subverting brand messages has been around for a while, but this technology enables more people to take control of their built environment.
I’d like to see these types of systems open up into a robust platform that people can invent upon. Creating communal gaming environments, message boards, local information systems, as well as artistic expression.
It’s important that these systems are open, so that organisations don’t appropriate it as just another branding layer and are made to compete with community innovation on a level playing field for people’s attention, engagement and interest.
Watch the video below the fold on their site. Kudos to Intermediae for providing funding.

Streamgraph

admin — Tue, 18 May 2010 15:28:39 +0000

I’m working on a project at the moment to create a communal sense of accumulated achievement over time. A way of changing behaviors in regard to energy usage. I like the Streamgraph as a method of telling a story, it’s visually organic, not too analytical, and feels gentle. As a way of engaging a viewer with data in an emotional way it works well. Detailed write up here. Open source code to experiment with your own here.

Human Happiness Meter

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:09:36 +0000

The observed environment causes physical chemical reactions which in turn cause emotions that stimulate subjective self expression. I want to create a system that will convert subjective self expression into an objective form that can be universally comprehended by everyone, with no language or cultural barriers.
The objective beauty of flowers has been investigated by artists and thinkers for thousands of years, their attractiveness is not culturally determined, and is consistent throughout different cultures through the ages. I think this is a uniqueness of a biological form, that its states are unambiguous, unlike colour or graphical systems would be. A flower in full bloom is a universally positive symbol of life, and the inverse for its withered state. Alexander Stengel’s wonderful films are perfect for this. The flower withering and dying would represent negative emotions, and in full bloom more positive emotions. The artistic history of the flower in still life paintings has an understated sombre quality and is a study on the inconstancy and brevity of life.
I’m not interested in making a familiar reward based input/output interaction. I’m more interested in making a comment on something I’m curious about, and in this case the level of appreciation or investment that it takes to fully understand is the responsibility of the observer. And in that respect it has a relationship with the artistic paintings it’s derived from, in that the deepness of appreciation of the work is proportionally related to the experience you get from it. And in that way it moves away from the paradigm of the Internet, although it exists through the Internet, in that it isn’t based around some sort of utility or easily comprehended end point that grabs at your attention to keep you engaged. The pace of its functioning requires more time to appreciate than would usually be expected online or outside a gallery space. Which is why I’ll also create a video of the installation working, that would convey the themes and ideas of the object.
The installation asks the question if emotional expression is a function of human life, is the flower technically alive, is it more alive than the organic form it represents, and how do our emotions effect the physical world?

Intimacy and Loneliness

admin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:47:39 +0000

Everyday communication is conducted in discrete zones, Facebook, Twitter, email, IM, Skype, SMS. Abstracted and mapped onto functions like upload, send, attach, comment, tag. These functions often overlap and don’t facilitate intimate interaction with other people. Communicating feels like filling in a form, and notifications of these communications adds to the cacophony of distracting bleeps and bounces that subliminally increase our stress levels and reduce our concentration. We’ve become prolific journalists of our own lives yet this mass of work and energy produces no beautiful thing, nothing that someone else can behold and cherish. We’re compelled to spend so much of our time away from the people we love, yet we develop these disperse virtual identities that are becoming omnipresent, can we create something out of these identities that makes our absence less felt?
Being connected online and having new forums help invent new ways of communicating and has been a huge benefit to our society, although the potential for communication in my opinion hasn’t really been exploited online, we’re still using the internet in the way we used pens and paper, writing things down, sending them, waiting for a response. The advances we see are in the speed and scope of our textual communication. Faster and broader. But no change in the quality of our communication, the mass of these efforts has no weight, no singular representation in our lives.
Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary anthropologist who has conducted research on how our social world is constructed by what we can handle. The size of the social group we can have is dictated by our brains, the number of relationships we can maintain a personal history with is 150. Cross cultural and backed up by research.
We should use the internet to create richer relationships, because there is no doubt that in densely populated societies, the internet is a great management utility for our relationships, but simply broadcasting our thoughts and feelings out to our communities and communicating textually will never create sustainable and rich friendships ‘words are slippery stuff’ and real communication relies heavily on face to face interaction and touch.
If each sentence, photo, friend, email, message, were a small piece of Playdoh dropped into a bucket, when we roll all the pieces together what kind of thing would it create, how big would it be, what colour would it be, would absent friends and family grow to cherish it?
This would be your digital footprint made visible. Can we create something with a personality that changes and evolves depending on you, that a friend or loved one can relate to as representing you, something that can live in many places and be a companion, and become a new way of communicating with someone, a way of making online interactions more fun, spontaneous, engaging, rather than technical, functional and cold. Can we make our online lives more intimate?
I propose making software that can live on a bespoke unit or more plausibly on a mobile phone, that can marry with your partners corresponding software, and once partnered, can never be undone. You would link avatars together so two people would be connected through these Tamagochi-like objects opening up the possibility of more intimate interactions. On their phone your partner could record a wake up call for you that’s transmitted to their avatar on your phone, being there in the morning to gently wake you up. It could grow large and vibrant when you get closer to them, vibrate when the other person cups the phone. Fade if you haven’t been close for any length of time. People should be able to invent their own interactions on top of the platform. The myriad sensors on mobile devices are opening opportunities to develop more surprising communication and continuous sharing.
It would be great if the internet could incorporate touch, movement and warmth to text, image and sound when communicating whilst apart, developing a free new environment for deepening relationships with whoever you choose.
Intimacy and Lonliness image by Mike Mills.

Moscow to Vladivostok

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:45:08 +0000

Fantastic Google Maps mash up, travel the full length of the Trans Siberian Railway, the pride of Russia, whilst listening to Gogol’s Dead Souls. Amazing. I’m hoping for a few days, bed ridden by flu, where I’ll have the excuse to go the full length of this Russian odyssey. I’d have to get a dubbed audio book, but this is entertainment! In high definition from YouTube too.

Evident Utensil

admin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:13:30 +0000

Evident Utensil music video, interesting datamoshing texture, digital psychedelic. Right click and watch it big.

Sync/Lost

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:47:46 +0000

Sync/Lost is a multi-user installation for immersion in the history of electronic music.

Die Antwoord

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:01:33 +0000

Class voyeurism, catchy music and lots of wrong things, all made right. Right click to watch big.