PBS Arts Off Book

Watch Off Book: Visual Culture Online on PBS. See more from OFF BOOK.

This is a PBS documentary series loosely related to the 'arts'. It's very slickly produced, and interviews the very fashionable in New York City. If you find a great cynicism welling up in yourself while watching these, I think it is forgivable. Perhaps the best description of this particular series of videos is that they highlight a number of popular cultural trends that have probably just reached their apex and are now sloping downwards.

Networked Public

Cultural researcher Danah Boyd explains some of the more subtle motivations of social networking in "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites". In the essay she expands on the concept of "public" spaces, impressions and attitudes to reveal the effects social networking may be having on today's youth. With social networking sites, youth are able to create a 'profile' for themselves and post 'comments' on each other's profiles. As Boyd puts it,

"Friends are publicly articulated, profiles are publicly viewed, and comments are publicly visible"

She focuses specifically on myspace, but the implications of a "networked public" carry on to other sites. (The above picture is a typical example of a picture posted as a comment on myspace)

Popplets

Whenever I hear "popplet", or a similarly catchy internet term, I can't help but think of tribbles. (Oddly, I also just noticed the their resemblance to hedgehogs). Hrrm... Anyway, www.popplet.com is a website where you can make your own, personal mind-maps and share them with people on the web. It's got a nice interface and it's real easy use.

Info and graphics

Making generational distinctions is always difficult and usually left as merely a vague separation of time periods. With computers and the internet, however, those 'time periods' appear more condensed than they have throughout much of recent history. There's a sense that culture is changing more rapidly than ever and that it's harder to get an accurate perception of those changes.

A Tale of Infinite Adventure

Distributed cognition is a decedent of the idea of extended mind which I've addressed earlier on this blog. It's one thing to expound an idea as a description of a phenomenon already in place. It's quite another to then take that idea and use it to create an altogether new example. That's what the Infinite Adventure Machine is.

PressPausePlay

PressPausePlay

PressPausePlayis a new movie about the art industry primarily, and (from what it appears in the trailer) art and culture secondarily. I'm only judging by the trailers as I haven't had a chance to watch the entire movie, which is notable for being offered free for download.

Retouching Self-Portrait

Most of our identity is constructed from what we learn. In a sense, we're walking amalgams of bits and pieces in formation. The historical threads of written and interpreted thought pass through us while we keep only fragments. Our tacit paraphrase of these ideas weave together into unified, open-ended wholes. It's this shredded, textual characteristic of identity that my self-portrait attempts to represent.

Compositing Big Ideas

-The culmination of the flickr clusters assignment-

This is an illustration of technology's potential to 'extend' our mind beyond its dermatological confines. Facilitated by technology we're able to communicate over great distances almost instantaneously. Moving images, and images that move, contain our collective memories projected on screens of various size and orientation. We are continually sharpening our intuitive use of these tools to phantasmically extend our primitive reach in the world.

Intertextuality

This is my example of Intertextuality in the form of a faux magazine cover for Dragon integration into society. As a 'layer of interpretation' in visual imagery, Intertextuality is the same idea represented in different forms in different contexts.

Dragons have had numerous representations throughout various time periods and civilizations as well as various media. For topicality, immigration seemed to loosely fit, but I tried to give it a humorous spin ;D

Brain Movies

Azarius

By now this has been all over the tech blogs, but it is a pretty big deal. That is, if the implications of this technology pan out. The idea is that we can reconstruct the image of a person's mind. It would be inaccurate to somehow say the image is in a person's brain, but that's still the idea. The attempt is to visualize externally what a person is seeing while watching a movie.

Photoshop Semiotics

Self Portrait at Buchenwald:It's the Real Thing by Alan Shcechner

What might appear to be a confusing article title turns out to be interesting idea. For the authors verbiage might be the flavor of the day in this piece, but from what I can gather, it attempts to describe how our understanding of the photographic image has changed since the advent of the computer age. In this case, the 'semiotics' part is not specifically about language, but what we interpret as symbols in in computer manipulated photographic images.

The Extended Mind thesis

The cloud assignment big idea I'm choosing is derived fromThe Extended Mind thesisby David Chalmers and Andy Clark. In short, the idea is that technology is/becomes an extension of our minds, literally. Our mind in this view doesn't end with our brain. The technology is intimately connected to us and the way we think. They use the example of a smartphone, but imagine having to hammer a nail for instance. What we first think of is a hammer. It doesn't usually occur to us to punch the nail with our fists or to even get a rock. The hammer, even before we find a particular hammer, is already there in our thoughts. When using the hammer, it is directly an extension of the thought process required to insert the nail.

Another example might be how we've adopted not only the term, "Google" into our lexicon, but how when we attempt to remember something our first inclination is to find a computer and search for it. My muscle memory actually has my hands moving towards the keyboard position. Here we've fused an entirely new word with the phenomenon. When we're instructed to 'just google it' we're not only requested to use a particular tool, but a very specific part of that tool which we're expected to be closely associated with. This particular example even has some concerned to an extent similar to the fear of losing a limb.

Sweeny's Big Idea

Robert W. Sweeny had a big idea. (in the sense of Sydney R. Walker's big ideas). Part of that big idea was metaphorical. In this case, he borrowed some characterizations from William Gibson's novel, "Neuromancer": the cyborg, the clone, and the parasite. Not too long ago these fictional characters seemed rather far off, but we're seeing them closer and closer to reality. Sweeny viewed them as a critique on the, "connections between individuals, objects and institutions". Used in an artistic sense that very well may be the case. People however appear to have a much greater tolerance for adaptation to change. Transhumanism in particular has been gaining notoriety of late.

NYC Skyline

Matteo Pericoli

Being on the precipice of the 9/11 ten year anniversary I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about the New York City skyline. In my Technology in the Art Room class, my group happened to pick the skyline as an example of an iconic image and how it fits in with Walter Benjamin's theory of Aura. His description is somewhat ellusive, but many appear to take it as a form of 'authenticity'. That's hard to imagine considering experts go to great lengths to authenticate questionable works and authentication is often given in the form of a written document for a particular work.

A better analogue for the idea of aura might be 'presence'. The point being that the presence of a particular artwork is lost in the reproduction of that work. Eitherway, the New Yorker Magazine recently featured an artist specifically for his illustrations of the NYC skyline. They discuss in part how the loss of the twin towers affects his work. Could it be said the skyline lost some of its aura with the change?

Banksy in Nola

Image source

Having just visited New Orleans I spotted some graffiti that looked like Banksy's work. It's hard to tell though because he's got some imitators. I think he might even encourage them. Either way, I wasn't sure and just did a quick search and apparently he has visited New Orleans!