It’s not a surprise. After information, street maps, and books, Google is at it again. This time the Mountain View giant has chosen art, and recently launched Google Art Project, an innovative platform that offers both a – still not perfect – pseudo-3D navigation of the world’s biggest art institutions and an impressively detailed view of some of the main pieces in their collection. So far the list features the MoMA, the Tate Britain, the Uffizi, the Van Gogh, and several others, but we can expect it to grow in the future. (more…)
“My nephew has HDADD: Hi-Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it’s unbelievably clear.” – Steven Wright
Since Twitter came out it was pretty obvious it was something else. Its minimal, quasi-zen approach (short haiku-style posts, ultra-light interface, a very “carpe diem” real-time nature) won many users over. But why would such a restrictive, limited social network become so popular? There are so many more things you can do via MySpace or Facebook, where you can easily embed everything possibly embeddable.
Nonetheless, although Mark Zuckerberg‘s well-tested money-making machine is still bigger than Twitter (I’d go as far as to say it’s almost necessary for internet users), the social colossus has been learning a lot from its younger, smarter brother.
The “twitterification” of Facebook has raised some perplexities and the opening of that once closed and well-guarded environment wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing for their business. I like the definition of Facebook as a “gated community” (read here): you can easily do everything you need on the internet inside of it and forget about the outside web. This has been part of the network’s strenght in the past, one more reason why it is both scary and addictive.
While Twitter’s openness (making information public and searchable in real-time) has definitely played a major role in the social network’s rise to pop culture phenomenon, replacing Facebook as the next internet thing, I think there is another factor worth analyzing (and no, it’s not journalist A.D.D.). (more…)
It all started by doing what every active internet user does once in a while: egosurfing (or something like that, I wasn’t looking for my own blog – this one here – but for the one I work for).
I googled “yskira.com” and found, at the 8th position on the first result page, a link claiming to be a blog review. The url name read no less than “topblogreview”, so I was intrigued and clicked in hope of a nice comment. It turned out the comment was far more than nice, and even enthusiastic would be a euphemism:
Every post available in the blog is neat, no dirt in terms of inappropriate photos or anything. The articles titles makes you want to read more. I enjoy the widespread reach this site has in terms of its readers from over the world. It’s like the writer has eyes of a hawk not at all missing any point. As soon you read a post you can’t wait to read another one for the tips given. Once you start reading you could not give over.
First of all, such grand terms are so fired up they sound ironic, and second there is no reference whatsoever to what the blog is about. (more…)
In his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius the argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges imagined a place with a completely different perception of reality than ours.
In Tlön “the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say “moon,” but rather “round airy-light on dark” or “pale-orange-of-the-sky” or any other such combination.” Also, lacking the concept of subsequentiality brought by verbs (and heavily discussed by scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Derrick De Kerckhove), “they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas”. This also reflects on Tlön’s philosophy: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”
To read the story many years later it’s kind of easy to think of it as a metaphor for the internet, even though there are some important differences between Borges’ imaginary land and the World Wide Web. Google continuosly caching the web makes time stand still, but the importance of real-time has been re-established after all the Twitter Search buzz that shook SEO blogs a few months ago. Also, sequentiality of events still matters a lot: any happening carries its own trail of cascade sub-events, parodies and top-down debate or conspiracy theories on the internet, and while blogging we’re desperate to link as much as possible.
Still, a crucial similarity to Tlön is the process of tagging. The self-selecting nature of meta-data, driven by user-generated tags and keywords ruling both Google’s ad services and the much more innocent knowledge-focused social bookmarking networks like Delicious, is one of the main features of Web 2.0 and the semantic web.
“I saw a commercial on late night TV, it said, ‘Forget everything you know about slipcovers!’ So I did. It was a load off my mind! Then the commercial tried to sell me slipcovers, but I didn’t know what the fuck they were!” – Mitch Hedberg
Although I’ve always been reading it, I had never put my hands on Wikipedia before. Turns out the interface is kind of messy; everything is user-generated, but sometimes not so user-friendly. Before I could get to writing I had been going in circles (metaphorically speaking) for a while and my click finger was getting bored. Eventually, I was able to start playing in my personal sandbox and start working on my entry. Being a stand-up fan and unhappy with the information provided by the italian wiki, I thought I might start with one of the many american comedians who had a lot going on media-wise, like Dave Chappelle. I was thinking the whole Africa thing and the Oprah interview were perfect material to contribute spreading the word on enlighted comedians in my country (an often difficult ground for those who dissent, no matter how comicly).
The italian entry for Chappelle is kinda slim, and it needs some plumping up. However, I wound up creating a page from scratch, and I did it for Mitch Hedberg. The guy was hilarious and acted like only a sincere person in showbiz can do, confused out of his mind. I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to his postumous Do You Believe In Gosh?, but it’s never enough. (more…)
Here’s a post I already published on yskira.com a few months ago.
Thanks to the internet, we now own more knowledge than we can possibly absorb. As a consequence, the web is more and more about interfaces, about the way we’re served this cognitive over-abundance and the graphic ways we can filter it. Interfaces become the aesthetics of the latest postmodernity: when all information is common, to filter, choose, and even discard it, is an act of elegance, a semiotic gesture more significant than information itself. So, the explosion of maps, indexes, graphs and charts over the internet becomes the world wide web’s most relevant content. (more…)
(I did this interview for Ymag. You can also read it here.)
As promised, here's the second part of our interview to bestiario.org. These last questions touch the very sensible subject of geospatial web, one of the emerging technologies that are already changing (and are likely to change more) internet use for everybody.
What do you think is the correct balance between direct information and an imaginative visualization? Do you consider your work as closer to visual research, like generative art, or to conveying customized, intuitive information modeled on the reading user?
Different projects deserve different approaches. But there are two things we don´t want to create: aesthetic experiences that barely communicates an idea and analytic and cryptical tools that give computed answers. We believe in the power of human brain – and not only on its rational capacities – to understand and create. Our spaces should facilitate the brain's hard work giving it information and several ways to navigate it, display it and combine it. We strongly believe in intuition. Our spaces might give and experience to perception, analysis and intuition. Generative art is usually devoted to results instead of giving understanding of the processes. That´s why, although if we use some generative arts techniques, we are more close to "conveying customized, intuitive information modeled on the reading user". (more…)
