art tech culture 1.05 : Digital Relationships
Posted by art.tech.culture - January 29 2010In this episode, we explore what a digital relationship is; the good, the bad and downright creepy.
The digital relationship for some of us is the connection between people who live apart, such our hosts (Alex & Ted). We use Skype to conduct our inter-provincial show (in addition to a dodgy mic which is the cause for the audio lags) and because it’s an element of our mission (art, technology and culture). Even if we were in the same room, we would still use Skype to conduct our shows.
The music this week is “Homage To Patagonia” by Lemon Jelly.
Our homage, is to evade current events through way of natual expression, and we think it’s special to mention that tonight (Jan 29, 2010) we’ll all find the biggest and brightest moon of 2010. It’s called a Wolf Moon (no, not the Internet meme by a similar name) that “will appear 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than any other full moon this year.”
We’ve experimented with the dating sites, we have our blogs but we probably use Facebook more to digitally connect to people. Stefana Broadbent, a digital anthropologist, relays via a TED talk, that while Facebook stats that the average Facebook user has 120 friends, they only talk to four to six of them on a regular basis depending on their gender.
She says her research shows that 80% of cellphone calls are made to four people, and when it comes to Skype, it comes down to two people (like us).
In this show, we also included a public service announcement (PSA) from the Ad Council titled “Textual Harassment” which brings us to the creepy part, where people can abuse technology for harassment. But what’s worse might be when “bots” stalk you; programmed scripts designed to harass you like spam?
art tech culture 1.04 : Memory Device
Posted by art.tech.culture - January 22 2010This Veen is quite shorter, with mention of John Berger.
Who needs memories when we have our photo albums stored online and meta-tagged? Or local hard drives for that matter?
The photos at the start were from a Polaroid commercial and the music this week is thanks to Montreal group Fly Pan Am with their song “Vos rêves revers”.
art tech culture 1.03 : Evolution
Posted by art.tech.culture - January 15 2010We started this show being inspired by a talk by Dr. Susan Blackmore, a British Psychologist and Memeticist, after she gave her perspective on genetics and memetics.
Her words that “design out of chaos without the aid of Mind” really struck a chord with us as it followed up on last week’s show when we closed off the show summary by quoting reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian: “it’s okay to lose control”.
That said, yes, we did notice the audio lags in this week’s video but that’s okay. And the closing error message at the end of this show was pure chance – it was an ironic and amusing close to the topic of computing the universe.
But could machines supersede humans like Terminator showed us, if robots could beat chess geniuses a mere decade ago? Will artists be replaced by Computer Aided Design applications, if we can solve the chaos theory? The answers might lie here.
The music this week is brought to you by Montreal’s HṚṢṬA, with “Swallow’s Tail”. And the closing credits’ sounds was a great remix of Windows’ nightmares.
art tech culture 1.02 : Social Media
Posted by art.tech.culture - January 09 2010Well, we had some technical problems this time around, you might notice some audio lag. The show wasn’t posted until late late Friday night (post date is Jan 9th as a result). At least we figured out how to finally make the videos wide-screen with better video quality.
The song in the background is “Last Place” by Toronto’s Broken Social Scene.
In this episode, we talked a little about the social media universe.
One of the social media planets we’re using is Facebook (check out our group page here), where we gained 150+ members in our first week. It was decided that we would use Facebook as our platform for invoking discussion instead of using an Internet forum software because the majority of people on Facebook are using legitimate profiles with real connections to real people.
This is a primary component of what we’re trying to achieve with art.tech.culture; encouraging positive discussion.
Social media is indeed changing human processes and structure, and perhaps is the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution but when more than one social site ironically connects with another, we witness a profound example of social change. For example, Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit) made a TED speech titled “How to make a splash in social media”. His speech told the story of Mister Splashy Pants.
In November 2007, in response to the Japanese Fisheries Agency’s plan to kill 50 humpback whales, Greenpeace decided to micro-chip one of the whales and track it via satellite. To personify the campaign, they held an online poll featuring about 30 nominated names. Most of the names held some deep meaning cultured words, but one name stood out: Mister Splashy Pants.
One evening, someone using an Arizona IP address found their way around the one vote per person rule and began voting for Mister Splashy Pants 120 times per second for about 38 minutes (roughly 4,500 votes). Even though Greenpeace had posted about it and removed the votes, several social media web sites like Fark, BoingBoing, reddit and Digg (to name a few) began to spread the news and people started voting in the name somewhat as a joke.
In less than a day, the votes for Mister Splashy Pants soared from 5% to 75%. When voting closed, Mister Splashy pants had won the poll with 78% of the vote, or 120,000 of the 150,000 votes. Reddit claimed they were responsible for 20,000 of these votes.
This was a great example of a campaign that might have only got a small amount of media attention that was hijacked into a successful viral campaign. In the end, the Japanese government reversed their decision to kill the whales.
Alexis Ohanian closed his speech with this:
The (other) important thing is that it costs nothing to get that content online now. There are so many great publishing tools that are available, it only takes a few minutes of your time now to actually produce something. And the cost of iteration is so cheap that you might as well give it a go.
And if you do, be genuine about it. Be honest. Be up front. And one of the great lessons that Greenpeace actually learned was that it’s okay to lose control.
art tech culture 1.01 : Start
Posted by art.tech.culture - January 01 2010The first show.
A patchwork of a/v cables and connections, none of which are named after the Radio Corporation of America, coupled with some creative attention-deficit disorders. Kurt Cobain was right when he said making a video takes a day but it’s possible to squeeze the shooting alone to six hours as we did.
The music playing while we ramble on about black snowflakes and how it reminds us of Toronto (or Sudbury) is Toronto instrumental rock band Do Make Say Think. The song title is “Think” and if we had more time we would have played “Make” because ultimately that is what we want from our audience in the months to come, to respond by creating something.
Along the way, and in remembering Cobain, our driving follows us to Seattle where all those cars were mercy to the icy streets three years ago.
So we warmed up by creating our own fires, respectively and got to the question: What is Art? Please tell us.
The cat at the end is D’Noddy Oh, one of Dave Twigg‘s rulers.
