Change Blind, Visually Unaware
Posted on April 1, 2008
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EJ Carr, New York fashion photographer who is coming into the gallery soon sent me a clip from this mornings New York Times. It’s about change blindness, particularly or inability to be able to see things changing, a kind of visual inadequacy that is widespread.
After a year as a gallery owner I can attest to people’s curious relationship to the visual. I wouldn’t dare call customers or potential customers blind but I would question whether we talk enough about what we see, how we see, what we are looking for. Anyway here is the clip:
At a meeting “held at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, the audience failed to notice entire stories disappearing from buildings, or the fact that one poor chicken in a field of dancing cartoon hens had suddenly exploded. In an interview, Dr. Wolfe also recalled a series of experiments in which pedestrians giving directions to a Cornell researcher posing as a lost tourist didn’t notice when, midway through the exchange, the sham tourist was replaced by another person altogether.”
It’s a complicated issue but this sentence or part sentence seems to sum it up: “you glance outside at the same old streetscape and nothing registers.” Hopefull our new show coming up in Ten Cubed on the 24th of this month will provide a cure.
Clare Greene
Posted on March 27, 2008
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All teh radio silence has been down to preparing for Clare Greene’s show tonight - I know I should have posted this earlier. How could I forget the blog as a marketing tool?
Clare has a fascinating painterly technique. She sketches by hand, she then sketches the same objects and figures using Paintbox and she then manipulates the form, colour scheme and plane of her work digitally. Then she goes ahead and paints from the screen.
I’ve never heard of screen mediated work like this before and I think it implies some interesting avenues for Clare - representing our screen-based society through the screen and traditional media combined.
Fingers crossed for tonight of course. We have another exhibition coming up in Ten Cubed soon - around April 17th. A busy few weeks ahead.
A Few Questions About Art
Posted on March 17, 2008
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This is an embarrassingly unassertive post. I’m hoping to get a handle on the range of exhibition options artists are using - I mean for the most part new media artists. Of course there is the screen, the projector, and there is the website and the blog, but I came across this today and wondered what artists aspire to in the area of using new media to make virtual art part of the real world experience.
Last autumn the design retailer Target staged the “first “model-less” fashion show in the vast expanse of New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, with holograms sporting the latest fall and winter apparel lines strutting down virtual runways.”
The fascination of this is obvious. Artists are doing great work in Second Life but the holograph brings some of the virtual virtues to the real world. I picked up this from MIT but that apart there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot on the use of holography for exhibition.
Turnaround Time
Posted on March 16, 2008
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It’s time this blog went in another direction. From now on it will be New Media Art - and the sooner I can fix the header image the better.
The blog has addressed many convergence issues - new types of content, new ways of making audio-visual content, and of displaying it, but that’s run its course.
Why the change? I’ve said all I can about how the media is changing whereas I’ve only just begun to understand the changing place of art. When artists make extensive use of convergence technologies there’s every chance their vision will get the kind of currency that audio-visual media now get. Put another way, as the long tail hits the media industry it becomes more like art. It becomes more difficult to find an audience, it becomes more competitive on a personal level, the movie and the TV programme are affected by the same forces that make art appear a monitory pursuit.
While that’s happening artists can now make a better claim to be the engine of innovation. I grew up in a world where that honour belonged to the television. It was the TV making comments on how we lived. It was also a time when political values were extremely important and the objective of many people’s moral pursuits. Now it is celebrity - an area not many artists have really come to grips with. Celebrity as a moral force, as the standard people judge their lives, appearance and achievements by, a change largely brought about by the preponderance of the media.
I’m interested in how artists who use new media are responding to those changes so as of tomorrow that’s what I’ll be writing about.
Quero Search For Networked Future
Posted on March 14, 2008
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I caught this below by way of the lewispr blog.
“The European Union’s competition watchdog has approved the use of €99m (£76m) of French state aid for a consortium attempting to build an internet search engine to take on Google.
The Quaero project is a coalition of 23 companies led by French technology giant Thomson.”
It originated in the Daily Telegraph.
Curious because Google and most other search engines began as garage start-ups. I have a bit of background with Quero as a couple of years back I wrote the document that facilitiated a Euro 50 million investment by the EU in audio-visual search. It was the keep Quero afloat moment. A large part of the justification was, Europe needs a multimedia and semantic search option (Yahoo might argue it is getting there).
I wasn’t against the idea of a European response to Google though then and now I find it debilitating that European politicians and bureaucrats believe it will come from a consortium of large companies.
Pluck’s Blogging $50 million
Posted on March 12, 2008
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Demand Media, an aggregator of specialized Web sites, has acquired social-networking software company Pluck, according to the company.
CNET describes Pluck as a supplier of social-networking software to media companies such as USA Today and Fox….
My recollection was they ran blogburst, a blog syndicator to newspapers. They pulled in some top names.
Now Demand plans on syndicaating its own content out to newspaperes. Demand began life asa minimalist content user - setting up sites where the url had been mispelled.
I joined blogburst when it first started. It monetised your blog by syndicating to newspapers - but it did it in the most trivial way. I earned so little I gave it away.
I’m amazed to see their success but then not so…. those blogs produce great content and newspapers snapped them up. The only negative was how little bloggers got paid but that’s showbiz.
Fascinating development in the content sphere nonetheless. “Demand Media’s first product with Pluck tools will be a social media site launched in partnership with Lance Armstrong, called Livestrong.com. Demand Media plans to introduce a beta of the site in May.”
The Broadband Movie Channel (s)
Posted on March 11, 2008
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From a press release yesterday:
Babelgum, the new interactive web TV portal, has released all entries to the Babelgum Online Film Festival onto its platform for public voting.”
Be interesting to see how far the public get involved.
“The festival introduces a huge variety of professionally produced short films. Over a thousand entries from 86 countries are available to anyone with broadband, reaching a potential global audience of 360 million.” Presume that’s the number of broadband subscribers but: Ever heard of the long tail?
“The Babelgum Online Film Festival is the first of its kind, and provides a unique distribution opportunity for the newest filmmaking talent. A number of entries have been created specifically for the festival, proving that it is also generating new and original content.”
We have a glut of creative talent.
Perhaps providing a glimpse into the future of film production, exhibition and consumer tastes in the digital age, a quarter of the entries are original, unseen content, which means that Babelgum will be premiering the films. Young and emerging filmmakers are seeing strong representation, with entries from 198 film students and the average age of entrants at just 29 years old.
Where are the Ads Going
Posted on March 11, 2008
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When I check my adsense account I’m always surprised by the gap ebtween what these must cost and what I get.
Here’s some data drawn from a recent conference: - 50% of the UK’s 28.3 million Net users shop online. 40% of all online ads are now accessed through search technology. And, according to a US Bancorp Piper Jaffrey study, the average cost to advertisers for online ads is just 27 p a click through as opposed to £9 for direct mail.
Broadband and Those Innovations
Posted on March 11, 2008
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This strikes me as a good use of broadband. The story circulated last year but the film is now ready for release. I’ve taken this verbatim from the publicity for The Objective, a Dan Myrick film, due out soon.
“When Dan Myrick and the producers from JAZ films sent out a world-wide internet casting notice, they employed the services of renowned Casting Director, John Jackson C.S.A, to find the actor to play the role of Sadler in their movie.
Their casting notice happened to appear on a local acting site in Sydney, which prompted Jeff to apply for the role.
After borrowing a mate’s video camera, he recorded the requested scenes in his lounge room. He placed the camera on a chair in front of him, sat on the floor and used the remote to record himself. After several takes, he called upon his neighbour, to choose what she thought was the best one.
With well over a thousand submissions, Jeff won the role of Sadler in the movie.”
Broadband Claims, A Little Dubious
Posted on March 10, 2008
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Charles Leadbeater writing in the Observer Sunday believes broadband access is our most potent way to promote democracy. The article was also a page long ad promoting Charle’s book, We Think. We Think is an extended essay on content co-creation and Charles consults on these issues.
“In time even top-down public services will feel the power of We Think.” That kind of thing. “The Linux community is the most impressive example of sustained We Think.”
The book is published by Porfile and clearly they’ve asked for those two keywords to run through the book, articles and websites associated with it.
Powerful claims. Still I disagree. I think broadband facilitates different kinds of participation but they have little to do with political processes. Or rather political processes are quite separate these days from how we run our lives. I doubt the Guru will survive the move towards participation either.
I sense we are running away from a rational way of life - one where we force egalitarian objectives on our democratic representatives. One where we don’t even force probity on them any longer. One where we’d rather play games like the alternative reality game set up for Halo 2, quote by Charles. Last night I spend an hour on a virtual reality cruise liner - what else needs to be said? In this situation political parties become stronger rather than weaker.
Broadband television, soon to be coupled to broadband games and multiple realities, will accelerate the flight of rational people from dull ole democracy.
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