I made the cylinder head using SL building tools, and applied a hello kitty image as the texture. Then I checked off all of the boxes that let gravity, wind, etc. affect the head, which is why it moved and wiggled whenever my avatar moved. Originally I was going to keep the skull head that came with the ready made costume, but decided against it when I had the idea for a hello kitty head (way more epic.)
Should people be forced to move out into the country in
order to get genuine freedom from the overbearing level of advertisement in
public space? This documentary focuses on this very issue: visual pollution in
urban areas. The film brings up the very important question of why the city has
the right to sell of our visual lives to companies who want to sell products.
Whoever owns the land that a building is located on or that a billboard is
placed on has the right to rent out space for the benefit of private industry.
The film covers two issues in this debate about advertising
in public areas. The first of these has to do with the legality of the
advertisements. Although it is legal to put up billboards, there are legal
limits in many areas to how big they may be, and in the case of electronic
billboards, how distracting they may legally be. It has always mystified me how
it is legal for casinos and car dealerships to put up huge colorful signs that
blink, change and light up all to the distraction of passing drivers, but it is
illegal to have undercarriage blue lights on your vehicle because it might
cause an accident. The law in this case seems to reflect the interests of
business and not really the interest of public safety.
The other issue touched on in the film was the reaction of
some select people to what has become of our public visual space. Artists are
drawn to beautify the spaces around them, and in the case of mass visual
pollution, one artist in particular decided to bring his art to solve the
problem. The film documents a man in New York who paints over billboards in his
home city and replaces them with original works of art. This is a prime example
of the conflict between creative people and the cult of consumerism.
4.
To build free societies you must limit the control of the past.
The
past is working right now to control our future, and keep their large profits
as far into this future as possible. The largest companies in the country,
those same companies that hold so much money and therefore power and influence,
have made it their mission to protect those profits. Their weapons are their
enormous money reserves, and therefore the best lawyers money can buy. These
organizations have been using Congress and federal law to control the
activities of our people. We are not even dignified to be called people anymore;
we are simply consumers. The producers of consumption have perpetrated the myth
of intellectual property to the point that artists, and really everyone, are
constrained legally to only play by their rules, the rules of producer and
consumer. Why is this a bad thing?
The
irony of the arguments against free and fair use is that everybody borrows. The
very products, such as television, movies, and music, that organizations are
attempting to protect from theft, where created with borrowed elements. That is
how human creativity is able to function; we take in inspiration and ideas from
our environment and remix them into our own point of view. Art works the same
way, even the highly commercialized music and movie products of our modern day
society have been borrowed and advised by what came before. To say that all of
a sudden such activities are illegal and dangerous is a blatant attempt at fear
mongering. It is a way for the past to continue profiting as it has before.
In
RiP, the film discusses how Disney in particular used music and stories from
the past to create its shows and movies. How is it possible that even though
the company was built on the intellectual property of others, the law says that
they now have the right to sue whoever uses a Disney movie in a mashup? Well,
because the movie and music organizations influenced those laws into existence
in the first place, to support their profits. Now if an artist/consumer tries
to update those stories and make them relevant today in a way similar to
Disney, they are sued for copyright infringement.
As
Ani Difranco sings mockingly, "What's good for business is good for the
country. Our children still take that lie like communion." If you put the
societal costs of these copyright laws up against their economic gains, I am
fairly certain the moral right would be obvious. It would be a tragedy of human
evolution and creativity if the PTB where able to monopolize the internet the
same way they monopolized what is heard on radios or seen on televisions and
movie screens. The internet is an incredible tool because it can be a way of
bringing back the old folk mode of creation. The promise of the internet has to
be protected in the courts, or else it has no chance.
Since
there is no real way to kill copyright violations, everybody borrows in order
create, there is only the option to criminalize the act. RiP, "If this is
crime, we have a whole generation of criminals." Either we unite in
telling these companies to back off and allow us a reasonable amount of freedom
in the use of their products, or they will continue to constrain the
marketplace of ideas as long as legally possible.
Trained professionally to be an architect, Shepard has expanded his
role to include artist and researcher. Everything he does is
interrelated, his art is sculptural which lends itself to his
architecture, and the works are also explorative of his research
interests. His interests include the effects of pervasive media on our
cultural lives, including in the construction of our urban landscapes
and cities. This is where his sculptures come in: he conceptualizes
items that really will be useful in an imagined “Sentient City”
future. These he has compiled into a video explaining and
demonstrating their function. The website where you can find this
video is called The Sentient City Survival Kit. Viewers learn about
Shepard’s Ad-hoc Dark Roast Coffee Mug, GPS Serendipitor, RFID
Under(a)wear, and CCD-Me-Not Umbrella.
Ad-hoc Dark Roast Coffee Mug – A way to transmit messages from one mug
to the small LCD screen on the lid of another mug nearby. Tipping the
mug back and sipping form it broadcasts a typed message to the other
mugs on the network. The applications for this mug are limited since
cellphones and texting already allow for immediate transmitting of
messages. However, there is on advantage of these mugs over
cellphones: security. The mugs are secure in a way that texting would
not be, since they can only be viewed by others on the network who
also have a Ad-hoc Dark Roast Coffee Mug.
GPS Serendipitor – A cellphone application that allows users to input
a location and receive a ready-made route to get to that location,
with serendipity along the way. The application works by planning a
route for the user to take that consists of roads that person has yet
to take. This way, there is always something new to be discovered.
RFID Under(a)wear – Underwear garments with vibrating implants that
are designed to identify when Radio Frequency ID’s are nearby and
alert the wearer with vibration. RFID’s allow hackers to view the
purchases and other records of the people they scan who own RFID
credit cards (a technology that should be in widespread use in the
future.) There are currently no security measures that can prevent
this, hence Shepard’s ironic Under(a)wear. The product promises to
provide “a stimulating, if no longer secure” experience.
CCD-Me-Not Umbrella – An umbrella with implanted LEDS all along the
top dome and batteries in its stem. These LEDS were designed to blind
the security cameras of the future, making it impossible for their
movement tracking algorithms to latch onto the figure holding this
umbrella. This would allow purchasers of this CCD-Me-Not Umbrella to
maintain more privacy.
There is a blog that details the plans for these objects and allows
for comment and discussion. The link is http://survival.sentientcity.net/blog/. The video is on the main page
of the website. Unlike the usual fate of sculpture, to be admired only
by a few who can come to view it in person, the video allows for
Shepard’s art pieces to be considered and enjoyed on a large scale.
This is another example of the irony of using technology to talk about
technology.
These artifacts are supposed to be imaginings of a particular type of
future, all from the mind of Mark Shepard. Through his research he has
discovered the ways in which technology is reaching into every aspect
of our lives and changing it. Technology will be the driving force
behind our future designs and ways of interacting. Mark’s work is an
exploration of the mind, into the matter of new technology and its
integration into our day-to-day lives. Although the works are serious
in the subject they deal with, all of the artifacts have just the
right amount of humor and entertainment.
Paulo Cirio
Paulo may be an artist, but he is one living deep in the technological
trenches. Hacktavist and programmer are also titles that he holds. His
art is meant to make a statement about technology as it exists today.
In particular, how present day users interact with those technologies.
Paulo created a three step project where he targeted some of the
biggest brands on the internet market. He called this project the
Hacking Monopolism Trilogy.
One step targeted Amazon, taking their own software that allowed
shoppers to preview a section of a book that was for sale, and
expanding it so that the whole book could be read. Then they set these
titles up on a website so that people could come and read the books
for free. By doing this Paulo was playing with the idea of paying for
copyrighted materials, materials that could be made free with some
simple hacking. This leg of the trilogy was called Amazon Noir, and
the purpose behind the hack was to turn Amazon’s tool against them, a
theme that runs through the whole trilogy.
Another of these hacks was focused on Google, and in particular a
program that Google uses to allow merchants to advertise for a small
fee per click. This program is called Google Adsense, and it works by
website hosts allowing ads on their sites in exchange for payments
depending on how many clicks those ads receive. The ad owners pay for
the clicks. It is a very successful source of income for Google, and
Paulo conceived of a way to turn this technology against the search
engine giant. The hacktavist/artist was able to change the ads to
contribute the funds to the wrong account.
However, the most famous part of the Hacking Monopolism Trilogy was
the last part of it: Face to Facebook. The project consisted of
designing software that would extract data from many different
Facebook user profiles, some of which was set to public and some data
that was not. This data was used to set up a phony dating website,
which the artist named Lovely Faces. This website was not like most
dating websites in that you could search for people not just based on
their interests, but also by whether or not they looked happy,
interesting, or any number of different ways in their photographs.
Paulo accomplished this through the creation of another set of
software, consisting of algorithms that scanned images and then placed
them into different categories. The user profile pictures that were
taken from Facebook were fed through the algorithms. Paulo’s purpose
in creating this fake website using data from real people, was to show
Facebook users that their information was not as secure as they might
think.
Face to Facebook received much media attention, probably because it
did raise some important issues about privacy. The project also
brought this issue to the attention of Facebook users who might be too
trusting of the website they give their personal information to. Many
major news organizations spread the story to the public, and even
though the website Lovely Faces was shut down it still had people
talking about what privacy they could expect when we have this kind of
technology. So, in effect, Paulo’s purpose for his art project was
successful.
Hacking Monopolism is a good example of how technology can be used to
open people’s eyes to important social issues. In the case of Amazon
Noir, the issue was copyrights. In Google Adsense and Facebook both,
the issue was security. Paulo is doing what hacktavists do best,
bucking the system just enough to open people’s eyes and hopefully
affect change.
Message
Both Shepard and Cirio are using technology in their own ways, and both should be considered to be researchers because they are exploring the impact of technology. They are the quintessential digital artists, using the digital form to describe the world and the realities they see. Where they differ is in the approach.
Shepard considers some far out future (or maybe not so far out) where the world is permeated entirely by computers. In response to the research he does in this arena, he expands the ideas he finds there into art sculptures that cause us to look at the realities of where these technologies are taking us. In his works there is also a bit of humor and light-heartedness that makes these works powerful but also personal.
Cirio is different in this respect. He does use humor but it is not so lighthearted. Also, rather than benign objects that come from the fancy and serve only as conceptual forms, Cirio uses the technologies that are already embedded in our culture to make his points. Facebook, Google, and Amazon are names that everybody knows, and at one point or another we have to come into contact with them or their influence. As such Cirio’s Hacking Monopolism Trilogy is relevant in a way that the Sentient City Survival Guide is not. It is in people’s faces because it represents reality, as it exists today.
Overall, both projects address the same issues, with data mining and security being prominent among them. Despite the many advantages to the continued advance of technology, there are some issues that deserve more attention than they are receiving. In company’s quest for more profits and cutting edge products, it is up to consumers to tell these companies that privacy has to be considered.
The Improvable website would be a hub for improvers and the people who could supply them with great ideas. My main focus for the website would be on flash mobs who perform choreographed dances in public places, whether to make a statement or just in the spirit of stirring things up. There would be two groups, one of idea generators and another of performers who went out and put those ideas into practice. I would also include another sub-hub, directed towards the more political side of things. In particular this second, smaller hub would be to serve in the Wall Street Occupiers movement. The prototype website above shows how I would set up and design this interface.
At first I wasn't aware of what a photo essay was, so I went to the site's archive and started to browse around, clicking on whatever looked interesting. I found this link and realized that these photo essays have the potential to be truly moving. I wanted to something less sentimental and more artistic and personal, so I thought about possibilities and realized that I had the perfect essay topic. Reno Clouds. I have been taking pictures of beautiful Nevada cloudscapes for years, and had quite a few. After narrowing it down to the following 3 images, I wrote an accompanying passage about what the cloudscapes mean to me.
This is a sample of the beautiful Reno, Nevada skies. These cloudscapes occur every so often in the Biggest Little City and they are a great source of creative inspiration.
The concept behind this website was not so hard to figure out. I chose to submit my pictures because this seemed like a fun way to show the effects of time. After clicking through quite a few of other people's contributions, the ideas were flowing and I went through some old photo albums to find a good starting photo.
This is possibly my favorite of all the crowd-sourcing projects we had to choose from. The idea of speaking directly to an old photograph and expressing whatever it is that the photograph brings up makes for an interesting dynamic. That is evident when you scroll through the posted contributions to the website.
Dear Photograph:
Here's to making a pile of wood a home.
