matt:littlemore

‘When 24-year-old Jacob Quaglozzi won a contest to design a Labour election poster, he doubtless thought it was the first rung on the political ladder. But yesterday his ambitions appeared to have been nipped in the bud after his idea backfired spectacularly.’ Mail Online, April 5th 2010.
The idea was to compare David Cameron to the politically incorrect Eighties TV detective Gene Hunt, but instead this pop-media subversion (copyright issue not mentioned) was subverted by the Torys to use as their own election poster… apparently pleased with the unintentional rebranding of Cameron to make him ‘cooler, less posh’. The winning labour poster comes with a prize to visit the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising offices.
The tories have called in M&C Saatchi, notable for the 1997 Tony Blair “demon eyes” campaign, more than a decade after the ad agency last worked for the party. Saatchi & Saatchi was appointed in 2007 to devise Labour’s advertising and are no longer connected with the brothers Maurice & Charles (M&C).
How will the impact of the governments’ white paper on Digital Media affect these cases of Visual Media Mash Up and subversion of ideas/intellectual property?

There are lots of incredible generative data visualisation pieces around at the moment, and some great inspiration for the forthcoming Creative Flows project. With our group already having an idea of what we are trying to achieve, some examples on the net seemed to immediately jump out as a benchmark.

Being very much a graphic design influenced team, the visual aesthetic was discussed almost before the actual concept. Digg BigSpy feeds the most popular stories ‘Dug’ by users and is definately close to how I imagine the news feed type aesthetic for our project. I like the minimal use of colour, varying type size and immediacy of the scrolling info as it comes in.

As we will be using RSS feeds, I also note RSS voyage by Andy Biggs. It’s a really immersive way of displaying usually linear snippets of info. You can integrate your own personal RSS feeds and browse them while you zoom in and out. As we intend to create a piece which requires no interaction but generates the visualisation automatically voyage will not be so much an influence directly, but I really like the smooth 3D space.

The NBC tweet tracker is also worth pointing out, as it is employing a similar approach to our own project. Using a more obviously accesible interface the most tweeted strories appear as larger images. Our Flow project will be a more abstract (and hopefully more indicative of the frenzy of ‘chat’ around olympic stories) version of this concept.

It is also worth watching Hans Rosling’s funny and engaging talk on the importance and future of data visualisation of publicly funded information
and his website www.gapminder.org

For the first time in history, the most powerful mass medium of a society is totally controlled and dominated by advertisers and the market, totally driven by commercial imperatives, saturated by ubiquitous commercials that deliver audiences to advertisers (not programs to audiences).
Avante garde artists’ experimentations with both form and content function as a direct challenge to the ideological and political power of mainstream commercial cinema …no solutions or programmatic statements, but a series of intricate challenges, hints and coded messages, subverting both form and content… it is by definition an aesthetic and political movement… film is sacked, atomised, caressed and possessed in a frenzy of passionate love.
Amos Vogel (From Film As A Subversive Art 1974)

Vogel’s view of the future of mainstream cinema seems to ring true today in relation to the remix culture of social networking sites such as YouTube. Perhaps not entirely subversive in intent, millions of Vidders and remixers are deconstructing and envisioning their own personal takes on film, TV and other media forms in popular culture. Usually as homage to their favourite movies, bands or even TV commercials (caressed and possessed in a frenzy of love) or in other cases a parody or political message (subverting form and content) usually delivered tongue in cheek The ‘Born Digital’ generation are making their own TV from slices of other people’s work, remixing peer’s as well as commercially owned work. Are they Vogel’s (unknowing?) iconoclasts transgressing narrative modes, structures and visual convention? For this is the art of the common people, this is modern entertainment, an ever-changing production and consumption cycle where new styles are immediately critiqued by peers, imitated and devalued. This is art separated from the art world, often illegal in media usage and so widespread almost impossible to police.

Thanks to Honor Beddard for an interesting insight into the curation of V&A Digital Pioneers Collection. Running until 25 April 2010, the collection highlights the very beginnings of computer generated art with work from Frieder Nake, Herbert W. Franke, Harold Cohen, Manfred Mohr, Roman Verastko and Vera Molnar along with other pioneers at the cutting edge of the creative use of computers in the visual arts. The collection is a selection of prints, plotter drawings and multimedia works using computer algorithms to create non-human decisions within the creative process. The works themselves are accompanied by documentation from the artists and industry behind the technologies which reach back as early as the 1950s. The collection is destined for expansion as more pieces are discovered and recognised for their importance, and a must see for anyone interested in the history of computer generated art and design.
Check out the V&A Website

‘Combining Art with Science’. Some fantastic vintage news clips of Rick Dyer, creator of the classic animated arcade laser disc game Dragon’s Lair showcase his new technologies such as the Halcyon speech recognition computer and it’s implementation in a new, secret, interactive video laser disc epic which sadly never made it into production. The average sitting time was to be 3 hours… Perhaps wishful thinking for the parents of today. ‘We are estimating you’ll be able to play the game 20 hours a week for 6 months before you will have explored the entire world’.
Why did nobody ever make a video game which gets annoyed when you leave the room for a snack?

As we enter the increasingly global, mobile and interactive digital age, so the social impact of new media becomes ever more important. Becoming part of everyday activity much earlier in life than print literacy of previous generations, parents of the first generation of ‘Digital Natives’ (John Palfrey & Urs Gasser) will probably struggle to keep up with the ever changing face of social media while those kids ‘Born Digital’ will continue to shape the future of our culture, economy, politics and social roles in the global digital world. Media literacy is essential to promote the analysis and production of various texts & media through greater access to information and the tools required to produce them. Whilst it is important to teach the foundations of new media within education systems, it is out of the classroom where students will produce, distribute and critique the cultural pieces they create through global open source networks. The freedom of expression that has been unlocked is not without its potential pitfalls and brings along new concerns of safety & legality but as is already evident will feed the tidal wave of inventive creativity which will change the way we experience art, music & life.
In ‘On Photography’ Susan Sontag describes the transformation of the photograph through industrialization -

“That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was gratuitous, that is an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. as industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.”

Parallels can be drawn with the domestication of digital media – no longer the specialized knowledge of the academic or wealthy and increasingly open source resulting in the snowball effect of creativity and skill of the ‘amateur’. Interactive social communities and Web 2.0 sites allow content to evolve to that which the users want to experience. This in turn changes social consciousness as the consumer becomes more than a viewer – producer, critic and collectively, content editor.

Read New Guerrilla Media

TV didn’t kill newspapers, video didn’t kill cinema and the ipod didn’t kill radio. What happens with the arrival of a new technology is that cultural significance and usage of the old medium shift, often embracing and enhancing rather than instigating it’s demise.
According to The IPA Study – ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’
TV is getting more effective over time; it has increased its lead over all other media channels in each of the last three decades. In fact, the report concludes “don’t neglect TV. Far from being dead, TV advertising remains one of the most effective and efficient media. New technology and increased competition for viewers may actually be making TV more efficient, not less”
It showed that campaigns focusing on fame and emotion were far more effective in driving the bottom line (sales, market share, profit and loyalty) than more rational campaigns based on information and persuasion – and that TV is the most effective medium at delivering these.
Thinkbox TV Marketing tell us ‘TV hardwires brand memories… TV is typically processed at a low involvement level, which means the content is less critically analysed but this makes it well suited to thematic or brand messages that need to be remembered for the long-term. Information which enters the memory through low involvement processing gets stored directly via the emotional centres of the brain straight to the long-term, implicit memory without any conscious filtering. TV is an incredibly effective way of increasing a set of associations around a brand. It literally hardwires brands into the brain.
fMRI scans demonstrate that the two parts of the brain most stimulated when watching audio-visual material (like TV and cinema) are the amygdalla (emotion) and the hippocampus (long term memory encoding). Emotions and long term memory = where brands live. Neuroscience studies from a variety of media companies (Viacom, GMTV and PHD) have confirmed this finding.’
They also tell us ‘We’re watching an hour more commercial TV a week than 10 years ago’. It would be interesting to see how much of this extra time spent is taken up watching extending advert breaks!
TV is still the dominant Youth Medium. TV is the medium that young people spend nearly half (47%) of their media time with. MTV and Microsoft research, along with Thinkbox’s own has shown how TV is young people’s favourite activity (along with listening to music) and the IPA’s Touchpoints 2 showed that young adults spend nearly twice as much time watching television as they spend online.