A name?!

Well this is the Exhibit piece as it stands:

As I've mentioned it's an installation featuring an Audio piece, the Audio is representing the rate that people emigrated from the country from in the period mentioned (ie one every 8mins 4seconds). After some brainstorming I settled on using a visual metaphor as well to house the speakers. So I settled on an open packed suitcase, this would also be a suitable way to display the title and Information. My Biggest problem as it stands is this - I don't have a name! All suggestions are welcome, please comment below!

HUMAN+

Hope someone else hasn't done a post on this, my google reader has 1000+ posts in it! One of the most literally relevant Avant Garde related Exhibitions that I've come across is called HUMAN+ (or humanplus). It is a study of Human kinds increasing reliance on technology. It also comments on the trend that our interaction with technology is becoming more direct as technology advances. There are many very interesting exhibits on the site but a number stand out. One of these would be the prosthetic head by Stelarc.

Stelarc is Chair in Performance Art, Brunel University West London and Senior Research Fellow at MARCS Auditory Labs, University of Western Sydney. Stellarc was well ahead of the trend with probing his own body and how it will interact with technology in the future. His exoskeleton Exhibit is quite freaky. Annoyingly , and after the fact, I discovered he gave a talk in our local Gallery in Cork City, something that would have been great to attend. The Head is an AI of sorts, it is somewhat creepy and reminds me a bit of the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz. The user can interact with the head as if it were a person. Also check out http://stelarc.org/_.swf - here you can see the texture used for the face, it uses flash but if you click on the top right hand corner you can 'turn the page' a bit annoying but interesting. Judge for yourself.


Another stand out Exhibit for me is AREA V5.

Be Your Own Souvenir

Another interesting project I came Across was Be Your Own Souvenir from blablabLAB. THis project takes advantage of perhaps two of the most exciting technologies becoming available to students,artists and hackers in recent times. Notably the Microsoft Kinect, and 3D printers. 3D Printers really have the potential to change how our world works, at the moment the price is the issue keeping it out of most people's hands but in the future it might be possible that if you break a Hoover nozzle you could download and print a replacement! Anyway, I digress, check out the video.

Be Your Own Souvenir! from blablabLAB on Vimeo.

I really like the description 'This proposal aims to connect street users, arts and science, linking them to under-laying spaces and their own realities.' The fact that the brilliant Golan Levin approves in the comments is also a big feather in their caps. It is also worth checking out their other projects, such as HABERLANDT. All their projects have an academic basis so are very relevant to the study of Avant Garde.

LEDs etc

One of the most interesting Blogs I've come across about LEDS and other electronic projects is Limpkin. He is a DJ and is very capable technically, creating his own displays and projects. The detail in his Blog is very interesting too, there is a clear step by step order that is lacking in others. One of the more intriguing projects he has done is involving an LED display and a webcam. The full post is available here, it does get quite technical as it's a fairly in depth walk through. Very cool though:

Daytum

One of the artists I came across in reading literature was Nicholas Feltron. He is known for his interesting info vis, or social vis, depending on what you see his work as. His well known for his annual reports on his everyday life. This obviously got a lot of attention as it's cited quite a bit and a group made his theory into a website / app called Daytum. Daytum lets users make visualisations of their actions and interactions.

This project is interesting from a psychological and sociological sense also, we all know that twitter exposed that sometimes people like to tweet about the most mundane, boring things but that usually isn't their sole purpose for being on twitter. So what if your sole purpose of being on a site is to make visualisations out of only boring mundane things? It's even interesting how they describe this service

"Whether you would like to tally an afternoon or a year, Daytum can help you collect and communicate the most important statistics in your life."

Most important? I find it interesting that people would consider what food they eat the most important statistic in their life...

On the other hand there is a positive side to tracking your 'statistics' like this, you could keep an eye on your diet or on your training. These kind of projects take info vis a step further, by telling you something personal you already know subconsciously. I must admit I find it amazing that people pay a monthly fee for this service, but they do. And they like it.

"Daytum is a web application that lets you set up any number of various displays tracking virtually anything you want, and presents it in a beautiful way."

It also shows just how important aesthetics are to users.

Health and Other Obsessions

Being a bit of a health nerd I have come across numerous Health info vis in the past. Some of these are quite literally food for thought (sorry, couldn't resist the punderful joke). Mashable has brilliant examples of info Vis also. They have an interesting link here: http://mashable.com/2010/03/19/amazing-health-infographics/ At the end of the day it is hard to advise people on their Health as too much of anything is bad for you and people differ, however using scientific evidence as a good way to get around this:

Some of the not so effective supplements here are rather surprising. I think this is where Info Vis outdoes normal textual Data, at a glance you can see that vitamin A and vitamin E, though popular are surprisingly unbeneficial. The original pice is way more interesting as it is interactive, check it out here. It is also done using Flash, something I am considering using for my assignment.

As I mentioned at the start I'm a bit of a health nerd, I'm also an economics nerd. Another interesting Info Vis I came across was American shame. This is a fascinating piece for many reasons, one it shows that the if we leave the banks go line we've been fed isn't as black as certain parties have been making it out to be, Iceland did just that and currently rank higher than us in this, based on IMF data. Although represented in a fairly traditional manner, the colour holds signifigance here. It's called American Shame as America performs so poorly, this should also finally put the Boston V Berlin debate firmly to rest, look at Germany and look at USA, it's clear which model we should aspire to. Sorry if this paragraph is overtly political!

Info Vis

One of the interesting artists I came across when researching Info Vis was WardShelley.com. On his Bio it defines him, by not defining him,
"Ward Shelley works as an artist in Brooklyn, New York. He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley’s installations defy classification. Over the last five years, Shelley has concentrated on bizarre functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during the exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment.
Shelley also works on a series of diagramatic paintings, timelines of art-related subjects such as the careers of artists working in de-materialized media and the history of art scenes. "

Ward does a huge range of different projects, he has won the New Yorker and New York Times awards and has been referenced in numerous Art and culture Books. AS evident from these awards, he is based primarily in New York, some of his pieces concentrate on Solely on the Avant Garde in New York, one such would be Downtown Body.

Interestingly Shelley also does Info Vis, and he did a series of Oil Paintings, purely coincidentally one of them called "Who Invented the Avant Garde"
exhibition at Pierogi, April 2009.

This is an interesting piece, in ways it almost looks like a Mind map or a brain storm but it is actually a portrayal of accurate Data in a visualised Timeline.

enlarge here

I find his pieces interesting because they are so Old School they are bordering on Steam Punk, and they show there is a true heritage of Information Visualisation and Design Visualisation through portraying this data in an old fashion.

MM4 Semester 2

Back in College February. As part of one of my modules (Avant Garde in Digital Media) I need to set up a separate Blog. Since I have too many blogs already and my project has to do with Data I will be putting these posts here but they'll be labeled Avant Garde. This is the first such post.

Data can be used in many interesting ways and many boring ways. These range from Tescos barcode scanner app to a library database. One of the most interesting Graphical representation of Data I have seen is on Nuclear testing. It is interesting the impact sudden information has on you.

I had previously read plenty of articles and books on Nuclear Weapons development and the cold war but when you see this portrayed Graphically (as it is done in this video titled "1945-1998") in animation it is simply staggering.



Unsurprisingly it is a Japanese man, Isao Hashimoto that came up with this video. He describes it as "... a bird's eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world."

It shows that although text offers in depth analysis it sometimes fails to get across the actual reality of the subject, the scale, the horror, the enormity. I think this video succeeds at all this very well. It also breaks down barriers of accessability, your average 10 year old would not read an academic paper on Nuclear Proliferation but after seeing this he would have a lot of info an insight that otherwise would require hours of reading.