Peer pressure can be a terrible thing.
A friend introduced me to xkcd with this picture two years ago. But even though I have since that time seen a lot of work of Randall Munroe, I consider this my favorite.
No physical cards from me this year, but to just put something out there I adjusted an illustration I made last year in Inkscape.
The article is for Masters of Media and can be found here.
Today I went to a symposium ‘I don’t know where I am going but I want to be there’ organized by the Museum of the Image. I loved it, especially the presentation given by MoMa curator Paola Antonelli.
It was inspirational, full of critical thought and intelligent people contributing to society through using there own tools. It made me think about my own work, and about its lack of social contribution. The only things that I made that have real meaning where the things I made for my grandmother. This is a story about her and the things I made for her.
You start a story, or maybe a sentence, and whisper it in the ear of the person who stands next to you. That person whispers the same message, or so you hope, to the person next to him. This continues till the last person has received the message. He or she gets the honor to say the message out loud. This moment is always tense, all the children will look with anticipating faces to the last child. What will the message contain? Will it be same as the original one? Of course not. That is the reason why this game is so hilarious.
You become older and leave the playground behind. You are a little nerdy, you purchased your first computer in 1976. You create ‘things’, electronic objects with complex behavior. We arrive in the eighties. It is the time of satellites, networks, surveillance.What would you create as a forty-eight year old guy?
Of course: Hearsay!
“And then I got a call from a friend who wanted to have a show of erotic art, and I didn’t have any pieces. But when she suggested to be in the show, this piece came to mind” [1]
Murmur Study from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.
‘Murmur Study is an installation that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook’s status update. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal — often emotional — expression should give us pause.’[1]