Masters of Media

... Interface and media may be two names for the same thing. From the viewpoint of McLuhan and the concept of re-mediation, media are merely containers that encapsulate other pieces of media. This can be seen as an “onion” model of media. Media themselves are then intrfaces: through the containment concept it becomes the means by which the encapsulated media can be extracted from the layers. Interfaces/media are the point of friction, of agitation between layers.... Interfaces are an ‘outside’ that possess the ‘inside’, “a fertile nexus” that has its own autonomy and represents an area of choice. ...

On the 8th of this March, the Sunlight foundation launched the Design for America contest. This non-profit organization aims to make government data more accessible for citizens. The development of information visualizations from governmental data is becoming a fruitful way of translating the bulk of government data into an understandable and comprehendible modus. Through the Design for America contest, the Sunlight foundation is emphasizing the importance of data visualization in the process of bridging the gap between citizen and government.

The Sound of Shadow is an exhibition of works by graduating students from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy that takes place in Amsterdam (Westergasfabriek) in the month of May 2010. The works aim to reflect on the relation between sound and (moving) image, and they do so by using image instead of sound. The structure of the exhibition is essential to the…

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Do disaster movies collocate with a growing awareness of climate change? Are puppies relevant in a time of economic recession and could post Vietnam stress have something to do with the popularity of hyper masculine movies like Robocop, the Terminator and Die Hard in the 1980s?

These are the example questions we used to explain and…

Pedro M Cruz created recently a Project related with the visualization of Traffic in Lisbon. His project lets you see the city waking up through the motion of traffic on its main arteries and fading away towards the end of the day. It also shows you which are the streets with swifter traffic, green lines, and the ones with traffic jam,…

Social activism is strong in Santarém, a city of nearly 300.000 habitants in the North of Brazil, the Amazon region. Mainly driven by a group of media activists, they aim at the appropriation of alternative technology throughout the Amazon.

In my previous blogpost, I finished with the statement that there are many other authors (besides Manuel Lima) that talk about artistic ways of information visualization and the distinctions these cultural practices have from traditional (conventional academic) information visualization. Kosara wrote the article ‘Visualization criticism - the missing link between information visualization and art.’ In this he introduces the notions of pragmatic and artistic visualization to delineate between two very different approaches within the general field of visualization.

Democratization of Data

Open Data is a practice (and philosophy) of making data freely available to everyone. Advocates of Open Data argue that restrictions, licenses, copyright, patents, or other mechanisms of control are against the communal good and that data should be made available without restrictions or fees. Recently, governments have been making some of their data publicly available (data.gov, data.gov.uk),…

“Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of . . . [a] map [is that it] has multiple entryways as opposed to the tracing, which always goes back “to the same.” The map has to do with performance”. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980/1987, 13-14)

According to Crampton “cartography should be understood as existence (becoming) rather than essence (fixed ontology)” (Crampton, 2009) —…

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In this post I will try to describe the way videogames have paved the way for information visualization as a tool for digital native learners, how visualized information on academic achievement might aid learners in reflecting on their learning strategies. To do this properly, I must first contextualize gaming in education:

To clarify the way in…

Since I am a huge Beatles fan and I’m currently enrolled in the Information Visualization course I want to give this project some attention; Charting The Beatles, lead by graphic designer Michael Deal. This projects attempts visual analysis of various aspects of The Beatles’ extended oeuvre, such as collaboration proportions in the group, references between songs, work schedules and song…

The visualization of information has long been a tool for generals and historians alike to go over military strategy and to materialize the concomitants of battle. As military operations continue within an increasingly data-rich environment, we must ask if more can’t be done to implement and improve upon the tools that may have the power to aid in conflict resolution.…

Tomorrow I will be attending the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels. This conference is both free as in beer and free as in relating to the best projects the free, libre, and open source communities have to offer in the realms of graphic and visual design (including typography). Generative design processes will also be duly discussed and represented.

See the program and the list of…

24000+ Facebook users have publicly committed to quit their accounts on “Quit Facebook Day”, the 31st of May. Thousands of users will revolt against Facebook and not just for the sake of their privacy. The campaigners, from Quitfacebookday.com, argue that Facebook doesn’t give their users fair choices to manage their data; the settings are too complex for the average user. Moreover,…

First off, I’d first like mention that there’s an upcoming symposium as a part of the INFODECODATA exhibition on Sunday 13 June at the Graphic Design Museum Breda. There’ll be plenty of interesting speakers including Lev Manovich, Jack van Wijck and Yuri Engelhardt, who will be discussing fundamental topics like ‘Will the Graphic Designer become a Software Developer?’ and ‘Is Design the new…

While many technology and media journalists are now focusing their attention on Facebook’s recent privacy moves, I’d like to shed some light on an earlier privacy issue: the implementation of Google Buzz. Some of you might be are aware of its intrusive introduction, five months ago, whereas others might have completely missed it. This is a recap of the actual…

This month on -empyre-, a forum that facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media, you’ll find a collaborative discussion unfolding about seismic shifts shaking up the publishing industry. Conversations so far have spanned the mutating definition of the book, printing for multiple screens, e-book piracy, alternative print economies, FLOSS designs, and the book as…

Though I’m following up quite late, I wanted to list highlights of the presentations I attended at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels (about which I’ve blogged before). While I strongly suggest you look at the recorded presentation archive so that you don’t miss any presentations that you might find interesting, I’ll also highlight a few of my personal favorites.…

At the recent Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels, I had the lucky pleasure of meeting Jon Phillips, a man with seemingly as many projects in a given moment as he has fingers and toes. Just a few of his notable involvements include: vector graphics application Inkscape, the Open Clipart Library, the innovative web application stack Aiki Framework, the fully-federated Twitter replacement Status.net (which powers identi.ca), and the projects (palm-top computer, video camera, and portable VJ station) being developed at Qi Hardware. All of these projects are free in the ontological imperative sense.

"Early histories of 'the digital content revolution' will center around one area, San Francisco's South Park." (Justin Hall talking about San Francisco's multimedia gulch)I'm in the bay area researching HotWired - Wired's ambitious website created in 1994 - feeling like I've stumbled on a fairly pivotal event in the transition from cyberpunk-and-VR-driven cyberculture to something recognizable as today's web culture. Here are a couple of observations from the field: