Hasta La Ideas

An artist and a technologist pair up to find the cultural meaning of words through pictures

Recently presented at Rhizome’s annual Seven on Seven conference, Aaron Swartz and Taryn Simon‘s “Cultural Differences” application culls the top six photos from a Google image search for a specific word in 15 countries, displaying a visual comparison of its meaning among an array of different nations.

The concept was born to follow the conference’s purpose of pairing a technologist with an artist to see what they can make in a mere 24-hour time frame. “Cultural Differences” highlights the incredibly talented and informed pair’s individual interests while showing where they connect. Swartz, a brilliant programmer and activist played to Simon’s background as a photographer concerned with exposing truths.

While they’d like to expand the app to cover every country, the duo began with the randomly organized selection of 15 currently shown on the site. The user simply types a word into the search field and hits enter to get a pictorial portrayal of how each culture sees the word. Swartz and Simon pointed out in the presentation that Obama yields a variety of results—while most are classic presidential images, in Syria Obama is linked to Beyonce and North Korea obviously prohibits any images of the American president. For the word “Jew” a variety of images pops up in various countries, but in Germany, the word for “Jew” is “Jude”, bringing up nothing but images of Jude Law with that search.

All politics aside, the app is a valuable tool for designers, who can immediately see that, for example, in Saudi Arabia, a search for an Eames chair generates few relevant results. By gleaning results from each nation’s local search engine, Swartz and Simon’s app refines results, thus usurping the limited scope of a Google image search.

Conceived and developed in less than a day, “Cultural Differences” marks an impressive concept sure to entertain, enlighten and inspire new ways of visually contrasting cultural conversations through simple technology.

Entrepreneur brings a punk-inspired DIY spirit to the Internet age

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Creator, activist and entrepreneur Sean Bonner assumes the cyberpunk intrigue of a character cast in a William Gibson novel one might say. As both a co-founder of L.A.’s hacker haven, Crashspace and regular contributor for BoingBoing, Bonner is a subculture clairvoyant on the cusp of technology and social trends. Growing up to the anarchistic anthems of the punk rock scene, Bonner naturally gravitated to the “make or break” ethos of technology. Bonner explains, “The punk rock world has a very strong DIY ethic and from a very early age, my instinct was that when something needed to get done the best possible option was to do it yourself.”

Actively adopting a grassroots spirit, Bonner opened the acclaimed art gallery sixspace with Caryn Coleman, featuring such street art luminaries as Shepard Fairey and Space Invader. In 2002, the gallery relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles, later launching the photography group show, Sent: America’s First Phonecam Art Show. The show’s debut prophesized the pervasive popularity of the device, which the LA Times likened to “a socio-anthropological study as much as an artistic display of technological capability.”

Bonner began to further pioneer the techno-sphere with his finger on the digital pulse. In 2003, he and business partner Jason DeFillippo started Bode Media to publish a community of blogs under the unification of Metblogs. In a time when the Internet was forging the emergence of the great “Global Village,” Bode Media looked locally, creating a pilot Metblog that exclusively reported on his home base of Los Angeles. Bonner explains, “In 2003, the idea of a group blog almost didn’t exist and there was next to no local media online at all. We wanted to inspire more of both of those things and help people connect with their cities and other locals via the web.” With a city-centric focus, the international success of Metblogs expanded to cover local culture in over 50 cities around the world.

Conjuring technological savvy and astute activism, Bonner heads up the “Black Ops” of Neoteny Labs, a “consumer internet startup fund” with a focus on South East Asia. Giving a leg up to bootstrap start-ups, Neoteny Labs pairs software companies with angel investors. In 2009, Neoteny Labs held the Singapore Camp conference covering “investing and incubating” topics. Bonner elaborates, “We wanted to inspire people to venture down a route that wasn’t decidedly ‘safe’ rather than just do what was expected. I tried to bring in speakers who I felt embodied this attitude of doing something they loved rather than something they thought might be profitable.”

Continuing his altruistic efforts in Asia, Bonner continued his altruistic efforts in Asia with Safecast, “a global sensor network monitoring the radiation levels” of Japan in wake of the nuclear disaster caused by the March 2011 earthquake. “After the earthquake we quickly realized how little information was available and set out to change that by collecting and distributing the data ourselves. We’ve provided countless people with detailed and accurate information about the radiation levels in their areas. To date we’ve collected more than 1,000,000 individual radiation readings and published them free and open for anyone to use,” says Bonner.

A dedicated evangelist of awareness, Bonner also has a hand in Coffee Common, “an education brand” launched at TED in 2011. Bonner recently spoke at the TEDx conference in Vienna, returning to his DIY ethic with his talk espousing how less is truly more. Inspired by the liberation of downsizing his belongings and traveling around the world with his family, Bonner forecasted “Neominimalism” and discussed the rising subculture of “Technomads.” Bonner posts on his blog, “Technology enables this lifestyle shift, and is changing the way we interact with our surroundings.”

This story is part of an editorial series sponsored and inspired by Le Meridien.
New Perspectives explores fresh ideas and distinct points of view in global art and culture.

An online gallery streamlines the interaction between users and content

Hastening to bridge the gap between traditional media’s tendency to over-curate and the Internet’s overflow of content, Melissa Jones has relaunched Dream the End, an online space for art, music, poetry and film. With a homepage curated by guest editors, the site will update regularly as new virtual “editions” are released. The content comes from a mix of emerging artists and lesser-known figures from the past, with exclusive mixtapes available for streaming. It’s a great way to escape from quotidian demands and browse creative interests without the deluge of commentary and criticism.

Dream the End is unique in that it isn’t set up in a rational, linear browsing interface but rather resembles a cloud, with content scattered around a page lacking typical navigation features. Clicking on a piece of art will take you to a gallery of that artist’s work, and selecting a few lines from a poem will show you the piece in its entirety, accompanied by a blurb about the artist. The “random view” button at the bottom of every page redirects to a new homepage with different content, so the browsing possibilities are endless. All the while, because the site’s streaming music isn’t page-specific, visitors can enjoy listening to new music while they explore other mediums.

The widely appealing art selection includes an impressive range of works, from Sean Kerman’s “Female Lying,” a muted image Jones excerpted from a ’70s-era photography reference book on the human figure, and “Hand,” a recent piece by Chinese artist Hai Tien that harkens tranquil tropical flowers; to the more contemporary styles of Belgian artist Raoul De Keyser, whose minimalist black-and-white piece “Ad B4” juxtaposes with Rupprecht Geiger’s bold “Geist Und Materie 1,” an example of artist’s late geometric-inspired work, which he painted at the age of 96.

“As an antidote to the increasingly chatter-driven online environment, I wanted the design of the site to be a uniquely distilled sensory experience,” says Jones in a press release. “Dream the End is where people can see what’s good and hear what’s good, and not just read about it.” The success of Dream the End lies in its simplicity. The layout requires users to follow their interests around the site without worrying about what is current, relevant, or otherwise popular.

Refresh!, the first edition of Dream the End is now live and ready to browse.

A few words with one of the secretive figures behind the client horror story blog

Web designers, those anonymous talents who help make sense of the sheer volume of white noise out there, are the unsung heroes of the digital age. The transition for many businesses is rarely seamless though—irrational behavior coupled with an unhealthy dose of old-fashioned racism is expressed by many of these Clients from Hell.

Consider this one:

Client: I want more ethnic people, I feel as if there are too many “white” people.
Me: I see only one picture with Caucasian people in it—you want them gone?
Client: Maybe you could just give them a tan? Or make them more “thuggish?”

Or another:

“I got this email once from some lawyer in Nigeria and when I opened it and clicked the link, the same email was sent to everyone in my contact list. I thought, hey, this is a pretty smart and simple marketing technique. When I send out this email to the 4,000 people, I want it to automatically forward to everyone in their contact list. Can you have this done for me by tomorrow?”

The Clients from Hell blog has been cataloguing these types of exchanges since 2009 and came out with a book late last year, offering a humorous form of therapy for the tech community and a rare inside look at the petty and downright insane requests to which they are often subjected.

Cool Hunting tracked down “Vincent,” a web designer in the 18-25 demographic, who is part of the shadowy team of disgruntled designers that have been running the site and recently published a 150-page book.

Cool Hunting: Which anecdotes do you find the most disturbing? Most amusing?

Vincent: The only anecdotes I find truly perturbing, actually, are the ones where the person who’s sent it (the “me” speaker) is jeering and maligning someone for not knowing something they couldn’t have possibly known. That’s not the spirit of jest, y’know. When it comes to poking fun at someone for being technologically ignorant, the tone ought to be spoofy, if not just a bit frustrated. When it comes to the real slimy characters, the ones we hear about who casually employ misogyny and racism as business models, those are the guys that you can really sink your teeth into—they deserve it.

CH: How did the Clients from Hell communities develop?

V: The way most communities develop. We settled around a body of water, or some other lush, food-bearing area and proceeded to erect houses and practice agriculture, until the crop-yield became sufficient enough that we could support guilds and artists, forms of governments, kleptocracies at first and then monarchies and then democracies. Then we abused that democracy and sold our interests to foreign investors and got mixed up in a few wars. 😉

Do you see different patterns in different countries and regions?

It’s mostly American, Canadian and English submissions, I think, with some Aussies peppered in. I always love getting submissions from people whose first language is clearly NOT English. Their delivery and word choice is incredibly awkward, but you can tell that they find what they’re saying really funny!

What kind of submissions are unpublishable and can you describe why?

Ha ha, well the aforementioned submissions where the English is horrid but the emphasis is still punchy (e.g. “And then he ask me make Sunday work for only same prices!!!”) are generally unpublishable. And we get a surprising amount of submissions where someone has clearly read one of our earlier posts and has a very similar story, so they send that. We can’t publish the same joke twice, though, I feel like telling them.

As a design professional, is the relationship getting better, worse, or does it remain the same?

I’d imagine that as the generation that grew up alongside computers begins to grow up and take over companies, that the client/designer dynamic will be less of a comedy of misunderstandings.

What effect—if any—do you think the CFH phenomenon has had on your profession?

Very little. The people that ought to be learning from it aren’t, unfortunately, the ones reading it.

How long do you reckon the CFH site will continue? Is their a clear goal aside from making a mint?

As long as there are fresh injustices or some fresh ignorance at which we can laugh or roll our eyes, there will be a CFH. If, one day, all the client relationships everywhere magically become harmonious and right, then we’ll retire it.

Online visualizer reveals the intricacies of music mashups in real-time

What started as an early-aughts gimmick led by 2manydjs has since morphed into a full-blown pop-culture phenomenon with party animals like Girl Talk disseminating their name-that-sample form of music far and wide. For multilayered tracks where the original samples become indistinguishable, Web Technologist Cameron Adams developed the Anatomy of a Mashup, breaking down his own creation “Definitive Daft Punk” as an example to “reveal its entire structure: the cutting, layering, levels, and equalization of 23 different songs.”

The online visualization tool breaks down and analyzes the complicated construction, demonstrating how individual sounds work together to form the whole in a diagram of rainbow-colored concentric rings. The beautiful animation lends a unique understanding of the intricacies of the particular mashup, joining the audio and visual for experiences not unlike “little slices of synchronous art, designed to please all of your senses.”

To make that direct connection between what unfolds on the screen with the art of the mashup, Adams built the site using the latest HTML5 and CSS3 technology so that the browser renders the song as it plays and evolves for a visual that performs in real-time. To learn more about the inventor and his Anatomy of a Mashup, check out his site, The Man in Blue.

via Information Aesthetics