Jenny Holzer Twittering

If there was ever a technology that was ready-made for an artist, it is Twitter for Jenny Holzer.

View Holzer's twitter entries

Some People

Some People is Harrell Fletcher's new web-based project. Like Learning to Love You More, his earlier collaboration with Miranda July, the project is platform for others to publish their interpretation of an artistic-ish task. Whereas Learning to Love You More has a growing list of tasks to choose from, Some People focuses on people documenting others' lives.

From the website:

Some people get to be well known and other people live their lives in obscurity. For this project you get to choose and present someone that you think other people should know about by making a documentary about them. Your documentary can take any form that can be presented on the web — video, sound, images, text or any combination of those things. The hope is that this will eventually become an archive of interesting people that previously were not well known, from all over the world.

Some People very neatly combines Fletcher's work that prompts others to take part in a social, creative act and his work that takes the form of documenting another's life/interests such as Boy (a 1999 show about a ten year old Seattle boy named Gregory).

[via Marisa Olson @ Rhizome]

A day without the mobile-phone

Recordings of the sculpture made by Andrew McKenzie, h3o

Eve Arpo & Riin Kranna-Rõõs coordinated "a day without the mobile-phone" last September in Tallinn, Estonia. The project is a an installation made up of cell phones collected from the people in the city. The phones are hung on a tree where they create a light- and sound-installation. Through out the night the phones light up, ring, & vibrate as they receive phone calls--some inadvertent and some specifically to trigger the sculpture.

The artists are organizing a second installation for June 2008 in Edmonton, Canada as part of of The Works Art & Design Festival.



Part 1: TV coverage in top evening news, Reporter, Kanal2.
Part 2: documentation from the installation, recorded by Üllar Luup, Reporter, Kanal2

Question Box

Question Box is a very interesting, very cool project which allows people in an Indian village access to the Internet's wealth of information via a intercom that links up to a human researcher.

The spread of such access reminds me of how the Internet has changed the way that I think of (& access) knowledge and information--when I was a kid I would often wonder about a certain topic, but would know that the information was basically out of my reach. My town (population 7,000) didn't have a particularly comprehensive library--and even if it did, I couldn't spend hours in it to research a momentarily, idle curiosity. Now, I am constantly looking up information simply for the joy of it (e.g., "I wonder about Vanilla beans... are there vanilla trees? Oh, they come from orchids!").

Here's what Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow wrote about the project:

The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley's Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query to the operator, who runs it, reads the search results, and discusses them with the questioner (it's like those "executive assistant" telephone services, but for people who live in very rural places).
...

But the net isn't binary (well, it is, but not in the way I mean): it isn't there or not-there. It can ooze in, over the period of years and decades.

The Question Box has been deployed live in Phoolpur village in Greater Noida, close to New Delhi and it was a stonking, smashing success, and will now be expanding further.

[via Boing Boing]

David Troy at the MoMA

David Troy's Twittervision and Flickrvision projects opened at the MoMA this week as part of an exhibit called Design and the Elastic Mind.

From the show's website:

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale.

Dave's projects maps in near-real-time people's Twitter announcements and uploads to the Flickr photo sharing site. (Anyone interested in art based upon Flickr should also check out my Self-Portrait, Anthroptic, and Mirror projects).