Tag: public

Performativity · Photographics · Public Space

Street Ghosts

Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Paolo Cirio: In this project, I exposed the specters of Google’s eternal realm of private, misappropriated data: the bodies of people captured by Google’s Street View cameras, whose ghostly, virtual presence I marked in Street Art fashion at the precise spot in the real world where they were photographed.

Street Ghosts hit some of the most important international Street Art “halls of fame” with low-resolution, human scale posters of people taken from Google Street View. These images do not offer details, but the blurred colors and lines on the posters give a gauzy, spectral aspect to the human figures, unveiling their presence like a digital shadow haunting the real world.

This ready-made artwork simply takes the information amassed by Google as material to be used for art, despite its copyrighted status and private source. As the publicly accessible pictures are of individuals taken without their permission, I reversed the act: I took the pictures of individuals without Google’s permission and posted them on public walls. In doing so, I highlight the viability of this sort of medium as an artistic material ready to comment and shake our society. The collections of data that Google and similar corporations have become the material of everyday life, yet their source is the personal information of private individuals. By remixing and reusing this material, I artistically explore the boundaries of ownership and exposure of this publicly displayed, privately-held information about our personal lives.

Statement by Paolo Cirio via Street Ghosts

Film/Video/New Media · Human-ities · Public Space · Social/Politics · Theory

The Pornography of Equality

Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

When Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, “the problem that has no name” was the problem of college-educated housewives sitting at home being bored to death. Today, the “problem that has no name” is more widespread, more alluring and more aggressive. Its most insidious aspect is how close it comes to the licit ways in which women are used to lure, seduce, persuade and sweetly tease those who see them. To buy more. And more. Promising to make us sexy and our eyes glaze in pleasure. In the commercials saturating our public spaces. The bestselling novel now rising high on sadomasochistic frisson. The film crossing and uncrossing its legs.

We like to think that these are metaphors. That the impossibly beautiful things calling out to us, seductively and low-voiced – to be them, to desire them, to touch and possess that thing they have, their hot sexiness on the edge or pure life itself – don’t literally mean it. Or do mean it, but then only in order to sell us sandwiches and Victoria’s secrets. Or as a bit of diversion from boredom. And yet, the constant presence of their siren-calls wherever we look, day in and day out doing their best to arouse in us some amalgam of desire to be, to possess, to have what they have, is striking.

Excerpt from an article written by Markha Valenta at Berfrois. Continue HERE

Art/Aesthetics · Book-Text-Read-Zines · Games/Play · Philosophy · Social/Politics · Theory

On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre)

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On the run from the Nazis in 1940, the philosopher, literary critic and essayist Walter Benjamin committed suicide in the Spanish border town of Portbou. In 2011, over 70 years later, his writings enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Anca Pusca, author of Walter Benjamin: The Aesthetics of Change, reflects on the relevance of Benjamin’s oeuvre in a digital age, and the implications of his work becoming freely available online.

Via The Public Domain Review. Continue HERE

Architectonic · Book-Text-Read-Zines · Design · Public Space · Social/Politics

Studio Public

Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

www.studio-public.org

Human-ities · Performativity · Technology · Videos

The baby time-lapse trend

Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Baby time-lapses – which see parents take daily images of their child, and run them together – are becoming increasingly common. So are they now the ultimate way of documenting a child’s development?

Parents have always been fond of storing sentimental keepsakes – a first tooth or lock of hair – as their child grows up.

And pictures marking significant milestones – birthdays or their first day of school – are a mainstay of mantelpieces.

But there is now a much more ambitious trend in cataloging a child’s growth. And rather than being something typically kept within the privacy of the home, it prides itself on going public.

Excerpt of an article written by Vanessa Barford, BBC. Continue HERE

Blog-Sites · Digital Media · Social/Politics

Occupy Directory: All the Data is Free and Public

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The Occupation Directory is a public listing of all known Occupation sites built by and for the #Occupy movement. The directory aims to be a service layer upon which anyone can build other apps. All our data is FREE and PUBLIC in a variety of formats.

The directory data was instantiated from a manual merge of the data from a number of public sources from our partners and collaborators at occupytogether, wealloccupy, The Guardian, and many others.

Surveying the landscape, we saw there were many overlapping, spreadsheet-based, directory projects. We identified a need to standardize the data collected, liberate it from Google, and assist data submission and editing with form validation, editorial workflows, and community participation.

Text via http://directory.occupy.net/