How Your Great-Grandchildren Could Talk to You Decades after Your Death

June 21, 2014 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Humans have sought immortality since at least the 22nd century B.C., if the ancient story “Epic of Gilgamesh” is any indication. And if we’re looking for biological immortality, we might have to keep looking. But if you don’t mind living a virtual life, immortality might be yours for the taking.

Our new digital lives have opened up countless ways for us to express thoughts and share ideas, particularly on social media. While you’re busy posting your latest selfie, something much more meaningful is happening. With each photo you take or message you write, technology is slowly capturing digital artifacts of your life. Artifacts that someday not too far from now might be reassembled into your virtual avatar.

Instead of flipping through photo albums, imagine if your great-grandchildren walk over to the latest voice-controlled computer of their day and say, “I want to talk to grandma.” In just seconds, a “virtual you” is projected into the room ready for a quick conversation. Your thoughts, stories, favorite phrases and even mannerisms are all correct. Sounds far-fetched, but not as much as you might think.

In fact, there are several companies who promise to collect your digital content and create a virtual you, including Eterni.me, LifeNaut and LIVESON.

Read full article by HuffPost HERE

Digital Media · Human-ities · Social/Politics · Videos

THE END OF FACEBOOK. I know you know…Just reiterating.

May 14, 2014May 20, 2014 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Sure, at this point we just continue with Facebook because it is interesting to see the collapse of a city, we were brought into, from within.

“It is very unnerving to be proven wrong, particularly when you are really right and the person who is really wrong is proving you wrong and proving himself, wrongly, right.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“It is not truth that matters, but victory.”
― Adolf Hitler

Human-ities · Philosophy · Technology · Theory

What Is the Social in Social Media?

December 14, 2012December 14, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

New York city police supply a generator so that victims of hurricane Sandy can charge their cell phones.

Headlines, 2012: “Next time you’re hiring, forget personality tests, just check out the applicant’s Facebook profile instead.” – “Stephanie Watanabe spent nearly four hours Thursday night unfriending about 700 of her Facebook friends—and she isn’t done yet” – “Facebook apology or jail time: Ohio man gets to choose” – “Study: Facebook users getting less friendly” – “Women tend to have stronger feelings regarding who has access to their personal information” (Mary Madden) – “All dressed up and no place to go” (Wall Street Journal) – “I’m making more of an effort to be social these days, because I don’t want to be alone, and I want to meet people” (Cindy Sherman) – “30 percent posted updates that met the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for a symptom of depression, reporting feelings of worthlessness or hopelessness, insomnia or sleeping too much, and difficulty concentrating” – Control your patients: “Do you hire someone in the clinic to look at Facebook all day?” Dr. Moreno asked. “That’s not practical and borders on creepy.” – “Hunt for Berlin police officer pictured giving Nazi salute on Facebook” – “15-year-old takes to Facebook to curse and complain about her parents. The disgusted father later blasts her laptop with a gun.”

The use of the word “social” in the context of information technology goes back to the very beginnings of cybernetics. It later pops up in the 1980s context of “groupware.” The recent materialist school of Friedrich Kittler and others dismissed the use of the word “social” as irrelevant fluff—what computers do is calculate, they do not interfere in human relations. Holistic hippies, on the other hand, have ignored this cynical machine knowledge and have advanced a positive, humanistic view that emphasizes computers as tools for personal liberation. This individualistic emphasis on interface design, usability, and so on was initially matched with an interest in the community aspect of computer networking. Before the “dot-com” venture capitalist takeover of the field in the second half of the 1990s, progressive computing was primarily seen as a tool for collaboration among people.

Text and Image via e-flux. Written by Geert Lovink. Continue HERE

Rand Corporation think tank employees brainstorming, 1958. CA, Santa Monica, US. Photo: Leonard Mccombe.

Blog-Sites · Digital Media · Performativity

SCROLL TV

July 23, 2012July 23, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Finally you can enjoy the spectacle of social media without bothersome interactions, in the fashion of modern, broadcast media.

SCROLL TV

Human-ities · Technology

Mummified Bodies and Glowing Computer Screens. Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

April 18, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.

Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.

The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.

Excerpt of an article written by Stephen Marche, The Atlantic. Continue HERE
Above Image: Phillip Toledano.
Title of this post by Katie Fahey.

Art/Aesthetics · Digital Media · Education · Events · Film/Video/New Media · Performativity · Podcast · Videos

BMW Tate Live: Performance Room [Jerome Bell]

March 30, 2012March 30, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

BMW Tate Live: Performance Room is an innovative series of performances broadcast viewable exclusively online around the globe, as they happen.

Five artists each present works for the BMW Tate Live Performance Room beginning with choreographer and dancer Jérôme Bel on 22 March 2012 and continuing monthly with Pablo Bronstein, Harrell Fletcher, Joan Jonas and Emily Roysdon. Audiences can pose questions to the artist and curators, and interact with other viewers via social media.

You are invited to enter the online BMW Tate Live Performance Room via Tate’s YouTube channel at 20.00 hrs in the UK and at exactly the same moment across the globe on the specified dates. So if you are on the East Coast of America, log on at 15.00 hrs for a mid-afternoon art break, if you are located in Europe then join us at 21.00 hrs for an evening performance and for those in Russia, needing some late night art at 23.00 hrs.

A second chance to watch Jerome Bell’s performance and see the conversation with the artist and curators captured live Thursday 22nd March 2012 at Tate Modern.

Text via TATE

See Pablo Bronstein on 26 April, Emily Roysdon on 31 May, Harrell Fletcher on 28 June and Joan Jonas later in the year.

Blog-Sites · Design · Digital Media · Games/Play · Motion Graphics · Performativity · Projects · Public Space · Sculpt/Install · Technology

The Digit

March 11, 2012March 11, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

The Digit is a giant chrome double-finger that looms over unwitting passers-by in Union Square, NYC. More precisely, it is a double-sided finger, with a second appendage extending out of where the rest of the hand would be. The two fingertips methodically double-tap and swipe, while reflecting the surrounding architecture on their bulbous surface.

The Digit is a virtual (augmented-reality) sculpture that can be viewed with an iPhone application available for free at the App Store. Simply launch the app when you are on the southern tip of Union Square and look up through the iPhone’s camera.

The sculpture is a response to two public art works located in Union Square – the statue of George Washington (one of the first public sculptures in New York) and Metronome – a recent installation about time that occupies 3 building facades just south of the square. Incidentally, Metronome includes an enlarged replica of GW statue’s hand (located just above the smoking hole). The Digit follows this trajectory by isolating the index digit of George Washington and appropriating it as an emblem of the digital condition.

The Digit also exist as an interactive web experience and in the form of physical souvenirs. WebGL compatible Browser Required (Firefox 4 or Chrome 9 and up) or you may need to update your graphics card driver.

Project designed by Slava Balasanov
All text via The Digit

Art/Aesthetics · Blog-Sites · Events · Performativity

America’s Got No Talent

March 8, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

“America’s Got No Talent” is a web-based software project by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki that synthesizes and processes the steady stream of Twitter feeds for several American reality television shows such as “American Idol,” “America’s Got Talent,” “America’s Next Top Model,” and “X Factor US” among others in this genre. The project highlights when and how these shows gain popularity through social media and followers. When tweets are sent, they are dynamically displayed along with the bias for each program which is based on retweets from followers as well as fans. The visualization takes the form of a horizontal bar graph in the shape of an American flag that updates dynamically. Each show’s virtual presence grows in size based on the amount of attention it receives from social media users worldwide, creating a measurement meter that ranks popular media on their social exposure, rather than their credit as viable media sources.

Commissioned for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012 for Artport, with support provided by Jeremy Levine.

Via Whitney Museum of American Art

Digital Media · Social/Politics · Technology

Spring Awakening: How an Egyptian Revolution Began on Facebook

February 19, 2012February 18, 2012 Sebastian Alvarez1 Comment

In the embryonic, ever evolving era of social media — when milestones come by the day, if not by the second — June 8, 2010, has secured a rightful place in history. That was the day Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive, was browsing Facebook in his home in Dubai and found a startling image: a photograph of a bloodied and disfigured face, its jaw broken, a young life taken away. That life, he soon learned, had belonged to Khaled Mohamed Said, a 28-year-old from Alexandria who had been beaten to death by the Egyptian police.

At once angered and animated, the Egyptian-born Ghonim went online and created a Facebook page. “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.” It took a few moments for Ghonim to settle on a name for the page, one that would fit the character of an increasingly personalized and politically galvanizing Internet. He finally decided on “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said.”

“Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to me,” Ghonim writes in “Revolution 2.0,” his fast-paced and engrossing new memoir of political awakening. “All young Egyptians had long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own homeland.”

Image: Wael Ghonim, photo by Sam Christmas. Written by JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS, NYT. Continue reading HERE

Digital Media · Social/Politics · Technology

The Death of the Cyberflâneur

February 14, 2012February 14, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Evgeny Morozov: The other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the “cyberflâneur,” it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when “what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur.”

Intrigued, I set out to discover what happened to the cyberflâneur. While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today’s Internet suggests that they couldn’t have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media. What went wrong? And should we worry?

Written by EVGENY MOROZOV, New York Times. Continue HERE

Evgeny Morozov is the author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.”
Image above: Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” from 1877.

Social/Politics · Technology

Young Indians in social network ‘fatigue’

January 25, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Indian IT professionals are pictured at an industry event in Bangalore in 2010. India’s urban youth are suffering social-media “fatigue,” prompting a number to delete their Facebook and other accounts, according to a new study.

“Youngsters have started finding social media boring, confusing, frustrating and time-consuming,” the survey commissioned by by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) found.

India’s youth have “started experiencing social-media fatigue” and are tending to log less frequently onto social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Orkut, and others than when they signed up, the study reported.

The research that polled 2,000 young people aged 12-25 in 10 cities found many were instead using mobile applications such as Blackberry Messenger, WhatsApp, Nimbuzz, or Google Talk that allow them to chat with their friends.

“Tech overload is apparent among youth and their fixation with social media seems to be eroding,” said D.S. Rawat, ASSOCHAM secretary general, commenting on the survey emailed to AFP on Tuesday.

Some 55 percent of respondents said they had “consciously reduced” their time spent on social media websites and it was no longer a “craze” for them.

More than half of the 55 percent who had cut down on their activity on social media sites said they had actually deactivated or deleted their accounts and profiles from these websites.

Of nearly 200 young people interviewed in New Delhi, 60 percent said they found it “boring and sick to see constant senseless status updates.”

Most of the social media website users said they had opened many accounts initially but now preferred now to stick to a single site.

A majority of the Indian respondents also said “compulsive” social networking had led to insomnia, depression and poor personal relationships, the survey said.