Theorie et Critique

Cartography

2011-07-24T12:17:00.001-07:00

Emotional Cartography: a lovely free book on emotion mapping

is a lovely FREE book, which you can download here. It's a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists brought together to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising people’s intimate biometric data and emotions using technology. It'll show you how you can use equipment like this to make "emotion maps" like this

Pretty cool, huh? But how could we use them? Well, if I was working on a tourist attraction, like Alton Towers, showing people the levels of emotion inside vs outside your grounds could be a fascinating way to sell it to them. It could also make a fun addition to the traditional map people get given when they arrive - heightening their experience of the day. Allowing participants in the project to take home personalised emotion traces could also make for a fantastic memento - and a great change from the usual, slightly embarassing photo of you getting drenched on the log flumes.

Places like the Tate Modern or Saatchi Gallery also seem like a good fit with emotion mapping. As well as helping them to understand which pieces truly move people, the result could be a piece of art in itself - and an ever-changing addition to their collection.

These kind of devices can also help us understand behaviour a bit better. As the book says "The Greenwich Emotion Map suggests an experience of the city as a series of distinct ‘events,’ by which we mean moments of distinctive attention. The actual nature of these ‘events’ varies from meeting people, taking a photo, crossing roads, to being annoyed by one’s surroundings. What these events have in common is an element of novelty which has caused the person’s attention to become focused... Within this ‘event space,’ a fork in the road causes a moment of indecision which competes for attention with the family argument taking place at the same time."

With this in mind, you can see why it takes something pretty new and powerful to get people to engage with our ads. So much of our behaviour happens on auto-pilot. So much else is happening. So is it any wonder that so much brand building happens subconsciously? It's "osmosis," as Alex calls it. And, speaking of free downloads, if you haven't read his IPA Excellence Diploma essay yet then you can check it out here.

Posted at 03:11 PM in Data capture, Data visualisation, IPA Excellence Diploma, Mashups, Painting with data - production techniques | Permalink

Technorati Tags: Emotional Cartography, Infomagination, Matt Sadler

2010-05-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

REMAPPING MEMORY

Inspirational projects

1) Urban Cartography Project.

This particular project were also involves the audience to map out spots with special meanings for the public in Bandung City in Indonesia as a dynamic psychogeography of Bandung from the view of its inhabitants. Urban Cartography Project was actually inspired by work of Indra Ameng and Keke Tumbuan (Secret Places, 2005), that was exhibited at 347/EAT exhibition space in 2005.

http://projektheterologia.wordpress.com/2007/01/19/hetero-utopia-2006/

2) The secret Agents

http://thesecretagents.multiply.com/

Experimental maps

2010-05-10T21:12:00.001-07:00

REMAPPING MEMORY

This project proposes the use of process maps in order to organize memories geographically to related spaces. The completeness of the maps is very important in order to create a useful urban engineering with memories.

Its a project that started from the knowledge of Max Msp software to add digital value in order to present a conceptual body of project: Remapping memory

Mapping PRIVATE memory ORALLY in a public space creates an oral history in the sense of recreating identity of community.

Major Focal points:

- Imagining communities: Memory, Loss and Resilience

- Scars in the Ground (…if only walls have ears they'd speak up).

- The expectations of type of narratives from the audience.

- It is an authentic concept of democratic mapping of the history.

This installation art in practice is seeking to challenge the discontentment of the empirical ways of registering and publishing fragments of life. Instead, this body project uniquely will create a social bond seeking an alternative contemporary collective artistic historical development.

it is an organic sustainable alternative map making project investigating the space narrative through public personal perspective with a micro-narrative that exhibits the multi-layers of the ground.

Also, Seeing the past and visions of the future liberating and releasing the ideal or the utopic urban space contextualized by George orwell's 1984 revolutionary inspirational work examining utopia.

This groundbreaking technology deconstructs all socio-political walls and intertwines believes through pure auto-dictated perceptions of space. This flux creates a channel for negotiations added upon the urban agenda.

The videos would be unleashing possibilities of visual stimulus scanning through banality of the geo-scapes the balanced aspect of the place.

The map presentation becomes a structure that enables to steer the participant's way of thinking. It becomes a intersection of the self in relationship to the other via the same spot.

It becomes a moment of reflection as Maurice Halbwachs explains in his critical theory regarding collective memory. Collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present.

Also, this art of mapping digitally memories also provides functional opportunities for the public; a critical study that Suzanne Lacy provides by reevaluating the parameters and function of public art as well as the critical aspect of public participation as an essential component for the new age media.

THE KEYBOARD_DIGITAL MAP

The pattern map is defined by techniques of using the keyboard's digital electronic circuit to allow the existing memory and knowledge reuse by triggering "BANGS" to either voice record and recite the memory or witness and listen to the recitation. Another "BANG" is triggered after 24 seconds of starting the Voice Recording limiting the length of the memory. Those memories will be encapsulated in these patterns stored in classic folder repositories that quickly become overcrowded.

The Keyboard's internal digital circuit is detached from the body. USB port remains the main connector to the patch.

The white rectangular board is used for projecting maps onto.

MAX MSP PATCH

THE CONNECTOR

-left button = clears listen

-right button = switch between record and listen mode. left is record and right is listen.

to record : select record mode

Each Button connected to CENSOR

* press button and speak into the mic for 23 sec.

to listen : select listen mode

* press button to listen

THE VOICE RECORDER

(+24 seconds delay)

VIDEO PROJECTION

Case#1 Video: Borders and toll roads with maps of worldwide walls (e.g. W/E Germany - Berlin, Gaza Strip/Israel, China, Turkey, ...)

MAPS

Selected maps are projected with a handheld pocket projector fitting the whole white plastic surface of the keyboard.

ORGANIC & DIGITAL MAPS

(Nike Company's "running" online interactive GOOGLE map - The hot areas of most used trails)

GOOGLE MAPS/EARTH enabling online interactivity for the global community

2010-03-31T19:06:00.001-07:00

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Louis Althusser)

2010-03-23T21:17:00.000-07:00

What I would like to underline in my paragraph is a reality comprehensive adaptation of Althusser's critical theory for the Marxist short-coming theory for the society/production and specific ideological formation knowledge.

Theory for practice and not just unusual useless theory literature.

Perhaps it is a deconstruction of the theory and an application in the reality to address the "sixties" efforts of understanding the functionality of a society.

The theorist mentions two major mechanism for insuring that people within a State behave according to the rules of that state: the RSA or the Repressive State Apparatuses that can enforce behavior such as the prison system and the police; and the ISA or the Ideological State Apparatuses that generate ideologies where individuals get included and act in accordance with such as schools church and religions.

Althusser mentions that ideology is a structure that has no history linking it to the idea of the unconscious. Ideology works with unconsciousness. There is no ideology without practice and there is no practice without individual and without its belief this marxist superstructure is an illusion.

In the real world, the "Alqaeida" so called terrorist group of Osama Bin Ladin is not something that is objectively out there but something that is the product of our relations to it and of the ideological representations we make of it - Whatever the media and public opinion stories tell about what is real becomes the reality.

That's ideology, it presents people with representations of their relations to relations of production rather than with representations of the relations of production themselves.

Add-on, the series of call for action print in the sixties

The series of well-known recruitment images; The print "IF I WERE A MAN, I'D JOIN THE NAVY" showing a young woman in a Navy Uniform during WWI…AND of Uncle Sam commercial art illustration with the strong copyright "I WANT YOU for the army" during WWII.

Both prints address a particular ideology with the usage of the word YOU, whether spoken or not "YOU! BE A MAN"… This is the case where the one becomes the calling subject which means now the BEING has a name that's being called upon. The propaganda machine creates the illusion of individualism; freedom and equality;

Capitalism and Democracy.

However, there is a distinction between Subject and Individual in the structure/ideology. The Subject is to obey the call.

The call for freedom is an illusion. The free individual has to behave to whatever the system dictates.

He explains, the being becomes subject when its being announced. A recognizable information arises a process of becoming subject of exploitation.

In the real world, in a doctors' office, the patient would be subject only when the nurse calls out the name of the person; this act is a construction of the subject himself in the real condition entering the consciousness of the determined to the space and its function.

The Death of the Author (Roland Barthes from Image Music Text 1977)

2010-03-22T20:05:00.001-07:00

I would like to expose the layers of ideas in Roland Barthes' essay. Roland Barthes analyzes the aspects of human knowledge. A discourse on language that sets the basics of writing and reading intelligent interaction. With a swift order of language yet conceptually sophisticated, he presents the argument of the classic-criticism; and adventures giving birth to scriptor with the death of the author. Barthes examines the notion of the text in its language anatomy and linguistic basis as a medium to write and represents the role of the author who creates meaning by constructing sentences. And he emphasizes that the body of text acquires its true original valued meaning only through the reader demeaning and degrading the authors' geniality demonstrating through examples of Mallarme and Proust the reversed role of author and reader. The author creates text and the text creates author; Thus demoting in his essay the "Godly" author.

Barthes stressed the death of the author by separating the text and its reconstructed meaning. This distance creates the disappearance of the author only when in this multi dimensional space and the role of the reader deconstructs the script and implies his original meaning therefore its the text's interpretation itself becomes a master creation.

The argument highlights marxist revolutionary concept in the sense of the reversed role between the higher (God-like Author) the government and the lower (reader) the mass (production). A multi-layered contrast essay argues the roles between two separate figures and develops critic about the classical approach to a modern outlook on redirecting the roles and the limits not only by focusing on the author but on the readers' open creative interpretation of text.

CAPITALIST RITUAL (ICONOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS)

2010-03-03T21:06:00.001-08:00

A visit to the museum becomes the experience of a lifetime. Through its representation of modules and arrays that’s its structure and architecture, it refines the human’s experience from the mundane to a certain spiritual elevation.
This space conception embracing on the entrance identifies the separation of the outside from the inside by its art representation and high culture in the displayed object.
Empty without art but in context of space and setting the object has more meaning.

This separation channels the energy into the structure creating passages and a powerful trajectory to reach the sublime, the prescribed enlightenment. Hence, this temple/sanctuary with its displays underlines concepts of subjective freedom, timelessness, contemplation and oriented movement accentuated with its special analogy.
Halts/ stops in the “labyrinth” on Fine-Arts pieces emphasize the meditation and become emblem of reflection.

Unconventional in the museum unique perspective, this individualized journey into its depth marks the passage with an inner-experience a significant embodiment part of existence elevating the self to Brahmas.

Distinguishing many elements:
Darkness / light
Death / life
Degrading / elevating
Corporal existence/unity with divine
Material/Spiritual
Overpowering the sense of liberation and elevation as a stretching metaphor to discover the sacred purpose of Art. All this settings empower the museum as a contribution
It eliminates and creates aesthetic detachment (sacrifice) leading to a sort of a genesis.

This dialectic of myth is set to discover the sacred purpose of art with its training to taste and orientation (higher/finer). This delusion attributes value and sophistication to the whole experience that makes it the supreme barometer reveals with its rich diversity of contexts the fascination of the patron/professional aesthetes. It is the address for sacralization of Art . The definition of high art that elites could appropriate as their own cultural property defining boundaries between corporate/entertainment and ART.

MUSEUMS: MANAGERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

2010-03-03T21:05:00.001-08:00

German American conceptual artist focused on systems and processes,
Hans Haacke as an introduction of framing the functionality of a museum underlines Enzenberger’s terminology vis-a-vis museum as “INDUSTRY” where in this world, scholars in ART practicum predominantly throughout decades and centuries strives in preserving the notion of this practices’ romanticism versus indicating the frontline techno-industry.

Hans describes the museums’ creative sustainable context and its long term practice concentrating on its attitude and behavior through both time and space aspects and shifting gears adapting enhanced policies in the midst of all socio-political focal points.

These shifts are significant indicative marks in museum development structure to enhancing and integrating from siècle to siècle dominating movements.

Also, the challenge presents itself from a consumer perspective that can assist in the creation of sustainable museums. These challenges fundamentally change in the mental modes and attitude assumed in the management of its structure. The custody of duality Hans discerns is more effective managerial role as the debate analyses strategies of seating two streams for servicing.

This implication develops noticeable exciting improvement, creating reflective outcome attitude and satisfaction for the overall investors and community.

Museums have developed established and today it becomes a service, a data and a method, highlighting the creation of reflective spaces, self-paced consumption, solitude versus social exchange and a behavior creating qualitative relationships on all aspects of interconnected bodies and institutions (Global Economy: Academia: Political Power House).

Museum services delivery for doctrines, social and institutional. Subscription offers unlimited opportunities with its complex hierarchy structure promoting delicately particular agenda of different motivations.

Hans: Its task “democracy” is as easy described as “Democrazy”.

CULTURAL PILGRIMAGES AND METAPHOR JOURNEYS

2010-02-18T08:52:00.000-08:00

Suzanne Lacy provides a crucial study reevaluating the parameters and function of public art. In her pages she widely situates art within the world of contemporary spectacle.
The text introduces the complex of theory of object in public (cannon in the park)
then sidestep to highlight the TERRITORY IN QUESTION* of many aspects that EXPLORES* encompasses function, aesthetics,
reception and participation/critical involvement of the viewer as an essential component for the new age media artist as well as the disintegration and displacing material outside "jadis" indoor art place like museum to the outer-continental space; the social, public place
And from this insight alone constructs the responsibility of the artist as a key and active "tastemaker" peacemaker from the outside an insight of CHANGE presented as a result of engaging the audience and address to the real-world issues.
Yet the breaking ground of the text is the challenge described for the artist to claim
individuality and authorship and create interaction of a once passive audience.

New Genre, It is the journey of redefining the map of what Art is.

P.S. What is interesting I found is the imagery on the side of the first page
the wolf and the covered with a stick and their role in describing all the facets
of which the author scripts as major players actors*

* page 30 Exploring the territory in question
* page 39 New Roles for Artists