couchprojects

President Obama’s Social Secretary, Desirée Rogers, will be stepping down in April.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Rogers when I was a student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I interviewed her for my experimental documentary- 2096: A Lottery Odyssey. The video was based on a story quoted form a Lottery Magazine, about the perils of a futuristic lottery addict.

In looking at the clips today, I find it funny that I had the nerve to bluntly ask Desirée Rogers if the lottery was a regressive tax on the poor. I am not sure  I would be so direct today.  See the clip below for some snippets (apologies for my experimental sound design, I was 21).

In rehashing her career with the Obama administration, The New York Times’ Peter Baker writes about White House staff’s displeasure in her referring to the “Obama brand” during interviews in glossy fashion magazines in the early days of her assignment.

I think Desirée Rogers was being honest, albeit opening the administration up to criticism from opponents.

Naomi Klein’s piece “No Logo Update,” in a recent issue of The Baffler descibes the top-level marketing behind the Obama campaign. She writes that for the first time corporate brands were upstaged by politics and piggybacked on Obama’s campaign (i.e. Pepsi).

Although David Axelrod scoffed at Desirée Rogers’ comments, her statements were common knowledge.

In the time since the election, the marketing wars have not stopped. The health care debate has seemed like a bad episode of Reality TV. It is depressing, but I find a voice of comfort in the last few paragraphs of Naomi Klein’s article:

Personally, none of this [branding, marketing] makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather, I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns…All of their high-priced market research had found  a longing for something more than shopping—for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. …Our ideas weren’t as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn’t fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.

Sources:
Obama Social Secretary Ran Into Sharp Elbows, Peter Baker, Nytimes.com, March 1, 2010

No Logo Update, Naomi Klein, The Baffler, Vol. 2 No. 1, 2010

The information design guru Edward Tufte will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. “This panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds.”(Tufte)

Mission statement: To promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user-friendly information.

As an information design instructor, my students were assigned readings from Tufte’s books when we discussed graphical integrity. His books have always been an interesting companion to read alongside writings about contemporary artists who use statistical gathering and information design  techniques in their work (such as Hans Haacke and Mark Lombardi).

In my own practice, Tufte is a sobering reminder that being expressive and representing data are not a good team.

From his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information:

Much of twentieth-century thinking about statistical graphics has been preoccupied with the question of how some amateurish chart might fool a naive viewer. Other important issues, such as the use of graphics for serious data analysis, were largely ignored. At the core of the preoccupation with deceptive graphics was the assumption that data graphics were mainly devices for showing the obvious to the ignorant. It is hard to imagine any doctrine more likely to stifle intellectual progress in a field. The assumption led down two fruitless paths in the graphically barren years from 1930 to 1970: First, that graphics had to be “alive,” “communicatively dynamic,” overdeocrated and exaggerated (otherwise all the dullards in the audience would fall asleep in the face of those boring statistics). Second, that the main task of graphical analysis was to detect and denounce deception (the dullards could not protect themselves).

Of course false graphics are still with us. Deception must always be confronted and demolished, even if lie detection is no longer at the forefront of research. Graphical excellence begins with telling the truth about the data.” (P.53)

I find this passage interesting in contrast with this quote from John Cassidy’s article about Timothy Geithner in the March 15 New Yorker:

The hardest part of the job, Geitner often says, is getting people to comprehend the inner logic of a financial-rescue operation, and the unpopular actions it entails. In fact, his problem may not be economic illiteracy but its opposite: Americans understand all too well what has happened. Financial crises have a way of revealing aspects of our economic system that otherwise remain obscured, such as the symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and Washington, the hidden subsidies that financial firms sometimes receive from the Fed and other government agencies, and the fact that vast profits that firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman generate depend in part on an implicit agreement with the taxpayer. When ordinary Americans are confronted with these realities, they get angry.

Be careful with those infographics!

Sources:
Edward Tufte Presidential Appointment, March 5, 2010

John Cassidy, No Credit, Timothy Geitner’s financial plan is working—and making him very unpopular. The New Yorker, March 15, 2010

While doing research for my video about Willets Point and the area’s eminent redevelopment, I noticed some conceptual public art inside one of the renderings. As as way to memorialize 260 closed businesses and  1,711 lost jobs*  – a creative person used an allusion to The Great Gatsby as a placeholder for art that comments on the historical background.

If you look at the sidewalk in the above rendering closely (near the baby stroller), you will see the following caption from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; …where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

1. NastyNet’s contributor Joel Holmberg unearths pups & order – a revelation that the Law & Order theme song has a disturbing effect for housedogs around the globe. Could it be that there are high-pitched musical tones that  only dogs can hear? …or are they sick of their owners watching multiple episodes back-to-back? See the full collection here.

2. A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter - “A physical sculpture that is perpetually trying to auction itself on eBay.”  The black box is currently for auction. If you are the winner of the auction, you have to agree to the terms of the sculpture which entail plugging it into an ethernet network upon arrival. Once the object is plugged in, it will automatically initiate a new eBay auction so that it can be collected by someone else. The artist Caleb Larson was interviewed at On the Media, which you can listen to here.

3. Paris, 2007 by Tim Schwartz.
I can’t remember how I ended up on this site, but it features Tim Schwatrz’s interesting data visualization graphics and sculptures. I like the simplicity of the one above: an odometer that distinguishes if Paris the city or Paris the personality are receiving greater network traffic.  See more here.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Brian Stelter wrote about the relationship between television and Internet, and how the two mediums once thought to be enemies, are now friends. Or, in my opinion, television is winning! It seems obvious now. If anyone interested in the subject had searched “internet vs. television,” he/she would have seen that market researchers like Zona Latina were aware of the future merging of the mediums back in 2000. Zona Latina presents this simple yet effective observation:

The crux of the matter is that Internet usage and television viewing are not mutually exclusive activities.  Below, we show an example of the equipment setup within a home.  On the right, there is a computer connected to the Internet.  On the left, the television is tuned to a Gloria Estefan music video on a cable television channel.  This is multi-tasking, or parallel processing.  Just because we don’t have the time to do everything we want to doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to give something up.  We can try to do everything at the same time.  In fact, if we spend a long time on the Internet, the television set on the side may be left on longer than ever.

(…)the Internet and traditional television may converge into a single medium.  If you look at the photo above, there are two video screens that look rather similar.  There are no compelling reasons, either technological or economical, for keeping them apart.  The prospects for convergence are in fact good.

I only stumbled on Zona Latina while writing this post. But it definitely foreshadowed this “water-cooler” effect.

I have recently started an online index called “Unknown Unknowns” in which I keep a daily log of all of the google trends from the previous day. After entering these terms, I write definitions for them from the top of my head based on my personal experience, things I’ve heard or my own ignorance to the subject. Frustrated with the cultural implications of information being chained to pre-determined relevance, my inspiration is Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas where he aimed to create an encylopedia that satirized clichés endemic to French Society.

In undertaking the project, I had assumed that I would have some familiarity with the things showing up in Google trends. But this is not the case. I feel like I did when my school had a few of us in 6th grade take the SAT just for kicks. My eyes glaze over in a similar way to when I stared at the bubble patterns on the scantron form. But this time, instead of it being Calculus formulas that I don’t understand, I am out in the cold because I don’t watch much television.

When I do know what the term means, I am perplexed as to why it became a popular search query. An example: The term “Shakespeare trilogy” became a popular topic of interest around 4pm, making it a top search query for February 22. My guess: Were student’s cheating on a test? – a standardized test that all middle school students had to take at the same time and they all had access to iphones and were cheating.

My hypothesis proved to be incorrect. Through a non-native English speaking web site titled “Global News,” I found this juicy bit of information posted by “smith” :

Sony Pictures United States arranged a Jeopardy Quiz Show which is a famous show through out the world. It is also termed as the top most quiz demonstrate of the United States.

This show got a big media buzz. The famous daily newspaper of United States – New York Times and The Jeopardy had joined hands for the last four years and the New York Times gave Clue of the Day. The answer to the question in Shakespeare Trilogy has been shown in the Jeopardy Show. This all was shown in the electronic as well as print media, as the TV channels as well as most of the newspapers gave stories in their next day issues.

If internet searches are skewed based on what people are looking for, perhaps we need a new search engine for people who don’t watch television.

Referenced articles:
Water-Cooler Effect: Internet Can be TV’s Friend, The New York Times
Shakespeare Trilogy, Global News
Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web, Wired
The Impact of Internet on Television Viewing, Zona Latina

Over the year I have been “germinating” a project about paranoid delusions inspired by the Internet and video games and/or fantasies about the Internet’s powers. A popular example being the car thief who behaved as though he was in the middle of a Grand Theft Auto video game.

Yesterday’s “On the Media” featured Chris Suellentrop whose article in this month’s Wired describes how virtual football games like Madden NFL are emulated in real games instead of the reverse.

Well, the Broncos are on the 13-yard line, their own 13-yard line.

[GAME HUBBUB]

The quarterback drops back to pass. He heaves this somewhat desperation toss downfield. It gets deflected into the air –

[CHEERS]

- lands into the outstretched arms of a Bronco’s wide receiver, Brandon Stokley, who streaks toward the end zone for the winning touchdown.

[LOUD CHEERS]

And that was an amazing play, known as the “immaculate deflection.” But more remarkable than the funny bounce is that Stokley cuts right across the field horizontally and lets about six seconds drain off the clock before meandering into the end zone, because no one was near him to tackle him. And, at that moment, for a certain brand of football fan, the video game-playing football fan, you were, like, holy cow, did he just pull off a video game move?

When I asked Stokley that question directly, he said, yeah, of course that was a video game move.