documenting your (web) persona

MIT labs and Aaron Zinman created a digital installation that creates your online genome, a visual representation of how the web sees you. Part art installation, part critique, Personas | Metropath(ologies) exploits the fact that there are likely several people in the world, living or dead, who share your name. A simple search of websites, however, cannot distinguish between you and your name.

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity.

Try your own at http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html

delete Durham billboards

Fairway Outdoor Advertising’s attempts at wooing City Council into removing the current ban on new billboards may not be going so well. At least, not for Fairway.

The billboard industry suffered a trouncing at the March InterNeighborhood Council meeting, but the City Council vote that will ultimately decide the fate of Durham’s billboards will come later this summer. The persistence of both advertising as a phenomenon and the belief that people are essentially consumers with obligations to subject themselves to advertising in public spaces warrant more discussion, and Fairway’s recent attempts at infiltrating community groups leave the public to wonder why the ad giant doesn’t want a real conversation.

Not only is it becoming clear that the community doesn’t support the attempt to supersaturate the Bull City with corporate advertising, in the process of covering the issue, the Independent has identified and mapped 110 billboards in Durham — 89 of which are permitted and 21 that are not. (Note: Fairway currently owns 45 billboards in Durham.)

If those billboards identified as illegal are not dealt with by “the proper authorities,” then who knows what will happen to them.

Perhaps, someone might by inspired by a recent public art campaign in New York, which reclaimed public space from illegal billboards by whitewashing, then replacing with art.

Alternatively, in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, there is a compelling description of what happens to billboards that violate the spirit of community aesthetic.

Whatever the resolution, there’s new stuff to read on supportdurhambillboardban.com:

a video of the InterNeighborhood Council’s vote, overwhelmingly supporting the City’s current policy on billboards
emails sent to contact@supportdurhambillboardban.com
updated list of letters to local newspaper editors

And if you haven’t yet voiced your opinion on whether Durham needs more billboards, just send an email or write a letter to the editor of a local newspaper.

Trips for Kids benefit art show, Cinco de Mayo

The cycling community has a reputation for creativity — the annual Bike Art exhibits (I, II, III, IV), the Bicycle Film Festival, and the alt-bike phenomenon each attest to the restlessness that two-wheeled travelers often feel. By restlessness I mean an inability to accept the world as ordinary. Perhaps nowhere is that restlessness evident than in North Carolina, where a bicycle mechanic on the Outer Banks once said to his brother, “what else can we make with these tools?”

Danielle Riley, a Durham school teacher and editor, is sharing her art with the cycling community for the month of May. Andrea Hundredmark, Durham Public Schools teacher and Director of the Triangle chapter of Trips For Kids, says…

Danielle Riley is showing her photography for the first time EVER at The Broad Street Cafe. Her work will be up for the month of May. The kickoff for the show is Tuesday, May 5th at 7 pm. There will be a wine tasting as well.

Please check out the link [sic] to learn a little about Broad Street Café, their menu and Danielle. There is a short artist bio and some samples of some her photos on the site.

20% of any proceeds from the sale of her work will be donated to Triangle Trips for Kids – a non-profit organization that takes children living in at-risk situations on bike rides, teaches them about cycling and how to build bikes.

To learn more about Trips for Kids, check out their website or this article written for the Herald Sun last year. The Broad St Café is located here.

PennSound

Poets are social critics by default. That is, since not very many of us take the same care to craft our daily language that poets do, poets often are (or see themselves as) outsiders. And as outsiders, many poets are well-positioned to see things that not everyone is able to see. Hence the buzz of excitement Obama generated just by carrying (and thus being photographed with) a collection of Derek Walcott’s poems three days after the election. Imagine… a politician with a daily habit of thinking about something in a meditative way.

Celebrations of the power of words, succinct demands for our attention, suggestive as well as demonstrative. When done well, poems — like film — leave the reader/viewer with much to think about, much to interpret.

There are many, many poetry websites that host, share, invite, and collect the written text. But like Meyer Abrams argues, poems should be read aloud. I remember well the first time that I heard a college friend, poet Edward Bartók-Baratta, perform a collection of his writings. Without artificial amplification, his normally quiet voice took possession of the stirred atmosphere inside the Northampton, MA church. It was a look inside the soul of someone I knew best as a baker and gardener.

PennSound is a remarkable online archive of poetry readings. Supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s English Department Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and the Kelly Writers House, the web-based project is directed by poets, and the recordings are of poets reading poetry. [Thanks to Al Filreis for the correction.]

Collecting original recordings as well as hotlinks to recordings hosted in other archives, PennSound is the “first and the biggest site of its kind,” says Charles Bernstein, an English professor and the site’s co-director.

Launched in January 2005, their first press release boasted a collection of 1500 recordings. By 2007, the site had aggregated more than 10,000.

According to a May 2007 Associated Press article, recordings are…

contributed by poets, fans and scholars worldwide and converted to digital format. Some, such as Gertrude Stein recordings from 1934, date back decades.

The site mainly focuses on historical avant-garde and innovative contemporary poetry. So while you can hear Allen Ginsberg or current U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall, you won’t find Maya Angelou.

You won’t find Billy Collins or Rita Dove, but you will find plenty of contemporary and historical readings, mostly with an avant-garde bent. Don’t miss the extensive set of Ezra Pound readings.

Sticking with the theme of this site, below is a poem that includes mention of a two-wheeled pilot.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

John Tranter reads “God on a Bicycle” at a March 30, 2005 reading at the Kelly Writers House.

Full Frame

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

Flying Shepherd
Salt
Owning the Weather
Art & Copy
Sons of Cuba
The Yes Men Fix the World
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
La Chirola
Unit 25
Objectified
Oil Blue
Sweet Crude
Burma VJ

All in one weekend… I’ll be bleary-eyed tomorrow.

a digital manifesto

http://www.eletrocooperativa.org

Tomorrow is Digital Humanities Project day

On March 18th, 2009, digital humanists from around the world are planning to collectively document their day, and we are looking for interested participants!

A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (ADLDH) is a community project that will bring together digital humanists to document what they do on one day, March 18th. It is an autoethnography project by digital humanists about the digital humanities. The goal of the project is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, “Just what do computing humanists really do?” Participants will document their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal. The collection of these journals with links, tags, and comments will make up the final work online.

More information can be found here.

English subtitles for the video
A DIGITAL MANIFESTO

A digital manifesto

image through image / tapeless / filmless / cinefull

Is this your recorder? It´s recording me already, it´s modulating right?

Image through image / and Who is making it? Me? Or the computer?

These images / this life / and Who is editing it? Me? Or the machine?

Created with no brush / only pixels / pixelated paintings / pixelized

here goes my manifesto

pandora´s box

the past is a myth // a system that lives from the past / this is na echo -
system

Love / oh Love / why isn´t the planet moved by love

it should / true love

*“another proof: music that comes from new times. It is the civilization of
leisure not business / it is a new man / a new time a new era…”*

that´s it / after Love / water a lot of water // the holy drink / not this
dead drink

*“radioart / water*

*Lord forgive them they do not know what they´re doing…*

Listen / hear / hear us

The muse//

the primitive future is being lapidated by digital craftsmen / those that
through self-sustainability / deconstruct shapes / in order to find meaning

the past is a myth // human salvation lives in the internet

TRIBES

television never more /// gone is the industrial age // long gone industrial
age

technology has not been completely understood yet // it´s messianic function
in this planet

we are the 1 and technology is the 0

maybe everything seems exact / extract /maybe

Society / liquid society // why not?

*Liquids, differently from solids, do not maintain their form with ease /
they´re fluid / don´t fixate space and don´t tie time // it´s time to
liquefy patterns of dependency and interaction / they are now malleable / to
the point in which past generations did not experience and could not
conceive of*

*there´s a new tribe in town and that´s the hybrid tribe*

*this is the post-concept*

*a cool insight in the Word post / doesn´t mean necessarily posterior but
re-evaluated / self-aware / from a psychoanalytical perspective *

*we all come from the same echo echo-system*

*digital being*

*why not share life is all live the same life*

*at the same time at the same age*

*the future is now*

the digital being liquid celebrates

digital being

do it yourself

by fabricio jabar, from eletrocooperativa
–
renata lemos
http://www.eletrocooperativa.org
http://liquidoespaco.wordpress.com/

all roads go through the humanities

Whether they cite the articles that influence their thinking or not, scientists consult the humanities and social sciences.

A recent study by Johan Bollen and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico used anonymized server log data from 35,000 journals over a two year period. Included in their published findings is a “knowledge map,” a spatial-visual representation of the academic disciplines represented by the articles that the scientists consulted while researching online. The centrality of the humanities, represented in yellow, is a curious finding given that humanities departments across the country are feeling pressure to defend their utility, while the sciences are not feeling similar pressure.

image, PLoS ONE