Image source: Solar Navigator

As I write this entry, the Internet is flowing with comments and information about Michael Jackson.  Here is my drop in the sea of data that will be archived in places people who adopt RSS as part of their daily life will never know exist.

As critical as I am about pop culture, I have to admit that Michael Jackson was ever-present in my growing years; the teenager in me mourns, while the critic cannot help but reflect on the implications of this unexpected and unfortunate death.  As sad as Jackson’s passing away is to millions of people, one cannot help but notice how media has changed in the way it handles celebrities and public figures. Just a few years ago there would have been some distance from the dark side of a person’s life.  This may still hold true for presidents of the United States as one hardly heard anything negative about Richard Nixon during his funeral.  Watergate had become so abstract that it could be cited as a historical moment with no major shame for the country or Nixon’s presidency.  This is the power of ahistoricity: people’s  lack of historical knowledge made possible by 24 hour news cycles.

But with Michael Jackson a different kind of mourning takes place. His accomplishments and setbacks are cited simultaneously.  Everywhere, from CNN to all major newspapers, like the NYTimes and El Pais in Spain, Michael Jackson is remembered for all his deeds–good and bad.  As he is remembered as the King of Pop, he is also remembered as a  person who was accused of child molestation (this was not proven in court).  He is subjected to the aesthetic of reality TV.

In a way this might be healthy for the way people perceive celebrities, as people may become more accepting of public figures’ shortcomings.  The sad thing is that scandals sell, and this is the last thing Michael Jackson is remembered for.  The King of Pop was planning a comeback, but this one was not to be.  He will be remembered as a  conflicted figure, who will inevitably be romanticized for his early production and his conflicted last years.

And now, it is time to settle for reissues of MJ’s music in whatever form networked culture will allow.  As I write these lines, files of Jackson’s songs are being swapped across the Internet–bootleg remixes made in bedrooms across the world to be shared in just minutes, while music executives figure out a way to cash in on MJ’s music legacy.    Such cash-in will be mixed and hard to control.  Michael Jackson dies in a time when things for the music industry are not so clear cut and no celebrity is perfect, and that imperfection in the end may mean more cash

He was a person who everyone knew through spectacular images.  He may have known himself through the same images as well.  As constant exposure rises with social networks, Michael Jackson, the most famous person vanishes.  Let this be a rupture in the era of networked media.  Michael Jackson is about to become an institution,  like Marilyn, like Presley, like Warhol.  He will live forever as a spectacular figure.  But let’s not forget that somewhere in there was a child who was trying to understand himself.  I may be accused of a bit of romanticism with this last statement.  Let it be. This is why I chose an early image of Michael Jackson to complement this short reflection on a celebrity I felt I knew, as I had no choice but to acknowledge him everywhere I turned as I grew up.  I accepted him as I was bombarded by his presence, just as I am now by the repetition of his spectacular absence.  I admit to have moonwalked.  RIP MJ.

Image source: The New Mexico Independent

Written for Interactiva Biennale 2009

The following text was written for Interactiva 09 Biennale, which takes place the month of May and June of 2009.  Other texts written for the biennale can be found at the Interactiva site.

In March of 2005 I wrote “The Blogger as Producer.”[1]  The essay proposed blogging as a potentially critical platform for the online writer.  It was written specifically with a focus on the well-known text, “The Author as Producer,” by Walter Benjamin, who viewed the critical writer active during the 1920’s and 30’s with a promising constructive position in culture. [2]

In 2005 blogging was increasing in popularity, and in my view, some of the elements entertained by Benjamin appeared to resonate in online culture.  During the first half of the twentieth century, Benjamin considered the newspaper an important cultural development that affected literature and writing because newspaper readers attained certain agency as consumers of an increasingly popular medium.  During this time period, the evaluation of letters to editors was important for newspapers to develop a consistent audience.  In 2005, it was the blogosphere that had the media’s attention.  In this time period, people who wrote their opinions on blogs could be evaluated with unprecedented efficiency. [3]
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Image source: Boing Boing

Just saw this shirt at a local Waffle shop in State College. We asked the guy wearing it where he got it, and he said, with a blank stare,  “from DC…”

“Ahh!” we said… “Of course!”

On the web, leave it to Boing Boing to have the tip:

“Photographer and Boing Boing pal Glen E Friedman, who shot many of the iconic photographs of the hiphop band Run DMC, shares this t-shirt with us — he’s seeing them everywhere in NYC, I understand they’re all over the place. But this was the first time I’d seen the design, so I LOLed and blogged. Larger view. Link to a few related shots.”

Just got notice from Zemos 98 of their new book, Codigo Fuente: La Remezcla, which brings together a range of articles on Remix in culture and media.  The book is in Spanish.  I look forward to reading it and highlight some of the essays.  Kudos to Zemos 98.

Image and text source: TechCrunch

Timelines are becoming an increasingly popular user interface. Today, Google Labs launched a new product called Google News Timeline, which lays out the top stories from Google News in columns for each day. You can scroll down to see more stories or, of course, can search for specific topics or keywords. (It also launched similar image search)

The timeline view gives you a snapshot of the major stories for each day, and you can drag the dates across to go back in time. It seems to favor Time Magazineand Wikipedia Events, although you can get rid of those results with a click. If you want to zero in on a particular topic, you can search for that term to see how a story has evolved over time. The timeline remembers your searches and saves them if you are logged in.

Read the entire text: TechCrunch

Found via Infosthetics

Image source: Wolframalpha

Text source: The Independent

Originally published Sunday, 3 May 200

The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.

Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. “It is really impressive and significant,” he wrote. “In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.

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Image and text source: Free Software Magazine

Originally published August 15, 2005

The free culture movement is growing, from its inception in the free software movement to the relatively recent establishment of Creative Commons. Across the world, localised teams are adapting CC licenses to their particular legal systems. Record labels, indie film studios and well over 10 million web pages are using CC licenses. Are we on an inexorable ascendency? Well, not quite. In this article I will show that we still have a lot of issues to iron out.

But first, I want to illustrate my personal experience with Creative Commons. Remix Reading is an artistic project that I lead, based in Reading, UK. Our aim is to get artists (working with music, video, images and text) to come together and share their work, be inspired by each other’s work, and ultimately to create “remixes”. All material on the web site is released under a Creative Commons license, as is all work performed or exhibited at events we organise locally. Our main focus is bringing Creative Commons to local, non-geeky people.

Read the entire article at Free Software Magazine

“The Warhol Che,” artist and year unknown, an example of the image’s ubiquity.

Image source: NYTimes

Che Guevara got some attention at the beginning of 2009 with Steven Soderberg’s film Che, starring Benicio del Toro. More recently, Che is the subject of a book titled, Che’s Afterlife, by Michael Casey. The book is reviewed by the New York Times as a detailed account of Che’s famous image taken by Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, known professionally as Korda. The story goes that Korda took the photograph during a funeral in Cuba. Korda’s creativity was not only in knowing when to take the photograph, which is for what most photographers are praised, but also in knowing how to crop it. To quote directly from the New York Times:

“By radically cropping the shot, snipping out a palm tree and the profile of another man, Korda gave the portrait an ageless quality, divorced from the specifics of time and place.”

This divorce is what Walter Benjamin noted in the first half of the twenty century in his well-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” An essay that many cultural critics have cited and will probably cite, because Benjamin foresaw many of the elements that today inform media culture in all areas of reproduction. Read the rest of this entry »

Image and text source: NYTimes

So, after all the buzz about the YouTube Symphony Orchestra altering the audition process forever, after months of interactive computer chat about the world’s first collaborative online orchestra, after 96 winning players were selected from among the more than 3,000 musicians who submitted audition videos and were brought to New York for a group summit and Carnegie Hall concert, how did the YouTube Symphony Orchestra finally play?

Read the entire article: NYTimes

Data mining visualization

Image source: Richard Lees Website

Note: The following interview was originally published on Digicult in February 2009. The introduction has been translated from the Italian by Lucrezia Cippitelli. It is here published as originally written. I would like to give a humble thanks to Lucrezia for her introduction, which I think gives me more credit than deserved.

Three years ago I had a long interview with Eduardo Navas about his editorial project, newmediaFIX, the online platform that republishes and redistributes texts and interviews from the most influential international magazines focused on art and media (between them Digicult) and which I collaborated with as editor for almost one year. Recently, I met Eduardo again by e-mail for another interview about his last online project, “Traceblog,” launched on October 2008. ”

The artist, theorist, curator and scholar from the United States works on software and web-resources for blogging. He reflects upon the dynamics of the Internet, the concept of Remix and distribution of concepts and information in culture, since the beginning of his artistic career. He is now one of the most influential voices on network cultures and use/abuse of its tools. As Eduardo asserts in this long chat, referring to “Traceblog” but it could be related with his art practice at large: “I aim to explore the implications of the growing pervasiveness of information flow and its manipulation. From this point of view, I see it in direct relation to my ongoing investment in blogging culture.”

In line with his early net art projects as Goobalization and Diary of a Star, while simultaneously following Eduardo’s theoretical researches on blogging and remix, “Traceblog” is an online artwork that appropriates the free Firefox plug-in (Track me not), created by NYU developers and researchers Daniel C. Howe and Helen Nissenbaum. The plug-in is designed to obfuscate the transparency of the online activities of Internet users. As result, “Traceblog” publishes the pseudo logs of Eduardo’s daily online searches and activities on a web site http://navasse.net/traceblog/. The same website contains links to the explanation of the project, links to the Firefox plug-in and some tools that make users aware on how to hide search trails.

“Traceblog” makes visible how our daily Internet activity is tracked by the browser we use and produces an archive of all our data and information that could be used for commercial and control purposes. A fact is that data mining is totally out of control if we consider all the web 2.0 platforms, that stimulate Internet users’ obsession to expose themselves and constantly be in touch: just consider common tools as Blogger, propriety of a big commercial corporation as Google, just to make an example. We could name a few others such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and also (although they are not related with browsing), Skype, Msn, the free services for email and so on and so on… We talked with Eduardo about all that and much more.

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