Merry Christmas

Santa and Basement Cat do not get on very well...

Re-inventing the "F" word

Guerrilla Girls celebrating 25 years!



25 years ago Guerrilla Girls started campaining for equal opportunity, the end of gender-based discrimination, equal access to education, freedom from sexual exploitation
and abuse, reproductive rights education, and human rights for women everywhere in their unique style.

There is still much to do considering these bleak United Nations statistics:

- Women comprise more than 50 percent of the world's population, but they own only one percent of the world's wealth

- Up to 100 million people are homeless throughout the world, the majority of them women and dependent children

- Of the estimated 1.3 billion people living in poverty around the world, 70 percent are women and girls. Women and girls are also the fastest increasing group of impoverished, a process called "the global feminization of poverty"

- Women are much less likely to have steady employment than men, and working women are lower paid, including those in industrial countries.:

Keep fighting girls!

Modern Tools

The tools of "survial" are changing! Swiss knifes now come with laser pointer and USB stick (very handy when downloading those Top Secret files).

I think you have Cats on your Internet

No blog would be complete without some cats, therefore I want to give some fuel to a running gag about the internet and share LOLcats with you.



So are Lol cats a sign of increasing creativity in society as Clay Shirky argues in his book "Cognitive Surplus" or should people better watch the Sopranos like Johan Lehrer of Wired magazine proposes?

I think the whole debate about consumption versus creation is beside the point. Especially Lehrer gets his creation and consumption completely mixed up. If you are writing about your TV consumption (like he did) it is actually creation. In any case, creativity does not spring out of a vacuum, it is always triggered by something that has been experienced or consumed before. If you write a Wikipedia article, you (hopefully) consumed a lot on the subject before. (Or maybe Lehrer gets his divine inspirations, if not from the Sopranos, directly from God?)

And the tools for creation have always been available, if people felt inclined they could have put captions to cat photos before the internet was available. So what has really changed with the Internet? It has given people an audience and the possibility to connect with like minded people. This turned out to be a huge motivator for creating things that only your internet community could possibly understand and like. Subcultures emerge that share special characters like ceiling cat and basement cat:

And insider chokes, running gags and even a special language:

In many ways, it is those thriving subcultures and idiosyncrasies that make the web exiting and not the streamlined sleek branded webpages. However, like almost anything this is a double edged sword and we can all think of some groups like neo-nazi organisations or paedophiles that we would prefer not to connect and thrive on the internet. But is the web in this respect really any worse then society as a whole?
If society is full of consumerism, banality, stereotypes, misogyny and violence then this is what we will encounter in the net as well. Of course the computer and the internet are special media and in the way they allow people to connect and be sender and receiver (or creator and consumer) at the same time, however this does not mean that the medium is the message. Like books, TV, film or radio before computer and internet can be used for good or evil, stupidity and enlightenment. If we have the feeling that the internet is currently a tool of collective stupidity, a time waster and attention destroyer then it should be all the more important to show how it could be put to a more beneficial use. The alternative would be to stay away form it altogether and that would be too bad, because then we would miss all those LOL cats ;)

Plotter drawings

I have always been fascinated by the delicacy of line drawings, both hand drawn or computer produced. Recently, I came across some beautiful line drawings that are done with a computer and a plotter printer. This is a plotter drawings by Roman Verostko a pioneer of algorithmic/software art.

A plotter is a printer where different pencils can be inserted to achieve very precise line drawings.

By inserting different colored pencils and repeating the print processes a multicolor line drawing results. Some artists have also been inserting brushes into the plotter to achieve totally different results. Or below and example of a plotter drawing on sand by Jean-Pierre Hebert using a steal ball as a drawing device that is guided by a magnet controlled by the computer/plotter. After some time the patterns in the sand vanish and the process starts again.

The algorithm that controls the output of the printer is usually programmed by the artists themselves. A programming language that has been particular popular in recent years to achieve this type of visual outputs is Processing.

However plotter drawings where used since the very early days of computer art in the 60s. Below an example of early computer art using the plotter as an output device by Charles Csuri called Sine Curve Man.

If you want to see more visit the Digital Art Museum

Games to save the world?

Lately, I have come across a few games that try to convey serious messages and deal with real life problems:

The toughest is probably "Dafur is Dying" deals with the humanitarian crisis in Dafur. The aim of the game is to collect water for the family while trying to avoid militias. A nearly impossible task and very frustrating, when you keep loosing one family member after the next and still you have no water. Yet, this might just be the message that the game programmer tried to convey.

Re-mission is a game for cancer patients, where the player fights the cancer cells in a body. According to the makers of the game playing the game during cancer treatment can be beneficial and supportive for the patient.

Evoke claims to be a crash course in changing the world (hopefully for the better). I haven't tried it yet, but it is meant to encourage creative solutions for urgent problems.

I wonder if playing those games can really help to change anything in really world, but it is least a good attempt to use the medium to raise awareness for social issues.

Digital News

Good news for 3D artists and animators. Bad news for video production:
Taiwanese TV summarizes the news from abroad in digitally animated format.



Apparently it is cheaper to create the scenes virtually then to pay for the shooting and editing of the scenes.

I wonder if the trend catches on in other countries. It might take getting used to, as it is not what we would expect in a news format.

Spoilt for Choice: Browsers

Luckily there are a number of very good browsers out there now to choose from, but as I am a lazy creature of habit my browser of choice for some time already is FireFox. Occasionally, I use Internet Explorer 8. I have also downloaded Google Chrome, but it is leading a sad rarely used live on my PC.

What I like particular about FireFox are the Add-ons you can install. These are a few I am currently using:

- FireFTP : Easy to use FTP client

- Web Developer: Adds a menu and toolbar with various web developer tools

- Flagfox: Displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website's server

- Xmarks: Synchronises your bookmarks between devices

Unfortunately, Xmarks that always kept my booksmarks in sync between devices and browsers might soon shut down: Xmarks Sync NOT Dead Yet :-(

I look forward to read your browser experiences! Maybe I can be convinced to try out a new browser.

I am NOT a Facebook user

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.... everywhere you look. 500 million users and no end to the growth. Even welfare officials in Ireland uses it to uncover social fraud (Internet crackdown on welfare cheats). Employers use it find out about future employees. But what if people do not find you on Facebook at all?

I am NOT a Facebook user. While I have already handed over my live and soul to Google, Facebook is not yet mining my data.. It is said that I have a choice if and how I will use social media (Facebook is evil... so are we?). But do I really? Will not being on Facebook make me a social outsider eventually? Might it even disqualify my for certain new media jobs if my future employer does not find me on facebook? Will one day not being on Facebook raise as many heads as having uploaded inappropriate party photos?

What do you think? Is there a social pressure to join Facebook?

PS: There are also alternatives to Facebook, for example check out Diaspora. It is social media with a big difference: no centralized data collection, no commercial interest. Unfortunately, so far also hardly any users :-(

The Everlasting Digital Memory

Interview with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger author of "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age"

In his book "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age" Viktor Mayer-Schönberger addresses the problem that information put out in the public realm of the internet takes a live of it's own and it becomes very difficult to control the information once it is has been released to the word wide web as information gets disseminate immediately once uploaded. To illustrate his point the author gives some examples of people who have experienced serious problems due to information available about them on the internet. He for example claims that a teacher-to-be Stacy Snyder was denied certification because of inappropriate photos of her on the internet.

As a solution to this problem the author suggests an expiry date for information on the web.

While discussing this book in class we did a quick survey to find out how many people agreed with the author and thought that unlimited storage and availability of personal data on the word wide web was a problem that needed a solution. The result of this data collection showed that 18 people agreed that is was a problem while 11 disagreed.

My personal opinion is that while I think that the author has a valid point when highlighting those problems that can arise from releasing information into the web, on the other hand I also consider the almost endless digital storage capabilities of the web one of its greatest assets, that means the possibly to retrieve any information and build on this knowledge, which are the building stones of a collective intelligence. There might also be historic events that some political regimes might be eager to delete from the global memory, but this must not happen.

However, to avoid that uploaded content, while in mood to party, becomes an obstacle to future employment, it is important to educate people on what to consider before releasing data into a public space like the internet and handing private data over to big corporations. Additional, stricter guidelines should be introduced on how the corporations deal with the personal data mined from the users to ensure that this data is not put to a detrimental use.

Google boss Eric Schmidt only recently warned that people would have to actually change there intently to escape there online past. He said: "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." Google chief warns on social networking dangers

And he knows what he is talking about, being the head of one of the largest data collectors. The prospect of actually having to change your name should really alert people to the problems that can be caused by being too liberal with personal information on the web.

PS: Interestingly, there are already a number of companies who over to clean up your online reputation against a fee. One person’s predicament has always been another person’s business opportunity.Google Yourself—And Enjoy