Visual Media Vs Other Media

Here is a little (12 minute!) snippet into my visual and verbal thoughts on visual media while I address the question of "do visual media work differently to other media forms?"

Something a little different...

Today Was A Day Unlike Any Other

Enjoying the most beautiful day at Kitchen by Mike to celebrate my lovely Mum's birthday.

Let's Discover the Unknown

So there we were, my sister and I stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on the M4 motorway in a frantic attempt to get away to The Blue Mountains for a rushed 24 hour holiday. All in all it was a successful trip, it was only the two breakdowns along the motorway which made our initial plan to get there in one and a half hours skewed as we resorted to sitting in the car trying not to go crazy. As we sat there, I think my brain was still some what hot wired into thinking of publics, publishing and in particular visualisation. My mind is easily stimulated. As my brain is wandering off into its own little world of obscure thoughts, sure enough we crawl past this sign over head which immediately alerts me to firstly the fact that what I am witnessing is visualisation of text and secondly to indeed wake up! 

I got a little overly excited and whipped out my iPhone, and with one hand on the wheel I snapped this photo while moving at 10km/h on a 110 km/h road. Life.
The fact is, this form of visualisation is working in a number of ways to stimulate and interact with the thousands of minds of drivers that are passing under this sign every hour. Instead of communicating audibly or through colour pictures, the sign is working with words to help us visualise the message which is clearly to 'wake up' and concentrate on driving. 
Information graphics, a rather complex term pertains to the idea of visually representing information, data and knowledge. If we were to get overly technical one could say it is the aesthetics associated with the publishing of data and it usually stems from this concept of archives that collect said data over a period of time. 
After pondering over the idea of data visualisation, I figured it would be too easy to include a subway map of the train systems of a busy city like New York or London, or to include a strange graph with data people only pretend to understand, hence I got thinking of the data visualisation of another sort. The sort that follows here...

I think this is a fantastic representation of data of another kind...a human and the way it changes over the course of time. Instead of looking at statistics on paper of weight, height and age we see it before us transforming on the screen of this man and a visual representation of him every day over the space of six years. Phenomenal! 
I believe it is this sort of visual information graphic that uses images to allow us to structure different epistemologies surrounding human quotidien development. 
Please ignore the irony surrounding the fact that I have clearly written far more on a topic of visual and graphic representation than I have inserted graphics...however hopefully this has been interesting and provided some food for visual thought. 

Where is Piracy Taking Us?

With a whopping 60 hours of video content alone being uploaded to Youtube every minute, there is a phenomenal amount of content circulating the world wide web through the endless number of platforms allowing for user generated content uploads. Hence the evolving problem of piracy is constantly emerging and the response from the public has generated the interesting outcome to the way we interact with the thing that plays such a big part in all of our lives, the internet. 
Although a rather controversial issue, the Internet has propelled our society forward to be discovering and connecting in new and more advanced ways each day. Even the most moral have admitted to illegal activity through the ease of access the Internet provides. Yet on the other hand, through this constant sharing of content there are obvious problems recurring from the owners of the content who are not receiving their owed loyalties and credit.
The music industry is renowned for being the industry which has suffered the most from the development of P2P sharing networks like Limewire and uTorrent. With its ease and accessibility, Limewire turned the most moral of us into 'pirates' yet there was always that looming threat of a virus attacking your computer, however by the time most of us discovered uTorrent that threat had long disappeared into an archive of old wives tech tales. 
One of the music industry responses to this threatening sharing network evident on the internet has been to adapt reverse psychology and eliminate the guilt associated with illegally downloading and offering the artist's album for free but not before being prompted through a pop up saying pretty much that they are thrilled that you want to listen to their music and we only require that you pay as much as you think it is worth. This method has been successful on many accounts as it toys with the human guilt. Here is someone saying yes sure have our music, we would love you to have it. And then there is the hold on one moment, you realise we work our backsides off to give this to you, please feel free to give us something small back in return. AND IT WORKS. Perhaps Danny B sums it up the most succintly through his testimonial to Bandcamp.

Bandcamp is the best thing that's happened to music in the last 5 years. I find myself using Bandcamp almost exclusively as my website these days. Being able to set my own prices is great, the staff is helpful and responsive, and getting paid immediately is soooo much better than waiting months for a check savagely slashed by 30%.

 Through the lecture given on the topic of piracy, evidently there are multiple problems in the ways in which information is available so freely and in saying this is empowering people in ways they have not been accustomed to previously. As initially stated, given the phenomenal amount of content surfacing on Youtube, there are an unbelievable amount of law suits evolving from the apparent misuse of an artist's music that has not been pre-approved by the music label before it appears on a Mother's upload of a video of her baby dancing. It is when these stories surface for example this one which gets you thinking..."how far are people going to take this!?" However needless to say underneath the absurdity of it all, the problem is still there and what are we going to do to fix it? Is the modern answer SOPA laws? 


The final interesting point I found upon researching this topic stemmed from some research into Lawrence Lessig and I stumbled across a talk he conducted with Shepard Fairey. Fairey, who is the famous artist of the Obama HOPE poster. Offering free downloads on his website of his unreal posters, Fairey shares his views on piracy and where he draws the line on stealing. Lessig offers the interesting opinion on the piracy debate that...

It's an important line to try to draw, because some people think that this debate is between those who want to make money and those on the free culture side who don't think money should be earned by anybody anywhere. And that's not the decision, artists need to earn money to flourish and do their art. That's the purpose of the copyright system and an important purpose for the system to play. The critical thing is to draw the distinction between places where someone has been caught ripping you off and places where they have been inspired by you and to celebrate that inspiration.

Take Me Back. I Command It!

Delightfully Beautiful

Today was a day that everyone in Sydney stopped to admire the most powerful friend of ours...the weather. The sun was strong, and a subtle autumn breeze was evident. After a glorious breakfast for lunch in Elizabeth Bay we wandered home and it dawned on me to take a photo of one of the most beautiful blooms I have seen for a long time. Previously the thought of stopping to take a photo of a tree in bloom would have bewildered me, however today it was the most natural thing to do...EVER! The glory lies below...

I felt it necessary to share these beauties while I sit here sipping on Lady Grey tea and listening to a Craig Armstrong classic. Lovely. 

Clear Signs of a Fever

A repetitive notion that I have been left with both after this week's lecture as well as reading into the notion of archives is the idea that even though one would think archiving is the way to contain the past, it is in fact the method of unveiling the future. As abstract as this sounds, I thoroughly enjoy this idea and have immediately started shredding apart all of the platforms I currently use to "archive" and realise the way in which this "calls into question the coming of the future".
The method by which archives are formed is through this concept of memory which is discussed widely by 90's philosopher Jacques Derrida who makes the vital observation on the impact of technology to its relationship with the human memory and in essence the conceptions of the archive: 

The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content...archivisation produces as much as it records the event.

Considering Derrida was writing well before the immense rise in social media he should be credited for initially identifying the impact technology was having and indeed forecasted to have on the development of archives into the future. The most obvious archival platform that springs to mind upon archive discusssion is one that I interact with on an hourly basis belongs to the real-time web (Matthew Ogle) is Facebook. Facebook as well as its predecessor, Myspace is a perfect example of a technological archive constantly recording your presence, photos and comments that you make in the cyber world. With its latest development of timeline, it makes looking back through the years to find what you were 'thinking' in 2007 simply with a click of your mouse. Derrida makes note of the concept of archive fever focusing on the idea that:

"It is to have a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement”

I can relate to this idea personally as it is through Facebook that I am able to quickly see a snapshot of my life in England in 2010. 10 years ago, the ease at which one would be able to jump back to that time in your life would be completely different to what we have today. The 'desire' will come to me at random times and it is so simple to go back through various archived photo albums or messages sent to you from that time in your life.


Another platform of which I have only recently discovered is rather new and deals with purely image archiving. It is called Pinterest and is a perfect way to accumulate various images you find on the 'real-time web' and culminate them in the one place. The purpose of the site is to allow for an archive of photos of which you can look back through at ease. The interesting thing about Pinterest which I particularly love is that there is this complete network of people from around the world that will "Pin" photos from the internet to their respective "walls" and anyone can view them and get the option to "re-pin" or "like" them. This concept of merging private and public comes back to the idea of convergence and publishing in the public arena. As an example of the brilliant ways in which Pinterest allows you to archive work I have embedded some images of my "wall" as well as my "wall feed"...

Author(s): Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
(Summer, 1995), pp. 9-63, The Johns Hopkins University Press


http://julierenszer.blogspot.com.au/2008/11/archive-fever-freudian-impression-by.html


http://mattogle.com/archivefever/