Today was a day just like any other...

Except for the fact that it was this day 21 years ago that I made my long-anticipated arrival into the world. As I sit here at 11:30pm at night on my 21st birthday, I am struck not only by the thought that I have not blogged away for a solid amount of time but also by the shock of how time comes and goes. I have been aching for my 21st birthday for such a long time that now that it is here, it has come and gone in a blink of an eye! I love birthdays, and this one was particularly lovely. I was given the most extravagant gifts which make me feel incredibly spoilt but beyond that was lathered in love in the form of texts, calls, and video messages. I'm a lucky one. 
I guess the point that has struck me tonight is that time goes quickly, hence one should always be living to make the most of it. 
From here on in, I vow to you dear blog one that I will make the most out of everything.
Hoorah. 


This is a rather random post but one with an important message, and one that I will like to be reminded of. 


May the blogging begin. (Or 're'-begin in my case.)

Assignment 3, Question 4

Q.4: When publishing changes, so does society. Investigate and compare the impact of two publication technologies, one pre-1900 and one post-2000, on a specific aspect of society (e.g. education, politics, creative industries, science, entertainment, social relationships).


Please find below the references for arts2090 final assignment:


Beacon Learning Center 2004, Brief History of Cave Paintings, pdf, accessed 3 June 2012, <http://www.beaconlearningcenter.com/documents/1137_01.pdf>


‘Publishing’, Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing>


Innis, Harold, The Press: A neglected factor in the economic history of the twentieth century. London: Oxford University Press1949, p. 5, date accessed 29.04.12


Kamdar, Sachin (2012) ‘Why Publishers are about to go Data Crazy’, Mediashift: Your Guide to the Digital Revolution, January 17, <http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/01/why-publishers-are-about-to-go-data-crazy017.html>


Kluth, A. 2006, A survey of new media: Among the audience, The Economist, Available at: http://www.economist.com/node/6794156, Accessed 01.06.2012


Suciu, P 2007, The Rise Of The Prosumer, Tech Crunch, accessed 6 June 2012, <http://techcrunch.com/2007/06/15/the-rise-of-the-prosumer/>


Naughton, J. 2007, Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, Oxford, accessed 3 June 2012, <http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/>

Presenting Data

5'10". Brown hair. Blue eyes. Native english speaker. Lebanese heritage. Australian. 

This is a glimpse into the immense amount of data pertaining to an individual human. For all seven billion people who live on earth (http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/), similar data exists on each person. For most people, data collections have occurred from the time they were born, with their initial statistics being recorded on birth certificates. Over many years, data similar to human characteristic data has shifted to adopting a stronger digital format. Today for example, almost any data you are after can be sourced online with the most up to date research and statistics available at the public's disposal. 


It was only last night, that after watching a documentary online into the life of Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg did I realise the phenomenal power of online data that is constantly sourced for the benefit of other businesses, a prime example being Facebook. In the online environment, data is constantly being collected from web users by large organisations to meticulously target individuals with customised adverts. Facebook analysts who through thorough data collection on their 900 million active users (http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/entertainment/25-Apr-2012/hits-900m-users-values-77b) are able to provide all of the data collected to large firms, for example advertising firms to offer plans to market and advertise various products through the technological platform on a customised basis. 

On the topic of human data, I got thinking towards a way to present data that perhaps has not been visually presented previously. A topic that always interests me are the 8 Millenium Development Goals. Perhaps it was after seeing the eye opening BBC production The Girl in the Cafe (which is worth a watch!) that triggered an interest in global development, however I managed to come across data pertaining to each of the eight major goals which I thought would work extremely well as a visual graphic. Given that we are in a group, the goals will work well to form a creative presentation. I feel that in order to make a presentation of our respective 'goal' successful, we need to look at ways to uniquely represent our different data sets. My goal is the number 1 goal: to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger in developing countries by 2015. While this may seem like a simple task to some, the statistics prove otherwise. The below inset image is a pdf of the way I chose to represent my given data, and instead of listing the points of information, I attempted to leave a little up to the imagination...

The beauty of a presentation is that it allows a directed interpretation of information for an audience. As opposed to simply relaying facts and figures which are so easily sourced, a presentation and a visual one at that is allowing for facts to be transmitted and a message to be received and interpreted by the audience. Perhaps this particular presentation may not contain such 'visual hypertextuality' (Gye, Munster, Richardson, 2005) as other visual art forms, yet it contains enough graphics for an audience's mind to interact with.

The final point I wanted to mention on this talk of graphic presentation, takes me back to the point about this constant shift we are experiencing with our average, everyday objects gradually entering this virtual environment. In the online article, Distributed Aesthetics from The Fibreculture Journal, the author raises the point made by Vince Dziekan that, "art galleries are increasingly both virtualised (their Web presence often producing entirely different aesthetic and cultural modes of engagement) and their infrastructure digitised." Upon reading this, I immediately thought back to when my sister who works at Google Australia, was explaining the launch of The Google Art Project to me. This relatively new concept relates back to what Dziekan is talking about where it encourages both the 'aesthetic and cultural' engagement from an audience situated anywhere in the world. 

Edwina Bartlem in her article ‘Reshaping Spectatorship: Immersive and Distributed Aesthetics’ argues that "both immersive and distributed aesthetics...can effectively shift our understanding of art spectatorship from passive to performative mode and transform how we interpret and experience community, the human-technology relation and our own corporeality and consciousness." Being able to source Van Gogh and Monet online from an extensive data collection such as Google Art Project, people can begin to interpret art differently and in turn experience it in a very different light, given the its distinct presentation.

Lisa Gye, Anna Munster and Ingrid Richardson, December 2005, Distributed Aesthetics from The Fibreculture Journal, available at: http://seven.fibreculturejournal.org/ , date accessed: Tuesday 1 May 2012.

http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/entertainment/25-Apr-2012/hits-900m-users-values-77b

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Roasted Beans, Steamed Milk...and a Cheeky Smile

Different twist to a favourite part of my day. 

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.