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.
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/
