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. 

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!