AnneX

I am starting this blog for my COMM 400 class. Let's just see what happens, shall we?

[annexgx]

Wealth Inequality

Okay okay.  This IS in fact another post about visual representations of data.  I just watched this video posted on Upworthy about wealth distribution in the United States.  Like all Upworthy videos, the tagline promised to shock me, but unlike most Upworthy posts, this one actually did.

According to this video 1% of America controls 40% of the wealth. Oh, and CEOs make about 380 times what their average employee makes, which only means the balance is going to become more skewed. 

I am going to cut myself off before I start spewing a bunch of opinions about the rich and their influence on legislation and how the middle class is going to disappear, ONLY because I think those are arguments that deserve a lot of time and research and thought.  And this is just my Saturday morning blog post.

For now, I will let these numbers and their effective visual components do the talking.

[annexgx]

Data Becomes Art

In this week's assigned reading from Software Takes Command, author Lev Manovich discusses the "media/content" vs. "data/information/knowledge" categories he used to organize his list of types of cultural software.  On page 30, Manovich acknowledges that while some types of cultural software fall firmly in one category or the other (he gives the examples of a feature film as being "media/content" and an excel spreadsheet being "data/information/knowledge"), he also acknowledges that there are plenty of cases of both.

It is right at the intersection of "media/content" and "data/information/knowledge" that artist Jason Salavon lives.  Salavon, a Chicago artist and faculty member at the University of Chicago, uses software processes to further examine the role of the part in the whole or the individual in the group.  For example, his work American Varietal is a visualization of U.S. population growth based on information gathered through the U.S. Census, while Every Playboy Centerfold is a series of images created by the mean averaging of every Playboy centerfold in a specific decade. 

You can see an explanation of Salavon's work in his own words here.