mediamorphology

[mediamorphology]

akaKURDISTAN (initiated 1998) is a website that collects stories and images about the Kurdish diaspora. It was part of the Engage.net exhibition.

akaKURDISTAN collects photographs and stories from members of the world-wide Kurdish diaspora, presents them online and initiates a process of communal remembrance. People are asked to submit historical photographs which can help to reconstruct the political and social history of the Kurds, and to contribute stories and information that they or their relatives may have about photographs that have been submitted by others. The site is a repository and zone of reflexion for individual and the collective memories of people who have no country and who for centuries have experienced suppression and exile. akaKURDISTAN creates a plane for communication and exchange and provides hope by building and binding together all those loose, individual threads into a joint historical experience. The WWW project akaKURDISTAN grew out of the book KURDISTAN: In the Shadow of History (Random House, 1997) which combines photographs and text to explore the past hundred years of Kurdish history.

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Who Made That?

An archive of the weekly Innovation column from The New York Times Magazine.

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"A Communications Primer" by Charles and Ray Eames (1953)

An instructional film on the basics of communication, created by Charles and Ray Eames of Eames Office for IBM. Music created and composed by Elmer Bernstein.

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"My Meds" from Testament (2009-ongoing) by Natalie Bookchin is an ongoing series of videos and video installations made from found online video diaries in which choruses of speakers flow and dissipate in streams and patterns of self-revelation and narrative across space. The works explore contemporary expressions of self and the truths we construct and share in public. They give new social shape and form to multiple instances of isolated expression, depicting the collective longing to be connected – to define oneself as part of a larger social body and to be seen and heard in public – even as we further isolate ourselves in front of screens.

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Listening Post (2002) is an art installation by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.

Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it’s own data processing logic.

Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.

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Anab Jain, founder of Superflux talked at NEXT13 about 3D printed firearms and bamboo drones. Her rapid fire slideshow highlighted examples of a new age of technological empowerment.

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Eidos - Sensory augmentation equipment (full version)

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Jennifer Steinkamp Orbit 2, 2008 video installation dimensions variable

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In 1963 Ivan Sutherland's "Sketchpad" pioneered the Graphical User Interface or GUI.

This video is a TV show made about the software Ivan Sutherland developed in his 1963 thesis at MIT's Lincoln Labs, "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System", described as one of the most influential computer programs ever written. This work was seminal in Human-Computer Interaction, Graphics and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Computer Aided Design (CAD), and contraint/object-oriented programming. While watching this video, remember that the TX-2 computer (built circa 1958) on which the software ran was built from discrete transistors (not integrated circuits -it was room-sized) and contained just 64K of 36-bit words (~272k bytes).

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"Permutations" (1966) by John Whitney Sr. is a computer generated film created using GRAF, a programming library developed at IBM by Dr. Jack Citron.

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Installation of a Sol LeWitt wall drawing at SF MOMA in 2010.

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THE JOHNNY CASH PROJECT IS A UNIQUE COMMUNAL WORK, A LIVING PORTRAIT OF THE MAN IN BLACK by Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk (2010)

Through this interactive website, participants may draw their own portrait of Johnny Cash to be integrated into a collective whole. As people all over the world contribute, the project will continue to evolve and grow, one frame at a time.

Submit your drawing to become a part of the new music video for the song “Ain’t No Grave”. Strung together and relayed in sequence your art, paired with Johnny’s haunting song, will become a living, moving, and ever changing portrait of the legendary Man in Black.

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Aaron Koblin's data visualization of flights patterns over the U.S. in a 24-hour period. This work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the project "Celestial Mechanics" by colleagues Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

Aaron Koblin is an artist and designer specializing in data and digital technologies.

Aaron's work uses real-world and community generated data to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and the systems they create. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His projects have been shown at international festivals including TED, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. He received the National Science Foundation's first place award for science visualization and two of his music video collaborations have been Grammy nominated. He received his MFA in Design|Media Arts from UCLA. In 2010 Aaron was the Abramowitz Artist in Residence at MIT and he leads the Data Arts Team in Google's Creative Lab.

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"Pockets Full of Memory" (2003-2007) by George Legrady

Database installation in which the audience contributes a digitized image of an object in their possession with descriptions input through a questionnaire. The sum of the archive of objects is continuously re-organized on the large projection in the museum, positioning objects of similar descriptions near each other. The archive of objects can be viewed in the museum and accessed on the internet where the public can add comments to each object.

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An interactive archival history of one of the main boulevards of Los Angeles.

  The city as a living museum. Spanning 16 miles and three cities from downtown L.A. to the ocean, Wilshire played a key role in the history and development of Los Angeles, represents virtually every major architectural style of the twentieth century, encompasses the most dense and ethnically diverse neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and embodies changing visions of urban life.

Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd. kicked off on October 2, 2005 with an architectural tour of six historic sites on the boulevard and continued through November 2005 with a range of related events presented in conjunction with partnering organizations along Wilshire.

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An experiment in human storytelling, using a photographic heartbeat of 3,214 images to document an Eskimo whale hunt in Barrow, Alaska

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Excerpts of films by Zbig Rybczynski including New Book (1976). Rybczynski is a Polish experimental filmmaker who studied art and cinematography.  He experimented with the film medium in optical printing and other filmmaking techniques to produce experiments with non-linear narrative.