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Watching Brave New Minds, the sixth episode of the series, you are immediately transported to director Jennifer Abbott’s interpretation of disorder-related terms to a world where you almost feel the threatening force of Unspeak and begin to question the... 

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Too big to fail, fiscal cliff, austerity...the world of finance has proved to be fertile ground for Unspeak. Join us for Part 3 of our Unspeak Data Visualization series, where we look at the rhetoric surrounding the financial crisis. http://goo.gl/xS26Q0

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Unspeak word of the day: Bitcoin Jesus The astronomical rise in the value of bitcoin which has surged more than 8,000 percent over the course of 2013 has created a new breed of digital currency multimillionaires.

Source: News article

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Unspeak word of the day: Iran Nuclear Deal

Tsar Bomba - Largest Nuclear Divice Ever Tested - Soviet Union (50 Megaton) 1961

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Data Visualization Unspeak part 2

In the fourth episode of the Unspeak series we dive right into where you’re most likely reading this right now - on a social network. But as Steven Poole points out, what is actually social about this network, when corporations and brands consistently disguise their true intentions in an attempt to monetize our interpersonal relationships and materialistic preferences, and ultimately...

[unspeakdoc-blog]

Data Visualization Unspeak

Natural Disasters. Climate Change. Clean Coal. Bio fuels. Organic Food. Oil Spill. No doubt, we are in the science and environment-related Unspeak episode that we featured in the second week of this Tumblr. As Steven Poole so poignantly points out, public debates are won or lost as soon as...

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Unspeak Explained

When we first kicked off the development for Unspeak on the web, integrating a data visualization element was one of the features we were most excited for, following the dictionary that would catalogue Unspeak words for current and future generations to come! The main purpose of the visualizations was to discover how Unspeak words are framed and actually used in the real (digital) world - on social media and on traditional news sources, and to explore their prevalence and the context they’re spoken in, amidst layers of digital data. We were curious about demographics and how that related to Unspeak words – is there a divide between males and females? Could we discover interesting findings amongst different age groups? What would be key issues tweeted along with certain words? How would the popularity of terms change over time? And so much more…

[unspeakdoc-blog]

Interview Jennifer Abbott - Director Brave New Minds

1) How did you approach this project, and specifically the theme of your video: Disorders / Brave New Minds ? In Brave New Minds, I wanted the viewer to feel the threatening force of unspeak and the insidious ways it manipulates our individuality and humanity. My goal was to the leave the viewer with an uncomfortable emotional resonance that causes them to question the DSM categorization system, and indeed, the meaning of sanity and insanity itself.

I also wanted to draw attention to the very act of language creation; sometimes beautiful and creative and other times, or even at the same time, dangerous and oppressive. As users of language we are deeply immersed in this act; swimming as unknowing co-conspirators in water that we mostly don’t feel. The use of the typewriter symphony is the most obvious example of this.

  2) What was the most challenging part of the montage? The most challenging part was to resist cheap laughs; people do a lot of strange things with garden hoses when one googles “erectile dysfunction.” While searching for footage, it was also difficult to say, “Enough! Stop! You will get swallowed by the infinite nature of this abyss.” I’m still here and so obviously I managed to tear myself away from YouTube.

Another difficult thing was resisting the temptation to put Stephen Harper, Bill O’Reilly and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat in the montage of “annoying people.” So I didn’t. (The young Japanese girl dressed as little red riding hood dancing with human size stuffed animals was just a whim and now I regret putting her in with that lot).

  3) How does the subject-matter (manipulation) or the form (using existing material and remixing it), or both, relate to your other work? As an indie filmmaker working generally with smaller budgets, I long ago found ways to re-purpose existing footage as evidenced in A Cow at My Table and The Corporation and then later I AM. I especially love old archival footage because it gets right down to one of my goals as a filmmaker: making the familiar strange (credos to you Bertolt Brecht). Feature a Spam commercial from 70 years ago and today’s viewers go “yuck.” Ta da, attention has been drawn to the social construction of food, to name just one layer of meaning.

Living on a permaculture farm today, it’s of interest to me that re-purposing existing materials, a basic tenant of permaculture, has also been such an integral part of my art practice.

4) What are you working on at the moment? As a filmmaker, I intentionally take breaks between big projects to have a more balanced life – a necessity with my large blended family of seven with young twins in that mix as well as living on a small farm. Between all of that, I’ve been writing a screenplay, originally with the National Film Board of Canada: A multi-genre romp about one woman's quest to escape meaninglessness and find her voice in a peak everything, neo-con world dominated by the heartless supremacy of money. I’m also in the early stages of development with a feature documentary whose subject is not yet public and am helping a few stuck filmmakers wrestle to completion their documentaries.

 Watch the full episode:

[coonigf]

[unspeakdoc-blog]

Unspeak word of the day: Caffeine Intoxication Have you just drunk too much coffee? Feel a bit wired or anxious? You may think you’ve just had an overdose of the active ingredient, but you are actually suffering the mental disorder listed as ‘caffeine intoxication’. That this is thought to merit inclusion in a psychiatric manual is arguably an example of rampant ‘diagnostic inflation’.

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Unspeak word of the day:  Binge eating disorder The psychiatric disease you may have if you overeat a minimum of once a week for a period of three months, and feel ‘distress’ afterwards. Poses the significant danger that restaurant critics must henceforth be considered pathological specimens.   

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Week 5: Brave New Minds

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Top 5 Unspeak words of the week: 1.Too big to fail: Financial institutions were ‘bailed out’ because they were ‘too big to fail’. In fact they already had failed, which is why they were haemorrhaging cash and letting in bilgewater. But they were deemed too big to be allowed to fall apart under the repulsive force of their own incompetence. 2. Austerity 3. Recession 4. PIGS 5. Subprime

[sunflowers-and-mangoes-deactiva]

[unspeakdoc-blog]

Unspeak word of the day: Too big to fail Financial institutions were ‘bailed out’ because they were ‘too big to fail’. In fact they already had failed, which is why they were haemorrhaging cash and letting in bilgewater. But they were deemed too big to be allowed to fall apart under the repulsive force of their own incompetence.

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Unspeak word of the day: Recession The term ‘recession’ originated as a euphemism for ‘depression’, because that sounded too depressing, even though it in turn had first been employed as a euphemism for ‘crisis’. A recession occurs when an economy ‘contracts’ for two consecutive quarters. Notice that economies ‘grow’ but never ‘shrink’; instead they ‘contract’, like a muscle or a legal agreement.  Michigan Central Station | Detroit

[anarchyfla]

[unspeakdoc-blog]

Unspeak word of the day: Bailout From big banks to tiny countries, the idea of ‘bailing out’ troubled institutions or economies pictures them as leaky boats, and subtly reverses the action involved. In the metaphor, we are taking large quantities of water out of the boats, but in reality we are putting large quantities of money in — which would surely cause any leaky boat to sink faster.