Information Distribution Via Digital Media (2011)

Information Distribution Via Digital Media (2011)
Rhizome Curated Exhibition by Joanna Duran

This exhibition presents new media through world news. New innovative ways of communication are infiltrating the lives of people all over the world. We no longer have to wait for the morning paper to hear about current news and world issues now that new digital media brings light to new ways of disbursing information in seconds. These particular artworks retrieve current news by pioneering the use of digital computation and visualization. The Oracle of Elsewhere by Ian Wojtowicz presents us with a 3D generator that exhibits a rotating model of earth. This visualized globe not only conveys current live news around the world, but does so in a way that is extremely innovative with today’s technology by allowing the viewer to geographically choose the current news as it fluctuates through Google’s database. Similar to this oracle the rest of the artworks demonstrate world news as it happens. The artwork created by Martin John Callanan provides a web page that displays single images of hundreds of newspapers from all over the world. As we continue evolving into this new day of age that is the world of technology Callanan and Wojtowicz, as well as others, are able to make latest news available to millions with creative ways of streaming communication.

Text Trends

Text Trends

Greg at Serial Consign has written a review of my new work Text Trends

… In experiencing the piece, the viewer sits idly and watches animations plot out the ebb and flow (or lack thereof) of a series of search terms over the last four years. This all plays out matter-of-factly with all the passion of a market index or a readerboard… In viewing this piece, I found that it invoked a bit of anxiety and I felt a little helpless… It is not too often that you come across a data-based project that makes you step back and think about how you qualify and evaluate visualization. More importantly Text Trends abstracts the casual manner in which we receive, scan and process information and language on a daily basis.

Media Salon

Tyler Friedman at Media Salon on I Wanted to See All of the News From Today:

I saw a panel discussion with the guy who did this project before. It is pretty ambitious. […] It is a constantly refreshing overview of the state of the global consciousness. It is not every newspaper yet, but, as I understand, that is the goal. Of course, this project is dependent upon physical print- upon the concept of a newspaper front page. It would not be as effective to make a similar conglomeration of the daily headlines using, say, internet home pages, as most news sites are not as regionalized as a printed paper is. So, this project acts upon physical reality, compiling it in a way that would be physically impossible without digitalization and the globalized communal work ethics enabled by networking.One other thing that is nice about this, is that it doesn’t attempt to say anything. There is not editorial voice, or artistic presence providing access to the information for you. No translations, no links. The site is completely 2-dimensional. The information is left to speak for itself, to be interpreted as it is. As such it is a pretty radical visualization of the international current moment.If only the images were higher resolution and a pdf style zoom in zoom out function was supported so that the smaller text would be visible.

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