“The way in which humans deal with physical objects has been formed by extensive interaction and, according to the theory of embodied cognition, has led to conceptualization and interpretation that is grounded in physical interaction of the body with elements in the environment. Digital objects are immaterial and cannot show similar external properties as physical objects, and further, they are representational in nature. Specific problems related to their immaterial nature are those of permanence, location, and ownership…It is concluded that the importance of the distinction between direct physical objects and immaterial objects has been vastly underestimated, at the cost of usability, trust and security.”
—Don G Bouwhuis, (2006) “Perception and interpretation of internet information: accessibility, validity and trust”, Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, Vol. 4 Iss: 1, pp.7 – 16
If the Mashup Awards are any indicator we are far from the future. I believe web application hybrids (or mashups) will mitigate, aggregate, and supply returns all our information retrieval needs when we eventually move away from paging through text-based preview links in a single channel of discovery. Wikipedia, feeds, and dynamic dashboards are training a new generation of digital natives to expect information to be composited onto one platform, and why shouldn’t it? And yet, although I’ve seen some stand out mashups this year, a majority of those getting press seem to extend off of Twitter. Snooze.
Here are my Mashup Awards, ending with the meta-Mashup to the third degree
NY Art Beat Bubble Machine
Paul Hagon’s Then & Now
Map of Amazon (hint: once you’re there double click)
TubeGraph (Kayne & Obama Mashup Mashup)
Cooliris: a new 3d image wall plug-in that allows you gorgeous, high-speed, gesture-sensitive spacial navigation of image search returns. Honestly, it’s kind of blowing my mind, although one could argue it belongs to the already well developed “cover-flow” model or the iPhone “touch and flick” generation.
Why limp through 20 pages of google images (next, next, next), when you can whip down a wall of all your options erstwhile rotating, enlarging and culling metadata?
Below is a screenshot from my search of the NY Public Library Digital Gallery, although perhaps the more meta example would have been my google image search for “Cooliris” which I navigated using Cooliris to find the picture above. My keyword on NYPL was “romance.”
A kind of dorky demo in video form here.
Artist Andres Laracuente, my partner, has long wanted to make a piece using images of Vladimir Putin’s daughters. The elusive offspring have managed to avoid being photographed on a scale that seems incomprehensible in today’s paparazzi-fueled celebrity culture. According to Andres, only two images of Maria and Yekaterina Putin as adults are publicly available online.
Fortunately for Andres, 3D morphable face animation has advanced to such a degree that its now possible to create a realistic video from any 2D photo; the technology can used to animate a photo’s subject while altering their expression, weight and illumination. You can even make a female subject “a man” and vice versa. See this video, made by Volker Blanz & Thomas Vetter at the MPI for Biological Cybernetic’s, for more info.
Right now I’m interested in:
