2008 is shaping up to be a real out-there Art year. A dog is starved in a gallery, a woman conceives and aborts multiple times as an undergrad piece, and now this at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art in New York.
What is it this time? One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the MOMA in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened…
Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”
From the very fertile minds that gave you “Guitar Hero”, comes Hyperscore, a musical composition software program that uses a friendly interface to score music. What is lovely about this program is that it is accessible to everyone, kids and adults, musicians and nonmusicians. Once the graphical interface has been rendered in colours and shapes and so on, it can then be instantly transformed into a musical score with notes.
In this wonderful TED video, Tod Machover (of MIT’s Media Lab) introducesDan Ellsey, “a young man with cerebral palsy who has found his voice through music created and performed using Media Lab technologies. Ellsey plays his “My Eagle Song” in a soaring rendition that underscores music’s power to heal, to communicate, and to inspire.”
Here you will see The Mona Lisa, the most protected painting in the world, which will never be restored. Using a remarkable high definition camera capable of “seeing through” spectral layers of paint this technique expose the artist’s visible and invisible painting stages revealing for the first time in hundreds of years the original color and appearance of the painting.
Imagine seeing for the first time the painting as it was meant to be. No cracked varnish, no grime, etc. Not only that, imagine discovering “underpainting”, or first draughts, to see how La Gioconda had “moved” her hands.
This article mentions an award-winning design whereby children in Africa contribute to collecting water by playing. The play part is the mechanism by which the water is pumped.
“Water in Africa is precious, like life itself. Women and children, in most rural and poor urban communities all over the continent, trek tens of miles daily or pay dearly for a gallon. But an innovative pump is giving children in South Africa a more definitive role in bringing clean, sustainable water to their communities.Powered by play, the PlayPump water system is a children’s merry-go-round attached to a water pump and storage tank. It provides easy access to clean drinking water, brings joy to children, and leads to improvements in health, education, gender equality, and economic development.”
YouTube wants to be a venue for academe, I suppose like Wikipedia wishes to be taken seriously. In the past few months, several post-secondary institues have signed agreements with the site to set up official “channels.” The University of California at Berkeley was the first, and the University of Southern California, the University of New South Wales, in Australia, and Vanderbilt University soon followed.What is happening is that lecturers are becoming rock-stars of sorts, some videos even getting millions of hits and thousands in feedback.With all the new and emerging technology, there is no longer any excuse to not embrace the chance to garner new audiences. Besides, it’s free (so far). There are many other venues to upload your lectures, iTunes being another.
One of the Internet stars at Berkeley is Marian C. Diamond,a professor of anatomy and neuroscience who has taught for more than 40 years. Since the university started uploading her lectures to YouTube, she has been getting fan e-mail from around the world. “I respond to every one of them,” Ms. Diamond says of the e-mails. That means more work, but she has no complaints “For a teacher, you couldn’t ask for anything better.”
A video by Michael L. Welsh (and 200 students in his cultural anthropology class at Kansas State University garnered over 1.4 million hits and over 6,000 comments. The students in the video hold up signs that read “I bring my laptop to class, but I’m not working on class stuff”, or ” I spend 2 hours on my cellphone”.
When Mark Marino (lecturer in the writing program at UCLA) saw the video, he wanted to respond. What Marino was concerned about was the fact that most of the students were white in the classroom video, and and felt that that perhaps reflected the Kansas U more than most other Universities. Hi Response? Another video. Enter the new dialogue.
Wikipedia, the beacon of lay-person usage, has always fought for its right of respect in academia. Now the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, announced this week that it willwork with the research centre UNU-Merit, which is run by the United Nations University and the Netherlands’s Maastricht University to conduct its first Wikipedia survey. It intends to collect data over the next several months on who Wikipedia’s contributors are, why they visit the site and what they do there. The results are to be put forward in Alexandria, Egypt at the Wikimania conference this year.
Some values of “virtual worlds” in education come to the fore. As demonstrated in the linked video below, Professor Randall Davis of CSAIL at MIT uses software called “Magic Paper” (Natural Interaction). His quote “one of the nice things about an online environment is we can have the advantage of having it feel like paper and yet be able to do things that are not possible on paper. Sort of like a smart Smart Board.
Twitter is a service that lets you micro-blog by sending out very short notes up to 140 characters to a select group of friends or other subscribers, who can receive them as text messages on their cell phones. Now, thinking academically, you would be excused if you thought using this technology would contribute to students use of the cell phones for messaging endlessly.
Well, enter David Parry, an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas. Parry sees Twitter as a useful classroom-communication tool and outlines several “Ways to use Twitter in Academia” here. It’s interesting, and from my past post about a professor that smashes cell phones in class, a refreshing forward look into using tech in education.
My previous post concerning new words making it into the holy books of dictionaries, I mentioned how Locavore was the number one new word. Now it appears the Merriam-Webster open (on-line) version has come up with a winner for this year. Last years winner was “Google”, as in “Go ahead and Google my name”. If you don’t know how w00t is used, it’s a pretty geeky way to express joy, often associated with on-line gamers. Winning loot off another gamer, or even just winning a round in a game will set off a lot of WOOTs. However, it has dripped into the on-line experiences of Bloggers and such.For better or worse, FaceBook came in second place. To FaceBook, you must be uploading on the social network site, or finding friends, sending messages, playing games or taking tests, depending on the Apps that are piggybacked onto someone’s page. BTW, the real definition of w00t can be found here.
Michael Geist, a technology-law scholar in Canada, has been campaigning against a proposed copyright reform bill via YouTube and Facebook. The measure, he warns the public, would mirror the controversial U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act by restricting the use of digital works, and making it illegal to bypass copyright protection devices on digital books, recordings, and other material. In a video he posted on YouTube this month, he urges people to write letters to government officials, university presidents, and media outlets to denounce the copyright proposal. Mr. Geist also started a Facebook page called Fair Copyright, which has signed up over 23,000 people. With the power of YouTube and Facebook, he has managed to delay the reforms until the end of January. That’s not good enough. Until citizens have a voice, these reforms should not proceed.
