‘Murmur Study is an installation that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook’s status update. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal – often emotional – expression should give us pause.’ [1]

The project focuses on one of the key characteristics of the web; persistence. With sharing publicly your personal thoughts, relationships and chitchat, people make themselves easy targets for the commercial corporations. But why are people sharing so much of themselves on the web? Roy Ascott wrote in 1984 a possible explanation:

Logging in to the network, sharing the exchange of ideas, propositions, visions and sheer gossip is exhilarating, in fact it becomes totally compelling and addictive (Ascott, 1984, p. 231)

Murmer study looks like the sophisticated version of the installation News (1969) from Hans Haacke. ‘It [News] consisted of Teletype machines that received and printed out local, national and international news in real time, as it was generated by news services.’ [2]

Where Haacke monitored the news with his installation, forty years later Baker is monitoring individuals. This is not really change when you put it in a historical context. In the sixties the most important media were the mass media: the traditional newspapers, television and radio. In the beginning of the seventies artists began experimenting with networking, they started to create telematic art. The Internet started to spread in the eighties, coming in the hands of individuals. Now we are part of a distributed network, it is just as easy to speak with a friends who lives one street away as with a colleague who lives on another continent. It is appropriate that an installation made in the 2000s focuses on the individual. People just receive as easily as send, just as Brecht imaged when he wrote in the 1930s about how the radio should be used as a two-way communication system [3]. We have arrived in the third age of the logic of images distinguished by Virillio; the age of paradoxical logic.

This new kind of images gives priority to speed over race, to the virtual over the real, and therefore transforms our notion of reality from something given to a construct. [4]

Sounds familiar? I hope there will come a moment of rationalization and we will remove certain kind of messages. Do we really want that our children in twenty years time see our Tweets about having diarhea or hot sex? But of course, that is just a trivial issue, it is more about exposing yourself and how other, unknown parties respond to that. The real question is: do we need to use a condom when we are on Twitter?

References

[1] http://christopherbaker.net/projects/murmur-study/

[2] Hans Haacke, News (1969), in Art and Electronic Media, p.121

[3] Bertold Brecht (1932), in Art and Electronic Media, p.228

[4] Virillio citated by Eduardo Kac (1993), in Art and Electronic Media, p.236

(And a happy new year to our readers!)

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Smashing Magazine raises the question if blog posts should have it’s own very identity depending on what the post is about. So when Dustin talks about ‘A Tour of my Brain‘ the design get it’s own unique flavour, like every other post. It has a lot in common of what you see in magazines like Wired or Bright. Yesterday I heard Russian media tycoon Derk Sauer saying that you can’t get the same ‘fulfilling experience’ while reading on the web as you sense it when reading a magazine. I think I don’t agree with him, especially when you see blog posts like Dustin, Jason and Gegory did. With the variety of options you have nowadays with HTML/CSS and cross-browser font possibilities it’s so much easier to create an unique and appealing ‘print-like’ experience. Altough it takes an awe full lot of extra work, I’m aware of that.

There are ’skeptic people’ in the comments at Smashing Magazine thinking this approach is something designers only do to please there own needs. On the other hand people think that an ‘average visitor’ wouldn’t appreciate the different approach for writing a blog like this, because it feels like their not on the web anymore. And off course a lot of usability questions pop up too (for instance: wide screens versus small screens).

Personally I find this new and ‘innovative’ approach to blog posts really appealing and I’m over thinking to use this sort of concept for my new blog which hopefully will be launched at the end of December this year. So what is your feeling about this?

I’m Reinier Kuipers, a 21 year old student Interactive Media. Beside my study I’m running a small interactive agency with Frank van Rest called ‘Woodenshoes‘. We are based in The Hague, at Labs55 to be precise.

I simply have a deep passion for interactive media. My expertise varies from designing interfaces, web applications and interactive experiences to swinging Photoshop files into semantic and well-coded HTML. Besides this I am busy learning more about interactive strategy and marketing. In all the spare time that’s left I love snowboarding in the Austrian alps, traveling, running, cooking, reading books and spending quality time with family and friends.

At the 6 Angry Men blog I will mainly be writing about design, (interactive) communication and innovation. I hope I can add some valuable content to this blog. Enjoy!

Like everything from Japan, it has a very unique flavor to it, I haven’t heard it much from any other part of the world (the Scandinavians get close sometimes though). I want to give you some names to check out, and you can see what you do with it.

First off, a very versatile guy called Susumu Yokota. He created over thirty albums already, touching everything in between classical and techno. Some of my favorite albums are Symbol, Sakura and Mother. Here’s a song called Baroque, you will notice that this genre of music goes hand in hand with beautiful video art.

Okay, so next up is Aus (Yasuhiko Fukuzono), this guy is also one of my favorite artists, and very productive as well. A glitchy ambient sound is typical for him. All of his albums are equally interesting, but if I had to pick one, it would be Antwarps. Here’s a song from the album Lang though, sadly, I was not able to find any music video’s.

Okay next I want to mention a guy called Motohiro Nakashima, his music is incredibly ambient and relaxing. The video for the song Stanly Park is also very nice, I was not allowed to embed the video, so here is a link. If you like it, you should check out his album I dreamt constellations sang.

Takagi Masakatsu is not only a musician, but also a very successful visual artist. I heard him say in an interview he switches focus, one year he makes music, the next one he makes video’s, animation and paintings. His music is certainly not for everyone, I will embed the song ‘girls’, because I love it so much, but expect more experimental stuff when you start digging deeper in his discography.

Finally (I could go on forever), I picked Aoki Takamasa. Aoki has a very unique sound, sometimes very danceable. There is a techno flavor to his work, it’s not a coincidence he is living in Berlin at the moment I guess. A notable cooperation is the one with Tujiko Noriko, together they recorded the album called 28. This video for Mirabeau is another good example of the unique style of visuals that comes from this genre.

I listen to these artists a lot when I don’t want to be distracted too much, when I work at home for instance. I’ve always been fascinated by this genre and all the (graphic) design it brings with it, you can see a lot of similarities within the different websites from these artists for example.

Other artists in this category are Takashi Wada, Ryoji Ikeda, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Akira Kosemura, Sawako and many more. If you’re interested, look for the hard to pronounce names on my last.fm page, or ask me.