Monday 17 October 2011

It's the metrics, stupid!

Artist Ursus Wehrli tidies up art, as these photos show. It's an interesting way to make sense of something supposedly untidy, chaotic and meaningless. Geeky minds who look for parameters on everything they see may find Wehrli's method somehow comforting. As for me, I find these art pieces a very good way to represent the currency of today's online world: metrics. Everything is measured, organized and shown as numerical data of some sort, from Facebook 'likes' to Twitter followers to infographics about percentages of any trade you can imagine. Everything is measured for the sake of the busy reader or user, who needs to make sense of his or her Internet usage and performance, not to mention businesses who need to understand what these users are doing. Thanks to Wehrli we see that nothing is safe from metrics, not even art. It's the world we're living in, stupid!






Saturday 1 October 2011

Technology is nature



This TV commercial for the new Audi A6 Avant works as a metaphor to uncover the type of environment most of us humans live in, which is a technological one. Most of the world's population live in cities, a very complex technological development. We live our lives longing for what we think 'nature' is: the trees, the mountains, the rivers... but the truth is that our natural setting is nowadays a technological construction, a city. Nature as we like to think of it is just something you see in travel agency posters.