"Content is Queen", a generative video painting

"Content is Queen" by Sergio Albiac is a portrait created using an innovative generative technique developed by the artist called "generative video painting". This generative portrait reflects on the foundations of democracy and the resilient nature of the structures of power.

Experiences of infinite space

"Fireflies on the Water, by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, offers an out-of-this-world experience from the confines of a modest room paneled with mirrors and adorned with 150 tiny beads of light deliberately suspended throughout the compact space. Upon entering the room, there's an illusionary effect that gives the impression of infinite space reflected on all sides and in the two inches of water that flows below."

Image and text from My Modern Met

Bodies in transition

"Artist Andre Wee constructs figurative and metaphoric representations of limbo in his series titled Forming and Fragmenting. The artist interprets this collection of work as "An experience of being of two different states at the same time and yet, not belonging to either" and refers to the subjects' disposition as being in "an eternal state of transition." It is unclear whether his geometric renderings are regenerating their human form or disintegrating into nothingness."

As seen on My Modern Met (more artworks in this link).

Lead and technology will follow

I've read an interesting article in the New York Times called "Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty?" by Diane Ackerman. She gives some great insights which help bringing to the surface the notions of embodiment, presence and the senses in the discussion of human-technology relationships. I'd like to comment on some of her ideas.   

"... we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature."

I believe that the search for balance is key in the face of any technological innovation and so-called "progress". Encouraged by scientific intelligence and high doses of imagination, technology tends to expand itself to the level of science-fictional proportions, but when it faces human interaction, this comes as a reality check that puts it back on its tracks. Any technology that do not align to and serve the human condition and its purposes will fail, because technology is only in relation to the biological realm. In this sense, how useful is to long for a previous historical period of life under certain bio-technological conditions in which humanity used to be more in contact with nature?

The senses are at work also in our relationship with technology, but they are contested by its apparent complexity, although more so is technology, which undergoes the test of human perception. What doesn't pass the sensory and corporeal scrutiny, it will fade as a useless technology. Presence is also in our interaction with any kind of technology, like when driving a nail with a hammer or browsing the Internet.

But of course, I understand what Ackerman is referring to: how can I know what a tree is if I haven't seen it, touched it, felt it... how can I ever truly know India if all I have seen are photos in a computer... it's true that digital media seem to be getting between us and the concrete world we live in. But there are signs of balance, which is evident as media technology is increasingly going mobile. Our bodies, our senses, our drive to interact with nature have taken the development of technology to more intuitive, safer, grounds. In this world, everything is in constant change, and "transitioning" is the normal state of things. If we want for things to fall into the right place, we just have to exercise that human quality that it is all about being present: patience.

Big Data markets and individual freedom, a new frame for an eternal dispute

In the online article by Inc. Magazine called "Business Opportunities in Big Data", it is stated that Big Data is hot because:

"In an increasingly digitized world, everything you do creates an electronic record—every purchase, doctor's visit, or instance you "friend" someone on Facebook. As organizations continue to amass hundreds of terabytes of that information, they are looking for more sophisticated software tools to mine and analyze it, to help businesses better understand their markets and customers, and even predict what's next."

It is clear that if Big Data is a market, then our digitized actions are treated as commodities. Information sourced from our own digital actions are being used or sold to governmental or commercial entities but we're also buying it ourselves (let's say you're paying Linkedin to access more and better information about the state of your professional online relationships).
As technology always evolve in an experimental phase, we also follow by jumping into those new developments, until it comes a time to assess and make meaning of that technology and our relationship with it. In the Big Data context, now that the movement is going mainstream and it is big enough to become a market, it is time (again) to revise the meaning of individual freedom and autonomy. The only thing we have freedom for in this world is to decide what we want to think about our individual position in relation with the technologies we evolve with. When it comes to our bodies and actions, we've always been subjected to our connection with other entities and technologies. In fact, we are "in connection".
For me, the notion of the market of Big Data is just another technical way of visualizing and administering the connections and relationships that make the world, those that of course existed even when the previously analog materiality of media didn't allow us to recognize (although we've always felt them). As there is another way of seeing what has always been happening, the time has come to revise how we want to think about ourselves in this new media context, to ask ourselves if we are willing to understand our identities in function to the state of the media through which they actualize. Either you fight the Big Data movement and the challenges it supposedly represents to our identities and privacy or you consciously choose to attune to it by understanding that it could be just another stage in the history of our bio-technical evolution.
Of course, we may not be free from the constraints of media forms that shape our social life but we can be critical about the direction that is taking, and that freedom should be non negotiable. Change can only come from within. 

Image credits: Inc. Magazine and Viegas/Wikipedia

Your digital image doesn't look like you

The digital image shows us a different image.
Bodies are not anymore those that are reflected by the mirror, but those revealed by the statistics of their actions. The digital image of the body is not a virtual reconstruction of its physical structure but a numerical report of how it is performing. It doesn't matter how it looks as long as the body is sending vital signals of what it is doing, how it is doing and where it is. A virtual body is always "checking-in", updating other bodies or machines with its functional data. The new image is one that shows the relational body, one in constant movement. The quantified, bio-mediated body is an informational interface; it is not an autonomous entity with a defined visual image but rather a shapeless body that exists entirely in co-creation with everything it is connected to.

Image source: new-aesthetic.tumblr.com

Diving into the past of the future

This is a Carmagnolle diving suit made in France in 1880. It sits, unused, in the Navy museum in Paris. Compare this suit with current ones made of spandex or Lycra which work as a second skin and it becomes clear that the evolution of a useful design has to do with the evolution of its components and materials. We have always had the same ideas and desires: to fly, to dive, to communicate remotely... just that the state of technology hasn't always been the right one to make them realize at their full potential.
There is nothing ever new but hardly old things become updated, refashioned. It is rather a matter of naming. For example, the functional quality of "paper" doesn't belong to the paper itself but to many other different things like, let's say, the ipad. What "dies" or gets replaced is just the name of the thing, but not its function. We can say "paper" is dying but in fact it is the word that may be going out of fashion. Its functionality just gets remediated into another technological device made of a different material that serves for the same purpose.