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EME RGE .JPG.TXT.FLV.PNG.RTF.MP4
Monthly Digital Trends of oct. 2011
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EDITO Finally, from the depths of our liquid world, strengths emerge. Powers emerge. Goddesses emerge. Cleverness emerge. Collective brands emerge. The people emerge. Against the fear of being downgraded, against the dread of being told by someone else what to do, against the feeling of being deprived, they chant one word : occupy. A word interestingly close to the name of the TV serie that fascinated Argentina middle class in 2000, at the time they felt relegated as lower class people : Okupas. Occupy the field, occupy the streets, the places, the TV, even the bills. Occupy the space in order that nobody can kick you out of it. Occupy together in order to become an anonymous powerful and spontaneous brand. Occupy the place you think you deserve. And stand for it. This is their motto. This is our motto. Let's start an anthem. Let’s start with emerge.
TABLE OF CONTENT CHAP.1 - WE ARE ISLANDS!
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CHAP. 2 - TOMORROW FUTURAMA!
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CHAP. 3 - 100 YEARS OF BOREDOM!
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CHAP. 4 - THE ART OF PORTRAIT!
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CHAP. 5 - MEDUSA!
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CHAP. 6 - PLUG & PRAY!
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CHAP. 7 - TRANSPARENCY WAR!
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CHAP. 8 - OCCUPY EVERYTHING!
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CHAP. 9 - WHO ARE THE 99% ?!
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CHAP. 10 - QUAI DES BRUMES!
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CREDITS!
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CHAP.1 - WE ARE ISLANDS
No. It is not The Earth From Above. These photographs are a close look at leisure activities. Kind of inbetween Martin Parr, Andrea Gursky and Olivio Barbieri. Bernhard Lang’s pictures are like a piece of cake. Sliced from the world of leisure. Fresh.
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No matter how close we are,
until the end,
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from the start,
we are island.
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CHAP. 2 - TOMORROW FUTURAMA Ok. Eurozone is struggling, Wallstreet is occupied, Fukushima is still warm. Meanwhile, chinese scientifics have successfully launched their first unhabited capsule into space. Do you dread that future may have abandonned our developped countries ? No. Pieces of the future remain. Future is called «quantum superconductors locked in a magnetic field».
First, look at this video of a levitation device that introduces « quantum superconductors locked in a magnetic field ». And then imagine where you could go with your home ...
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CHAP. 3 - 100 YEARS OF BOREDOM When colliding together the works of UNHAPPY HYPSTERS & CHARLOTTE LYBEER, the shining world of hipsters suddently looks like it is a never ending day, perfectly slick and harmonious. Of course, even if it is not photobank, UNHAPPY HYPSTERS is not the true life of young creative people ; it is just a collection of commercials featuring young hipsters in their fresh environment. But the FOUNTAINS resort in Florida isn’t a fiction . Even if its baseline is «Where Living Is A Pleasure». Would you have ever imagined a better punchline for any of our hipsters’ commercials ? Then think about ROY LICHTENSTEIN’s situations and you’ll see that nothing is new out there. Hipsters have no age. Their boredom has no ending.
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CHAP. 4 - THE ART OF PORTRAIT
When I first saw Sebastien Schramm’s art work, I must confess it was more inspiring to me than his corporate work. The art of portrait isn’t easy to renew or refresh, and I think Sebastien Schramm did achieve some interesting art pieces in this filed. First I thought about Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Scultures. And then I recalled Marcel Van Der Vlugt’s photographs about beauty. Both made me think about what a portrait ought to bear. The word ‘Portrait’ comes from ‘pour trait’, copying ‘trait pour trait’, with high fidelity, outline of someone’s face or someone’s silhouette. In these pictures the traits are slightly exagerated, making carricature beautiful. Like in our digital lives, when you scroll over Facebook profiles, you will notice how often we highlight one aspect of our personnality. Making ourselves as drags. Or drawing. Sometimes even a simple meaningful object. It is as if the Facebook Timeline was’nt the most important feature at the end. The beauty of our online self-portraits does not lay in the continuous stream of things we did or things liked, but it does emerge from our tiny 64x64 px pic featuring ourselves maked up. So now, how crazily inspiring or creatively sweet is your profile picture ? Feel like changing it to present a better side of yours ? Go back to Sebastien Schramm’s serie of photographs to get inspired and portrait yourself. :-)
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CHAP. 5 - MEDUSA N e v e r
could I have
imagined impression a n d
such
an
of chaos beauty than Iris Herpen’s
melt together
v a n work . The
c l o t h e s
seems to be
alive,
massively on the
crawling
b o d y ,
holding
tight
embracing
m o d e l ’s
to each of their movements,
their allure more than their
skin. This rough
feeling of such a power that you may percieve from these silhouettes is astonishing ; the
dress is their royal sceptre. The dress highlights them, as angel or goddess, fallen from a world of warriors in which they
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have
proven their stunning strengh.
Lightness
is combined together with
steadyness in order to reach the stage of
immateriality. I know I’ll never see
any
walking
t h e s e goddess
in
my
real
life,
and
it is such
I wars
believe
a
of
pity.
e n d e d
could be only with
such a
vision.
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CHAP. 6 - PLUG & PRAY In the first issue of these JPGTXTFLVPNG RTFMP4 zines, I wrote a short piece about the Sysiphe’s lives of robots. Back then, I was watching kindly at these machines getting more and more mature as i would have stared at a 2 year old kid walking and falling. Even the most advanced articificial intelligence organanisms remain as cute as children. This is what I got from watching an amazing reportage like «Plug & Pray».
Now I see that you are thinking about HAL, in the 2001 Space Odessey movie. Yes, the one in which the machine becomes crazy and will do everything in its power to make sure the mission goes until its term. Machines are designed for that.
Today I need to go one step further in the direction of these uprising lives of bots. The latest comercialised example of these thinking machines is Siri, the talking interface of the iPhone 4S. Talk to it and it will do its best to be your dedicated butler. And one day soon, your best friend. If you don’t already own one of these wonders of techology - or if you don’t ever want to get one - Shit That Says Siri gathers quite a bunch of screenshots, displaying discussions Siri had with its owners.
Other current examples are the Google car, completely autonomous, or the US AirForce automated helicopter. These research in automated vehicules aren’t new ; but they are finally becoming real. What service or product will be commercialized out of these ? I cannot predicted. The only thing I’m almost sure is that we will hear about them more and more often. Even the first accident of the Google Car didn’t stop the project.
«Screens will read us ; we will not only read them.»
Interestingly, it doesn’t says much yet ; the fun part comes from the gap between the question and the anwser. And yes, I wrote «it» and « not «him» or «her». In the same field of our interactions with these automats, Jan Chipchase - head of UX at Frog - recently wrote about the world of screens. Because most of these bots we interact with have no skin nor body ; they are just a voice behind a screen. Traveling in asian countries, Jan Chipchase was thrilled when he went back to Seoul, thrilled by the amount of screens surrounding his path, screens to interact with as much as screens scanning his behaviours. He ends up writing that «screens will read us ; we will not only read them.», underlining that screens are not only an interactive LED any more.
Jan Chipchase
The main actor in this field remains the army - the American one leads the race of course. But most other weapon manufacturers are pretty interested in these kind of drones that can move around an monitor any type of activity by themsleves, on the battlefiled but soon for a commercial use as well. Pilotes will one day become autopilote assitants I guess ... The amount of devices in wich a Siri kind of artificial intellignece may fit in grows day by day. And even if it remains science fiction today, researchers like Christoph Adami’s team modelizes the way the life of these organisms may spread and evolve, generation after generation. Soon we will reach a point where there will be no more «plug & play» ; everything will be already plugged to play with.
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Go & check more Siri sentences on Shit That Says Siri
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« When I call my cable company in 10 years, I'll most likely be talking to a robot. (...) Unless I have a very sharp accent or a very strange problem, I'll have a robot handling my problem.»
Andrew McAfee, an MIT economist and co-author of the book Race Against the Machine. The impact robots may have on our lives will be both from our perspective as a customer and from the perspective of a worker. This is the point of view of Andrew McAfee, an MIT economist and co-author of the book Race Against the Machine.. Like we have experienced outsourcing jobs in developping countries, robots will easily replace tasks actually performed by low range workers.
However, McAfee doesn't envision a workplace without people ; "That's still too science fiction," he said. "Don't get me wrong. Technology grows the economic pie. Technology is not bad for the economy. It makes us more productive. It lets us grow more. The problem is that there's no guarantee that technology will float all boats equally ... The median worker is being left behind by cutting-edge technology."
More about the fundamentals of Adami’s Definition of Life
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CHAP. 7 - TRANSPARENCY WAR Julian Assange will finally be extraded to Sweden. The British court has stated. Interestingly, he has become the symbol of transparency. Openness. When you read him or listen to his rare speeches, you may be amazed by his charismatic urge for freedom. Litteraly speaking, he ought to be one of the person carrying proudly the motto we all share between developped states : liberté. In the hackers’ family, I want the son : Mark Zuckerberg. On the opposite, he is praised for his masterpiece : Facebook. Probably praised because he succeeded to make it profitable for everyone who joins the network. Sure not for freedom. Is it to say that money is more appealling than freedom ? No. We are not eve close to the question. What these guys fight for isn’t freedom or any big word of that sort. What they fight for is data. Data that have gained value since guys like them have succeeded to turn them into gold. Like trash isn’t only rubbish anymore, it may become energy, recycled paper or valuable raw materials. The same happen to data ; they were around since ages, stored in servers and valued internally within coporations’ marketing departments. And now that d a t a i s p o w e r, t h e r e a l question turns out to be what do you do with this power ?
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Then, in the Hackers’ family, I now want the younger brother : Christopher Poole. Alias Moot. He was 15 when he launched in october 2003 - yes, before ‘The Facebook’ - a virtual place called 4chan, originally dedicated to talk about manga and anime. It is ment to be a place where users remain anonymous ; the group The Anonymous is said to have apparently started from 4chan. Event if 4chan does not gather the 600 millions users Facebook does, it is a very tight and active community - like Wikileaks folks - that may have a bigger impact on specific topics. Like politics. Or IRL meetings.
At the recent web2.0 summit, Moot explained to his elder brothers (i.e. Facebook & Google) that they got it wrong :
«We all have multiple identities. It’s part of being human. We’re all multi-faceted people. Facebook and Google do identity wrong. Twitter does it a bit better, and I want to think about what the world would be if we did it right.» His idea is that it is neither about full transparency, neither about complete exhibition, it is about multi-facette - digital - identities. It si to say that our data should end up in our hands for us to shape them - and perhaps sell them if we want to. Do you have an opinion about it ?
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CHAP. 8 - OCCUPY EVERYTHING The snow has arrived early this year in New York City. But the 99% continues to gather and occupy. Occupy what? Occupy Everything ! It is not a regular protest, neither a Reclaim The Street action nor a FlashMob. All of these guys are taking the opportunity to tell their own story aloud. Broadcast themselves individually together becoming a collective brand. They have no unified demand nor statement, apart from ÂŤThe People Are Too Big To FailÂť, mimicking what used to be said for large corporations head of states cannot let go bankrupt.
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From simple cardboards to US dollar bills, everything is an opportunity to occupy. And No need of fancy analytics nor interactive infographics, a stamp worth a million webpage views when it is applied of the most efficient support. In the street, the best supports for spreading the word aren’t the one we first think of - the social digital one ; in the street, the cheap, tangible and customisable one are the most efficients supports to play with.
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One of the most impressive accomplishments these folks have done is, according to me, the « GA ». Read « General Assembly » :
Watch a nice example of the « GA » exercice in this video, featuring Slavoj Žižek inspiring the crowd. No mic. No RT. Just ideas.
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So, talk to your neighbour and
spread the word !
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CHAP. 9 - WHO ARE THE 99% ?
Now that you know they are doing nothing except occupying, you may wonder who are these folks ? What drives them ? Look at the We Are The 99 Percent Tumblr and you’ll get an idea about who is involved in this massive sitting. Analyzing the content posted on this Tumblr, Mike Konczal has build some interesting figures, showing the age range of 99% people 19 y.o. to 31 - or the most recurrent words in their statements «job», «debt», «work», «college», «pay», «student», «loan», ...
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An other way to get to know the 99% people would be to get into the tent with them. This is what Jasper White did in ‘Festival Tent’. So, if you are in NYC near Liberty Square, or any other Occupied locations, just go and photograph these tents.
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To end this issue, I just remind the TV serie that touched a large part of Argnetina’s population a bit before the 2002 economic collapse : okupas (Note that the ‘occupy’ terminology was already used at that time). The pitch was young adults getting themselves out of the society and ending up living in a squat. What happen at that time was that the middle class society feared the worth, i.e. behind donwgraded. They suddently felt empathy for the abandonned because they saw themselves getting close to their situation. And no need to say that today in the western world, the fear of drowngrade is tangible. The 99% are just ourselves.
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CHAP. 10 - QUAI DES BRUMES
Have you ever experienced an immersion into the post 9/11 mist of dust ? This is what Ann Veronica Jansen aims to produce as an art pice to experience. It is a a disruptive feeling not to be able to relay on your sights any more. Trust what you feel Trust your other senses. Observe. Meditate. Recover from the downgrading.
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CREDITS cover# #
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art work from Il Wong
page 3-6#
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photographs by Bernarhd Lang
page 7#
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image from Rafa Zubiria
page 8#
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images from unhappyhipsters.com
page 9#
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photographs by Charlotte Lybeer
page 11-13# #
photographs by Sebastien Schramm
page 14-17# #
fashion & photographs by Iris van der Herpen
page 19#
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image is Siri, from shitthatsirisays.tumblr.com
page 20#
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images of the Google Car, Robocopter, ÂŤ Plug & Pray Âť trailer
page 21#
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TED talk of Christoph Adami
page 22#
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image from alisonwithers.tumblr.com
page 23#
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YouTube video from Chris Poole at web2.0 2011 summit
page 24 - 25 # # # # # #
image from occupy image from occupygeorge.com
page 26#
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YouTube video of Zlavoj Zizek at OccupyWallStreet
page 27 #
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photographs from wearethe99percents.tumblr.com
page 28 - 29##
photographs by Jasper White
page 30#
phograph by Marc Chataigner, art work from Ann Veronica Jansen
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Š Marc Chataigner @marcchataigner