Curatorialist

As I prepare myself for my first trip to SXSW, I’m trying to sift through this insane dust cloud of activity that seems to descend upon Austin. But, you know, I’ve been to conferences before. I’ve sifted through complication before. I’m not a little baby, wandering naked into a zoo with no locks on the cages. Not since the 70’s. This is an event, after all, like any other – panels, speeches, discussions, movies, get-togethers, etc. I think I’ve done this before. It gets slightly more noisy at SXSW, I guess, because of all the social networking. But haven’t all conferences had social networking… forever? You participate, or you don’t. And, really, it’s just talk. Once again, those of use who make messages are getting caught up in the medium.The real sifting one has to do is news versus noise. I’m on a mission to learn something and although the experience of being at SXSW sounds kind of exciting, so are a lot of things. I’m not on a mission to be excited. The last 10 years have been too exciting, as far as I’m concerned. Digital has become legitimate on the knotted shoulders of those of us who’ve stuck with it and built it. And make no mistake, hype is not what built the Internet – real companies, like the ones we work for, are who build it, for their real business needs. The rest is entertainment. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’m more interested in what’s going to change the way businesses run.

So, I’m preparing myself. How to take in the best panels, hear from the top minds and maybe accomplish the promise that SXSW poses: TOMORROW HAPPENS HERE. We can’t rely on Twitter to tell us what the future holds. Twitter just is now. Oh, I’ll be hooked in to the hashtag hoi poloi, don’t worry. But I don’t want to look back, I want to look forward. But first… prepare.

So, I’m at the page for “first timers:” http://sxsw.com/first_time and I am greeted with this nice lead-in paragraph: “SXSW can be overwhelming to first-timers. All the things that make SXSW amazingly informative, fun and unique are also what can make it so daunting. We’ve made a video to show you what SXSW is. Watch it below:” Okay, I’m on it. Don’t love being categorized as a noob, but whatever, nobody’s watching…

HOLY CRAP. Am I supposed to be less daunted from this? A montage? And not just a montage, which daunts me, but a sped-up montage, with music! And the organization of information in this video seems to follow a “5 Days Of…” mechanism. You fit all this into five days? Even if this were put to Yo-Yo Ma, I’d be a little stressed out with how to take it all in. But scroll down; travel tips, hotel tips, dress tips… hold on, are they really giving me dressing tips? Hm. Starting to feel a little like that naked baby, all of the sudden. And, content-wise, what’s new here that I haven’t seen on a hundred conference websites? Let’s look at the panels.

I’m here for Interactive, specifically. Some interesting topics, to be sure: “The Young and the Digital.” Sounds good. “How Sci-Fi Shapes the Internet.” Interested. But, hey, what’s this: “How to Rowk SXSW.” Uh oh. That sounds awfully self-reflective. Especially when described as “Veteran SXSW speakers and attendees give their light-hearted insights and tips on making the most of your next few days in geek wunderland.” Whaaaa… where’s my bottle! And, as an aside, is misspelling words with the same amount of letters as the original word really our future? Didn’t that end with using Z’s instead of S’s? Moving on. Oh no, look at this: “How Not to be a Douchebag at SXSW.” Yeah, that’s a real panel. And perhaps the single most perfect example of irony ever constructed. So, you self-prescribed elitists, with your superior knowledge would like to impart upon us lesser-thans a warning about how not to be elitist and superior sounding, I suppose? Can somebody please call Keith Olbermann? I’d like him tackle this.

Let’s look outside the SXSW fold for a minute. Mmm, this is getting worse. Here’s an article called, oh god, “10 Ways Not To Be A Jerk at SXSW.”

Well, now I’m angry.

I’m angry, not just because this couldn’t be less helpful or more obvious, but because of the tone. Is this the voice of a new generation? It sounds like the voice of the old generation. It sounds like Silicon Valley elitism and entitlement all over again. It sounds like people I don’t want to work with, or know, or follow, or put on my Twitter List. And, unlike the pre-2000 days, where I didn’t have a choice, I really do have a choice now. Digital is legitimate. The best minds are the winners of the day, not the biggest attitudes. I know that’s what the article is trying to convey, too. But name calling isn’t necessary. We’re big boys now.

So, I believe my preparation is complete. Noise is, as it turns out, noise. I unfortunately won’t be attending the Music portion of SXSW, but I will be tackling this like I would that: trusting my ear and listening to one thing at a time with the kind of attention and appreciation that the people who are singing deserve. In that video, at 1:20, some dude dressed in all black said it pretty well, “The joy of learning and doing something new and doing something the way it really feels right – right here, right here and right here.” And he pointed to his gut, his heart and his head.

The best math class I ever took was the very last math class I ever took: Statistics. That was 1987. I remember remarking that if math had been this interesting in High School, I might actually have enjoyed it. And who KNOWS what would have happened to me if I had enjoyed math. But math was horrendously boring in my high school and I couldn’t see the magic in it, despite teachers who tried to speak of it romantically. In practice, they crammed formulas down our throats and lost us with ugly overhead projections and grease pens.

By college, I had sworn that I would be done with math as soon as humanly possible and Statistics was my random sampled swan song of choice. From there on out, I would concentrate on only things that had pictures. But in that class, I discovered something interesting – math can tell a story. The single moment that opened my mind (I can remember the classroom, I can even remember what seat I was in ) was the day the professor explained the fallacy of the phrase “3 out of 5 dentists recommend.”  “Which 5 dentists?” He asked. It was like the sound of one hand clapping. The class, for me, became a study in skepticism. Numbers never lie, but numbers can be used by liars, to tell lies. To this day, anyone who tells me something is a “fact” is immediately suspect. If you listen to Steven Pinker speak (from my earlier post), you see that he hardly ever uses “facts” and yet he is so clearly knowledgeable. Reason, I have found, is much better than math, in almost every instance.

Over the last few years, though, there has been a merging of math and reason, and it has happened through a technique known as “data visualization.” A quick sequence of events has lead us to a very interesting place in history, where we can now “see” math. The metaphorical operating system (desktop, folders, etc.) introduced us to this notion that code could be translated into something more humanly accessible. Then an important thing happened: the evolution of interface design merged with the evolution of the database. This was most prevalent in Website design, where engineers and designers worked side-by-side with each other, merging their talents to create online business solutions for people. One of the major discoveries during this time was the activity of “tagging,” which, in essence, was people filling up databases themselves. Imagine one guy at Flickr putting tags on photos as opposed the current practice of people putting tags on the photos themselves. Same with Facebook. Information started streaming in. Now, all of the sudden, we have a generation of people who are adept and trained to fill out database questions: from logins and passwords to cities and friends’ names to preferences and personal information. And we are starting to discover exactly how interesting math can actually be.

It used to be that visualizing data was was Excel did – you fill in the database and then it spits out a pie chart. Now, though, people are finding newer and more exciting ways of showing data visualized. Perhaps you’ve seen The Visual Thesaurus. Or tag clouds a sites like TwitScoop. Check out this site that maps Renaissance artists and writers on a timeline, as well as an overlay on Google Maps. During all the talk about “earmarks” in the debates, I used this website to get a better idea of what’s really going on, all done through data visualization. Or this guy, who has decided to log just about every activity in his life and rather than create a new kind of visualization mechanism, has just cleaned up the old one in kind of a fascinating way.  And we’re using it in marketing all the time, from Sprint’s “Now Network” Website, to our own “Health Footprint Calculator” for Anthem. And this site gives a whole overview of different data visualization techniques. A macro of the macro.

If I were teaching a math class in High School today, I would be teaching kids with these tools. Sure, the building blocks of basic arithmetic is necessary, but geometry, algebra, trigonometry and calculus are probably not the right set of tools for today’s little minds. Many of those math languages are as dead as Latin in terms of their importance in the actual application of math in most of the world. The excuse that schools use is that the process of learning formulas, equations and proofs creates great minds – I challenge that notion. The best applications of math are happening in the fieds of data strategy and programming. Let’s flip the math on math and assume that the greatest impetus for a great mind is excitement. I don’t have stats to prove that, but it sure stands to reason.

I got gravitationally pulled into the Apple store over the weekend and the iPhone 3GS lifted out my wallet and bought itself with my money. It’s real purty. But as I was reinstalling the apps, I did something wrong and the order got all messed up. Happy mistake though as I ended up adopting a new philosophy to my home screen. I used to group apps by type: utilities together, photography together, games together, etc. Turns out that’s a good organizational philosophy, but not really the best day-to-day usage philosophy. So, I brought the apps I just plain use the most to the front. Muuuuch better. The 20 apps that have made it to the front of the line for me are…

I showed you mine. Show me yours!

Many have gathered to make art in the form, and spirit, of collaboration. Little of it transcends. Originally, the Louvre was a place for a sort of artists’ collective, during the French Revolution. But collectives borne of necessity have a distinct advantage over graffiti artists getting together to do a mural for Nike. Maybe this kind of thing has been done before, but I haven’t seen it. A UK Website here proposes that an interaction on the site results in instant action/reaction at a real art studio. Like much art that relies on technology, rather than a more viscous material, it feels a bit cybercold underneath it all, but from what I’m seeing, the art that’s getting made at the studio itself is secondary to the possibilities that this opens up. Remember Christy Brown, of “My Left Foot” fame? Putting that into context with today’s technology offers some very encouraging possibilities. Beyond that, the gap bridged by technology has never seemed to reach into the world of fine art. All of the sudden, the Internet is a real tool for expression and the spreading of paint, clay, pencil lead and many other things. It is well time that our exponential growth in technology lead to something more artistic, human, tactile and expressive. I’m into it.

I don’t know what I’m doing. Am I looking at it? Buying from it? Learning from it? Being inspired by it? Knowing what day it is by it? I am helpless before it but somehow better because of it. It is Uniqlo.

I guess I just love me up some of the GIFs. Something I didn’t anticipate; becoming wistfully reminiscent of a technology from adulthood. I get my swoony love of 8-bit graphics and the sound of a Casio keyboard, but it’s harder to reconcile feeling all gushy over something that I used for work.

Perhaps it’s a representation of how far I/we’ve come since getting into Web design, back in the mid 90’s. Sort of like looking back on your first car, not nearly as advanced as your current car, but still a mark of distance, growth.

But moreso, I just like the creativity one experiences when leaning into a limited medium. All media is limited, in some respect. Certainly 8-bit graphics were. But even a canvas has an edge. Finding creativity within the constraints of technology are no different than within the constraints of clay. And the results no less effective. At least not to me.

Some of it, also, is knowing where something like this might show up: as a personal icon in a comment section, or simply sitting in the corner of a web page somewhere. Animated GIFs are like virtual graffiti tags – it’s as much where you place it as the mark itself. The technology and format of it is specific to the Web, and therefore it is as inextricably tied to it, as paint is to canvas or music was to vinyl (sigh).

Continue reading ‘A Moment in Time: An Homage to the Animated GIF.’

Weird, right? John Wayne is an icon, but so is that little picture of a house up in your browser navigation. Big, small. But in both cases, a symbol of something. But a person can spend an entire life trying to become an icon, noticed by everyone, whereas a graphic icon must often get created in the virtual world and is doing its job when it goes relatively unnoticed. Today we honor the small icon with this gorgeous set of graphic symbols (purchasable right here) ready to go for iPhone application developers.  They may be small, but to me, this is still a symbol of something great.

Maybe the only thing funnier is that the word “meh” became a word last year… but nobody cared.

Here’s the article: “Web 2.0 Becomes One Millionth Word; Just As We Stop Using It.”

This forwarded to me from curator of cool, Jason, at work. Who, interestingly, has a blog about work. If you’re wondering what the day-to-day looks like in the creative department, that’s as good a view as any.

My favorite quote from the comments on the video reads, “You won the Internet today, my friend.”

My first desk job after college was at The Walt Disney Company. Email was just being implemented company-wide, but there were  a few who preferred to write their “memos” by hand. My boss was one of those holdouts and I was tasked with transcribing her scribbles, printing them out, getting them signed by her and routing them, either by walking or through interoffice mail. Walking was the quicker of the two options. There was also a social phenomenon wherein having someone else type, edit and route your messages was a symbol of power and so for people like my boss, she resisted this new thing called Email, where she had to take personal responsibility for her own written messages. However, within months the entire company was up and running on email and she was forced to adapt. Not that many years later, the notion of handwriting a note to somebody seemed downright archaic. This kind of rapid growth of technology has always seemed mysterious to me, although I have been as much a part of it’s growth anybody. The rate of growth has seemed so fast as to be nearly out of control and certainly reading the news and trying to keep up with it is positively dizzying.

Ray Kurzweil has helped me understand how this all works. He’s obviously smart, you can tell within 9 seconds of hearing him talk. He goes right into the facts and possibilities of the exponential growth of information technology. The notion is complex and simple: we humanoids think linearly, but the growth of technology doesn’t move at the same pace as us, it pretty much doubles every time there’s a new advancement. It’s a great thought if you consider that it means we are actually closer to solutions than we think we are, at any given time. The energy crisis, our economic crisis…  although the complexity of the solution is, well, complex, the steps to accomplishing it are fewer than we might imagine.