In this blog I’ll talk about the class of May 8th about the topic ‘celibrity culture’. In class a quote by Andy Warhol from 1968 was used as an example for the upcoming/current celebrity culture. 

In class two interpretations of this quote were given: 

- Anyone can be famous, worldfamous, for 15 minutes. It’s temporary. Only for those 15 minutes. This could be explained by the current ‘internetculture’. The internet is worldwide, so if you or your photo gets on the internet, it’s there for everyone to be seen. Though than you have to see the concept of ‘being famous’ of ‘being known’. But of course everyone can think of certain ‘celebrities’ who are famous for being known… You know.. Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian.

- It would be justified for anyone to be famous for 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter who you are, you deserve, as anybody, to be famous. Everyone deserves to be famous. 

You could say this point of view is exploited in the real-life series and talent shows you see so much nowadays. That concept is utilised (‘uitgemolken’) to the max. It differs though, some of those people are only famous for those 15 minutes and then you’ll never hear or see of them again. But some of those actually become ‘celebrities’, for example the ‘cast’ of Jersey Shore. 

I think you can say Andy Warhol made a pretty accurate prediction, or like, it came true. 

You can even say it’s gone further then fifteen minutes. Even that time is nowadays too long. I’ve found the example of 15 seconds of fame. A site where you can upload a movie clip of fifteen seconds where you can show your talent. You can even win prizes. I’ve never heard of that site, so I’m not sure how famous you can get in this case.. But maybe that’s me. That’s another thing.. I believe famousness is more separated now, as in, in different groups you have certain kinds of celebrities. 

6:47 pm  •  27 June 2012

This blogentry is based on the class from 24-04-12 about ‘art in cyberspace’ and the article  ‘Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act’ by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern.

In this blog I’d like to talk about Wikipedia. The encyclopaedia everyone (secretly) uses. Whether it’s just for browsing, looking something up or even basing your school paper on an article from this site. It’s very ambiguous I think. In university, we officially aren’t allowed to use it as a resource for our papers and essays. We have to use ‘original resources’. Though I remember a teacher telling about getting certain definitions from Wikipedia. You get the feeling it’s a bit of a taboo to use it, but still everyone does it. Why is this? 

The main reason for this is both the weakness and the ‘great’ness about Wikipedia: everyone can add, change, write, delete etc. information on here. So in the perfect ‘Wikipedia’ world you’ll get definitions on things that are like adjusted and perfected by several people until you’ll get THE final definition everyone agrees about. You can see in some articles that people have been taking the subject very seriously by using serious scientific resources with notes etc. in order to complete their definition. Because as everyone can alter articles, so can actual scientists, and this actually happens.

The thing is though, if you allow people to adjust, you’ll always have those funny people who joke around with it. I’ve heard stories about people changing stuff in certain subjects, just for a joke. It seems funny, maybe it even is, but this is the main thing why Wikipedia isn’t taken seriously. Or people just add bad information, that isn’t seriously thought trough. 

But in the end people will still use Wikipedia a lot as a resource. That has to have a reason I believe, why it’s so popular. I will still use it, even though I shouldn’t as a student in uni. Some things are super hard to look up just with google or even in books. And I don’t believe the professors who claim that Wikipedia is ‘bad’ never use it.. 

4:09 pm  •  7 June 2012  •  1 note

An example of the remixculture is Lucky TV I think. It is a part of the program of the ‘Wereld draaid door’ on the Dutch television. The program uses the image of television journal or sometimes other images for example from youtube to mix those with new text. He makes a way of satire. Lucky TV deals with satire and mixing. Sometimes it seems so real that you may think that it is real and you have to search for the lucky TV logo to make sure that it isn’t real. The man behind Lucky TV is Sander van de Pavert. I think the new way of using the images from the television (and sometimes youtube films) for mixing with another text and satire is a perfect way to make people think about the items in the news or the items that seem to matter in the world. Maybe it is a little hard sometimes if you know that it isn’t real, does that matter than? I think what he does is art to and I don’t know if it can be called amateurism, because it is something Sabder van de Pavert works the whole day to create a video for ‘de wereld draaid door’. I think you have to practice a lot before you can make those films. That is what he says in an interview in the NUKS the paper of Cultural studies, he practices since he was a kid. So I think it is really a form of art. What do you think? It seems like everyone can mix images with music and make it to an perfect video. I know I can’t because I don’t want to spent the whole time on my laptop for that. But why should we call the mixing of films amateurism? Or is this example of Lucky TV a very different item than the mixing videos on youtube? Do you agree that Lucky TV is art?

5:11 am  •  6 June 2012  •  1 note

In Tuesday’s class we talked about artificiality and discussed things like bio-art, cyborg and the way we create human beings. I like to write about the first item the bio-art. Bio-art is art made by biological processes or biological objects. In class we talked about apples with a figure. That was a totally biological process, the only thing they changed was the way the apple got his light. The human action was only cover the apple from the light. There are also bio-art process were the artist put some bacteria’s in a rabbit to get a glow in the dark rabbit, for example. But what if the human create a machine to make some biological stuff, like meet.
                On Wednesday we went to de DEAF festival in Rotterdam and there was a fridge with meat from blood and some cells. Our guide told us that it was a totally natural process when the cells en blood were in the fridge. The professors who are busy with this project thinks that this is the new meat. It shall be exactly the same as the meat from animals, but is that a good thing that we create meat by our own techniques?  Is the meat exactly the same, or are there little difference in the structure? And an important question, is the meat healthy for us? I am also wondering what will happen to the countryside, will that be existing any longer if we eat meat from the meat laboratories? And how far will we go with manipulating the process of food? Will there be other food that we can make in another way? Or shouldn’t that be accepted? Wouldn’t it be easy to make fruit for example in another way?
                I am a little sceptial about the whole new meat thing and I really wonder if we will eat this meat in twenty years. I am really wondering what it will do to our world and I think it is a little scary. But that is what technologies do to us isn’t it? I think that it is something like cyborg it is something were most of the human beings are fascinated by and also scared. Like most new technical inventions we have to go through the aria before we can really accept this kind of new things.  

-J-

9:40 am  •  28 May 2012  •  1 note

inthemess:

Inorganic Flora by Macoto Murayama

6:05 am  •  22 May 2012  •  4,031 notes

theyoungfisherman  :

In Thursday’s class the phrase ‘artificial beauty’ was discussed. An example was given where a visual artist made ‘the best face’ with a computer. This was as a completely computer-generated face. It showed that beauty as we know it, is no longer restricted to the ‘real world’. It showed that computer generated faces can be beautiful. 

Now this was of course an artist who came up with the idea and made the face with software. Also, this was in 1993. 

In 2012, this technology and these methods are no longer only used by artists or professional editors. Take a look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_vVUIYOmJM   

The video hilariously underlines what a big part of society already knows: Celebrities are unrealistic good looking. So what started 19 years ago as a form of art and what amazed the world is now something very common and used as often as real make up. 

Because, let’s face it: You are not perfect. None of us are. Not even the people on the covers of magazines. But technology such as Photoshop offers us perfection. Celebrities are no longer real. They are made. Not just made by managers, money or ‘society’, no. By technology. They become, very literally, a product. The over use of photoshop doesn’t amuse a lot of people. The masses expect a ‘real’ celebrity, not some picture, edited for 5 hours by a man in an office. This frustration becomes clear in the final lines of the video: Maybe she’s born with it? No, I’m pretty sure it’s photoshop. We expect reality. Not virtuality. 

-Sjoerd

So here’s my question: If you use photoshop to ‘brush up’ a picture of yourself: what happens to you? Are you the photoshopped person in the picture you just saved as: thisistherealme.JPG; or are you the real person, not perfect, sitting in front of the computer? Are you changing yourself? 

I think you are making yourselve more confident on the internet, so you can talk to more people online. And feel good and maybe sexy online. I think it is you but than a little bit different. Maybe a little therapeutic idea like we have discussed in class.

5:19 am  •  12 May 2012  •  3 notes

In Thursday’s class we discussed our identity and how important our place is in our identity in space. We came to de conclusion that how we act in our place is still important to who we are in the digital space. So our virtually world can’t be separated from our visual world as we talk about identities. I want to discuss an article I read after the class about Klout scores in the NRC Next. A Klout score follows your activity in the online world and so they can see how active you are in some subjects on the internet and how powerfull you are in that subjects. There are articles publiced in which they said that your Klout scores were influential in interviews. In the article they discuss how important the Klout score is. They tell that it isn’t important at all but there are people, the digital narcists who use them for their feeling good moments. People can post links and things on facebook only for getting likes. And as we saw in the class today people can get famous on the internet but isn’t much aware of his space. The NRC says that the Klout scores aren’t dangerous or influential in our life. But maybe they can be very influential. Our own facebook page will be discovered when we have interviews on jobs, so why shouldn’t they take information from the Klout scores? I wonder if we think about Klout scores and identity what do Klout scores tell us about our own identity? Is it important to know about which subjects you talk much? Don’t you know that already? Doesn’t it only tell you how much people like your status and tell you how much you like yourselves?

-          J.

4:53 am  •  12 May 2012

excuse me! Those posts were for my own personal tumblr, it got mixed up haha.

6:00 pm  •  10 May 2012

In this blog I will combine two classes, because I have been very busy and ill, but also because I think I have found a very interesting item to discuss in which I can use both subjects of the classes. I will talk about the medium as the message and glocalization in the QR codes stickers in Leeuwarden on the 5^th of May. It is almost Saturday the 5^th of May. The date we celebrate the freedom in Holland and think about the freedom that should be everywhere in the world. We also think about the questions what freedom exactly is and are we really free according to our own definition about freedom. In different cities in Holland are festivals to observe that we aren’t in times of war. Also in Leeuwarden, the city where I spent the most of my live nearby.                

Every year there is a square of freedom where people can talk and write about freedom. There is always a large object on which people can write their quotes and thoughts, so they can share their views about freedom. his year is the large object changed in a QR code. I don’t know for sure if there is no place to write your thoughts nameless, but I read about the new way to use the QR code. The important theme of this year is sharing thoughts about freedom. And the idea is to write down your view about freedom, so the organization can put it on a sticker in the QR code, so everyone around you can see your thoughts, and you can share them with everyone.               

I think that sharing it on a object on the square is a really different thing of sharing than put your idea in a QR code. The way of sharing is put into a new way. So in my opinion is this a perfect example of glocalization, the way you change the things that exist for years into the new items like the QR code. The QR code makes it easier to share the opinions at the social media like facebook or twitter. But not only on facebook and twitter. There is a layer that comes before the internet. Before sharing the QR code, people on the street can see your thoughts about freedom with their smartphones. So people can discuss the freedom on the festival self.

It is not only glocalization, it is also about the medium of smartphones what tells the message. Normally you put your tekst on te street and nobody knows that it is your thought. By changing the object in to a sticker with the QR quote it is clear that it is you with that opinion about the freedom. So people create a idea about you because of that code and the way you look like. So the medium changes the message.
           
Sad enough I cannot read the QR codes, so I don’t know if I going to wear a QR code sticker, but I think it is a very interesting way to share the ideas about freedom and especially to talk about the freedom. So I think it is really a good way to use the new media in this way. The only thing I think its problematic is that everyone can see what you think. I am very enthusiastic about this, but also a little bit  scared. But maybe I have to get over it, because it is a easy way to start talking about your thoughts of freedom, so it should be very successful isn’t it?

http://www.befrijdingsfestivalfryslan.nl/plein-van-de-vrijheid/vrijheid-van-mening/  

J.

9:59 am  •  2 May 2012

Yaay, finally the tumblr-‘expert’ of the two of us has found how to enable the askbox.   So you can ask questions now ^^.

-K.

10:19 am  •  29 April 2012