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Tokyo-based artist Takuji Kogo gave birth to *CANDY FACTORY as a front for his individual work as well as a platform to organize collaborations with (sometimes) regulars such as this blog’s favorite YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. Kogo usually wears multiple hats, working as a curator/artist in ways that have deserved the label of “an information age version of Andy Warhol's Factory.” Just spend a few minutes exposed to his work and you will find that *CANDY FACTORY stands on its own territory somewhere in between numbers and air.

Infinite repetition seems to be among *CANDY FACTORY’s favorite tools. It is through manipulating this aesthetic element that we end up appreciating the chameleonic form of life itself. The same two seconds are manipulated in a simple, yet disturbingly powerful way to prove that no aesthetic detail should be underestimated.

A recent piece, BOOGIE WOOGIE WONDERLAND 2006 offers an excellent example of the depth of content and meaning that can be achieved via repetition and camera movement. Experience it and you will change your mind many times on whether you like it or not, as you will also change your mind repeatedly on whether it is sexual, funny, festive, cripy, beautiful, interesting, violent, unimportant, childish, serious…

Posted by camilo at 12:53 PM | Permalink

Pay attention to the conversation about the present and future of the marketing and communications industry and you will enter a literal storm of ideas. Change is the premise, what worked in the previous decade is out today, as McLuhan said, “if it works, it’s obsolete.”

Pay closer attention and you will note that some of the new ideas begin to resemble the past. Just like fashion seems to be cyclical (e.g. skinny pants in the year 2006), marketing and communications might be secretly entering an age of reconciliation with some of the ideas that prevailed in its recent past. Russell Davies wrote about it last week, referring to the similarities between marketing 1.0 and marketing 2.0 and pointing out to a refreshing piece of research from Dr. Robert Heath that seems to be driving the discussion in a different direction (3.0 maybe?), focused more on the delivery of the message than on the message itself: “In advertising, it appears to be the case that it’s not what you say, but the way that you say it that gets results.” Or should we rather say: The medium is the message.

On the same day of Russell’s post, Scott Bedbury (former marketing executive from Starbucks, Nike – also author of A New Brand World), gave a keynote speech at Yahoo!’s “Engaging Advocates Through Search and Social Media” conference at The New York Public Library. The focus: “Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century,” which ironically reinforced old-school brand-focused thinking peppered with new ideas in the brand advocate arena.

Bedbury’s lesson can be summarized in the view that remarkable brands are the result of “relevancy, creativity, and emotional connection.” His recipe to achieve this “remarkable” status requires a mix of brand connection with something “timeless and meaningful,” rooted in a great product or service that together with the brand represent a set of “values and promises” compatible with the audience’s heart. Emotional connection at its best, which ratifies at some extent Heath’s findings but from a different angle related to what you say rather than how you say it.

Emotion seems to be at the core of most schools of thought that seek a viable alternative to business-as-usual in the marketing and communications industry of the present. Emphasis on what you say rather than on how you say it or the contrary might not make a lot of sense when considering that the emotional connection that we are looking for is constrained by the attention economy in which what we say must be welcomed by means of actual, tangible value.

The logic of emotional connection makes sense and is valid as long as its mechanism includes something of value for the people at the other end. This is amplifying the meaning of (corporate) social responsibility to a whole new level, driven by the forces of the market, specifically by people with (media) options. Recognizing that the attention of any individual has value is probably a good place to begin revisiting all the good old thinking about emotions, regardless of whether you focus on the medium, the message, or both (can we actually separate them?).

Here is Nike’s “Revolution” spot which Mr. Bedbury used as an example of a piece of creative that contributed to Nike’s Air Max enormous success almost a decade ago. Nine years later Nike's revolution feels very different: It's Ipod-compatible.

Posted by camilo at 06:58 PM | Permalink

Wikipedia.org explains what seems to be the sad reality of the infamous practice of dubbing: “Foreign-language films and videos are often dubbed into the local language of their target markets to increase their popularity with the local audience by making them more accessible.” The article peppers the technical definition with criticism and defense, including some references to its use as a tool for censorship.

Beyond any deep judgments, dubbing offers an interesting experiment on the semiotics of cinema. By breaking the medium into an awkward combination of body, voice, and language, dubbed films present themselves as some kind of visual lego to be assembled in the spectator’s mind.

There is noise in the assembly process of dubbed films, the communication does not flow seamlessly and is interrupted by unavoidable errors derived from cultural contradictions, physical limitations (e.g. trying to fit lengthy Spanish-language dialogues in the swift modulation of American actors), and the substitution of the voice.

When confronted with Tom Cruise speaking perfect Spanish, the audience is inevitably forced to deal with a huge cultural incongruence that is amplified by the fact that Cruise’s voice might be too similar or even the same as Brad Pitt’s (dubbed) voice. Two or more real actors often times share the same dubbed voice, charging the substitute voice with intense connotations derived from the actor it represents. The end result is a constant reminder of the film per se that contradicts the very nature of cinema.

The dubbed actress, stripped from her voice, brings back the medium to a strange limbo between silent films and the modern era. The actress is not real; her acting is not complete without her voice. This situation transforms her into a container ready to receive the wealth of meaning embedded in the dubbed voice. She becomes the host of an alien element that redefines her as a person as well as an actress, distorting the character that she represents in the process.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante deals with dubbing in one of his essays published in Cine o Sardina. His excellent prose lets a very sharp argument cut through our intellect leaving a strong bias against dubbed films. The author exposes the politics behind dubbing rendering the need for translation as a mere excuse to ensure proper government control (via censorship). In Cabrera Infante’s eyes, dubbing also exposes stereotypes and plain racism, which can be easily uncovered by just listening to the voices that dub black actors in certain circumstances. The essay is rich in anecdotes and has a unique way of educating us on the nuances of dubbing, confirming its importance as a semiotic experiment which, at the end, might very well justify its existence.

Here are some dubbed clips from Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting to illustrate the point while celebrating the film's tenth anniversary.

Posted by camilo at 09:18 PM | Permalink

It comes as an unfortunate surprise to learn that there is so little information about José Antonio Marina in English. Being one of the leading voices on the study of intelligence, the Spaniard philosopher definitively (and urgently) needs more attention in the English-speaking world. Paraphrasing the author, understanding human intelligence will determine what we know about ourselves which is essential to understand what we really are. In modern society, this question is central to grasp the mechanics of the individual and collective intelligence enabled by digital technology.

Marina’s first two books (which deserved multiple European awards) were dedicated to intelligence in its creative form. Teoría de la Inteligencia Creadora (the second one), displays a thorough scientific analysis through a delightful prose, demonstrating right and left brain thinking in equal parts. The book is a mélange of neurology, artificial intelligence, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy, which blend to produce a theory that describes the creative process in a dense but entertaining manner, using two powerful examples: sports and arts.

An important part of the argument is the exploration of language as essential to understand and create meaning. Marina elaborates on the school of thought that considers language to be our prison due to the fact that we can only think what language allows us to think; adding that language is more like a halt which provides support in the production of meaning. Language is then where human beings unify information composed of images, values, voices, etc., and unload it into words.

In the context of our digital society, understanding our creative intelligence and the role of language is essential to come to terms with the real impact of the human-computer relationship and the implications to the great majority of people without access to this digital world.

The graphic user interface (GUI), is that element of modern computing that facilitates the dialogue between the human mind and the operations performed by the machine. It has evolved to a point that it blends seamlessly with the final result, rendering several layers of programming and mathematics invisible to us. The modern GUI has been feeding from language and its metaphors in the quest to become easier, more intuitive. Today the GUI could very well be considered some sort of language of its own, renovating and extending our “prison” and therefore allowing us to refine our own thoughts.

An attempt to digest Marina’s theories on human intelligence as part of the dialogue around the digital divide (the division between those with access to computers and the internet versus those without it), can potentially lead to uncover another dimension of the problem: A dimension that looks way beyond the economic, educational, and social aspects into a deeper division in the way we process information.

More about this subject soon.

Posted by camilo at 12:44 PM | Permalink

“Former MIT president Jerome Wiesner tells a story about (Vladimir) Zworykin’s visiting him one Saturday at the White House when Wiesner was JFK’s science advisor (and close friend). He asked Zworykin if he had ever met the president. As Zworykin had not, Wiesner took him across the hall to meet JFK. Wiesner introduced his visitor to the president as ‘the man who got you elected.’ Startled, JFK asked, ‘How is that?’ Wiesner explained, “This is the man who invented television.’ JFK replied how that was a terrific and important thing to have done. Zworykin wryly commented, ‘Have you seen television recently?’”

The quote belongs to Nicolas Negroponte’s Being Digital; sadly the same conversation could have happened yesterday. TV hasn’t improved that much in the forty years that followed. Back in 1995 Negroponte predicted that “being digital will change the nature of mass media from a process of pushing bits at people to one of allowing people (or their computers) to pull at them,” declaring an upcoming revolution that will evolve our “concept of media” from the filters that reduce content to “a collection of top stories or best-sellers” to a model of “narrowcasting” in which “the information industry will become more of a boutique business.” Sounds familiar?

Eleven years ago Negroponte forecasted his own version of what is known today as The Long Tail, in which society, empowered by the digital ecosystem, creates a marketplace that balances the overwhelming power of the “hit culture.”

In 2006 people are not only driving the development of a vast marketplace for products, services, and content, but are also collaborating (most of the time anonymously) to develop and remix information, much like Pierre Levy’s concept of the Social Megamind (see more details in an earlier post).

In the age of collective intelligence and digital collaboration it is almost impossible to keep this trend limited to the web. According to a Royal Magazine article, Current TV is reinventing how (television) content is developed by creating a system of participation that is opening the door for what the station calls “viewer created content.” Anyone can submit her own show to Current TV’s website where a community of viewers decides whether or not the material should be broadcasted. The system creates content that ends up being the final product of a collective effort, boosting creativity and leveraging cross-media synergies in a way that really adds value to public life by making a dramatic change in the tired TV landscape.

Tune in and judge for yourself.

Posted by camilo at 08:35 PM | Permalink

The Avatar

Three years is essentially nothing in the context of normal human lifespan, it is also nothing in many other contexts related to almost all areas of knowledge. In the case of the emerging digital world, three years can represent a huge gap between an idea, a premonition if you will, and its (always work-in-progress) execution.

Three years ago, right at the beginnings of Linden Lab’s Second Life, Ron Burnett published How Images Think, in which the artist explored the mechanics of visualization within the new ecosystem created by digital images as “integral part of all media, including animation, video games, data visualization, and the internet.” Burnett’s work also looked at the interactive experience in which spectators become participants and collaboration develops into a new form of intelligence.

Although How Images Think deals with virtual worlds and computer animated images, it does not directly addresses what was at the time the newborn Second Life, almost entirely unknown to most people and miles away from what it eventually became in 2006. Nevertheless Burnett offers an important contribution to imagining the avatar:

“Imagine an avatar that looks like a person, walks like a person, and is able to participate in worlds that people could never dream of entering. The magic here remains under the viewer’s control. Spectators are able to explore microworlds and macroworlds through their avatars. They can return in time to the terrible excess of a decaying Rome or go forward to hypothetical futures. As viewer-avatars play or walk among the people and places they and animators have created, they can change their characteristics to suit the feelings and responses they are having to the experience.”

Now, what is most interesting about this visualization of the avatar is that it is extracted out of a review of emerging forms of animation, specifically referring to digital films such as Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within (2001). According to Burnett, the avatar in film eventually achieves a level of identification from the audience that makes her real, closer to be perceived as a human entity. Fast forward three years later and you will be able to enter a more evolved (and popular) Second Life, where most avatars are created after human images and are essential part of a virtual world that can very well be a movie.

The cinematic feel of this emerging world transfer certain quality to avatars endowing them with the magic of cinema. We become part of this never-ending film, both part and creators of the story, which has the same elements of unpredictability as traditional audiovisual storytelling. The experience is different every time. Looking at avatars as characters of a movie or perhaps even a TV show (a reality TV show) can help us decode the meaning embedded in them, after all they are not merely representations of their creators but the result of a process in which conscious aesthetic decisions are made, communicating a wealth of information about the individual behind the avatar.

Eva and Franco Mattes (internationally know as 0100101110101101.org) are initiating an exploration of the avatar through its aesthetics (I’m sure a lot more will follow); their new portrait exhibition “13 most beautiful avatars,” is the result of one year of traveling around Second Life. The outcome is a photo exhibit that feels more like virtual anthropology than a digital catalogue or artistic documentation.

Posted by camilo at 08:14 AM | Permalink

The Economist published an interesting note on social news within its latest Technology Quarterly. It addresses the emerging role of this new media form and provides a capsule with most of the relevant facts using the two most prominent examples of traditional and social news websites: The New York Times Digital and Digg.com.

Beyond the numbers that favor traditional outlets in terms of traffic and the fact that yes, Digg and other social news sites draw most of their content from established publishers; the comparison might not be fair. In fact, we could consider this attempt to put these two media forms side by side misleading. To begin with (and this is acknowledged in the article), Digg and other social news sites do not produce content, that alone sets them aside into its own category. The new breed of social news sites are mere facilitators, leveraging technology to exploit the social megamind that is the internet (see more details on a previous post).

Outside of the question of whether or not these two sites can be compared, the article opens the door for a much more meaningful discussion centered on the layer of meaning attached to social news sites or any other collaborative effort to distribute information over the internet (i.e. Wikipedia.org).

What are the implications of consuming information that has been brought to you by a community of readers (collective intelligence) as opposed to an editor? Is it more credible? Less credible? Just acknowledging the fact that some of these questions (and others in the same vein) are valid will lead us to accept the existence of that layer of meaning asssociated with collective intelligence and that has the potential to alter how we understand and perceive news information. This is essential to see the value of social news sites and their impact in modern readers.

Posted by camilo at 07:20 AM | Permalink