I’m currently teaching a few classes for the New Media Production course at the Restart Insitute, in Lisbon. While discussing new media, i try to emphasize the transcodification of objects, and what happens when physical things are transformed into computational data.
One of the students suggested the possibility of translating feelings into digital, and even if i presented We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris as an bayilik example, i believe the work below is much more representative of transcoding physical into digital.
Feel-O-Meter by Julius von Bismarck , Benjamin Maus and Richard Wilhelmer is a media installation at the Lindau (Berlin-Schöneberg) Gasometer featuring an oversized smiley face, as the crown of the lighthouse at the harbor entrance.
A camera placed at the port, reads from faces, analyzes it and forwards the details to the installation, interpreting the different emotional expressions hunca life katalog from the faces of residents and guests of Lindau. The lighthouse Smiley then imitates the recorded emotions, expressing the mood from the city.
And they can always add extra signals from Twitter of Foursquare
Fine web design at Michelle Hunziker’s Official Website. Parallax scroll, Mootols transitions and exquisite art direction. The model/tv hostess is good for the eyes also.
One of the best ways to empower ou creativity is to stand on the shoulder of giants. From David Ogilvy to Hegarty there’s plenty to choose from.
Yet, there’s one an advertising agency founder that has been forgotten, that 50 years ago was already discussing issues like sustainability or escort bayan interconnectivity. Oh, and he also brought to San Francisco an obscure canadian academic named Marshall McLuhan.
The giant i’m writing about is Howard Luck Gossage. A critic but also reformer of the advertising industry, his thoughts are remarkably modern and fit to our interactive age:
“The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.”
“Our first duty is not to the old sales curve, it is to the audience.”
“Copywriters are very strange people who have only reached copywriting after eliminating every other means of making a living through writing”
“If you have something pertinent to say, you neither have to say it to very many people –only to those who you think will be interested–nor do you have to say it very often. How many times do you have to be told that your house is on fire?”
“First, what is the difference between seeing an ad on a billboard and seeing an ad in a magazine? The answer, in a word, is permission”
“To explain responsibility to advertising men is like trying to convince an eight-year-old that sexual intercourse is more fun than a chocolate ice cream cone.”
“In which a guy clearly does not set out to change the world, but does so, then denies he ever did, and has a whole bunch of people over for drinks who will all go on to become famous and miss him for the rest of their lives” — Jeff Goodby
After 5 years, this blog had his first long break. From building a new social media team at Fullsix, giving workshops, writing for publications, being guest speaker or just letting life happen, something’s gotta give and blogging was the one of the victims.
So much that i even considered ending the blog, but when reminding myself what it was like back in 2006, the blogging bug came moda back again. The previous months i’ve tried to write long form posts that went beyond the simple Tumblr, but it turned out harder to keep a regular frequency. On this comeback, i’m going back to the roots, highlighting interactive campaigns and focusing more on social media.
For those few who haven’t unsubscribed the blog (and still love Google Reader, despite the recent changes), thanks for sticking by. And let me know what else would you find interesting for me to write about at A Source Of Inspiration.
The past few years we’ve seen a surge on data visualization, from the proceedings of Edward Tufte to the masterful curation by the likes of Manuel Lima, blogs like Infoesthetics or tools like ManyEyes.
What was once an beautifying artifact to data crunchers has now gone mainstream, popularized by infographics on high traffics websites (Mashable and Jess3 you are to blame), a deluge of copy+paste graphics for the social age.
What’s perhaps more subtle but rather interesting, is the extension of this subset of visual narrative to the physical world, taking data visualization to more concrete forms of media, beyond the flat representation of digital images.
From the groundbreaking piece by Aaron Koblin for Radiohead, to the more recent work by Dentsu+Berg with iPad light painting, we witness the rise of ubiquitous infographics, were real surfaces become both data sets and data surfaces.
It’s time to acknowledge a future vision less screen-centric and more projection-centric (Microsoft shows a glimpse of it here), were each surface can both display data sources and act as data source.
If you find these examples still too digital, there’s a couple of more concrete ones:
If our allure with infographics extends to the physical world, brands and organizations creating concrete forms of data viz (or even augmented visualization) can easily explore our current fascination. One warning though: don’t mistake pretty graphics with lack of clarity and reasoning when interpreting data.
For those living under a rock, the movie adaptation of one of the most famous comic characters is almost here: Green Lantern.
The trailer above should be enough to seduce fans, but why stop there? And instead of the regular blockbuster campaign why not appeal to the geeky teenager and entice the astrophysicist within? That’s exactly what the agency Hide&Seek, Warner Bros. and Oxford University did, “bringing hardcore astrophysics and superhero movie fans together”.
At StudyTheSkyes.com, fans and aspiring astrophysicists can be explorers of The Zooniverse, a science project that allows internet users analyse photographic data generated by some of the world’s largest telescopes, and pass their findings for the research teams. Os as some say in marketing lingo, crowdsourcing. But in a geeky-milky way
So how does this relates to the character Green Lantern? Well, because the task at hand (tutorial above) would be looking for ‘bubbles’ produced by the formation of stars, that show up as … Green Rings.
Yeah, i know it’s geeky, but also a refreshing approach to movie campaigns.
Brastemp, a Brazilian electronics brand shows how you can be interactive with radio. The campaign was so successful that it was replicated in Portugal by a couple of radios.
The spot, that aired simultaneously in 11 major radio stations in the capital city, suggested: “Right now, millions of people at their cars, listening to the radio. All serious, sleepy, until an inspiration changes everything. We invite you to smile to the driver next to you. If he heard it, he’ll smile back …. See? Inspiration changes everything and life becomes just likeee… a Brastemp. “
The past few months already, the term digital has mostly left my vocabulary as an advertising professional. Instead, the preferred word is interactive. Not only because words matter, but considering computational ubiquity is just a few years away (from TV to nano sensors), saying a media is digital is almost an oxymoron.
Interactive goes beyond online communication and starts to explore new frontiers, from outdoor advertising to context sensitive ads (Minority Report, anyone?). Take for instance a shopping center in Portugal, promoting a witchcraft fair with an outdoor taking sensors and measuring the amount of people who walked underneath the ladder.
Would you call this digital? maybe. But interactive it definitely is.
If Leo Burnett did the above being a somewhat traditional agency, you can expect digital agencies to do the same. R/GA is breaking down walls, exploring new areas such as event marketing or data visualization, while creating and producing commercials. But they surely kept their interactive background.
It’s the evolve or die time for digital agencies, and they could start by dropping the digital.
On a side note, the same thing happens regarding ‘social media’. Even if the most experienced web professionals call it ‘social web’, the former has become so popular with the press, that it’s hard to escape from this broadcast view.
Digital or social is not about the media. It’s about how people behave on those channels. Or as it’s often called, culture.
If the above gorgeous piece of film wasn’t enough, now follows Radiolab Hyper Audio Player, based on the same episode.
Henrik Moltke took the amusing conversation of radio hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, built a custom HTML5 player, mixed it with Popcorn.js (a javascript framework for multimedia assets) and added the collaborative features of Soundcloud, the music sharing platform.
If we’re used to think of semantics regarding hypertext, this experiment ‘shows’ how this semantic value can be added to multimedia content. For instance, when a comment or image is added by Rabiolab on Soundcloud track it generates the corresponding visual cue on the player, incorporating Creative Commons images. Another feature uses one of Henrik’s experiments Hyperdisken, to get the show transcript.
Interactive creativity is not only about visual; sources can be found in audio also.
