In the annual survey of airport service quality by Geneva-based Airports Council International (ACI), Asian airports—Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Nagoya, Japan—won four of the five top spots. Nova Scotia’s Halifax was the only non-Asian airport to be included in the top five:

1. Seoul

21. Taipei, Taiwan (also ranked no. 1 in the world among airports serving between 15 million and 25 million passengers annually).

José Joaquín de Olmedo International Airport was named after after a famous Ecuadorian poet and the first mayor of the city of Guayaquil.
Ranks: number 8 airport in the world; the best airport in Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of service quality.

date: Friday, November 14, 2008 16:11:02

DMZ to Become Worldwide Environmental Attraction

Reports find the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating South and North Korea has a well-preserved ecology, containing organisms even on the verge of extinction.

A joint inspection team comprised of officials from the Ministry of Environment and various other organizations completed comprehensive research of the DMZ for the first time in 50 years.

Around 180 organisms, 13 of which are national treasures or rarities, were discovered.

The team said the DMZ could become a worldwide attraction with its combination of wetlands, grasslands, valleys and organisms.

The government plans to use data gathered from the research to create an ecological park near the heavily fortified zone, after which Seoul will request UNESCO designate the area a biosphere reserve.

( Reported by KBS WORLD Radio. )

photo by hiro oshima

“Radiohead released a new video for its song “House of Cards” from the album “In Rainbows”. No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.”

All data used to make the video is offered for download so people can create their own visualizations. As of today, House of Cards YouTube group features 82 user videos.

Congratulations to the brilliant Aaron Koblin (who got his MFA at Design | Media Arts department at UCLA) for this milestone project!

Dowload the PDF from here.

“The year 1997 has been taken as the base year for the purpose of calculating the base values. This year was a turning point in the history of the Indian Contemporary Art, according to experts, in which, among other issues, the first professional auction was held by an Indian organisation, HEART. The base value has been converted into 100 to obtain the index figures.

On a Compounded Annualized Growth (CAGR) basis, ET Art Index gave a return of 47.8% since it’s inception in Jan 01, 1998. From a level of 100 on Dec 31, 1997 the index value stood at 2513.1 on March 22, 2006. During the same period, BSE Sensex gave a return of 14% on a CAGR basis. The significant movement of the ET Art Index started in the year 2003, which was also the beginning of the boom period for the Indian equity market.”

Yamini Mehta, the head of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art for Christie’s in New York.

“KOLKATA: Till five years ago, Indian artists shared space with their western counterparts in shows abroad to lend prestige to their portfolios. Today, artists from the West are finding it commercially viable to work and exhibit their canvases in India in a reversal of the trend.”

Continued

Tyeb Mehta’s “Mahisasura” sold at Christie’s auction in London in September 2005 for USD $1.6 million.

Energy, money, and cultural innovation has been gradually moving from the West to Asia - a shift which manifests itself in a variety of ways. Not everything is as dramatic as Olympics 2008 opening - sometimes we can see this shift revealing itself in details.

Take SIGGRAPH, an annual trade show, conference and a festival for 3D computer graphics and animation technology. In 2007 edition (San Diego) I noticed a significant increase in the numbers of visitors from Asia - which was understandable given the fact that China, Thailand, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and other Asian countries have been investing considerably in building creative industries in their countries, in addition to being an “animation factory” for Hollywood.

I saw the same trend at SIGGRAPH 2008 which is taking place in Los Angeles this week. Add to this that beginning this year, there will be a new convention SIGGRAPH.ASIA (which will take place in Singapore in December). But here is the list detail which I found very telling. At the trade show many companies run non-stop demos of their software or hardware. A typical demo may last 30 min and will involve somebody demonstrating some application features, or digital designers explaining how they used the software in some latest production.

At the large INTEL booth, I noticed that each day last 2 hours of the shows were in Japanese and Korean - without any English translation. Here was a major conference in US geared first of all at US visitors - and yet it now added sessions for non-speaking Asian visitors. Interesting..

1. utilitarian;

2. new visual/spatial/temporal sonic forms driven by data - new chapter in the history of abstraction;

3. a parallel with other modern art forms and traditions: info vis as a statement about its subject (in this case, a set of data) made via various visual resources: using color, texture, composition, choice of visualization metaphor, type, labels, etc.

4. Yet another new subject for contemporary art (following all new subjects already explored in 20th century) - appropriate for our “data society.”

5. Creation of a new autonomous artistic world where data acts as (one of) inputs. 

Alex Dragulescu, spam architecture

ancient ritual and spectacle + 20th century mass ornament + early 21st century architecture + digital media

8 years after Minority Report, gesture and touch are on their way to become mainstream interfaces. (This is also another example of how the experimental interface research which in the 1990s was seen only in digital art exhibitions or computer science conferences is now rather quickly making its way into consumer electronics products all around us. )

Business Week:
Touch Computing Hits Its Stride | June 28, 2008.

The article talks about the following products and research projects:

Microsoft Surface.

Microsoft TouchWall.

Microsoft Windows 7 (due in 2010) running on a touchscreen laptop and responding to gestures.

Apple iPhone and MacBook Air.

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories: DiamondTouch.

Acnhors on CNN using “Magic Wall” (designed by Jef Hun / Perceptive Pixel).

Hewlett-Packard’s TouchSmart PC

Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) Misto, a prototype touchscreen system built into a coffee table.

MIT Media Lab projects: PICO, I/O Brush, Tangible Bits Lab.

Jeremy Douglass and Lev Manovich present interface design for Cultural Analytics Research Environment running on HiperWall, UCI, May 23, 2004.
Interface graphics: Bob and Sergie (UCSD Visual Arts Department).
Photos by Anne Helmond. More photos on Flickr.

Me and three other researchers from UCSD have been awarded Interdisciplinary Collaboratory Grant from UCSD Chancellor office to begin working on a project Visualizing Cultural Patterns. The following researchers are involved in the project:

Lev Manovich (Visual Arts);
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Communication);
Falko Kuester (Calit2 and Structural Engineering);
Jim Hollan (Cognitive Science).

Project summary:

Digitization of media collections, the development of Web 2.0 and the rapid growth of social media have created unique opportunities to studying social and cultural processes in new ways. For the first time in human history, we have access to large amounts of data about people’s cultural behavior and preferences as well as cultural assets themselves in digital form. A growing number of researchers have already started to take advantage of these opportunities. We propose to extend this work in new directions by taking advantage of the unique combination of expertise by members of our team, which come from the departments of Visual Arts, Communication, Cognitive Science, and Structural Engineering.

Project description:

Contemporary science increasingly relies on computer-based analysis and visualization of large data sets and data flows. This approach has already yielded significant advances in many fields such as astronomy, geology, genetics, and linguistics. Its success is reflected in the National Science Foundation’s Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery document (2006) that emphasizes the development of tools for the collection, storage, analysis, and visualization of large data sets.

The joint availability of (a) large cultural data sets (through the Web and digitization efforts by museums and libraries) and (b) tools already employed in the sciences to analyze big data makes feasible a new methodology for the study of cultural processes and artifacts. If humanities have typically relied on the manual analysis of a small number of cultural objects, we can now create information visualizations of large cultural data sets to discover patterns that have not been visible previously. Some initial work has already been undertaken in this area. However, it is limited by its relative lack of interdisciplinarity. We believe that here at UCSD we can make field-defining progress in this area by bringing together people who study and create digital cultural artifacts, people who study distributed human cognition, and people who are developing computational tools for analysis, display, and interaction with large data sets.

Out team will create new kinds of multi-modal interfaces appropriate for the study and experience of large sets of cultural artifacts in different media. We will also bring together the visualization techniques normally used in science with the techniques developed in digital design and new media art. The practical outcome of our research will be Cultural Analytics Research Environment: an open platform which supports an analysis of different types of visual and media data and a variety of visualization and mapping techniques. To demonstrate the use of our approach, we will produce interactive visualizations of cultural flows, patterns, and relationships based on the analysis of large sets of data comparable in size to data sets used in sciences. We believe that such visualization environments will be used by a range of people – social scientists and cultural theorists who professionally study culture, students in art history, media studies, and communication studies classes, museum visitors, and cultural creators who want to better understand how their work fits within a larger context.

Jeremy Douglass and Lev Manovich present interface design for Cultural Analytics Research Environment running on HiperWall, UCI, May 23, 2004.
Interface graphics: Bob and Sergie (UCSD Visual Arts Department).
Photos by Anne Helmond. More photos on Flickr.

The exponential growth of a number of both non-professional and professional media producers over the last decade has created a fundamentally new cultural situation. Hundreds of millions of people are routinely created and sharing cultural content (blogs, photos, videos, online comments and discussions, etc.). As the number of mobile phones is projected to grow during 2008 from 2.2 bil to 3 bil during 2008, this number is only going to increase.

At the same time, the rapid growth of professional educational and cultural institutions in many newly globalized countries along with the instant availability of cultural news over the web has also dramatically increased the number of “culture professionals” who participate in global cultural production and discussions. Hundreds of thousands of students, artists, designers have now access to the same ideas, information and tools. It is no longer possible to talk about centers and provinces. In fact, the students, culture professionals, and governments in newly globalized countries are often more ready to embrace latest ideas than their equivalents in “old centers” of world culture.

If you want to see this in action, visit the following web sites and note the range of countries from which the authors come from:

student projects on www.archinect.com/gallery/;

design portfolios at coroflot.com;

motion graphics at xplsv.tv;

etc.

Before, cultural theorists and historians could generate theories and histories based on small data sets (for instance, “classical Hollywood cinema,” “Italian Renaissance,” etc.) But how can we track “global digital culture” (or cultures), with its billions of cultural objects, and hundreds of millions of contributors? Before you could write about culture by following what was going on in a small number of world capitals and schools. But how can we follow the developments in tens of thousands of cities and educational institutions?

Impossible as this may sound, this actually can be done…

“The main tower ‘is to rise at least 300 meters (985 feet) into the sky and symbolize the growing power of the firm. It is also to be situated just opposite the famed 18th century Smolny Cathedral on the Neva River in historic St. Petersburg.’  (Via bldgblog.)

Some quotes:

“New Indonesian and other Southeast Asian artists are commanding five- and six-figure sums for their work, which is being snapped up by collectors, galleries, and auction houses around the world.”

“Contemporary art is now the driving force of an auction house,” says François Curiel, the Paris chairman of Christie’s Europe.”

“On Apr. 2, French Culture Minister Christine Albanel announced a plan to revitalize the country’s art market by providing zero-interest loans of €5,000 to €10,000 ($7,865 to $15,706) for buyers.”

( Via social architectures, a class taught by UCSD graduate student Derek Lomas. )

The site outside Moscow which used to house a Collective Farm during Soviet times is now a brand new international business school which emphasizes doing business in emerging markets:

“The curriculum will provide for analysis of business activities in the countries with rapidly growing economies such as Russia, India, Brazil, and China (the so called BRIC group).”

The examples of subjects to be covered in Skolkovo’s curriculum shows well there Russia is in early 2008: seemingly intergrated in global culture and yet continuing to carry its own unique DNAs (Machiavelli meets nanotechology):

“innovative technologies: nanotechology, biotechnology, gene engineering, etc.general education: chinese strategems, Machiavelli’s doctrine, H. Ford’s memoirs, etc.”

School’s architecture is by the British architect David Adjaye.

(From Sarah Rabia, Five-start Cells, The, issue 01, 17.09.2007, p. 5.)

Source: Times, as quoted in “Index,”The, issue 01, 17.09.2007, p. 17.

Source: Nadim Dimenchkie, The City Reports: Beirut, The, issue 01, 17.09.2007, p. 11.

If you were to ask in 2000, in what cities did I get most intelligent and challenging questions after a lecture, my answer would be London and Berlin. This was to be expected. But then things started to change - rather quickly. The intellectual pyramid of the world started to get flat. If were to ask me again the same question in 2004, my answer would be Hong Kong. I was there for 2 weeks in September of 2004 giving a number of my lectures, and the questions i got after every lecture were simply amazing. I had a feeling that people understood my ideas better than I understood them myself, and every question would send into a delightful terror. Terror - because I did not how to answer them. Delightful - because I was seeing in action how globalization and internet has shifted the relationship between a handful of old modern centers of cultural power and every other place.

Equally strong were questions I got after my lecture done via teleconferencing in Columbia in November 2004.

Today is March 26, 2008. I am Mexico City for a Computer Art Congress 2008. I just got back to my hotel after a full conference day and a two hour car drive back (well, Mexico is the largest megacity at the moment, so this part was not unexpected) with two undergraduate students. They study at a new program in digital art and animation at Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Estado de México. During the long car ride I had one of the best intellectual conversations of my life. Of course, students did not know everything - but they intuitively understood what were the key cultural issues facing digital culture today. When I would explain things, they understood me before I would finish a sentence.

Fernando, a media artist and curator from Mexico City showing his works on his iPhone

Compare this to my reception during lectures in London and New York last year where the audiences at some of the most well-known educational institutions (which I would not name) had real difficulty understanding what my talks were about (and consequently, none of the questions really got into the meat of my talk).London was particularly shocking: almost every question from faculty members involved Walter Benjamin. Why did not I quote or referred to Benjamin? I replied that while I have lots of admiration for Benjamin’s work, I don’t think he can help us to understand the some of the particular details of cultural changes now: such as the relationship between the interface of After Effects software and visual aesthetics of moving images created with its help. Although I don’t remember the literal text of the comment which followed, it was along the following lines: maybe I should dig deeper into Benjamin because somewhere he certainly says something which will help us address such current topics…