The Great Olympics Singing Switch
Lin Miaoke,right, was chosen to mime Ode to the Motherland
because she was prettier than Yang Peiyi.
THE International Olympic Committee has defended the Chinese over the great singing switch at the Opening Ceremony when nine-year-old Lin Miaoke, with her swinging pigtails and a red dress, lip-synched Ode to the Motherland. While Lin mimed the song, another less attractive girl, Yang Peiyi, 7, actually did the singing. It was a case of one face, different voice - something the Beijing Games organisers seem completely at ease with.
Asked yesterday how he would feel as a father having to explain to his daughter that she was not pretty enough to sing in front of the world, IOC Olympic Games executive director Gilbert Felli looked uncomfortable but likened the decision to the tough choices sports coaches must make when selecting the final team for an important match.
Nelson: It’s interesting how this one gesture reflects deeply the state of China: they rather lie to you than show you something bad. Which makes one wonder if everything else is just a facade, a show put on to impress others. No, i am not against China, and more than anything else, i believe in Chinese people and want to see them grow, but I believe in honesty and if they cannot embrace flaws that come with the truth, then all the progress they have and will make would be meaningless.
Anger Release Machine
Phone Sex Operators
“I got into phone sex because I thought: ‘Why not get paid for talking dirty, instead of doing it for free?’ It brings up my self-esteem so much, knowing guys are looking at my pics and wanting to talk with me. Wanting me to take them to a whole other place, filling their fantasies… painting that picture in their mind for them.”
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/phone_sex_operators/
Invest In My Future
this is so wrong
Lumen Eclipse 1-minute Film Fest
CALL FOR 1-MINUTE FILM SUBMISSIONS
Seeking filmmakers who adore seconds, flourish in miniature, and consider a standard minute to be an infinite amount of space.
In our 1st annual 1-Minute Film Festival, Lumen Eclipse seeks all varieties of 60 second films with the democratic proviso: none shall exceed one minute! If big films are the cathedrals of today, we’re looking for your take on what a tiny and beautiful shrine might look like.
This opportunity is unique because the only roof over our arts venue is Cassiopeia’s far off W. This is an outdoor event and your 1-Minute films will screen in an open-air modern day acropolis that would make Sophocles stamp his foot in envy.
The film festival will be an outdoor event at the newly constructed Palmer Street in Harvard Square (Cambridge, MA).
Free Culture
…Free Culture’s message is different, Lessig writes, because it is “about the consequence of the Internet to a part of our tradition that is much more fundamental, and, as hard as this is for a geek-wanna-be to admit, much more important.” (pg. xiv)
Professor Lessig analyzes the tension that exists between the concepts of piracy and property in the intellectual property realm in the context of what he calls the present “depressingly compromised process of making law” that has been captured in most nations by multinational corporations that are interested in the accumulation of capital and not the free exchange of ideas.
Culture Jamming
Ernst Bettler is a fictional Swiss graphic designer. He was invented by Christopher Wilson in a 2000 hoax article published in the second issue of Dot Dot Dot, a magazine of visual culture.
According to the article, Bettler was asked in the 1950s to design advertisement posters for Pfäfferli+Huber (P+H), a Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer. The article states that Bettler knew of the company’s involvement in Nazi concentration camp experiments and decided to accept the commission with the intention of damaging P+H. The four posters he created, Wilson’s article recounts, were exemplary works of International Typographic Style design, advertising P+H drugs such as “Contrazipan”. However, according to the article, the posters featured abstract compositions that could be read as capital letters – spelling out “N - A - Z - I” when displayed in sequence. Wilson’s article states that the public outcry that followed the public display of the posters ruined P+H in a matter of weeks.
Even though it was highly detailed and featured many photographs and illustrations, the article was a complete fabrication. Ernst Bettler, Pfäfferli+Huber and its drugs do not exist, and neither do the Swiss towns “Sumisdorf” and “Burgwald” that feature in the article – their names are presumably based on the real Swiss towns of Sumiswald and Burgdorf. Nonetheless, the story was well received in graphic design circles. Among others, the September/October 2001 “Graphic Anarchy” issue of Adbusters magazine hailed Bettler’s work as “one of the greatest design interventions on record”, and the 2002 graphic design textbook “Problem Solved” by Michael Johnson covers Bettler as one of the “founding fathers of the ‘culture-jamming‘ form of protest”.
via Wikipedia.
Wordle
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Mi Magazine - A Magazine within Magazines
The first issue explores the value of an idea. 10 Euros were sent to outstanding artists, designers and photographers, inviting them to create an idea worth the budget enclosed.
Participating Artists: Elisabeth Arkhipoff, Bewegung KOCMOC/Gruppe Gagarin, Frederique Daubal, Delaware, Gelitin, Gayatri Ghosh, Piero Golia, H5, Karlssonwilker inc., Rob Kidney, Katerina Matsoukis, Jonathan Monk, Stephen Powers, Rinzen, Stefan Sagmeister, David Shrigley, Vier5, Vlieger & Vandam.
Participating Magazines: Parnass, Etecé, Pool, Quart, Famous, Numero, Vorn, soDA, The Gap, Massiv, Idea, Bulgaria, Novum, n.paradoxa, Wespennest, Hot Rod, Sal, 50_easy.
Nelson: What’s cool about this is that the ‘magazine’ exists in many other different magazines, requiring you to search and discover the pages amidst other content. The magazine doesn’t exist in its own world, but lives in various environments, giving it a multi-dimensional manifestation.
Going to Olympics but don’t speak Chinese? Print this out- “show & point” picture guide
Single Men’s Kit
Much like Ling Lings, kit for single people, this is a kit more specifically for single men.
8 products included with many sketches for other ideas.
ITEM #6
When the woman of the single man‘s dreams visits spontaneously, all her needs are fulfilled with the women-kit. It contains hair conditioner, facial creme, a toothbrush and a pad to remove the makeup
the round PAD for makeup looks more like a condom…SEE MORE
MEWE Design Alliance
INTERVIEWER: There seems to be a western influence in your work although none of you ever studied or worked abroad. Where do you think that comes from?
MEWE: ‘Even if you have never eaten pork you have seen the pig running’!
READ ARTICLE ABOUT UP AND COMING CHINESE DESIGNERS
Designers showcased in CHINA DESIGN NOW.
Networks and Transactions 2 (Art 752a)
Fall 2007, Thursdays 1:30-5:30
Dan Michaelson
http://art.yale.edu/Art752a
Prerequisite: Networks & Transactions 1 (742b) or equivalent experience. The class is intended
for second-year graduate design students who are working toward their thesis. If space permits,
first-years who took 742b last year as prelims, are also welcome.
For me, some of the most exciting possibilities in design, arise when design’s job is to connect
multiple networks of information and of people, all of which are in motion. You will do two
assignments in this class, the larger of which is to create a system for communication.
We will also discuss how to site, show, or publish work that is inherently transient, in ways that
are appropriate to each student’s thesis.
Assignment 1: Junction
Identify two flows in the city of New Haven (or any other ecosystem that you frequent). For
example, cups of coffee sold at Dunkin Donuts, live music listings, bus schedules, historical
change in areas of the city, parking and unparking, classroom occupation, construction and
destruction, the movement of garbage or runoff, fashion memes, population flux, sunlight,
weather patterns, or the circulation of people within and between neighborhoods.
Expose or enable an intersection between these two flows. (Maybe or maybe not in an
advantageous way, or in an antagonistic, meaningful, or absurd way.) For example, could a
display in a bodega tell customers about lectures at Yale. In that case how would its design
engage both the bodega and the university?
Consider carefully what is your own scope or domain as the graphic designer of a junction, and
what is not. What is an appropriate and beautiful typography and movement for the junction
you’re creating?
No technology is necessary for this assignment and you must be able to finish completely in
four weeks, while working simultaneously on Assignment 2. (Therefore you are discouraged
from pursuing a technological solution for Assignment 1.) Your final deliverable can be a
scenario, a prototype or demonstration, or a temporary or permanent insertion into the
environment.
Final requirement: This project must contribute to your thesis book (as well as to your thesis).
Consider now how the visual work products of this assignment can help illustrate your thesis,
and can be adapted to fit into a book. In the past, students have sometimes elected to
collaborate on this assignment; I neither encourage nor discourage this, but have added this
requirement instead.
Assignment 2: Telegraph
“Last week, 745 human lives were saved from perishing by the wireless. But for the almost
magic use of the air the Titanic tragedy would have been shrouded in the secrecy that not so
long ago was the power of the sea … Few New Yorkers realize that all through the roar of the
big city there are constantly speeding messages between people separated by vast distances,
and that over housetops and even through the walls of buildings and in the very air one
breathes are words written by electricity.” – New York Times (Apr 21, 1912)
“Just a moment- just a moment-” – HAL 9000
Design a system for two-way communication between people. The system should enable
continuous back-and-forth conversation to take place. The system can use the computer screen
and the internet, but it doesn’t have to. It may instead use an intranet, hand delivery, the post,
telephone, semaphores, etc. It can connect two users at a time, or more. Your solution need not
be technological in any way. But you must show how it works as a two-way communication
system by implementing it.
As with the junction project, remember that your domain is graphic design. The goals and focus
of your solution should lie within that domain: a typographic and movement form, a system for
the structuring of language. What interface will you create for sending and receiving messages;
and what are the possible typographies for these messages? How do these two aspects
influence one another? Graphic design is always about technology and technique (technics); in
your project, how do modes of transmission, processing, and typographic display affect
language and communication?
Remember that your solution should be essentially adverbial or qualitative: what is
communicating like in your universe of messaging. The questions of what communication takes
place or why it does, are important to think about as you try to understand your users; but to try
to influence answers to these questions may not be productive.
I will provide sample code in Flash for an instant messenger. However, this is only one option
for you to use.
Due next week:
- Visual research and initial sketch(es) of junction project.
- Visual research toward telegraph project.
Power of Celebrities
The Welcome to Beijing olympic video is really interesting. Not something unique to Chinese, but it is a really common technique to have to have celebrities share a song or phrases together like this. I saw it all the time in HK. Regardless of this technique, it still captivated me because there were so many celebrities, and like nelson said, not all are in the mainland. But I think what makes it powerful is because I doubt they did pay all the celebrities wads of cash like they would receive for a regular advertisement. I do feel there is a sense of patriotism, that each person, regardless of how busy, rich and famous are believe this is a good thing that they stand behind. And as a collective, it is quite moving.
Which reminded me of the ONE campaign. A similarly powerful campaign utilizing celebrities to take a stand and urge the public to do the same. I’m sure you guys are familiar with this video, but check it out again and experience the impact of this emotional attachment.
So it is as powerful without high production and familiar faces.
Or if it not in a familiar language.
ISEA2008
ISEA2008
25 July - 3 August
ISEA, the International Symposium on Electronic Art initiated in 1988, is the world’s premier media arts event for the critical discussion and showcase of creative productions applying new technologies in interactive and digital media. Held biannually in various cities throughout the world, this migratory event is being held in Asia for the second time in its history, after Singapore successfully secured this bid.This symposium consists of three aspects of peer reviewed conference, internationally juried exhibition and various in-conjunction and partner events. ISEA2008 is proud to announce an Artists In Residence programme supported by the National University of Singapore that will run for the year leading up to the 2008 Symposium.
For more information on the main juried exhibition visit the AIR web page.
For more information on the conference programme visit the conference web page.
I Believe in…Press
Chinese press:
WorldJournal
Mingpao
Epochtimes
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