Visual Swarms

The top photo, above, is one I've been using for years in some of my talks on social media around the world, and it always packs a punch. It's a photo of a Brazilian favela; the city-facing walls of the Providencia slum in Rio de Janeiro have been been plastered with large, poster-sized images of the people who live there -- and the effect is startling. It is collaborative, public art produced in 2008 by JR, a Paris street artist, to help the disenfranchised celebrate themselves and bear silent witness to police violence in the favela. JR says the digital work helped to embolden slum dwellers and "give them a face" after the military opened fire on a rally in a public square, killing three local children. "What we see changes who we are," JR says. "When we act together, the effect is much larger than the sum of its parts."

This past week, in California, JR received his public due -- this year's $100,000 TED Prize for humanitarian activity, awarded annually by TED organizers to help a deserving social innovator fund his or her wish to change the world. [JR's Prize was announced in October but awarded to him on Wednesday in Long Beach.] His "photograffiti" involves pasting up giant, black-and-white photos on city walls. "The streets comprise the world's largest art gallery," he says. [Late last month, 10 of his large-scale portraits showed up in Los Angeles as part of a trilogy of public art projects called The Wrinkles of the City. Previous installments appeared in Spain and China.]

JR's wish? "To use art to turn the world inside out," he says. Using his prize money, JR is launching a global art project called Inside Out. The idea is to empower grassroots volunteers to "stand up for what they believe in" by collaborating with him digitally via the Web. He is asking people to upload their photos to the project site for enlargement; his goal is to catalyze, by crowdsourcing the photographs of ordinary people, the creation of public murals in cities and neighborhoods around the world.

"It is all about making invisible people visible," JR told TED conferees, who have described the semi-anonymous artist as a "true humanitarian" whose art inspires people to look at their villages, neighborhoods and cities differently. "The power of image in a world of image is really strong," JR says. " All I am doing is giving the medium to everyone."

Here's his project and his story:

Here's JR's TED talk Wednesday:

-- Marcia Stepanek

Slow

I first knew Douglas Gayeton as the creator of Molotov Alva, the digital avatar who explored the meaning of life in Second Life. Now, some three years later, Gayeton is pushing the boundaries of multimedia once more, but this time in a distinctly un-digital context. With SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town, his first book, Gayeton introduces the people of Pistoia and their progressively rare, digitally unfettered way of life in rural Italy. SLOW, which emerged from a year Gayeton spent five years ago in Pistoia, also marks the debut of his new and richly engaging, journalistic form of remix storytelling.

Using flat film techniques, Gayeton layers most of his portraits of Pistoia with his own, handwritten notes, anecdotes, recipes, quotes, and historical facts, bringing context and color to each. What emerges is an interactive, sepia-toned celebration of the region's romantic, slow, and profoundly authentic existence.

Gayeton explains:

—Marcia Stepanek

Explorations

Digital visualization wunderkind Jonathan Harris has just launched his latest art and technology effort. Called the Sputnik Observatory for Contemporary Culture, it's a Web site and blog that grew out of a two-year collaboration with New York-based Sputnik, Inc., an organization that documents contemporary culture through intimate, previously unpublished video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences, and technology.

A range of innovators, including Vint Cerf to experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, game designer Will Wright, science writer Philip Ball, and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, among others, share "some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades," Harris says. [Harris, himself, is featured, explaining his 2005 "We Feel Fine" project, a real-time survey of human emotions on the Web.] Adds Harris:

"The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them; the site itself aims to highlight the interconnections between seemingly disparate thinkers and ideas, using a simple navigational system with no dead-ends, where every thought leads to another thought, akin to swimming the stream of consciousness."

Harris says there are about 200 videos on the site, and will be thousands more added over time. [Sputnik is a Russian word that means "co-traveler." It was the name the Russians gave to the robotic spacecraft missions they created in the 1950s to launch, in 1957, the first human-made object into Earth's orbit.]

(Illustration from Sputnik Observatory site)

Remix Architecture

In architectural circles, Adam Kalkin is regarded as something of an oddball. At last fall’s CUSP design conference in Chicago, the New Jersey architect and provocateur delivered an entire lecture wearing a rubber face mask; at the installation of one of his pre-fab homes last summer at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, Kalkin included a 5:26-minute video of himself playing tennis with his mother (the video, itself, a kind of pre-fabrication of a yard). Then, this past spring, in London, Kalkin “performed” John Cage’s controversial 4’33” while holding a violin, interrupting his own, mock-version of the piece after 17 minutes with some words about his work. “Adam continues to be subversive, and subvert what architecture is supposed to be,” Alastair Gordon, a design historian, told a small group that gathered at the Municipal Art Society of New York in March to hear Kalkin speak. The topic was Kalkin’s new book, Quik Build: Adam Kalkin’s ABC of Container Architecture, a survey of 32 Kalkin projects, including Bunny Lane, the home he built for himself and his family that fits a 19th century clapboard cottage inside an industrial hanger. The book also includes Kalkin’s famous Push Button House, a furnished room that unfolds from a shipping container with hydraulic walls. [Check out the video, here.]

But to call Kalkin subversive misses the point. Consider this artist one of the most daring remix artists now pushing at the edges of today’s data-rich culture. Where online satire now has remixer Andrew Fillipone [Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett] and new-wave graphic art has Shepard Fairey [poster remix artist and creator of the iconic Obama Hope poster], architecture has Kalkin. “Some of the remix stuff is amazing,” says Kalkin, who buys surplus shipping containers from the ports of New Jersey for $1,500 to $2,000 each, then remixes and upcycles them into high-end glamour projects like the 12-container, $500,000 Adriance House in northern Maine and Kalkin House at Vermont’s Shelbourne Museum to a new, 12-story, midrise condo project in downtown Salt Lake City.

Sure, Kalkin isn’t the only person using shipping containers to create inexpensive, recyclable housing: Lot-Ek, for one, began offering recycled containers a decade ago as an alternative to chrome-and-glass modernism. But Kalkin is, by far, the most imaginative of the container architects—if not the most philosophical. “I have a fascination with ambiguity…with bending the rules,” says Kalkin, who studied philosophy and linguistics as an undergraduate, specializing in the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein. “In my work, what I like about the use of shipping containers in that it affords a chance to successfully play with people’s expectations and violate their sense of expectation to create surprises. That’s neurologically how we derive pleasure from music; I think it’s the same operation here, with these Quik House projects. The result is so convincing and so exclamatory and so surprising and, like, Whoa! It is all kind of wonderful because of that.”

Kalkin’s love of re-contextualization also is obvious in his lectures: at CUSP in Chicago last fall, he shared one of his favorite examples of remix from the world of entertainment—60s crooner Paul Anka’s rendering of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Anka doesn’t simply “cover” the Nirvana hit, Kalkin says. “It’s a perfectly unexpected corollary to the grunge thing. Cobain would have never been caught in the same universe as Paul Anka but here’s this orbital leap that works so well when joined that it’s beautiful”—kind of like what Kalkin attempts with his work: new visual and structural dialogues between the old and the new; the organic and synthetic, between one set of ideas and another.

While the downturned economy has all but put a stop to Kalkin’s high-end creations [a recent project to build a Unitarian Church out of containers was dropped, along with some pricey renovations involving some brownstones in Manhattan] the low-rise economy has begun celebrating his work: he was recently asked to build 50 units of affordable container housing in Newark, not far from the docks that supply his stash of materials. And Kalkin is especially excited that his drawing-board designs for refugee dwellings in New Orleans and Afghanistan, featured in his new book, are also getting renewed attention. “In rich countries, containers are constantly going out filled with stuff to places that don’t have stuff or that don’t have anything to ship back, so these containers end up stuck there, as a kind of scrap,” Kalkin says. “There’s an economic asymmetry that makes sure you always have these dead-ends and backlogs of these containers, and they’re usually in economically disadvantaged areas where housing is scarce to begin with. So it actually works, by some mistaken formula, that these things end up in poor areas. The possibilities are terribly exciting."

—Marcia Stepanek

(This post first appeared on PopTech and is being reposted here with permission)

(Photograph of Adam Kalkin's shipping container house: Peter Aaron/Esto)