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

Almost Real

Patrick Ruffini's recent blog post on techPresident has a notable take on the evolving use of social media by the Obama team. Here's an excerpt:

"The Internet is specifically like reality television. Much has been made of the "transparency" of Change.gov -- but it actually is to real transparency what reality TV is to reality. Submitting your story on why the health system sucks does not allow you to discuss alternatives to some sort of nationalization of the health system under Obama. It's using Web 2.0 and the illusion of openness to support an existing policy position which is unlikely to change. The politicians are using the Internet to justify what they were going to do anyway. This is very shrewd on their part, but a far cry from what transparency advocates say they are for."

Check it out here.

(Photo-illustration by Shaunl for istock.com)

Mind-share

I just finished skimming a proof of Michael Kinsley's new book, Creative Capitalism: A Conversation, due out December 2. Kinsley asked Warren Buffett, Oxfam's Elizabeth Stuart, Matthew Bishop and a few dozen others how to retool the global economy to ease poverty.

Say what you will about its timing; the book is intriguing—especially for the way Kinsley got it written. Remember how Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer talked his friends into painting his Aunt Polly's fence (so that he wouldn't have to paint it, himself)? Right after Bill Gates delivered his now famous speech on "creative capitalism" at the 2008 World Economic Forum, Kinsley—the founding editor of Slate—set up creativecapitalismblog.com, a place where people in his network could debate Gates' concept.

Kinsley made their postings into a book. It's 310 pages and 75 very short chapters long and roughly resembles a comment string at the end of a blog entry. Kinsley makes no apologies:

"We can debate the quality of Internet prose: the suspension of grammar, the cutesy acronyms (not to mention emoticons!), the casual spelling, the half-finished sentences, but it is the language of our time. And people do read it. And write it. So the idea for this book was to find a collection of smart people, entice them into a Web-based discussion of creative capitalism, and by this means trick them into producing a book. The book would have the quality of a blog or a "chat" or one of Slate's email dialogues. The prose would be casual, the organization perhaps a bit chaotic. The experience of 'reading' it would be somewhat like surfing the Web—except without the hyperlinks. Plenty of books have grown out of Web sites. But have there been Web sites started with the specific intention of using them to produce a book? Maybe so, but not many. This may remind you of the way Tom Sawyer got Aunt Polly's fence whitewashed. But rest assured that contributors will be compensated."

Most impressive is the brevity of some of the commentary, considering the sources. Kinsley may be on to something (again). Look for more "fast" books to be created this way, via the mass participation of a social network. It's just another way that social media are reshaping the conversation.

(Bending Globe, above, by Laurie Simmons for Project Globe 2008)