Charlotte-LookingOutwards-1
Something I admire
Poweronoff by Danja Vasiliev is a representation of the business a web surfer creates by just loading ads on their computer. The participant is placed in a room that has all the appliances that are part of a meager life, but none of them have power, only a laptop running on battery power. The participant’s only option is to load ad banners on the laptop, and then the amount of revenue crated by loading the banners is converted to watts and used to power this person’s life.
It helped me grasp the value the came from simply looking at an ad banner, by measuring the value in watts. The application of the monetary funds from ads as your lifeline was really creative and gave the project a futuristic and dystopian feel to it. Next time this project is made is should incorporate how your interests are sold to ad companies so they can show you ads your more likely to click on, maybe the longer you surfed, the more valuable the ad banners became. Also I wished the artist wrote a bit more on how he came up with the ad prices. This is part of the movement of activists, artists and hackers (like LulzSec) who want to remind their audience of how big corporations are a part of our everyday life without us thinking about it or questioning it.
Something that surprised me
Boarder Bumping by Julian Oliver surprised me. Oliver noticed that cellphone networks do not obey territory borders; He created a smartphone application to collect the data of cell phone boarders, and put the information together in a map.
At first I was disappointed in this project because I thought this was something that should only concern the carrier companies. That’s not the case; really it is challenging the integrity of national borders. (This is also related to another awesome project by Chris Pinchen about how cellphone towers are disguised as something like a tree or a wall)
Something that could have been done better
‘i am swimming in a pool’ by Gordan Savičić is a reinterpretation of alvin lucier’s well-known audio masterpiece ‘i am sitting in a room’, A submerged hydrophone is used to pick up audio waves the come from people swimming in this pool. The people swimming in the pool are wearing waterproof headphones that are streaming the sound of the bottom of the pool.
This project disappointed me because it seems like something very complicated and expensive to set up, when the user experience wouldn’t be extremely fulfilling. Judging from the photo of the project being preformed, people were just dunking their heads in the water for a quick listen with only one person getting the full experience.
This project was by Gordan Savičić who usually has a really interesting and original point to his projects.