This article from The New York Times discusses a controversy about the restitution of prehistoric objects by Indonesian government against a Dutch Naturalis museum.
While art museums have been grappling since the 1990s with claims that they hold or display looted Nazi art, and ethnographic museums have faced repatriation claims from African nations and Indigenous people worldwide, the Java Man case pushes restitution into the realm of the natural history museum — where it hasn’t been much of an issue until now.
Artist Sarah Ross created some interesting designs of clothes to circumvent cities’ hostile architecture:
Archisuit consists of an edition of four leisure jogging suits made for specific architectural structures in Los Angeles. The suits include the negative space of the structures and allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them.
Via Kottke.org.
An article from Slate.com describes photography technique used by photographer Jay Mark Johnson to “emphasize time over space”:
[H]e uses a slit camera that emphasizes time over space. Whatever remains still is smeared into stripes, while the motion of crashing waves, cars and a Tai Chi master’s hands are registered moment by moment, as they pass his camera by. Like an EKG showing successive heartbeats, the width of an object corresponds not to distance or size, but the rate of movement. Viewing the left side of the picture is not looking leftward in space but backward in time.
Artist Deborah Roberts created an interested series called Pluralism in which she collected names in a Microsoft Word document which are then marked as misspelled by the spell checker.
Have a look at the piece here (via Kottke.org).
Theirtube is brilliant project from designer and developer Tomo Kihara where you can discover how Youtube filter bubbles look for different people:
Theirtube is a Youtube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas. Each persona simulates the viewing environment of real Youtube users who experienced being inside a recommendation bubble through recreating a Youtube account with a similar viewing history. TheirTube shows how YouTube’s recommendations can drastically shape someone’s experience on the platform and, as a result, shape their worldview.
Al Jazeera made a nice short documentary about the work of data journalist and artist Mona Chalabi: Journalism Through Art. Her hand drawn style is really interesting as it can challenge dominant narratives and styles of representing data. And the style itself shows how there is always some uncertainty in the data:
She believes that drawing can make data more accessible to people - and more transparent. “Part of the purpose of creating hand-drawn illustrations is that I want people to look at it and question the illustration that they see in front of them because the truth is that there is a high degree of imprecision in data,” she says. “I think there’s something to be said for an understanding that for every statistic that you see the truth lies somewhere in the parametres around that number.”
The artist Simon Weckert made a fantastic art project using a guerrilla tactic to disrupt Google Maps algorithms. See more information about the project here.
99 smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic.
The video series “Dissolving Realities” by digital artist Ruben Fro are disturbing, yet fascinating. Via @Kottke.
The “Institute of Human Obscolescence” is creating thought provoking speculative fiction artwork about changes in labour from advances in artificial intelligence and possible “human obscolescence”.
One project is called “biological labour” and envisages how bodies may produce elecricity for mining cryptocurrency:
A single human body at rest radiates 100 watts of excess heat. We created a body-suit that uses thermoelectric generators to harvest the temperature differential between the human body and ambient and converts it into usable electricity. The electricity generated is then fed to a computer that produces cryptocurrency.
The Hyphen Labs collective is making brilliant projects at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future. Check out there work here