Fascination with Celebrity

Celebrities live fascinating lives when seen from the eyes of an everyday individual who works a 9-5 somewhere in middle America. People try to keep up to date on all the happenings of their favorite actor, musician, reality star, etc. through tons of different social media websites that give these people fantasy lives. If you look at someone like Kim Kardashian, one of the biggest social media celebrities of our time, you see her showing the world the life she wants them to see. Besides the mishaps with different leaked stories, all over Ms. Kardashians social media outlets are controlled and filtered by herself and her team. Everyday individuals think that this is the socialites true colors, but what some don't realize is that there is more to Kim than meets the eye. As with everyone else dealing with social media, it is all about creating your own image. You wouldn't put a picture of you stealing on your facebook would you? Well that is essentially what everyone else is doing with these websites. Including celebrities, they are creating this fake life that looks magnificent, but when you look deep down into their real lives they are exactly like everyone else. We cannot be fooled by these facades that are being shown to the world when it comes to people we admire or stalk on the world wide web.

Skills: Making eye contact

I’m always bursting with excitement when I visit India – there’s nothing like seeing your family after one year.  I imagine exchanging stories about what all of us have been up to. But instead, my 12-year-cousin takes over and I’m given three options of what I want to do: watch a movie, play an online game or be ‘physically active’ on the Wii. He’s almost more tech-savvy than I am! What happened to the teenage days when my friends and I used to interact over board games or invent our own versions of “Doctor, Doctor” or go to the parking lot to play Hopscotch and Tag?

As the use of technology has increased over the past decade, the idea of physical presence is becoming more and more obscure. It’s as if being able to make eye contact with another person in the room is a resume-worthy skill!

I’m not saying I haven’t been on the other side myself. Even when I’m catching up with my best friends back home, our catch-up sessions are incomplete without stalking someone on facebook, youtubing silly videos or flipping TV channels.

We don’t even have a family dinner without one of us checking a text message on our phones.  

It’s a scary thought- With the ability to text people, order food via Seamless.com and have group meetings via Skype, are we slowly losing the need to interact with other beings?

While it is imperative for designers today to gear their inventions to a further tech-savvy population, I also feel we need to rewind a little, and re-discover the joys of physical interaction. 

I love the delete button on my laptop to correct virtual errors. But what I would give if the ‘copy-paste’ function could allow me to re-live those heart-to-heart moments with my family, or re-bond with my friends over inside jokes and a couple of drinks!

The illusory nature of choice

And all this time...

the world of the subway

Riding the subway should be one the one of the few places in New York to experience the actual physical presence of another. Without access to a wireless connection, riders are forced to put their phones down, and interact with another (or at the very least, read a book). The media minded must awkwardly stare blindly at the advertising within the car (and seem much more interested in the “latest miracle weight loss program” or “where to get your next degree”) to avoid eye contact with a stranger. I am one of these people. I hate when someone stands too close to me, or shimmies oneself into the not-big-enough-for four-people-to-sit spot. I get seriously uncomfortable and irritated.

So, thank god for temple run, right? It seems immediate that when a subway rider enters a train, they either pullout the latest smartphone app, or swap from Pandora to Itunes to tune-out the noise of those annoying passengers for some musical bliss.

With each year, it seems that the media-rich environment of the 21^st Century is creeping down into the subway tunnels, allowing for less and less physical interaction with strangers. Just recently, the MTA along with T-Mobile and AT&T introduced wireless service in six subway stations (A,C,E,1,2,3, and F,M at 14^th st, L at 8^th Ave, C,E at 23^rd). You can text, email, tweet, and surf the web while waiting for the next train to arrive. And thank god for it, I was really starting to worry that I might have to start talking to that weirdo standing too close next to me.

-Amelia Stein

Physicality of Performance

I have always thought of theater as the ultimate form of communication.  While recently watching Vanya on 42^nd Street, the 1994 filmed production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, I came to the realization that even the best recording cannot do justice to the instantaneous nature of live performance.  While this film is a spectacular documentation of the intimate production put on in the then abandoned Victory Theater, the experience of actually being in the presence of this masterpiece must have been even more stunning. 

When an experience is digitalized, there is a presentational element that removes us from the work.  For years now, we have been able to easily edit photos to unrealistic perfection, splice a scene together word-by-word, or correct flaws in music to the point where all voices sound the same.  While this can be professionally beneficial, a certain amount of authenticity is always lost, as we take what would be considered incredible and rare in reality and make it uniform and accessible in the digital world.

However, no matter how much technological progress is made, there is still no replacement for atmosphere.  A prepared image cannot match the physicality of being present in an actual space— an experience that engages all the senses, rather than just a two-dimensional understanding.  This is currently being fully realized in theater, as physicality is combined with the undeniable authenticity of performance within endeavors like Sleep No More, a production (that I’m sure you’ve heard of, if not attended) of Macbeth staged as a completely immersive experience.  Or even at the beginning of Broadway’s Once, a more commercially accessible option, when the audience is invited onto the stage and into the world of the play. These works encourage the audience to push their own sensory boundaries.  To observe a scene and attempt to conjure up the character’s memories.  To want more from an image than meets the eye.  To watch a film like Vanya on 42^nd, and wonder what it might have smelled like in the Victory Theater. 

The Electric Information Age

The Electric Information Age Book by Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels brings to life the design aspect through editing and production in print form. Most say publication is dying off while the digital and electronic age is beginning to take over slowly. But if we think about it, it is just a new form of interaction with information and print through a new play in technology as a medium instead. This book really allows design to really play its part in print form and giving it life, character and interactivity. It is where the revolution of and practice of graphic designer have more control over the production of work and an efficient workflow and process. It is also much more exciting and it gives designers the ability to experiment and explore style type and layout.

The digital age is here to stay. With the advance technology we have today and the circulation and spread of information and data across the web is accessible through the internet (online) now. Not to say that print has become a dying medium but rather it is not prominent as it used to be since the digital age came into the picture. It is a new form and way of being creative and using what was build as a structure and to build from there a better way of access and becoming innovative. It is a new way of interacting with the media through digital form.

Physical Presence

The idea of physical presence in a space is a concept that is becoming more and more lost as technology and time progress. The value of being in a physical space is also being forgotten. The evolution of the internet and the smartphone have changed the way that people interact. I work with two individuals whom I have seen in-person 2 times in the last 8 months. We communicate via skype, email and phone which basically cancels out any need for being together in the same space. Sadly, new technologies allow this process to perpetuate and become easier as well as more common. I personally don’t mind the lack of physical presence; It is often easier to get the content I want or need to know from an internet source rather than speaking with someone in-person on going somewhere site-specific. Of course, there are so many exceptions. Some experiences cannot be duplicated. Google announced last year that they were starting a new project that basically incorporates the idea of “street-view” inside museums. I love the concept but there is no way a screen can possibly replicate the same sensation of viewing Monet’s Water Lilies in person. It is a great reference tool and wonderful way to look at museums in places people don’t have immediate access to. Overall, the importance of physical presence is being lost but will never be entirely forgotten because so many scenarios cannot be duplicated even with advanced technology.

http://www.googleartproject.com/

Life After Death with Social Networking

I grew up in a town where everywhere you go, someone either knows your name or your parents name. Life is simple, and the public sphere includes everyone within a 50 mile radius. The local morning and evening news is the main source of information for everyone. Life in Lexington truly happens at a slower pace, and it is takes about the same amount of time to get to and from my two homes to adjust to their paces. 


I began this class with an examination of life and death in the public eye in New York City, particularly focusing on the traumatic experiences in public transportation and how they are handled. I experienced an event that more or less led to my fascination of their coverage in the media but it wasn’t until last week when I was able to pinpoint why I was so alarmed at the anonymity of deaths in the Subway, and why it didn’t seem to phase others. 


I found out that late last Thursday night, a classmate of mine from middle and high school lost her sister in a fatal car accident. A friend sent me a text, and another as well. I spoke about it with my mother on the phone and read about it online at the local paper’s website. Her name was there, her age, her background and details on the funeral and where to contact the family. I looked it up on twitter and sure enough there were messages from friends and reactions. I look at the Gothamist today and see a cyclist had a fatal accident last night in front of the Met. A tweet of his the scene of the accident is visible (later taken down) and I can’t help but wonder who is this person, and do they know their life is being portrayed as an end rather than a journey?


It is as if in areas where social networks move at slower paces, technology helps connect people like myself who are physically distant. But in areas where populations are abundant and social networking is more often than not the main means of fast, instant communication, we use technology as means to disassociate ourselves from emotion, and connect to fact. 

Permanence and the Physical World

The permanence of the physical world, and the reality of the air-filled space are alarming to individuals who generally find themselves moving throughout digital media. The quick solution that is the “delete” key can negate the physical motions your fingers have made, while one cannot “take back” an in-person interaction. Various applications attempt to emulate the comfort of well-known physical motions, while maintaining the safety-net of a screen. Paper, created by FiftyThree, touts itself as the “simplest, most beautiful way to create on the iPad,” as “ideas begin on paper.” The irony, of course, is that the feeling one gets when clawing on the screen of a tablet, is nothing like the satisfaction that goes along with a pen and paper. Penultimate, a relatively successful application, and Paper are practically useless without a stylus. Having to purchase a writing implement in order to interact with a touch-based interface defeats the supposed ease of such devices, further distancing users from their digital “paper.” When using a pencil, the self-awareness of your movements force you to pay attention to not only the content but the initial styling, whereas a digital environment gives you the ability to alter that text later, allowing for more spontaneous, carefree text entry. When faced with the choice of working in an analog or digital space, one must consider the physical meaning of both choices, as the distinction between the two is blurred by the introduction of cross-platform, and augmented reality applications. 

In the News

Sometimes I catch myself checking the weather on the internet instead of sticking my head out of the window. It’s a strange idea that with our current day technologies one doesn’t need to leave his room in order to survive. Food can be ordered by phone, studies can be done online, and news can be watched on television. 

It’s actually the latter that paved the way for a dramatic renewal of the experience of presence, and not the internet, as many claim. And specifically by one genre within this medium: news television. 

On-location split screens, the movement of one continent to another in split seconds, instant financial information flowing at the bottom of the screen. Don’t forget the mandatory rotating globe in every intro. All of these are signs that make us –the viewers- feel omnipresent. The constant stress on watching sometimes live, the immediacy, creates a sense of hyperreality: the inability to distinguish reality from simulated reality. It was the postmodern French philosopher Jean Baudrillard who wrote the book “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”, in which he writes about the clinical, videogame-like representation of that war by news channels such as CNN.  

The difference between the experience of presence within (news) television and the internet is that in the latter the notion of hypermediacy is much more present: the user is aware of the fact that he is using a technology. So in the debate around immediate global exchange, don’t forget the originators. Back to you, readers.

- Jonas Kooyman

Getting Lost In The Digital World

The wandering girl that leaves her house with her phone in her hand, the streets are bare but she is surrounded by so many people. “Good Morning”, “What should I wear today”, “Nice weather today”, “I wish I had a coffee”, “Last night was amazing” scrolling through her Twitter and Facebook timeline/newsfeed the presence of the barren streets becomes non existent as she is surrounded by the many voices of her “friends”. Walking and walking head down so consumed in the digital word she almost stumbles in to the real world with real people not artificial perceptions. The interaction with people is near; she approaches public transit where the real world is in a slight daze from the congestion of the crowded media land. As she comes to her senses she is pushed onto a crowded train the perception of physical space now becomes relevant, but as soon as she allows the physical to become present she pulls out her phone and drifts back away to the digital world. Now amongst a physical crowd she feels surprisingly isolated because she’s comforted by a space she is familiar with, she’s back in her world. Fluctuating between digital and physical she is in control of her physical and mental space where the barren becomes crowded and the crowded becomes barren.

WHAT IS VIRTUAL PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE?

   

     Physical presences have always been a given condition of life for thousands of years. Communication required gathering of people and therefore group formation and also identity formation developed the way it did in the past. However, the means of communication has changed. Maybe it started with telephones then cell phones but the amount of technology advance was pleasant enough as it was convenient. Then, those technologies became a part of life. International calls were the only inconvenient factor due to the expensive rate.

     As Internet calling spread and developed, people were able to communicate cheaper and easier. Text messaging and Internet chatting also shaped the society in a very different ways. The virtual space gave chances to introverted personalities as well as extroverts, in the end, it became hard to define personalities online as they were considered made-up identities and many encounters were not a result from an instantaneous interactions. However, in the recent years, with development of video chatting everything changed. The romance of calling and hearing someone’s voice no longer existed with the video chatting. It is as a virtual physical contact with the person, which confuses the definition of physical, and the sensory experience.

     The technology is further advance now. Along with 3D tvs, Samsung’s smart tv is gives the ultimate virtual physical experience. You simply wave your hand to change channels and speak to tv to turn on or off the device. Built in camera makes it possible to Skype easily and see the person in 3D. You can’t smell or feel the person but other aspects of physical experience seems to be satisfied by this technology. It is unpredictable how the technology will advance from now and rather or not people will adapt to this 3D technology. Only time will give response to these questions and lead its way to further advances in technology and human interaction.

     READING & BOOKS

     

     The idea of print and book making changed dramatically in the past ten years. Especially in the last five years, people started to take parts in the advancing technologies. Reading started to associate with portability and connivance. The content of the book started to matter more than ever. It was not the design of a book or the pages that people were drawn to but the fact that many books can fit into devices such as i-pad, nook, and kindle. The competition among these brands also encouraged the fast changing digital market and advertised themselves by competing.

     It is now the book designers and editors are pressured to make changes to sell and advertise books more than ever. The physical experience of reading a book and viewing a full spread has to be emphasized. The Electric Information Age Book by 'Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels is the perfect example of this modern way of book making. Every page is designed rather than laid out. It is not just words but how those words fit into the page to make it more easily understood and interacted with the viewer’s mind. People now forget that reading is a personal experience especially with massive distribution of countless books. It seems that everything is accessible to everyone, however, in the details and eye-catching way of design, The Electric Information Age Book, the readers can find themselves alone with the book enjoying an intimate experience with the book.

Kiss My Glass

How beautiful it once was to explore the world; to see its illustrious scenery and lush landscapes, to explore its vast terrain and experience its endless world of potential.

How spectacular it once was to explore this world and run in to the mystery of the unknown head on, as if it was always there and never there at all.

How marvelous it once was to explore this mysterious place and find a fellow traveler along the way, filled with stories of excitement and passion, eager to explain the winding paths of their own dramatic journey.

I am not suggesting that camping and hiking and bumping in to new people along the way is a thing of the past. No. I am declaring that being in a physical place and encountering tangible people and things is becoming altogether a thing of the past. Frankly, the iPhone is King in the world of the blind, mute, and deaf man and woman of the twenty first century. Its camera is our eyes, its speaker our ears, and its functionality our voice. With the iPhone we have the power to do anything we wish at any time, and it has become a staple of modern times. This power has made our society drunk with a remorseful disrespect to our biological social obligations. It has turned some in to zombies, and others in to droids.

That being said…

The introduction of Google's next generation technology seems to be the first step towards a new type of communication, a type of communication that has never existed before - interpersonal communication.

It's one thing to look at a device and program it to do what you want and when you want, and its another for that device to actually know what are you going to do or in the process of doing. It is bringing us one step closer to a purely synthetic relationship with ourselves, one that may potentially diminish our capacity to interact with each other, or deepen our relationship with devices. Google, however, is carefully masking the fact that "Project Glass" is a device, and presenting it as the obvious next mode of communication and the primary object every contemporary human needs.

It can make calls, take photos, mark your calendar and remind you of appointments, send text messages and schedule meetings. It can do all this, and so, so, so much more...but it does it all with through a virtual reality based system that is streaming via a headmounted display. That's right - VR glasses to taint your world, alert you that stores are having sales, and that your friends are only two blocks away from you (it shares your location so you can always

know where your circles are) are finally here.

Project Glass may be one of the first steps to solve this twenty first dilemna of ours - this inability to comprehend the beauty of physical space and the dynamic poetry of physical presence and interaction with each other. It may also be one of the first ways that will eliminate all intimate and personal types of contact and spiral modern man in to a techno frenzy of pop-up advertisements and digital thought clouds that will refuse to leave us alone.

Sleep No More - an performance event that dramatized the experience of presence

Sleep No More, a mash-up of Shakespeare's Macbeth and 1930s film noir that combines elements of theater, dance, and haunted fun house for a unique evening that engages all of the senses.

This is an performance event that dramatized the experience of presence.

Upon check-in you must put on a white mask. The effect is transformative you become another helpless character in the story, a white-faced ghost hovering about the action but unable to alter the outcome of the tragic events playing out in front of you. You can wander pretty freely through five floors of dimly lit hallways and rooms, without speaking. As you wander, you'll cross paths with actors playing various characters. Follow them, and they'll lead you through the play. "Sleep" is unique because everyone's experience is different. This was a completely new experience for me and the concept of Sleep no more definitely brings back the experience in the physical presence. 

IRL

I woke up, it was 9:00. Still tired from the summer nights, I reached for my phone as I received a phone call from my Then-Girlfriend. We had recently moved apart following the school year, so we arranged to speak at times convenient for one another. However the glaring issue is that, there is no time that is truly "convenient" for one another. In an age where we continually add tasks to the status quo in order to occupy ourselves, we no longer have a "convenient" time in which we are able to pause and enjoy our lives. This hour I spoke with my girlfriend at the time, was an hour out of my sleep, a time I was more than willing to sacrifice, however as time wore on, it became harder to communicate with one another. This notion required the two of us to pause our lives for a brief period of our days, and once our conversation had ended, we were to resume "normal" daily activities. Our relationship had no longer remained in our physical spheres, but in an entirely different sphere altogether.

With advances in video technology, people are able to converse and view one another through this medium, however they still will not exist within the same realm of life as the user. Regardless of amount of hours spent speaking, viewing, and listening to one another, there is no amount of technology in which we are able to share our physical experiences. As long as this gap exists, the physical presence is an irreplaceable relationship.

Knowing Someone without Knowing Them

I think the strangest relationship that has come out of the growth of social media is that it has to ability to bring people together without even introducing them. It is easy to broadcast almost everything about your life; work, friends, hobbies, past trips, etc. With a click you can announce your background bio; where you were born, where you went to school, your family dynamics. You can make public whims, passing thoughts and minute details that ordinarily would be kept private. What makes this significant is that there are a whole audience for these updates; and that they actually read and pay attention to them. Facebook is probably the best known outlet for this kind of relationship; but take the uprising Tumblr. Tumblr sets up a relationship between people that may not be physical acquaintances and gives them the publicity for these types of broadcasts. With each picture or quote or gif that a user reblogs, there is the creation of a whole online identity. Anyone can be idolized for their taste in clothes, their taste in hipster pictures and photography. Small comments and responses to questions open up their perceived individuality. Viewer eat this up. On tumblr, people who have not even posted their real name can gain a following of thousands; thousands who read their word and see their reblogs and treat them as celebrities. There are several tumblr personalities that get hundreds of questions and inquiries a day; questions that are usually reserved for fans of famous personalities. There is a voyeuristic quality to this relationship that I can understand, and even sometimes appreciated, but in the end I feel uncomfortable for knowing so much about people I have never encountered in person.

Facebook is marketing your brand preferences - a new form of marketing concept.

Through social media Face book has become the new marketing tool. “The mass advertising is dead” said Mark Zuckerberg, Face book’s chief executive. The new marketing form of the future will be ad messages from friend to friend through online networks.  Face book is a social networking site where people find “friends”. Each member creates a homepage where you can keep in touch with people all over the world, post photographs and share updates about your activities. Face book started with a kind of mouth to mouth advertising. They began selling ads that display peoples profile photos next to commercial messages that are shown to their friends about items they had an opinion about or that they purchased. Now they use Face book as a way to share object that friends bought or read about on the internet through broadcasting it to all friends on Face book. The concept is that those communications start to carry ad messages from the companies that sell them. This is so called “social advertising”. Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend, our cultural environment.

Social media – learn it, live it, be careful with it

Social media is a tool that makes our everyday life’s easier but it also makes it less private and can be harmful. Easier, because through the social media we access more information than before the internet arrived. The social media affect our awareness, knowledge, attitude and behavior because of all the information out on the internet. The social media made it easier to share information, thoughts, promoting products, events. It is easy for an entrepreneur to promote their business online and get fast feedback from customers. We are using social media as a place to post our thoughts and promote our selves and our products and businesses. Blogging is a tool that helped many people find a way to speak to the public. The web has given people a voice through social media. But our life’s get less private. One should be careful what to post in the social media because it stays there forever. There's a screen in front of you so people feel somewhat anonymous but the truth is that the information you post on the internet is shared with the whole world. Everyone can see the post. They share it. Learn from it. Add to it.As long as you use the social media carefully it will only make your life easier and more productive.

Online vs. Physical Presence

As technology evolves, so does the meaning of presence. These days, it seems like just about anyone can become famous with a YouTube channel or a cool fashion blog.

Take Shane Dawson, for example. He makes YouTube videos—mostly comedy skits/music video parodies. With over 2.9 million subscribers and 690 million upload views, he is currently the highest paid YouTube star. So just how much does this 22-year-old make? Umm... only $315,000 per year. Let me repeat that, three hundred fifteen thousand dollars just off of YouTube videos! (What the fu*k are we doing in school, when we could be making bank off of YouTube?!) Clearly his online presence is worth something.

What about his physical presence? 

Existing, occurring, or being present in a place. He exists, online. He occurs, online. He’s present, online. I guarantee 99.9% of the people who comment Shane Dawson’s videos, have never even met the guy, nor will ever recognize him in person. So even though his online presence is worth $315,000, his physical presence, eh… maybe not so much.


Is one better than the other? I'm present online in this blog, but do you even know me in class? You tell me, would you rather have online presence, or physical presence?

- Nina

Hologram Tupac

Technology and media is so advanced now that it definitely blurs the line between tangible space and non-tangible space. One event that really strikes me is the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. It is a 3 day event that features many genres of music, including rock, indie, hip hop and electronic music. The event has several stages/tents set up throughout the grounds, each playing music continuously. It is expected that the biggest name in the game today is being featured such as Prince, Daft Punk, Madonna, Jay Z, The Chemical Brothers, Bjork, Kanye West. However, it is NOT expected that artist such as Tupac, Michael Jackson, Mozart and The Beatles are being featured. We can all agree that the death of a great artist brings forth a strange nostalgia, the death of anything great brings great sadness. When Michael Jackson passed away I was saddened by the fact that I will never be able to see this man perform live, how many of us wish we could bring back the ghost of a artist we admire. Yet this music festival was able to blur the line of real presence and non tangible presence using this new technology hologram that looks almost like a 3D person performing. In the clip of hologram Tupac performing, Snoop Dogg was interacting with the hologram figure and for a moment it looked as if it could be real, atleast closer than any 2D animation could be. It was a really eerie tribute but nonetheless sentimental and touching especially to die hard fans that could never see this man perform live.

Yes, advanced technology may be taking away from many physical spaces but it also creates many new "spaces" and brings forth many new possibilities that were not even imaginable before.

Video Clip of Hologram Tupac at Coachella 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6mL_Jr4Jps&feature=related

Digitization

In such a media-rich environment, like we live in today, almost everything can be transformed into a ‘digitized’ experience. From apartment viewings, to concerts, to college tours, most activities that are based in the medium of physical space are being moved to a screen in order to increase “convenience” of consumers. This his has been going on for a long time, and as a businessperson, it is opening up lots of doors in terms of new products and services that can be offered to the market. For example, 3D concerts that are being played in movie theatres are a new innovation that are widely spreading with artists such as Justin Bieber and Katy Pery launching their own 3D Concert Movies. It almost seems as if activities and events that focus on physical space are moving to the virtual world.

There are still physical spaces, however, that remain purely that – physical. Especially in New York City with its abundance of galleries, public spaces, parks it’s easy to be taken aback by a physical space, even in our digitized world. One place that always does this for me is the Metropolitan Museum of Art – the physical space in which the art is housed in, is to me, a piece of art itself. The architecture and the actual building is what I find most beautiful – more beautiful than the actual art itself. Places like these will never be able to be truly digitized – while works may be available online, the presence of the building never will be. 

The Screen

Most people around the world today are always staring at some type of screen constantly throughout the day. Whether it is an iPad, iPhone, Computer or TV, there is always something electric in front of our eyes. We cannot get away from the beautiful colors, but sooner or later it has to be enough. Books are great breaks for the eyes. Anything in print saves the eyes from working to hard to see something flashing in front of your face.

For many books are not as exciting as a moving 3-D image on a screen, but there are ways to create books that give the viewer something enticing to read. The Electric Information Age Book is not only something very interesting to read, but it also has a great design and keeps the reader guessing what will be on the next page because of the crazy book design. If books like this don't continue to surface to the top and give people reasons to purchase from Barnes and Noble anymore then the day of print will be lost.

The Art of the Book

The process of digitalizing artwork is occurring everywhere.  Not only are entire museum archives present online, but I can personally attest to obsessively documenting and backing up my own images to the extent that both two hard drives and two flash drives would have to crash, as well as the original artwork be destroyed in order for the work to disappear.  Now, in the case that this great misfortune was to happen, this process is certainly a positive advancement.  However, let’s say that only the original work was destroyed.  How much have I lost?

Throughout my reading of Jeffrey T Schnapp and Adam Michaels’s “The Electric Information Age”, I found myself dwelling on the physicality of the book as an artistic object.  Schnapp and Michaels provide an interesting perspective on the relationship between design and the written word, making the book seem an important and relevant artistic medium, rather than a simple home for the novel, or any standard literary publication.  As the term “typophotography” is discussed, coined by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to describe an image dominant integration of visual and text, emphasis is placed on graphic elements, as each turn of the page becomes an aesthetic experience.

Whether the assumption that printed word will become obsolete is a myth or not, one thing is certainly true: the book does not gain enough credit as a canvas.  Although a page may seem easily digitalized, is the possession of a bound book akin to the possession of a literal work of art?  What do we loose if every uniquely designed, or even simply uniquely written page occurs on the same screen at the press of a button?  Depending on your paranoia of digital dominance, responses will vary.  I do know that a few hours browsing the Met’s online catalogue certainly could never replace the trip uptown to spend the day among the unparalleled energy of tangible works of art.  

The Medium is the M(e)ssages: Information/Data Visualization in the Digital Age

At a time when media and advertising began gaining momentum, Quentin Fiore gained recognition as a pioneer of graphic design and information design in the 1960’s. By uniquely mixing text and image, Fiore as able to translate messages in radical yet completely enticing ways that were new to mass audiences in the 1960’s. His productions lived tangibly in time blind to the reach capabilities of the internet. Fast forward 50 years and we see a similar resurgence in the way that information is being exchanged with text and image, but this time digitally. 

We live in a world where seas of information are available to anyone within a click of a button. So how does information gain hierarchy or presence today, much like that of which Fiore produced?  

We can take a look at notable artists such as Nicholas Felton (work below) and see a new take on an old standard that was defined in the Mass Age for how information is presented and represented. In this digital information age in order for information to stand out and be recognized, original graphic renderings of imagery and and no typography take note and stand out in the sea. Artists like Feltron are constantly changing and innovating. How about a mobile app that visualizes your daily activities for a medium?

What We Lose

The evolution of the printed book is a long, historical narrative you've undoubtedly read about at some point in your life. But despite its rich history, printed matter is moving away from the masses it once served, to a niche market catering to the creative urban dweller. The Electronic Information Age Book is a beautiful example of what we lose when we choose to simply export files into various digital formats. Boasting interesting colors, experimental typography, and worthwhile content, the third book in Adam Michaels’ series “Inventory Books” forces readers to question their relationship with the written word. The size of the page, the width of the margins, the texture of the paper, are all decisions consciously made by a designer seeking to communicate a specific message. Unlike film, which “has been formatted to fit your screen,” much of a what a book has to offer is in the tactility and actual existence of the object. What is a publication worth to you when you’ve simple downloaded a file onto a device? The ten signature composition of Michaels’ creation is full of innovative design, reminding readers that speed is not always the answer to an inquiry of accessibility.

Experiencing places through the sense of smell

                                           Experiencing places through the sense of smell

 This is a book that I recently read and really enjoyed. It’s autors Anna Barbara and Anthony Perliss talk about the idea of the sense of smell being the most powerful of all senses. “ Of the five senses, the sense of smell is the one that best renders the idea of immortality” Salvador Dali.  I believe that when he said this he was giving credit to the fact that from all senses smell is the one that can transport us to a different moment or time thru our memory.  I am sure that anyone has experience that when they smell a familiar odor their mind automatically brings them to a specific person or place visited. The reason is that this sense develops the capacity of associating experience abroad with an odor and linking odors to the history of cities over centuries. For example, by just smelling a spice that we smelled on a trip to India we travel back and remember all the vacation.

             Have you ever seen those cleaning products advertising where they place someone with their eyes covered in a very dirty place but smelling clean and fresh and ask them to describe where they think they are? Of course they will answer they are in a lavender field but this is not just for benefiting the publicity, it is actually their real experience. This is because olfaction makes the false seem true being more powerful that sight .

Misconceptions of the Information age

“Google it”. The phrase is increasingly becoming the popular answer to all my questions. As hoards of us adopt a plethora of social networking sites, read books on our iPads and try to find our bearings in cyberspace, I cannot deny the advent of the digital age.

But I do question the complete dominance of the ‘information age’. For those of you who may believe that we will be one day taken over by the digital world, let me be a tangible obstacle for a moment. Take a step back. We need to clear up some rapidly spreading misconceptions.

In no particular order, here are 5 proverbs of non-wisdom:

Print is dead

Have you turned a deaf ear to desperate pleas to save trees?! Jokes apart, facts state that more books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. In 2011, more than one million new titles were published worldwide. China and India, amongst other developing countries are experiencing a book in the book business. Print is increasing, not decreasing, and definitely not dying. Print has a charm of its own – there’s nothing like the rustic smell of a new book! And nothing more personal than a handwritten letter as compared to a wall post you ‘like’.

Libraries are obsolete

On the contrary. Librarians all around the country have reported that they have never had so many patrons. While libraries continue to supply books, videos and other materials, they have ventured into new functions – access to information for small businesses, extra help on homework and employment information for job seekers. They remain a haven for intellect.

We have entered the information age

So you mean to say information did not exist in other ages?

Everything is online

Tell that to a librarian or anyone who has done research in archives, and they’ll scoff at you. I challenge you to look for archival material that has not yet been digitalized. Google estimates that around 13 million books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitalized a mere 12% of them. How will it close the gap, while production continues to expand at a rate of a million new works per year? Not only does the Internet lack a lot of information, but most of the material that once did appear has probably been lost over time.

The future is digital

While I can’t completely deny the statement, it can be misleading. We will definitely experience an overwhelming digital environment in the next few decades; but the prevalence of electronic communication and information does not mean that printed material will no longer be important. The advent of a new form of communication does not kill its predecessor. The radio didn’t kill the newspaper; nor did the television kill the radio. And the Internet didn’t make TV extinct. Instead, at each step, the environment became richer and more resourceful. And we should celebrate this excitingly complex transition!

-Anvita Dasani