Progress II

We have been thinking a lot today, and we think that narrowing it down content-wise even further might be a good idea. One idea that we have been discussing, is that we have a website with half a question, and the rest of the question will be formulated and asked every week. So for instance, for now we have been going with the core question “What did you learn?”, and the idea is that we finish the question and ask people to respond to that. A quick example could be “What did you learn about digital type?”, and then the answers would go on to the website and then saved and removed once the time is up, so we could build up a database of various tips/tricks/knowledge and experience from all the members.

Progress

We figured that some sort of organization was the way to go, to help fellow alumni the moment they left college. We thought about how we could pass on and exchange knowledge and experience, so we started thinking about how we obtain these things through CSM. We agreed on that crits and interaction with our fellow students is what makes CSM such a learning environment, and began playing around with various ways to explore this online. Some obvious ideas included tutorials, seminars, a monthly/quarterly magazine. But then we started thinking a little more freely, and came up with online video-meetings, mentoring as well as online collaborative mind maps.

The mind map seemed like an interesting idea to explore, as we couldn’t find any existing ones online. We thought that if one could create a personal mind map on a website by setting a topic and writing down one idea in the middle, it could then be saved to a website and other people could pick it up and respond by video, text, images, drawing and sound. We also thought about tracking, as all of these ideas could be potential memes. Even though the core idea itself is an altruistic meme; to pass on knowledge and experience to others. But we liked the idea of being able to track these ideas, in terms of authorship, duration, how long an idea can stay alive etc, all at the same time. That led us a little away from the mind map idea (at least in terms of looks), as we started to look at all these ideas as little particles, or stars if you like. We imagined an online interface where all these particles would float around in the same space, each one would be someone’s core idea. If someone had a new idea, they could simply click an icon; set a topic, write some lines/post an image/video, include some keywords, and just deploy it. New ideas would vibrate or pulse, so users would see if there was any activity. If a user clicks a floating idea, it will stop, and expand to show something similar to that of a forum post, docked to the particle. This will contain the core idea, and the responses. The users will have the option to respond by text, image, video, sound or drawing. Each post has a potential lifespan of one week; whenever a user responds, the time is renewed. This will keep pressure on authors to encourage response on their idea, as well as keeping the concept of a crit alive – where you have a certain amount of time to present your idea to the others.

As for the social aspect of it, we know that literally no-one wants another social networking account, so this will be more of a tool with some social networking attached to it. We thought that people could use Facebook Connect to log on, which will allow us to display their names, and location, and include these in a search function too.

We will also have a quarterly publication for sale (free to members). It could present the finished result of selected ideas, or articles on selected topics that have been popular on the site. Further along the road we will host annual exhibitions and/or talks.

Response to Sadhna:
The project focus lies in sharing and exchanging knowledge and experience, thus creating progress and breathing new life into our network. In terms of what concept we are exercising with this, it is first and foremost altruism; “Helping a friend in need will result in that friend appreciating you more and wanting to spend more time with you. By doing so, he will imitate you more than his less helpful friend, so your helpful meme will spread to him. He will become more helpful to his friends, and so the meme will gradually spread.” According to the article Share To Make Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky, “Creative professionals should take every opportunity to communicate new ideas broadly, seek feedback, and develop a sense of accountability.” From a more general memetic view, especially when it comes to online memes: this tool lets us track the origin and the lifespan of an idea, and potentially how long it takes before it “dies”. In terms of testing out research, it will be an ongoing process from when the whole thing is live. As none of us are programmers, we are looking to create a proposal explaining all the features and aspects of the website. We are, however, checking the possibilities of creating a small light-weight version of this, maybe letting people deploy an idea into a “pool” and respond to other peoples ideas by text only. We will also design the publication, and include documentation of the process there. So we are looking to create: a proposal for the site, a light-weight version, and a publication.

*****TLDR*****

Idea:
A platform for exchanging knowledge, ideas and experience, in the form of an interactive website. An intuitive forum that also serves as a meme-tracker. It will let the user browse ideas that are floating around in the same space, interact with them in terms of response as well as to deploy new ideas and getting feedback on them. Potentially this could draw links between professionals and students – a social network for ideas.

Design:
We imagine this as a cluster of particles or stars, floating around in the same space. Each particle/star is someone’s initial idea and when clicked, it will expand to show the whole post, with the other users individual responses. Every new post can be tagged with keywords. Peoples responses automatically contain the same keywords, as well as potential new ones.

Possible Features:

• Discussing ideas
• Hint and tips on technical aspects of design (software, type tips etc)
• Hint and tips on other aspects of design (how much to charge etc)
• Logging on through Facebook
• Posting via e-mail
• Responding with text, video, sound, images and drawing
• Tracking ideas by keywords
• Tracking activity by adding orbiting objects around the core idea/particle
• Tracking duration/lifetime. Ideas fade as there isn’t any activity, so after awhile they will be completely gone and moved to an archive (good ideas never die).
• Viewing “dead” ideas, and the possibility to revive them and sending them back into the system
• Tracking newly added
• Tracking where people are
• Lunch webcam meetings?
• Priority system
• Ideas attract each other according to keywords, as well as clicking on them.

Development of Ideas

After proposing the ida of the gentlemens club to Amanda, she advised use to look at weird traditional English traditions, such as the cheese rolling in cheshire, also typically british foods. We were told to find a name and write the rules/philosophy to begin with which then can be used to form the rest of the brand of the club. We were told to look at tradition and use our imaginations to bring it to modern day in a quirky fun way.

So we thought about possible rules in the evening and further thought what could be the brand of the club.

Our tutorial with Sadhna brought up the morals of a club like this. Main points were:

Like the freemasons clubs, the idea of the club was romantizing something that wasn’t sound.

The university is a multi cultural place, why just base it on the british.

“Shaky”

Our final feeling was that we should drop the “upper class” english idea.

After a short lunch we broadened our idea to present to Patrick, we said we are going to form a social club, where by the people for St Martins can join and remain in  contact, A club where by events can be held annually to bring these people back together and to remain part of this network.

He said that to follow the tradition of clubs isn’t necessary. and we should look at other practical things to make it work. such as Backing people up with clients etc, hints and tips, common problems in the field, sharing Knowledge and experience, he mentioned other “design clubs” such as Oslo based Grafill and QBN.

We then worked on this idea of forming a club whereby someone can get hints and tips about working on a project and other ideas including : Sharing peoples work, Cross-collabortion network, Seminars could be videoed and shared, coffee break video chats, We then thought about what the main aspects of CSM are.

Teamwork

I’ve teamed up with Martin and Alex (as of the 29th of April). We’ve been talking throughout the entire project, and found that we had a lot in common. The posts I’ll be posting here from now on will mainly be from out group blog www.critters.tumblr.com .

Hello

We (Alex, Anders & Martin) have decided to team up for our Unit 14. Alex has been researching semiotics of type, hidden narratives & changing behavior through design, Anders has been looking into memes, flocking, language & slang, while Martin has been researching the values of something being made in Great Britain with focus on bespoke tailoring on Saville Row.

We found that our common ground was how to keep the idea of something alive through associations (and passing on memes for my sake). This mind map explains our train of thought on how we came up with our first idea, the gentlemen’s club:

So what is this?

What:
Keeping the idea of something alive through our own approach. Our focus is on British high culture.

How:
Setting up a Gentlemen’s Club, and host events every month.

Why:
Key words are: integration, acceptance, cultural heritage, experiential events and semiotics. All of these words tie in with our separate research.

This made an incredible amount of sense to us in the beginning, especially from a memetic point of view: The idea of creating a community that continued beyond our graduation would be a great way of passing on and keeping alive our “hey-days” at CSM. The idea with the club seemed like a natural way of creating a common platform for us to interact. It also included established memes like language, belonging, acceptance and cultural heritage. The british Culture was something we added to not only give it a  point of view). The british upper-class culture was a way for us to interpret a culture we’ve never been exposed to, as well as doing something fun and creative. It also tied in with the whole “club” aspect of it, as the history of these clubs go long back in time. We came up with this manifesto:

Manifesto

As the graduates disperse with their endeavors, the community which once was breaks down. The Club is a private club set by and for alumni students from the Graphic Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, UK. The purpose of The Club is to maintain networks within the environment they were formed, after graduation. Like the old gentlemen’s clubs, it serves as a social support network for alumni’s of Central Saint Martins Graphic Design 2010. Through real events based around traditional British culture, The Club will act as a defined social network as well as passing on a culture people may not have experienced whilst living here.

This was our original timetable and plan:

New Direction

I have been thinking a lot today about how I could make a slang tracker, based on feeds from Twitter and other social media. This would let me track expressions as memes, so I could see where and when they originated, and how they spread – and maybe visualize it somehow. Obviously within the timeframe, this is not happening. That however, lead me onto the idea of a website where people could add their own slang, and add their own interpretations to other peoples slang. I thought that would be a good idea to both keep track of current memes, as well as keeping them alive. I like the idea of associations to a certain word, or image, and how people perceive differently. This again let me onto the idea of letting people tag something freely, after being exposed to say an image or a word. It would be sort of a pictionary, where I would set the context. Some ideas so far are:

• Flags/Nationality
• Images/Photos from Flickr
• People (leaders perhaps, or icons)
• Institutions (universities for instance)
• Symbols (religious etc)
• Slang

A tag cloud, or something similar will be created for each image, where the size of each tag will be determined by it’s frequency. And maybe something could be visualized further based on this information – if I went with flags, the flags could be ‘redesigned’ based on the tags to create a more accurate representation of the nation.

Social Collider

I stumbled across this website today via a classmate:

http://socialcollider.net/

The Social Collider reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

The Social Collider acts as a metaphorical instrument which can be used to make visible how memes get created and how they propagate. Ideally, it might catch the Zeitgeist at work.

I am currently looking at the term ‘grind’ or ‘grinding’, and how it has become a part of the rap lingo today. Maybe I could build some sort of memetracker (there are quite a few already, but with the right content and within the right context it could be interesting).

Mark Twain x Clipse

The term to ‘grind’ (as a metaphor for working) was first introduced in 1899 by Mark Twain, in his short story ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg’, and possibly made famous by Clipse in their debut single ‘Grindin” in 2002. I am now looking into how this has gotten into the hip-hop lingo by tracing it back in time.

Venn Diagrams

Thought It’d be a good idea to start with a few simple Venn diagrams to explore where some of these expressions come from.

Stripped Down Quotes

Some of my favorite quotes in a very simple form; plain Helvetica on a black background.

Ghetto Flip Cards

An extremely simple experiment (not even an experiment, more of a starting point), looking at some familiar – and unfamiliar words often used in a hip-hop context. Some words, like “chill out”, “what’s up”, “peace out” etc. have become commonplace within everyday conversation, and even used in TV-shows, films, radio and commercials.

Language: The Ultimate Meme

I was encouraged to look into systems in today’s tutorial;

What are the memes we use?
Shifting the balance of a system
Systems of belief

The sum of all memes is culture, and language is probably the ultimate meme, or ‘memeplex’.  A language is a system of signs (indices, icons, symbols) for encoding and decoding information. Language is also an ever-evolving process, with new words being added, slang, references from popular culture becoming expressions, new ways of pronunciation etc. According to Emmett G. Price, PhD, hip-hop culture has altered the English language more rapidly than any other influence. I thought I’d start off with a few experiments exploring this statement.

Rough Visuals

Some rough visuals I chucked together last night. They each contain a statement from James Lovelock’s Gaia: Medicine For An Ailing Planet, combined with Les Line’s photography from his book This Good Earth, which is celebrating the beauty of our planet.

Hysteria II

I am trying to simplify my train of thought (and narrow it down), but at the moment it’s something like this:

Memes > Hysteria > Natural disasters > Something beyond our control / unseen forces

combined with:

Memes > Memeplexes > Science > Theories > Lovelock’s Gaia Theory > Provides an explanation as well as being ‘expert opinion’ (not to mention the name Gaia which derives from the Greek earth Goddess, and therefore containing memes about religion, superstition and belief)

Now, the Gaia Theory itself is incredibly vast and complex so I thought I could use the gist of it i.e the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth act as a single mechanism. I thought I could assume that Lovelock is right, and by doing so, branding the Gaia theory as the explanation to all this climate chaos using fear spells and therefore making it into a hysteria.

Climate Chaos

In Gee Thompson’s book Mesmerization, he writes in his introduction “Western lifestyle is the most pervasive influence in our modern world. Hundreds, if not thousands, of contagious ideas spread by word of mouth or through the media – ‘spells’ or ‘memes’ – make up contemporary culture and affect just about every aspect of our daily life. The most successful of such constructs are the creation of the media – the image-makers, advertising executives, newspaper editors, creatives, designers, photographers and film producers who make up the ranks of the creative elite. Their dreams of affluence, comfort and well-being are being emulated the world over. More than we know, they determine what we believe, how we behave and think, and control our decisions as to what gets made, what gets seen, what gets heard.”

In the chapter Climate Chaos, Thompson dissects the climate chaos ‘spell’. The ‘spell’ is obedient to:

• Urgent wake up calls
• The heat is on; rising temperatures world-wide
• Greenhouse effect
• Total weather chaos
• Melting ice sheet
• The tipping point (past the point of no return)
• We only have a decade to save the planet

It also rejects:

• America (lack of leadership, failure on Kyoto)
• Big oil
• Gas Guzzling SUV’s
• Global corporations and international trade
• International flights
• Mass consumption
• Carbon trading as an easy ‘get out of guilt’ card
• Eating meat

“Our sense of well-being is often overshadowed by guilt; that enjoyment of life and affluence is in some way sinful and that retribution has long been overdue. Some argue that climate chaos provides that highly comforting sense of doom. A necessary corrective to an age of profligacy and extravagance. Climate hysteria has become big business, feeding Hollywood movies, documentaries, books, magazine and newspaper headlines. It has also created streams of funding for scientists, lobbyists and environmental advisers, all banking their future on climate chaos. What facts and figures that have been gleaned from what remains a bafflingly complex science, have been used to support arguments both for and against action. Uncertainty encourages prevarication. Doubt makes it ok to do nothing. All the more reason not only to get the facts straight but to make it understandable to the public.”

Our personal fears include:

• Powerlessness – nothing I can do will help
• Voice of reason smothered by the modern world
• Future of our children

World fears:

• Melting ice caps
• Hurricanes, heat waves and flooding
• Gulf stream shutting down
• Melting of Greenland’s ice sheet causing rising sea levels
• Mass extinctions; polar bears, rare frogs
• Positive feedback (Albedo effect, ocean and cloud reflectivity) contributing to faster warming
• Worldwide famines, civil unrest, economic meltdown, total chaos (Ironically, those who have done nothing to cause global warming – the poor of the Third World and Africa stand to lose the most from climate change through sudden drought, violent and extreme weather)

This spell seduces with the promise that people can change the world, by driving hybrid cars, recycling, and developing green, sustainable alternative energy for all. “Those hoping for a single, simple, easy to sell solution will be disappointed. It will be painful. But it needn’t be all negative. To back off from oil (an ideal in its own right) would be both a seismic shock and a catalyst for radical innovation. Setting vigorous restrictions on emissions will drive technological progress towards creating a more efficient lifestyle. A spur for the world’s innovators, thinkers, designers and visionaries to build new economies and businesses that are compatible with a low-energy future. Growth, but not as we see it.”

Iconography:

• Alarmingly coloured NASA images of the disappearing ice caps
• Street protests (Kyoto, Seattle)
• Pop stars rocking for trees
• Film stars in hybrid cars
• Renewable energy; wind, solar
• Back to nature; sandals, bicycles
• Melting glaciers and marooned polar bears
• Receding snows of Kilimanjaro
• Heat waves in Europe
• Drought in Ethiopia
• Floods in Bangladesh
• Dirty power stations in China

Hysteria

I feel that religion is too broad for me, and I wouldn’t want to go for one specific religion. I looked back on what I wrote last Friday, and looked into the term ‘hysteria’ a little more – specifically mass hysteria. It is a term to describe mass public near-panic reactions. It is commonly applied to the waves of popular medical problems that “everyone gets” in response to news articles. A similar usage refers to any sort of “public wave” phenomenon, and has been used to describe the periodic widespread reappearance and public interest in UFO reports, crop circles, and similar examples. Also, when information, real or fake, becomes misinterpreted but believed, e.g. penis panic. Hysteria was often associated with events like the Salem Witch Trials, or slave revolt conspiracies, where it is better understood through the related sociological term of moral panic. Mass hysteria can also be used to describe events such as i.e cults committing suicide, epidemic outbreaks, natural disasters. According to http://www.emergency-management.net , the Nazi movement (1933-1945) is also classified as mass hysteria. After emailing with my tutor, I was encouraged to get into detail and observe patterns within recent events – what the ingredients /components are. The first event that came to my mind was the recent volcanic eruption on Iceland, although it didn’t really turn into mass hysteria. The airspace in large parts of Europe was closed for about a week, people were stranded, airlines and hotels and the like lost a lot of money and there were speculations wether the dust pericles in the air were hazardous. I had a look at the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, as well as the recent earthquakes in Haiti and China, and came up with this little diagram for showing the timeline of an event possibly leading to mass hysteria.

Summary & Brief

I have had my doubts lately. Not so much in what I’m doing, but in the concept of memes. I do believe they exist, but I think that to bluntly call all of these behaviors, ideas, thoughts, creations, phenomena etc. simply memes is an understatement. I do agree with Dawkins and Blackmore on many points, but I think theres an awful lot of social psychology and sociology involved. However, there are three phenomena that have caught my eye:

• Online memes
• Hysteria
• Religion

Internet memes are truly funny – but that’s all they are. They spread quickly due to the vastness of the world wide web, and of course some survive and some don’t. This is merely a matter of using the right humor and the right language, I don’t think it has any deeper psychological aspect to it. They lack an appealing visual form, but I don’t really see a purpose, in the grand scheme of things, in designing the new archaic rap poster-template. Although there are lots and lots on information out there such as memegenerators, youtube, forums and such, I can’t really see the importance in them apart from being something funny you browse whenever you’re bored.

I am quite intrigued by hysteria (especially in the wake of the Icelandic volcano eruption that froze Europe’s air traffic), and how rumors and news are spread like viruses around the world within minutes. The amount of reasons for not flying I’ve seen in the media the last weeks are astonishing, as well as all the speculations around a much anticipated eruption from the neighboring volcano Katla. All of this ties well in with theories such as the Mayan 2012 prophecy, as well as James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis (where the Earth is seen as a single organism and regulating itself in regards to population, pollution etc.). These are a few types of hysteria (and some harmful memes) that I feel needs to be taken into consideration:

• Natural disasters
• Breaking news
• Famine
• Scandals
• Disease
• False medical doctrines (and cures)
• I know it doesn’t fit quite in but it annoys the hell out of me: SPAM. I actually have a collection of spam I’ve received on my local e-mail client the last year. Almost every single one.

Religion is a powerful memeplex, having an extremely high rate in spreading both horizontally and vertically. Now, back to my original post on Religion as Memeplexes, I can see that there are certain factors that seems to play a role regardless of the particular faith.

• A charismatic leader
• An all-seeing and omni-present God, who will punish followers for doing wrong
• Indoctrination of fear, and the reducing of it by forgiving sin and telling you to go to church
• Providing myths and answers to questions like what is the meaning of life? Who am I? Why are we here?
• True Faith is the Truth; rejecting faith is turning away from the Truth – converting others is giving the gift of True Faith.
• Evokes deep emotions and religious ecstasy
• Provides (often altruistic) rules for living
• Can turn evil into good. For instance the justification of the oppression of women in Islam, where they are turned into objects of disgust to keep them covered and inside.
• Includes certain clothes and trappings so one can be good to the ones who act and look like oneself. If someone acts and looks like you, it is likely that you both have cultural ancestors in common. If you now help him you make it more likely that he will be successful, hence he will pass on his memes.
• Prevents its own ideas and theories from being scientifically tested

These ideas, stories and behaviors have been copied over and over, and these mutually supportive gangs use all the right tricks to keep them stored in books, art, buildings etc. I personally think most religions boils down to something as simple as a system for security, comfort and belonging. It is also an extremely powerful tool of social control. I’d like to explore these statements, and see if either something can be designed and a message can be conveyed through the visual language and cornerstones of religion, or if I can strip one (or a combination of) religion(s) of its visual language, and rebuild it. I also like the idea of answering these arch-typical religious questions somehow (could I create a body of work based on the meaning of life?). Timetable and schedule will soon follow.

Boxxy

Iceland

There’s been some action here, don’t know who it is though.

Ok I Couldn’t Resist

So I was on my way to Oslo for the weekend. After being trapped at Gatwick for good 7 hours today due to an ash-cloud from an erupting Icelandic volcano, we got told that all flights were being cancelled till at least Saturday, so I went home. I felt the need to blame someone. I suppose who is kind of obvious here. I’m going to keep making these, hopefully someone will pick it up and start doing it too, and I’ll try and track them. Enjoy.

Internet Memes III

Joseph Ducreux aka Archaic Rap is a meme that’s been flourishing across the web for the last months. This follows the same Haiku Maco, depicting a self-portrait of eighteenth century French artist Joseph Ducreux, featuring “archaic reinterpretation” of popular rap lyrics.

Origin; “Fuck bitches, get money” from Notorious BIG’s 1995 single “Get Money”.

“Hi hater, bye hater”.

“Aint nutin but a G-thang”.

“Throw your hands in the air, if youse a true player”.