Research outfit eMarketer is bullish on Snapchat. Citing new features introduced since the messaging application’s ill-fated redesign in early 2018 and a revamped Android experience, eMarketer revised its forecasts for user growth upward. According to eMarketer, Snapchat will have 293.01 million users worldwide at the end of 2019, up from the forecast of 281.27 million…
In the run-up to Christmas, five-year-old Scarlett lovingly makes a decoration for her mum in her school art class. Made from toilet roll, pipe cleaners, glue and glitter, her fairy is simply… monstrous. And all ready to take pride of place on her mum’s perfectly-decorated tree.
The initial lineups of original shows on the two streaming services are hit-and-miss. But here are five worth checking out.
Unless you live on a small-ish island, chances are you’re just like me: you suffer from sea blindness, this disregard (or maybe we’re talking about sheer ignorance) of the crucial role that the oceans play in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, in regulating global climate, generating oxygen or providing livelihoods for communities.
But if we don’t understand how important this vast ecosystem is for our survival on Earth, we’ll end up leaving it into the hands of private companies to colonize and pollute its surfaces and depths.
Armin Linke, Ramu NiCo Management MCC Limited, Basamuk Refinery, Madang, Papua New Guinea, 2017
Armin Linke, Prospecting Oceans. Exhibition view at Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna. Photo: Foto/Industria
Commercial deep sea mining is a case in point. Hailed as the answer to depleting mineral resources, deep sea mining -we are told- could ensure unabated economic growth, supplying silver, gold, copper, manganese, cobalt, nickel, zinc and rare earth minerals for the tech industry and even assisting the transition to a renewable energy economy. It would be profitable, ensure our techno-dependent future but the impacts on fragile (and understudied) ecosystems are potentially disastrous. It could even have knock-on effects on the wider ocean environment and threaten the global fight against climate breakdown by disrupting carbon stores in seafloor sediments, reducing the ocean’s ability to store it.
The colonisation of the seabed would be an underwater mirror to what the shipping industry has been quietly doing for years on the surface of the oceans.
Armin Linke, Sea level rise at Kulili Plantation Village, Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea, 2017
Prospecting Ocean, a body of work by the filmmaker and photographer Armin Linke currently participating to the Foto/Industria festival in Bologna, explores the challenges oceans are facing today from the perspective of legislation, science, the mining industry and local populations whose livelihood is threatened by extractive practices. Drawing upon three years of expeditions to the Pacific Ocean, interviews with experts, archive material and rare footage of the deep-sea, the exhibition scrutinizes seabed mining and other forms of extraction and the effects they might have on marine life and communities. His research makes it clear that ecological protection of our oceans is incompatible with their economic exploitation (which is not at the moment as highly lucrative and straightforward as it was hoped.) If anyone had any doubt about it.
Part of Linke’s research zooms in on Papua New Guinea where licences have been granted to excavate seabed for minerals, threatening ecosystems, lifestyles, health as well as economic and political self-determination.
Linke quickly made the connections between the theme of resource exploitation and the new visualisation technologies developed in the 1970s. “I became intrigued by visualisation techniques developed in the 1970s such as sonar, which allowed for the mapping of the ocean floors, the artist explained in an interview. “This type of sound measurement was then translated by cartographers and bathymetrists who drew underwater topography. Subsequently, a legal structure was established. Now, nations can extend their economic territory by making a request to the United Nations. Such geopolitical requests for the colonisation of the seabed are based on images that have legal validity. It is fascinating to see how visual media have historical consequences of this type.”
As such Linke’s Prospecting Ocean fits perfectly into the general theme of the Foto/Industria biennial: The Technosphere, the relentless technological saturation of our planet.
Armin Linke, MARUM, International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), seabed core deposit, Bremen, Germany, 2017
I could have spent hours inside the Bologna University Library scrutinising the archive material, photos, videos and other sources of information. The images are not all aesthetically stunning but the little known realities they depict are fascinating: videos filmed at United Nations assemblies, in international law conferences, at marine research centres and at sites endangered by sea-level rise and now also by seabed mining.
Please find some of them below. Some of them are commented. Most are not.
Armin Linke, Twenty-Second Session of the International Seabed Authority Assembly ISA, Kingston, Jamaica, 2016
The International Seabed Authority organises and regulates all mineral-related activities in the international seabed (outside of national waters.) According to Greenpeace, far from protecting our oceans, the UN body are selling it off to industries which only objective is to plunder ocean floors for profit. The picture they depicts is bleak. The non-governmental environmental organization accuses the ISA of consistently siding with the deep sea mining companies, of lack of transparency, of ignoring environmental concerns, of being composed mostly by members who have little biological or ecological expertise, etc.
Armin Linke, International Seabed Authority ISA, manganese nodule, Kingston, Jamaica, 2016
Armin Linke, Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU, technical test for remotely operated underwater vehicles, Trondheim, Norway, 2016 in collaboration with Giulia Bruno
Remote-controlled underwater vehicles (ROVs) document life on the seabed as well as the impact of our exploitation of the Earth’s resources. The ROVs can reach a depth of up to 5,000 meters where water pressure it too strong for the human body to handle. The contrast between the mysterious, quiet seabed with the machinery used to extract specimen for research is unsettling. Especially when we think that soon heavy machines for excavation might also be roaming and ruining these ecosystems.
Armin Linke, Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU, Department of Marine Technology Trondheim Norway, 2016
Armin Linke, The University of Texas at Austin. Ocean currents modelling room ath teh Institute for Computational ENgineering and Sciences (ICES) Computational Research in Ice and Oceans Group (CRIOS), Austin, Texas, USA, 2018
Armin Linke, Prospecting Oceans. Exhibition view at Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna. Photo: Foto/Industria
Armin Linke, Prospecting Oceans. Exhibition view at Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna. Photo: Foto/Industria
Armin Linke, Prospecting Oceans. Exhibition view at Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna. Photo: Foto/Industria
Armin Linke, Prospecting Oceans. Exhibition view at Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna. Photo: Foto/Industria
Armin Linke, Prospecting Oceans. Exhibition view at Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna. Photo: Foto/Industria
Armin Linke, Prospecting Oceans. Exhibition view at Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna. Photo: Foto/Industria
Foto/Industria, the IVth Biennial of Photography on Industry and Work remains open until 24 November 2019 in 10 different palazzi and other interesting venues across Bologna, as well as at the MAST (Arts Manufacturing, Experimentation and Technology) Foundation, the engine behind this cultural project.
Previously: H+. We are all transhumanists now.
Valerie Plame is running for Congress: “America is going backwards on national security, health care, and women’s rights. We need to turn our country around.”
Amazon has launched a brand new innovation – The Echo Auto. The small device can easily be plugged into your car or connected via bluetooth, so you can take Alexa’s voice assistant along for the ride. It connects to your phone’s Alexa app to provide every voice-activated service that your homebound Echo does, including news, sports, recipes, shopping lists, and music streaming.
This is a student campaign for Self Control App that encourages and reminds people that sometimes social media can lure us in, especially when there is other work to be done.
The world is a beautiful place. No wonder everyone loves travelling. SpiceJet has, over the years, expanded their wings and fuelled people’s urge to travel. And this communication highlights the beauty of the places SpiceJet flies to.
Panasonic’s Razor will allow men to express themselves through their body hair. The men in the campaign took it a step further to express their inner self, even if it defies society’s norms.
There’s a secret hidden in almost every website and every digital image you’ve ever seen. That secret is Lena, a Playboy centrefold. She is “a face more studied than the Mona Lisa’s” and has been called Tech’s Original Sin.
But how did a centrefold from the 70’s become the most used test image in the world? And what impact has it had on women studying or entering tech industries?
Lena’s story began in 1972, when the Swedish model posed as the Miss November centrefold. The next year, her centrefold was chosen by some men at the University of Southern California (USC) as an ideal test image for the algorithms they were working on to turn physical photos into digital bits. This research laid the groundwork for what would later become the jpeg, an image standard that revolutionised our digital world.
Incredibly, 46 years on, Lena is still the most infamous test image in the world. She is symbolic of how women were left out, and pushed out, of the industry.
Losing Lena is a compelling documentary that questions the very tenets of the tech industry and leaves us pondering: Why wasn’t Lena retired years ago? It explores a thread that binds together so many similar challenges and biases women in tech have experienced around the world.
In a first for the Australian film industry and Facebook Watch, Losing Lena will be available to view at a series of events hosted by Code Like a Girl or exclusively on the Facebook Watch platform from November 26 onwards.
New World has launched their Christmas campaign with the theme of “Enjoy Christmas ‘round at ours” created by the Clemenger Group. A 45 second story featuring a happy-go-lucky dad, Jack, whose generosity and openness sees him off to New World to get what he needs to cater for all the people he’s invited ‘round. Inspired by the insight that Christmas can be challenging for those who are alone, we see generous Jack welcome an unexpected guest to his festive gathering.
Individual moments from Jack’s Christmas story will be cut up and used to promote all of New World’s Christmas retail activities in the build-up to Christmas Day. For instance, we see Jack collecting a set of glasses at check-out highlighting New World’s two-month long Spiegelau Glassware collection promotion. Images from the film will also feature in an OOH extension of the campaign.
To promote their Christmas Pizza, which is a full turkey dinner on top of a pizza, Boston Pizza didn’t create an ad. They created a Christmas carol, called Chorus of the Pizza, and a carolling pizza box to deliver it in.
A host of famous faces have discovered something life changing in Tubi’s brand new ad campaign. In the midst of the streaming wars, six celebrities find the cure for subscription fatigue during, what at first appears to be, a typical therapy session. They’ve all admitted that they’ve met “someone” new to help alleviate them of their streaming problems: the world’s largest free streaming service, Tubi.
One tiny donation can feel like a drop in the ocean. But if we come together, that donation can grow to something that can change the world. One donation can be the start of a chain reaction.
Kirkens Bymisjon (The Church City Mission) is an inclusive, nonprofit organization, which works in towns and cities across Norway, among people who face challenges in life for various reasons. This years Christmas campaign is set to make you think about how you celebrate Christmas, and that all though in a lot of homes, the celebration inhabits the same general traditions, some people stand on the outside of society, not being able to take part of these traditions. Gled en som gruer seg til jul (Joy to the ones dreading Christmas) is the tagline of the campaign.
As a digital marketing agency, we wanted to show how we help each brand express their services on different social media platforms, by personalizing and crafting each strategy!
A reminder that not everything said online is true, especially when it comes to dating.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
