Early in the Covid-19 lockdowns, questions of returning to the office typically revolved around proposed dates and mask protocols. But as the pandemic continued into its second year, it has become a highly complex–and potentially volatile–topic at companies around the world. For many organizations, it’s no longer about a return to normalcy; it’s about defining…
The influencer agency’s clients include DoorDash and McDonald’s.
Ainda restam três meses para que o Disney+ comemore seu aniversário de um ano de disponibilidade no Brasil e na América Latina, mas o território já se prepara para receber um segundo serviço de streaming da Disney. Afinal, nesta terça-feira, 31 de agosto, o conglomerado lança no continente o Star+, plataforma descrita simultaneamente como independente …
Leia Com catálogo imenso, Star+ busca contornar preço alto com proposta de valor ao público na íntegra no B9.
Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Today, Twitter’s Caitlin Rush illustrates the growing interest from marketers in platform transparency reports. Below, in her own words, she urges brands to take more responsibility for their online presence and…
McDonald’s is a brand that is known throughout much of the world. And as Europeans travel for their holidays, the fast-food chain released a campaign to remind travelers of its worldwide presence. The “Geniess deinen Urlaub” (“Enjoy Your Vacation”) campaign from DDB Vienna is made up of four posters featuring visitor attractions that include stone…
Over the past year and a half, cultural organisations have deployed efforts and resourcefulness to keep their audiences intellectually and emotionally stimulated. Believe it or not, I’m easily bored and, although I’m truly grateful for anything cultural that came my way during lockdowns, I didn’t enjoy the virtual tours of exhibitions, struggled to focus during Instagram live portfolio presentations and often felt that screens were the last thing I wanted to stare at.
Last month, however, the postman brought me an exhibition-in-a-box. Called SYSTEMS, the limited-edition publication is Science Gallery Dublin‘s attempt to share on paper and “from the comfort of your own home” an exhibition that had been scheduled to take place inside the gallery. With a live public.
The exhibition features artists, thinkers and researchers whose works unravel the many complex technological, social and ecological systems, both visible and invisible, that surround us:
In a time of heightened global crisis, the systems that shape our world are becoming increasingly fragile. While ecosystems are being destroyed, political processes are being manipulated, economic structures exploited and personal networks eroded, all of which are further exacerbated by our increased dependency on technological and automated systems.
Yet how much do we really know of these systems? How are they all connected, and what are the infrastructures and networks upon which they are built? How do we find out? How can we navigate, probe, critique and challenge them?
SYSTEMS reimagines what an exhibition can be in times of distance, condensing artworks and discussions about the infrastructures that keep our world (dys)functioning into essays, zines, posters, postcards, leaflets and interviews.
The design of the publication is brilliant. Inside the massive red folder are coloured cardboard pages that mimic exhibition labels with a bio of the artist or researcher and a brief presentation of their contribution to the show. The works themselves brought me a lot of joy. It wasn’t just the content that I found riveting, it’s the way some of the pieces found a new life on paper. That and the feeling that the designers and curators had a lot of fun crafting the publication. SYSTEMS contains classics such as Anatomy of an AI System by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler; Evan Roth‘s Red Lines, this time in the form of strips of images the artist saved for personal use as part of his research process; Mario Santamaria‘s Cloudplexity series (Internet representations extracted from the U.S. Patent database) was turned into a deck of postcards, etc.
Mario Santamaria, Cloudplexity
I tried very hard to find a boring essay in the publication but there simply wasn’t any. Here’s a couple of gems i particularly enjoyed:
Paul O’Neill, an artist and researcher whose work explores the hidden infrastructure that enabled Dublin to become global technology hub, took its cue from David Graeber’s essay Dead Zones of the Imagination to interview Ingrid Burrington. They discussed artistic interventions outside the systems, the extraordinarily boring manifestations of power and the possibility of making one day a decolonised computer!
Historian Ciaran O’Neill investigates the history of Dublin’s Silicon Docklands and its transformation from sandy marshland inhabited by shellfish to today’s headquarters of future-oriented tech companies.
Sarah Grant, the founder of Radical Networks, calls for communities’ right to positions themselves not only as users but also as creators of communication infrastructures and technologies.
Tactical Tech offers in print their tips about making phones more secure, detecting misformation, bursting your filter bubble, seeing yourself through the eyes of google, avoiding oversharing on social media and more in their Data Detox for Youth. A useful guide for not so young people too by the way.
Joana Moll, Ultimate Solvers, 2020
Joana Moll, Ultimate Solvers, 2020
Joana Moll‘s essay looks at the kind of world view our everyday devices carry and, more generally, examines the perils of trying to solve highly complex systemic problems, be they ecological or related to the ongoing pandemic, with reductionist techno-solutions. The text explores the reasoning behind Ultimate Solvers, a web-based artwork that holds a critical mirror to the aesthetics and grand promises of the tech industry. It subtly shows their slogan for what they are: an inflated, empty rhetoric based on an unrealistic premise.
In Asunder: In conversation, artists Tega Brain and Julian Oliver discuss with Dr Ruth Brennan from the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities. They too question techno fixes and in particular the impossibility for climate scientists to create the perfect simulation of the environment based on data. No matter how massive the dataset is, it will never fully reflect the complexity and interdependence of ecosystems.
In a similar vein, Adam Harvey‘s text asks whether we can change the world by changing how computers see the world. Several of the points he makes eschew the usual platitudes. For example, he mentions an essay that points out that solving representational problems in image training datasets by including more data from a marginalised population is not necessarily a move in the right direction because fairness cannot be achieved by the sole logic of accumulation.
To illustrate her research about Google Ads’ linguistic capitalism, Pip Thornton priced up 3 strings of covid-related terms (such as infectious, cough, symptoms and facemasks). The first was generated at the onset of the pandemic, the second in October 2020 and the third on 1 June 2021. In October 2020, the cost of the terms in Google’s search engine had almost doubled in price, showing how the search engine profits from our anxieties.
Vukasin Nedeljovic, The Old Convent, Ballyhaunis, 2007-2009
Vukasin Nedeljovic, Ballymullen Barracks, Tralee, 2013
Vukasin Nedeljovic, 318 North Circular Road, Dublin, 2016
When Vukasin Nedeljovic arrived in the Republic of Ireland in 2006, he was sent to a Direct Provision centre. The place was part of a system of asylum seeker accommodation often criticised by human rights organisations for being inhuman and degrading.
Using a small camera he’d brought from his hometown of Belgrade, he captured his surroundings at the Old Convent in Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo. He spent 3 years there before receiving his papers in 2009. What started as a coping mechanism became a project to document every Direct Provision centre in the Republic of Ireland.
Nedeljovic’s vast Asylum Archive shows mostly the outside of the centres but also -sometimes with the help of residents- the interiors of Ireland’s asylum system as well as traces that bear witness of the daily life and regime of surveillance that characterise these spaces of confinement: toys, abandoned objects, signing in papers and CCTV cameras.
The Science Gallery publication includes some of Nedeljovic’s photos in postcard format. Which makes them perfect for distribution and raising awareness among Irish citizens. Most of these centres look so mundane that they invisibilise the human rights issues associated with them. Nothing like a postcard to say “Hi! You might not see me but I’m there!”
I’ll end here this enthusiastic review of SYSTEMS. I could go on and on about how imho this was the most exciting pandemic experiment from the art world this year but the publication sold out very quickly, alas!
David Thomas Smith, Three Mile Island Generating Station, Middletown, PA, United States of America, 2010-11. From the series A Decade Of Reflections In The Anthropocene
Multiplay, A.I.R., 2021. Picture by Mark Stedman during the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin’s IN THESE STRANGE TIMES programme
Multiplay, A.I.R., 2021. Picture by Mark Stedman during the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin’s IN THESE STRANGE TIMES programme
Previously: Linguistic capitalism. Has Google become an all powerful usurer of language?, A guided tour of Dublin’s physical Internet infrastructure, Covid-19 might not follow us online but our carbon footprint does, Critical investigation into the politics of the interface. An interview with Joana Moll, Taking data packets for a ride. An interview with Mario Santamaria, Exploitation Forensics. Interview with Vladan Joler, Critical Exploits. Interrogating Infrastructure, Asunder. Could AI save the environment?, Exploitation Forensics. Interview with Vladan Joler, etc.
Fictional story created with Fig expands on previous ad and prepares kids with transition to a new abode.
Shortly after the pandemic hit New York last year, when social distancing and quarantining were in full effect, Andrew Bennett posted on his Instagram Stories that he’d be at Brooklyn Museum if anyone wanted to ride bikes with him. And they did–17 people came out for a cycling tour of the city. By the time…
Executives will share ideas at this month’s Ad Age Leading Women Conference & Awards.
Lone River Ranch Water, acquired six months ago by liquor giant Diageo, launches its first national advertising this week as the tequila-inspired hard-seltzer competitor has expanded its distribution to nearly every U.S. state. The young brand, founded by a former account director at creative agency Anomaly, puts riding, roping, cowboys, cowgirls, country music and decorated…
Tim Armstrong’s career has spanned a wide range of roles in both startups and big corporations including a stint as the CEO of AOL. His newest venture, Flowcode, aims to bridge the gap between offline and online connections between brands and consumers. Flowcode is a next-generation QR-code technology that natively integrates privacy, advanced data and…
DDB FTW has named the character its newest creative director—but what does that even mean?
3 marketing strategies to generate downloads.
D’Arcy was instrumental in teaching brands how to use social media advertising.
Amazon shoppers will soon be able to delay payments on big-ticket items through a new deal the ecommerce giant has signed with buy now, pay later provider Affirm. The partnership will give Amazon customers the option of spreading payments for certain purchases of $50 or more into monthly installments with no late fees or hidden…
There are few places in the world that are better to visit in the fall, or that have more vibrant downtowns for that matter, than New York. That’s why Manhattan’s Financial District plays the leading role in fashion brand Kate Spade’s fall 2021 campaign, which is set to the tune of Petula Clark’s 1965 hit…
O Clubhouse lançou o áudio espacial, novo recurso da plataforma projetado para fazer os membros da comunidade se sentirem mais imersos na conversa ou na sala que estão ouvindo, fazendo os microfones soarem como se estivessem espalhados pela sala, assim como acontece com os filmes. A nova tecnologia, que teve o engenheiro Justin Uberti à …
Leia Clubhouse lança novo recurso para conversas mais imersivas na íntegra no B9.
D’Arcy was instrumental in teaching brands how to use social media advertising.
A Ambev traz para o mercado brasileiro a Spaten, cerveja puro malte alemã criada em 1397 e considerada um dos rótulos mais tradicionais do mundo. Do estilo Munich Helles, Spaten tem sabor forte, mas que promete conquistar tanto quem gosta de uma cerveja marcante como também quem está acostumado com cervejas mais leves. “Estamos trazendo …
Leia Tradicional cerveja da Oktoberfest alemã, Spaten chega ao país na íntegra no B9.
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.
