Ratchet Up

Prison Photos From The Early 20th Century

Bruce Jackson found and reprinted a group of Arkansas State Prison photos dating from the period 1915-1937. Their decaying patina gives these faces from another world and time a wonderful elegiac sadness. [Via Boing Boing]

Design & The Dime

his article from the design blog Core 77 is a bit off the usual track for the Ratchet, but I was taken by way its implications speak to media arts generally. Since the tools and techniques of media arts are often [blessedly and maddingly] intertwined with big technology, larger institutional settings or simply self-funding, the way art and business fit together in many fields are changing rapidly. And more subtly, the integration of design and esthetic expression into core business practices is changing as well:

The much-celebrated divide between 'designers' and 'suits' is not only counter-productive to success all around, it's inaccurate. Once you demystify business fundamentals, they become just like any other design constraint, and are no more insurmountable.' [...] Increased competition in the industry, improvements in the global technology infrastructure, relentless pressure to lower costs in every industry are just a few of the forces leading a major shift in the field of design. Where earlier, design was the department brought in after marketing or sales or the advertising agency decided that a 'new and improved' product or brand extension was required to penetrate a target market or increase profits for a brand. This usually resulted in incremental improvements in product and profits. Notes Sharon Reier in her article When looks count the most, companies are now increasingly seeking to integrate design as a strategic tool for creating shareholder value. These companies understand that the real value in design is using it to improve the entire user experience, where advertising specialists and marketing managers focus more on the buying decision alone. [...]

Where does it leave the traditional product designer or studio? Michael Winnick, Head of Business Development at GravityTank, a strategic product development adds '..with the increasing commoditization of the back end, low intellectual investment portion, a service that most OEMs in China can now offer as part of their service, industrial design firms need to restructure to focus more on the product definition end, the early research, the strategic design planning and platform innovation end of the development cycle in order to generate revenue and stay profitable.' Nussbaum implies an evolve-or-go-under scenario for smaller design firms. Evolution implies a strong willingness to adapt to changing scenarios, 'prototyping' so to speak. As designers, change, flexibility and adaptability should be easier than most to achieve. While there are no quick fixes, there are short term and longer-term solutions worth considering. [...]

The playing field in the design industry is very different today than it was even ten years ago. If you are a current student you should take care to ensure that your education is not preparing you for a game of baseball, because upon graduation you'll be playing futbol.

Bernice Abbott Re-Photography Project

have always had a soft spot for re-photography projects. You know, where a contemporary photographer takes historically important pictures―often from a single photographer―and creates new images from the precise location of the originals. Re-photographs are typically shown in a comparataive format, often with the old and new on facing pages. They're a great index of cultural change.

Several projects have taken inspiration from 19th century landscape photographers, turning the modern versions into ironic commentary on the way the “hand of man” has intervened in the landscape.

Now you can check out an online version of Douglas Levere's re-photography of Berenice Abbott's remarkable “New York Changing” images. The book itself comes from Princeton Architectural Press. [A totally great little press, by the way. Order “You Are Here” sight unseen, and I promise you'll love it.]

Fall Out

My very limited edition X-mas card this year featured the above image, an homage to the huge new wind turbine that Carleton college recently built. It's a marvel of clean form, and the first of its kind for any college in the United States. Starting with a Victorian card, I 'shopped in a picture of the turbine from a photo I made this fall, then used that as a template to paint the turbine in distant grays. I loved the little jolt of excitement even I get at the prospect of Santa about to visit my town, Northfield, MN. Displayed here on a computer screen at a whopping 450 pixels wide, you can hardly miss the message. But as an X-mas card, very few people looked at the image long enough to get it. Could it be the “fall out” factor?

As kids in our family, we came to race through Christmas cards for what we called “fall out”―cash, checks, candy, sparkles, and other goodies that came tucked inside holiday cards. No question, cash was best. We'd rip the envelope apart, glance at the graphics for a nanosecond, then shake the card over our head looking for fall out. When my mom happened to open the card for us, she would take her time, and I vividly remember the fleeting but intense impatience I'd feel as she carefully read the two or three sentence message printed inside. Once teens, of course, we learned to chill out and feign an interest in reading sentiment rhymed in couplets. But after that once-in-a-lifetime Christmas on which some did-well-in-business-this-year uncle sent along a spanking new $50 bill, it was impossible not to feel your blood rush at the prospect of a card with a return address from out of town.

So as people crashed through their cards this season, and failed to note the little turbine in the distance, I have come to suspect that as a fall out family we may not have been alone. If so, sorry―this year my fall out was on the front. Including something that absolutely no one found.

Happy Holiday.

Hi Def MTV Sign In Times Square

MTV has a huge new hi def sign in Times Square that was made for them by Mitsubishi:

“Mounted in a giant picture frame on Seventh Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets, the screen is 21 feet 5 inches high by 37 feet 9 inches wide and about 4 feet deep, although most of the depth is taken up by the catwalks used to service it. With a screen area of about 800 square feet, it's about 80 times bigger than the largest home TV's. The screen, across Times Square from the glass-walled studios of MTV, the Viacom division that owns it, can broadcast music videos, news, content from MTV's Web site and live events taking place in the studio and elsewhere. Next month, an interactive feature will be added: pedestrians will be able to use their mobile phones to play along with programs on the screen, including text-message-based video games. And MTV executives say they are considering ways to enable viewers to hear the screen's offerings as well, either over low-power radio broadcasts or by dialing a special number on a cellphone.

Akira Tasaki, president and chief executive of Mitsubishi Electric U.S., said the high-definition display, which at its core consists of more than two million light-emitting diodes, is among his company's most technologically sophisticated screens. For one thing, because it is a true high-definition screen - like more and more of the fanciest sets sold for home use - it displays images at 1080i resolution, meaning it paints the screen with 1,080 lines in two passes - interlaced - 30 times a second. That's more than twice the number of lines a standard-definition screen has. Each of the 1,080 lines in the HDTV screen consists of 1,920 pixels, the smallest element of an image. At the scale of the MTV screen, those pixels are created by a bouquet of L.E.D.'s that can be controlled to produce any color. On the MTV screen, the L.E.D.'s are closely arranged in a quad pattern of two red dots, one green and one blue. [...]

Another digital technology, called color space conversion, compensates for and corrects the tendency of large L.E.D. screens to produce oversaturated colors, making, for instance, red appear more like hot pink. The screen's specially color-tuned L.E.D.'s are mounted in a panel called a lighting unit. The lighting units are then arranged 34 high by 30 wide to create the screen that has a 16:9 aspect ratio, sometimes known as letterbox. The units also have custom-made louvers, removable eyelids of sorts that can be used to improve the screen's viewing angle and that help maintain contrast even in bright sunlight. Like most outdoor video screens, the MTV screen has to be viewed in varying lighting conditions.”

[Check out an info graphic from the New York Times, and their article.

Google Suggest

By web standards, this is old news: Google has launched Google Suggest. Though not ready for primetime, Google Suggest offers a fascinating glimpse into our collective desires on the web.“Think of it as an autocomplete zeitgeist for your browser. Each keystroke you enter subdivides billions of the world's most popular requests to a specific handful for you. Google Suggest does not offer predictive searching for you, but predictive searching for us. That's why when you type the letter ”A“ it first suggests ”amazon“ and when you type ”P,“ you get ”Paris Hilton.“ You might not have been looking for Paris, but it's what most of the world ususally is looking for. In that way, Google's implementation of Suggest might not be perfect, but their intent is. Google continues to tap into the power of smartmobs, trying to help us help ourselves with the word that's stuck on the tip of our collective tongue.

I discovered that out of 294,000 results for ”ratchet up,“ this blog has ratcheted itself to the top. Keeps the Ratchet Man swatting for new content.

[Chris on Smart Mobs]

Telesurgery Via Robot

Cars collide on an isolated country road. A passenger is seriously injured. The paramedics arrive and determine he will die without immediate medical attention. Unfortunately, the nearest hospital is 40 miles away. Only one option is left. Robots. As early as two years from now, what seems like a scene from a sci-fi flick might be a reality, and Shane Farritor is working towards that reality.

Farritor, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln mechanical engineering associate professor, heads a project developing miniature robots to be used in remote laparoscopic surgeries. [...] Farritor has designed two camera-carrying robots that can be inserted into the abdomen. The cylindrical robots are no longer than three inches and can be pushed into the body through 15-mm-wide holes. “We’re really looking at a family of devices,” Farritor said. The team currently has two models. The first is a pan-and-tilt camera that sits in the abdomen and gives the surgeons greater visibility. The second model also carries a camera, but is mobile and can explore areas typically inaccessible to normal laparoscopic cameras. “We hope to continue making these devices better,” Platt said. “Then we’ll start getting more and more fanciful.”

The devices are advantageous particularly because surgeons can control them by radio. “If there were a car accident in the boondocks, first responders could make an incision, drop a device in, and a surgeon in a hospital somewhere could control it,” Platt said. “They can be used anywhere a surgeon isn’t available and you need someone more highly trained.” Farritor called the concept “telesurgery.” “It’s kind of been a dream for a while, but our robots could make it a reality,” he said. [...]

The devices have been successful in tests on pigs, and Farritor said he sees breakthroughs on the horizon. “We actually used the devices to remove a pig’s gallbladder,” he said. “I could see them being used in humans in about a year or two.” The team has received attention from the BBC and Popular Science, but the medical world has yet to take notice, Farritor said. “We just aren’t ready for that yet,” he said. “We’re still a little more sci-fi than we are serious.”

[Daily Nebraskan via Mobile Robotics]

In The Year 2014: An EPIC

From the “Museum of Media History” comes an 8 minute Flash movie that hypothesizes a future of news and internet media in the next years. It's provocative and well worth a click.

As you'll see, it's whispered urgency envisions twinned elements of eu-topia and dis-topia as we witness the death of traditional media and the birth of a computer-generated personalized information system whose authors are...all of us.

I'm guessing this will be memed over the next days, so if you have trouble getting it to play, just set a bookmark aside, or like me today, try it at 4:30 in the morning.

[EPIC]

Database Imaginary

arah Cook, Steve Dietz and Anthony Kiendl have curated an exhibition of artists exploring what may be the central cultural form of our time, the database. The repeating rhythms of query, retrieval and display are at the core of virtually every activity in the digital domain. Yet ironically the database― formally defined as a “collection of data, or information, that is specially organized for rapid search and retrieval”―typically remains invisible, submerged in the murky depths of code behind the interface.

Artists have explored and deployed the database in some fascinating ways, and The Database Imaginary: Memory_Archive_Database brings together the work of 12 new media artists with an accompanying essay from Steve Dietz.

Snapperazi

Participants in this popular new pastime, otherwise known as the “snapperazi”, are sneeringly referred to as Snappies (Slightly Nutty Amateur Paparazzi Imitators), or dismissed as Nokia Nazis. Snapperazi love celebrities, and they love snapping pictures of them. [...]

The media have been quick to exploit this new resource. It's now commonplace for showbiz magazines to offer the public cash incentives to submit photographs of celebrities. This week's Heat magazine proclaims: “You've been snapped! Armed with their cameraphones, here's who Heat readers have been spying on this week.” Note the language: snapperazi are not just nosey no-lifers with too much time on their hands. Oh no. They're “spying” on their prey, and, by implication, they're honorary members of that intrusive band of professional celebrity picture-takers who are on the trail of the next sizzling phew-what-a-scorcher scoop. Better still, it's £200 a picture.

There's cash to be made. A holiday-maker covered his vacation costs by phone-snapping a former England cricketer playing away from home in the Caribbean earlier this year. The shots were emailed direct from his handset to a Sunday newspaper's newsdesk, and (in time-honoured tabloid alliterese) the immoral miscreant's extramarital malarkey was all over the media in a matter of minutes. [...]

The celebrity's deal with the media devil is well-documented, and an accepted fact. They'll make you (if that's what you want), and they'll break you (if that's what the bottom-line demands). They'll take you to the height of fame but they'll take your privacy as the price. That they should now have a massive and well-equipped amateur support staff in every supermarket, and on every street corner, completely changes the nature of the game: it's now fully interactive, and privacy for stars will only exist in their homes and the upmarket clubs, bars and eateries that convert to mobile-free zones. How long before the Ivy and the Met Bar install a “phone check” alongside their “coat check”?

Once, the public were slack-jawed observers of a celebrity circus packaged and presented by media professionals. Now - equipped with advanced mobile technology - the public can provide active and instantaneous input into the media processes that power the celebrity machine. In the 3G age, we can all participate in the making and breaking of celebrities. The future's bright. As long as you're not a celebrity.

[James Herring in The Guardian]