science

Rhizome’s ‘Seven on Seven’ rundown.

Rhizome ‘Seven on Seven’ rundown.
22 April 2013

From Friend Fracker to Constant Update, Dabit and Giphnosis, the focus of yesterday’s sold out Rhizome ‘Seven on Seven’ conference was on social media and its power for both good and evil. Simulating what they define as the “data dread” of media bombardment, Fatima Al Qadiri and Dalton Caldwell simulate the anxiety and overload of Constant Update, while Paul Pfeiffer and Alex Chung harnessed the mesmerising powers and bizarre juxtapositions of gif-sharing culture with Giphnosis.

Hitting a more pragmatic note, Harper Reed and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer offered some relief through the random Facebook friend deletion app for the over-acquainted with Friend Fracker, while assistance came in dollars signs from Matthew Ritchie and Billy Chasen with their charity website, Dabit, that “gives back” by randomly allocating 50% of all donations to one donor. It’s an inclusive attitude that bore Cameron Martin and Tara Tiger Brown’s real-time crowdsourced learning with 3DHelper. Meanwhile, Jeremy Bailey and Julie Uhrmann stole the show by transferring the inherent narcissism exposed by social media into creating a new form of self-presentation, while illness and conflicting visions saw Jill Magid and  Dennis Crowley come up with not very much at all.**

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Rhizome ‘Seven on Seven’ Conference.

Rhizome 'Seven on Seven' Conference.
3 April 2013

New York’s The New School continues to live up to its reputation as being founded on innovation by hosting Rhizome’s Seven on Seven Conference on Saturday, April 20. Recognising the intersection of art and science as the way forward, the event will be pairing seven significant contemporary artists, with seven equally compelling technologists and challenging them to create something new.

Featuring the likes of artists Fatima Al Qadiri, Jill Magid and Jeremy Bailey on one end, and developers Julie Urhmann, Tiger Tara Brown and Dennis Crowley on the other, there is no limit to what the artists are allowed to produce, across media and disciplines. With author of The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov, giving the keynote speech, anyone on the other side of the Atlantic can only hope there’ll be stream to follow. **

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Fake Science

21 February 2012

Fake Science is nearly 2 years old but they keep coming up with the most revealing and brightest explanations in the scientific community.

No need for weird science or a bunch of complicated and incomprehensible articles published on Nature or Science to explain why cats purr or why the famous North American elephant went extinct after the famous 60s nose-ring fashion trend, “Fake Science” provides us with our weekly dose of brainfood for all biologists, chemists and average (but curious) Joe.

And the best thing is that you don’t need to buy National Geographic or Wired anymore (cancel those subscriptions please!), FS are about to release their own hard-copy publication + a WebOS app for all of us to follow (or buy). If it wasn’t because of blogs like this one, or world would definitely be much much harder to understand. Maybe the team behind FS could start a series of cosmos-explanatory thesis in their upcoming numbers? The origin of the black holes, the string theory and those sort of trivial matters…

And what can we say about the Eisenhower era ad style…. just add them to your daily pulse reader, not a waste. Many more this way.

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branding my brain

12 September 2011

There are too many portmanteau words created each month for me to keep track of all of them. Especially from my own paranoid studies with a scientific background… “neuroanatomy”, “sociolinguistics”… witnesses of our evolution and the boom of all sorts of disciplines. My new word today is “neuromarketing”, which comes to reinforce my “sophisticated” technical vocabulary. Scientific developments such as this one should come to satisfy our most basic needs.

Eye Tracking Glasses & Mobile Neuromarketing
Eye Tracking Glasses usually paired with other Mobile Neuromarketing measuring tools

Welcome to the marvelous world of neuromarketing where everything is intimately related (or not) with consumption as a primitive act.

This lovely discipline studies the cognitive effects of marketing in order to make communication a more efficient tool. Basically the rise of neuroscience which has allowed us to map, decode and study our brains in detail over the last few decades has finally been swallowed by marketing itself, probably the most omnivore discipline. We know thanks to neuroscience how the different areas of our brain work, which reactions take place in different situations and what behaviors are related to which parts of the grey matter. The  magnetic resonance imaging and other scan techniques are increasingly used nowadays to continue the analysis of such fascinating organ.

But how does marketing come to befriend these tissue studies? You know how marketing pundits have their eyes on pretty much every new emerging technology, discovery or discipline… anything could become of interest. Could there be anything more beneficial for them than deeply understanding how our brains work when purchasing something? How do our small neurons wriggle when watching an ad or buying a well-known soft drink? Continue reading branding my brain

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