Singularity
visual culture

It was the 5th of November 2008

It was a great night and one that change how news are experienced. I had on my Mac ABC news live, UStream, Twitter-election US, and Twitterrific. On my telly, I was swapping channels from CNN, RTE, Sky News, to FOX. But it was an amazing experience just being able to heard the voices of loads of people through Twitter, that had previously reported live the results from their own neighborhoods, cities and states. I think Twitter changed for ever how we experience ‘the event’, on real time and hyper-commented. 

Check this sites tonight

UPDATED:

Is Obama President?
Is Obama President Yet?

So now I wonder, how will I experience the Inauguration Speech? on Twitter and Current

Follow the Inauguration Speech, and make it yours

Head to Current and learn more: “Current & Twitter have teamed up again. We’re adding your real-time Twitter messages (“tweets”) over our live broadcast of Barack Obama’s Inauguration.”

This is a rather interesting ongoing collection of photographs of London’s shop fronts. Well, perhaps not your high street average shop front, but that makes it even more interesting. Would love to see that done in many other european cities that still enjoy some really old ones. Its all Eugène Atget allover again. Great!

via Emily Webber

“There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up  the people. Crazy.”
Janis Krums was the first person to offer an image and a commentary of the incident, through TwitPic.

Update: Some great compilations of various reports from kottke.org ‘Hudson River plane crash’, including a terrifying video of a similar incident, and in Flickr. On other media:

On the press:
EL PAIS: A salvo los 153 ocupantes de un avión que cayó en el rio Hudson de Nueva York 
LA TIMES: All safe after US Airways jet goes down in New York’s Hudson River
The Guardian: Plane crashes in Hudson river in New York
There is more in Google if you care to search.
And guess what, Once again, Twitter proves its worth as it happened with the Mumbai terror attacks

That is the real NEW in this event: Twitter is worth. It is an incredible tool for communicating as it happens.
You just can not be a photographer, a journalist, an academic, or just a citizen, and not know about Twitter. 

A peek at the upcoming design documentary “Objectified”, by Gary Hustwit, the director of “Helvetica”. The trailer features the voices of Jonathan Ive, Andrew Blauvelt, Marc Newson, and Karim Rashid. The song is “I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool” by El Ten Eleven. 

Objectified premieres at film festivals and events worldwide starting this March, more info here:http://www.objectifiedfilm.com

About the film

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Read director Gary Hustwit’s post about the film.

By Magnum Photographers, produced by Magnum in Motion

From October 17th to October 26th ILLUSTRATIVE´s 4th forum of illustrative an graphic arts will take place in the Zurich Messehallen. Conceived in 2006 by Pascal Johanssen and Katja Kleiss in Berlin, ILLUSTRATIVE is an annual forum, and the only one of it´s kind worldwide that presents the latest inclinations which run the gamut of illustrative and graphic art in one exhibition.
Illustrative art is fresh, humorous, and easily accessible: the scope of work displayed in ILLUSTRATIVE ranges from psychedelic wall paintings, to erotic neon pop art, while presenting monumental town views, as well as quasi photo-realistic drawings. The special sensitivity to artistic quality and a mix of analogue and digital techniques give a special progressiveness to the illustrative arts. This has decisively influenced the development of contemporary art for some time now.
The latest ILLUSTRATIVE has expanded in comparison to previous years. It now includes a central exhibition, section exhibitions, temporary workshops, and a forum for presentations and conferences.

A list of the artists exhibiting.

Here’s your ticket, and please, follow the line.

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As they put it in Screenfluent “the featured sites are handpicked and proposals are not accepted. as legend has it, remarkable designs will find their way to Screenfluent“. Therefore, one has to blow his own trumpet a bit when something like this happens.

Found inside the Palm house, at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin.

I have been visiting the Botanic Gardens for years, and yet its only now that this specimen came to my attention. Unidetified? Well, is not like she’s wearing a balaclava!

Got this brochure on the snail-mail recently. I cant help but wonder “why? why now?”, do they know something I dont? Most likely. I, in any case, feel now very well prepared, thanks to this piece of reading. Its a pity it is just an introduction…
Incidentally, www.emergencyplanning.ie