Quicktake: Small Global and Never been to Tehran at MIC

Currently showing at MIC, this exhibition by renowned new media artists D-Fuse tackles globalisation and it's impact - both in terms of architecture/environments, and in business. The first room is an ambitious, multi-channel installation centreing around the viral growth of fast-food giant McDonalds. World maps chronicle the time and position of every franchise, from local California eatery in the 50s through to global domination towards the turn of the millenium. As usual, the curatorial staff at the Moving Image Centre 'hung' the show impeccably, even adding multiple translucent screens to create a triplicate projected effect (see images).

But what's problematic about the work is it's over the top slickness. The data could actually be displayed in any web browser - via Google Maps or Google Earth - but dfuse instead use a barrage of electronic looking tickers and LED interfaces. What could be a dynamic, intelligently networked piece hooked up to data sources worldwide is turned into static video because of a perceived need to seduce the viewer. Adding another layer of irony, this piece about globalisation is fundamentally localised due to it's media, although d-fuse plan to add more video content as the show makes it's way around the world.


Next door, the superficially simple, "Never been to Tehran" is a case in point. The ambitious worldwide photography project challenged artists to "take photographs (from their home base) of what they imagine Tehran to look like." Participants upload their shots to a Picasa Web Album, allowing a single hub for coordinating, as well as built in features like 'geotagging' to show origin of each image, and RSS feeds allowing blogs to incorporate it into their sites. This open framework means that curators worldwide can re-present the show in a variety of formats.

Data visualisation: What does guilt look like?

In an age of information overload, a picture carries a thousand words - or stats. From around the net, political artists, environmentally savvy companies and concerned individuals are all making a statement, without uttering a word.


Hotmapping combines thermal imaging flyovers with residential mapping to uncover the highest energy hogs in any area. They recently completed a massive, 30 sq km section for Haringey in the UK, then posted it online, shaming the homeowners of those hot red dots on the map.

Radley Balko (stats) and Lee Laslo (programming) teamed up to reveal a pattern behind the numbers. Piecing together dozens of "isolated" botched police raids, the duo pinned them on a Google Map, complete with a key detailing items like "Death of an innocent", and case-by-case stories linked to local press articles. It's a textbook example of web 2.0 connectedness used for an incisive statement - stats+mapping+news articles - putting hyped but superficial initiatives like Twitter to shame.



Brazilian artist Icaro Doria takes national flags and rethinks them, mapping the area of a certain colour to damning statistics. Burkina Faso's tiny gold star becomes the percentage of children who actually reach maturity. Columbia's dominant yellow stripe representing it's cocaine production overshadows smaller crops like coffee and bananas. At best the stats are simplified. The EU's drastic oil production/consumption ratio is the result of many factors, many of which aren't necessarily negative. At worst, they're exaggerated or false - Somalia's shocking genital mutilation statistic would be difficult to get hard figures on.


Finally, Google's default inclusion of Darfur into it's Google Earth product is an overt political statement. It's 3d engine typically used to show corporate skyscrapers or monuments visualises something much more disturbing - tall purple towers representing numbers of displaced and wounded in the african nation.

et al: the fundamental practice at Artspace

Sneaked into Artspace on the final day for Et Al's repurposed Venice exhibition, the Fundamental Practice, and thought I'd mention a couple quick thoughts on the digital aspects.

While it has been shown before, the Artspace version has been "reordered, regrouped, restored". This was evident in aspects like the sound - the curatorial intern was kind enough to play a CD of recorded sound from the previous incarnation, which seemed much more solitary and quiet. The expansive concrete rooms of the current space meant that the sound channels boomed and echoed, mixed and collided. CNN style news headlines shifted with white noise and more melodic elements as you moved between areas.

Photographs by Jennifer French provided courtesy of Artspace

The Fundamental Practice also utilised a Google Earth element - playing back a series of waypoints and camera angles generated with the mapping tool. Strangely the locative element didn't anchor the work in a greater spatial context, instead zooming and panning around a collection of tiny village names in an (for myself unknown) Middle Eastern country (Iran, Iraq?). Overlaid in a circular pattern over 5 of these were obelisks, lending the whole thing a totemic, conspiracy theory quality which focused on a single village in the middle. This was reinforced by a second screen constantly scrolling through propoganda text - a mixture of military jargon and religious commands displayed in a raw code (think notepad) type format. As p. mule states, "Fundamentalism was rife throughout the process from all sectors. Is humour important (in the work)? p.mule: Yes. (or) It’s fundamental."