Personas is a fascinating art piece that takes a name and ‘scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data’.
Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. It allows you to see how the machine is working, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world where digital histories are as important – if not more important – than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant – for now. Fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, and this kind of data is indispensable but far from infallible.
So go ahead; give it your name and give it a shot.
There’s a good chance augmented reality will change the way we interact with information in the very near future, as this demo shows the potential that AR can have on a simple story book when combined with a video camera that has been integrated into a desk lamp:
Film the Blanks is “an ongoing experiment in deconstructing and abstracting film posters”.
The blog’s author takes famous, and not so famous movie posters, abstracts them, gives you a clue, and then your goal is to guess in the comments what movie the poster is from.
With projects like this, I think it’s interesting to see just how much information you can actually remove from something without loosing the meaning of that thing, so click over and see how many you can recognize.
The Credit Crisis is definitely complex, but Jonathan Jarvis’ The Crisis of Credit Visualized is designed to supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. (Hey, that’s me!)
It’s also a beautiful short that manages to cram a lot of information into just a few minutes of your time, while still being fun and interesting to watch, so sit back, stay calm and enjoy:
Sure, it’s just an ad for Sprint’s wireless data plans, but “Now” is also a fantastically imaginative take on what a start page can be.
The “Now” page is filled with widgets, and each one moves and changes to show some sort of interesting fact or figure when you visit the page. Then, when you mouse [...]
Always dreamed of driving in a rally, but never had the car or the finances to do it?
Then check out the Rental Car Rally, a 36-hour race from NYC to Montreal that encourages you to rent a car, grab a friend, pay just $150 per team, and be on your way to automotive action and [...]
