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.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronics Junk is a fascinating project in which a progressive lending library of electronic components becomes an internet meme in physical form halfway between P2P zip-archive sharing and a flea market.
Recipients of the box must:
Take out and add as much electronics junk as you like (but keep it small enough to fit in a USPS flat-rate Priority Mail box).
Write up, photograph, document or otherwise publish in some way online at least one thing you took out (suggested flickr tag: TGIMBOEJ).
There is a little book in the box. Add a checkmark by your name to show that the box has been to you. Also propose a future recipient by adding their name and e-mail address to the book.
Within two weeks pass the box along to one of the people whose name is in the book. Before mailing it to them, send them this list and make sure that they want to participate.
The goal is not necessarily to get anything of value from the box, but instead, to appreciate the box’s journey, and find some way to contribute to the overall story that the box represents.
I don’t know if the Internet needs another HD video provider, but regardless, if you’re a Flickr Pro member, you can now upload videos in sweat, sweat HD.
Regular Flickr members can now also upload two videos per week (though not in sweat, sweat HD) so it’s more video goodness for all!
Are you ready to catch up with the Internet? Do you want to know every meme and every popular video and every strange picture and every funny joke that has ever been converted to bits and bytes and put online?
Then spend the weekend going through Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should [...]
MrWong’s Soup’Partments is an abandoned attempt to build the world’s tallest virtual building.
Abandoned doesn’t mean it was unsuccessful however, as I can’t imagine anyone ‘building’ anything higher than the Soup’Partments, with its 406 residents and 2,000 meters of height.
To help with the construction, MrWong opened the project to anyone with an image editor and some [...]
