This is another official update to the original Shift Happens video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist. For more information, or to join the conversation, please link here or here. // AjS
:: I peeked this TED Talk today and was pretty impressed. Shirky does many things really well in this presentation, but most notably:
The last point is what I have spent a good chunk of my professional life trying to get others to understand (and pay for). It has vast implications for “media people,” (who is everyone now-a-days) as well as the communications, PR, marketing, advertising, etc. industries. The next time your client (or colleague, or your mom) just doesn’t get it, play them this video. If English is not their first language, get a professional to translate it into the appropriate language. It will save you a lot of time / effort / money in the long run. // AjS
:: I’m a TED.com fanboy – always have been, always will be. It’s some of the best content on the whole of the world wide wide, and It’s just gotten better.
With the support of NOKIA, TED.com is rolling out a major open source translation project aiming to present TED talk videos in 40+ subtitled languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese. There are already four videos subtitled in simplified Chinese (1, 2, 3, and 4 – many more coming soon), one of which is probably my all-time favorite TED talk: Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight. Enjoy, and share with your Chinese friends that perhaps wouldn’t watch without subtitles.
Related, TED.com is holding it’s first ever official event in China next month: TEDxShanghai. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the TEDxShanghai advisory board). Also, link here to check out TEDtoChina, a Chinese-language TED fan / community site. // AjS
:: I decided to celebrate consumer day / week in China by buying something – pretty much how I celebrate every week. I’m now the proud owner of the new-ish ColorSplash iPhone application. I’m a sucker for photo-related apps, I have a half dozen or so now. This one lets you selectively desaturate photos for that cool black-and-white-plus-a-little-bit-of-color effect. It’s beyond easy to use. See below for a before-&-after of my first attempt. Great app. Bravo, well done. // AjS
:: as often noted within the depths of these posts, design, technology, and communication are evolving — quickly. Our perspective, on this side of the globe, is within the spectrum of an emerging culture that is making leaps across traditional communication, travel, and technology barriers. The experimentation, chaos, and expressiveness that often characterizes modern art and design in china fits nicely into the Tate’s new concept — altermodern.
In his keynote speech to the 2005 Art Association of Australia & New Zealand Conference, Nicolas Bourriaud explained:
“Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This “reloading process” of modernism according to the twenty-first-century issues could be called altermodernism, a movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world.”
I also pulled the Altermodern manifesto from the Tate Britain’s exhibition which is fascinating and insightful especially as it relates to emerging artists within China:
A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture
Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live
Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe
Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture
This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing
Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves
Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.
I would be interested to hear how you think emerging Chinese artists fit into this paradigm…is it relevant? //
[ is a guest contributor on 56minus1.]
