#7on7HTC: Liveblog Part II

by Rhizome

 

Here's a fresh new liveblog for part II of Seven on Seven.

2:44: We're back with John Michael Boling on stage: "A lot more exciting things to come." Next team: Cameron Martin and Tara Tiger Brown. They're both open about webstalking each other.

2:54: "Technology also serves as a wall or box that gets put up around you." - Cameron Martin

 

2:59: Martin and Brown produce a great 3D model of a blue Koons baloon dog. "Today we're going to conduct an experiment we call real time crowdsource learning ... we want you the audience to transform from passive listeners to active participants." - Cameron Martin. Hands go up as Tara Tiger Brown asks who has done 3d modeling or 3d printing. Many more hands go up when Cameron Martin asks who hasn't.

 

3:05: Tara and Cameron utilizing #3DHelper to crowdsource volunteer Diego's 3d modeling:

3:10: Did we?

 

3:12: 60 seconds left for Diego's crowdsourced 3D printing challenge. 3D printer starts doing its work as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Harper Reed take the stage.

 

3:20: Overlap between Lozano-Hemmer and Reed: metrics. Reed is a devoted self-tracker, has collected a lot of data about himself for "no reason." "It might be important some day." - Harper Reed. Reed and Lozano-Hemmer have asked one of the most asked questions of our time: what do we do with all this data? Sometimes you just end up knowing bulldogs hate tape measures.

3:28: Eventually, Reed and Hemmer came to the idea of erasure: Snapchat, A.R. Luria, and Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing share the screen. "Forgetting is fundamental to being able to transform." - Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Their creation: Friend Fracker. From the website: "The site deletes 1 to 10 friends from your Facebook account. Use friendfracker to decrease the number of people connected to you." It cannot be undone. Lozano-Hemmer deletes 3 friends to great applause!

3:30: "This is aggressively against the Terms of Service of Facebook ... let's keep the Tweets quiet. Or whatever." - Harper Reed

         "The art is not knowing who was deleted. And if you don't remember them, good riddance." - Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

         "We can take things away from our lives and we just won't miss them." - Harper Reed 

 

 

3:38: Team 5: Matthew Ritchie and Billy Chasen. They've created Dabit. "The concept of Dabit is that you can choose your charity and everyday we're going to collect money for these charity. Only 50% of the money will go to the charities, the other 50% will go to somebody that donated that day." - Billy Chasen.

3:39: Live data visualization of Dabit donations takes the screen:

 

3:45: Ritchie and Chasen take Seven on Seven from intellectual to financial interactivity.

3:46: Ritchie deploys reality diagram by Graham Harmon:


3:49: Overarching sentiment at Seven on Seven that we can use technology as a training ground for goodness. Dabit "appeals to both the worst and the best," says Ritchie.

3:55: "The division of labor between art and technology became apparent: I drank beer while Billy did all the coding." - Ritchie, before taking us through the evolution of Dabit logos:

 

3:58: $953 raised by Dabit in the last 30 minutes.

4:01: "We can always be charitable to big organizations, bet we can be charitable to each other too." - Billy Chasen

         Ritchie emphasizes the exciting danger of Dabit: part philanthropy, part gambling.

 

4:04: 30 minute break before the last 2 teams: Jill Magid + Dennis Crowley and Jeremy Bailey + Julie Uhrman.

4:17: While you were getting coffee:

 

4:28: Jeremy Bailey and Julie Uhrman are cracking glowsticks on stage.

4:39: Moderation John Michael Boling introduces famous new media artist Jeremy Bailey and Julie Uhrman. "The famous is self-proclaimed, right Jeremy?" - Boling

         Uhrman: "I'm not so sure why I was invited as a technologist ... and after seeing previous presentations, I'm even less sure."

 


4:44: Uhrman and Bailey both love winning and video games. They're both "enablers." "What I try to do is create the best platform to enable your genius." - Uhrman. Takes the entire presentation apparatus as a target!

Throwback:

 


4:46: "We wanted to reinvent the presentation so that you get feedback to how you're doing halfway through." - Uhrman.

4:47: "We're vain, but we're vain enough to know ... it's all about you." - Jeremy Bailey. He's taken to the stage with a live projection on screen, the interface rewarding him based on movement, Tweets, and loud noises. It also gives motivational cues. 


4:51: "The future of presentations is measuring their success in real time." - Bailey. Another instance of the dominance of metrics and looping-- I wonder what Paul Pfeiffer and Alex Chung think about this?

4:53: John Michael Boling takes advantage of "big penis mode" in the reinvented, gamified presentation. He says it feels amazing.

4:58: John"Google Image search results for me are going to be bad"Boling introduces the final duo: Jill Magid + Dennis Crowley

5:04: Dennis Crowley: "We're presenting this more as a conversation than a presentation." Magid: "We both engage privacy and surveillance in different ways." Metrics and tracking foregrounded once more. Watching these two translate each other is really interesting, both have a focus on the city and its transformation by technology. Crowley wonders whether we are statistics or indivduals -- Magid tries to make herself an individual through "the system."

5:10: Magid forces the system to see her as an individual. Some ideas discussed by Orit Gat. How to combat the anonymity of techno-masses is a big question for Crowley. "We kept getting deep into these conversations and then asking: 'What do we make of this?'" - Jill Magid.

5:13: "Could there be something in technology that delays, that makes us more aware of how we appear?" - Jill Magid. Brings up Bruce Nauman's Performance Corridor:

5:17: "What does a Twitter mirror look like? Something that allows you to see your online persona." - Crowley. Crowley says of his tracking devices: "Someday, someone will find all that interesting, and make something of it," much like Harper Reed's conceptualization of his own self-metrics. In the future all this data will be useful.

5:20: Jill Magid: a data visualization of your decision to get engaged is so much more beautiful than a photograph.

5:24: Crowley brings up Timehop as an example of interesting things to be done with our archived social media selves. "We've all done a lot of work to create all this meda. We've been taught to think of it as ephemeral. How powerful can software be that goes through all this stuff and finds the meaningful nugget that you need to see right now to change your perception." - Dennis Crowley

5:26: Interesting to think of awkwardness as an intended consequence of social media.

5:28: "I'm never out to screw a system so that it collapses ... but it's interesting to use them for their latent purposes." - Jill Magid. Says her instinct is always to think of how a system can fail.

5:31: Too bad circumstances prevented Magid and Crowley didn't get to create an object together -- but their thought process was rigorous enough to make up for it. Perhaps the system they made together would have been fully realized by Crowley; taught to fail by Magid.

5:40: "We're all trying to do the same things, just through a different lens." - Dennis Crowley

5:41: "All systems and all technologies are defined by how you use them, how you interpret them ... I think you make meaning from a system" - Jill Magid

5:44: Moderator John Michael Boling announces the end of Seven on Seven, Rhizome Executive Director Heather Corcoran thanks everyone. This liveblog is officially over.