Johanna Blakley
Media | Entertainment | FashionFashioning the Future
When I saw a recent piece about success implanting a worm’s brain into a Lego robot, I immediately thought of William Gibson’s most recent novel, The Peripheral. Placed simultaneously in the near future and another one 70 years further away, characters traverse the time gap dropping into low-fi or high-fi versions of that Lego robot.
I’ve always enjoyed Gibson’s obvious interest in the ironies that emerge when physical bodies blend into virtual realities. Gibson’s brand of virtual reality is never disengaged from a suffering body. A common complaint among characters in The Peripheral, and his earlier novel Pattern Recognition, is jet lag. One of the many clever conceits in The Peripheral is that traveling back or forward in time, to another point on the space/time continuum, can only be done in real time, in different time zones, in a persistent world ticking its way to different versions of the future.
In Gibson’s cyberpunk extrapolations, technologies that seem miraculous in our present moment always reflect the inconvenient limits of human capacity. In the distant future of The Peripheral, the supercomputer that allows the wealthiest hobbyists to fiddle with people’s real lives in the past is of unknown provenance. No one seems to know how it works or who created it, though everyone presumes it’s Chinese.
Likewise no one knows how an extremely powerful predictive algorithm that aids police in preventing crimes works – apparently because it’s self-taught and no one kept track of its accumulation of datasets. When “the Aunties,” as the system is called, makes a prediction, it has the taint of mindless unscientific human gossip. It’s the gut instinct gone hyperdigital. Read the rest of this entry »
New Tools for Measuring Cultural Engagement
I was very pleased to be invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to participate in a lively symposium addressing perhaps the most important issue in the arts these days: how do we justify public funding for the arts?
For those of us who frequently attend arts and culture events, the question seems silly. Doesn’t everyone realize that humans are hard-wired to respond to compelling stories and visuals, whether they manifest themselves as sculpture, video games, concerts or novels? Isn’t it clear that music and movies can bridge the most profound political divides and move hearts and minds?
As we see arts programming melt away in cash-strapped public schools, we have to acknowledge the awful truth — that arts and culture is considered a luxury, not a necessity, and justifications for their value must be proven rather than assumed.
Both the NEA and the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council, which co-sponsored the symposium, position themselves as agencies harnessing the power of art, culture and leisure to improve the lives of citizens and invigorate and strengthen communities. The problem, of course, is proving that their funding strategies actually achieve these often hard-to-measure goals.
Measuring Cultural Engagement: A Quest for New Terms, Tools, and Techniques summarizes a two-day session that brought together a wide range of researchers, using both traditional and new-fangled techniques, to describe and measure the myriad forms of cultural engagement that take place in all types of physical and virtual spaces. I’m hoping that this report will jump-start an international effort to revisit our presumptions about what counts as cultural engagement (Instagramming a photo from a museum, for instance) and taking advantage of new technology to better measure that engagement. Arts and culture organizations should feel more confident about the possibility of measuring the impact of their work, not only to fundraise but also to make the crucial course-corrections that all creative enterprises must make when they are committed to achieving complex goals.
You can read another blog of mine about the Symposium here and you can follow the conversation on Twitter: #NEACVP
Experimenting with Space & Reinvigorating Modernism
I’ll be joining artists, critics and curators for a two-day conference about experimental art installations in modernist house museums. Anyone who follows me on Instagram knows that I was completely smitten with the Competing Utopias installation at the beautiful Neutra VDL House. It was a brilliant mash-up of East/West Cold War aesthetics and ideals that revealed how powerful and intellectually venturesome an art installation in a historic home can be.
And so I’m really excited to be involved in this upcoming conference October 4-5, 2014.
Invention: Contemporary Artists and the Modern House responds to the curatorial shift in the maintenance of house museums, in which directors are supporting increasingly transformative art installations that both challenge and celebrate the modernist landmarks. These collaborations with artists point to alternative preservation strategies, which move away from the conservation of historic homes as static objects and instead affirm the importance of human occupation and transformation. The conference will host a series of conversations between house museum directors, curators, artists and architects to reveal the curatorial motivations and artistic processes behind these interventions.
I’ll be joining Mark Allen, the incredibly creative guy behind Machine Project, and Ted Bosley, the Director of the Gamble House, for an intimate conversation about Machine Project’s playfully irreverent installations and performances at the historic Pasadena home. Be sure to check out the entire conference schedule (Oct 4-5), which takes conference goers to the marvelous MAK Center on King’s Road (built by Schindler), the Neutra VDL house, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House.
All events are free to the public. To register for the conference, visit the registration page.
Deflating the Filter Bubble
I was asked recently to speak at a symposium on Media Choices at Drexel University. The event drew a fascinating array of scholars who were studying things like Internet addiction, online dating, and political polarization in media consumption.
When someone mentions “media choice” to me, I automatically start thinking about the algorithms that have been developed to help shape that choice.
I have followed avidly the growing use of recommendation systems that you see on sites like Amazon, Netflix, YouTube and Pandora. I saw these mechanisms as a significant move away from demographic marketing (which I find deeply flawed) to marketing based on customer taste.
I did have my reservations though. I was very moved by Eli Pariser’s TED talk about the danger of “filter bubbles,” which effectively insulate us from opinions and content that we don’t understand or like. His talk really resonated with me because of the deeply divided ideological and taste communities that I found in a major survey research project I conducted on the correlation between entertainment preferences and political ideology (spoiler: they are even more deeply connected than you might think.)
But, when I conducted further research about collaborative filtering systems, I made some rather counter-intuitive discoveries. YouTube, for instance, found that “suggesting the videos most closely related to the one a person is already watching actually drives them away.”
Of course YouTube’s goal is to get you to sit and watch YouTube like you watch TV: to lean back and watch a half hour to an hour of programming, rather than watching for two minutes, getting frustrated trying to find something else worth watching and then going elsewhere. So, in short, it’s in YouTube’s best interest to introduce some calculated serendipity into their recommendations. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve Been Upworthied!
I just found out my TED.com talk on fashion and copyright was deemed Upworthy. As you probably know, Upworthy is a crafty outfit that goes to great lengths to increase viewership of video content that serves some kind of socially progressive purpose. Part of their process includes generating multiple potential headlines and photos, and testing the different combinations on different platforms to see which combos attract the most views.
Of course it’s fascinating to me to see what they decided worked best for my video:
I must say, it never occurred to me that my argument was something “hippies” would love, but there ya go!
I’ve been following Upworthy’s progress for the last two and half years, and I was especially excited to hear about how they are developing new metrics for assessing how people are engaging with the media they’re promoting. Uniques? Nah. Time on site? Nope! Their latest focus? Attention Minutes, which they define here:
Attention Minutes measures everything from video player signals about whether a video is currently playing to a user’s mouse movements to which browser tab is currently open — all to determine whether the user is still engaged. The result is a fine-grained and unforgiving metric that tells us whether people are really engaged with our content or have moved on to the next thing.
At the Norman Lear Center, where I’m managing director, we have been studying the “Attention Economy” for several years, and now with our Media Impact Project, we have the opportunity to develop tools that accurately measure human attention. Needless to say, there’s a great deal of debate about how this might be done and so we invited several experts in the field — including Daniel Mintz from Upworthy — to debate the topic on our new website, The Fray. Launched with a skeptical piece by Richard Tofel from ProPublica, we solicited responses from ChartBeat, LunaMetrics, the Financial Times, Parse.ly and Columbia University.
This is not a debate that’s going to be settled any time soon, but I sure hope I find out whether my little video turns out to be must-see-TV for hippies.
Inspecting Indian Vogue
As I was shedding my last bunch of rupees at Indira Gandhi Airport in New Delhi, I quickly snagged a copy of Vogue India to read on the plane. I was curious to see how different it felt from the American version, especially after spending two weeks crisscrossing Northern India.
One thing I’d been warned about before arriving is that women on the street do not – I mean DO NOT – wear the kind of revealing clothing that you see in Bollywood films. Head to toe covering is the standard; even short sleeves are pretty rare. Even when it’s hot. Scorching hot.
Billboards and TV ads in India reflect the bodacious Bollywood ideal, but I can’t recall seeing anybody dress like that in even the glitziest restaurants and hotels in Delhi.
Much of the recommended clothing in the editorial portions of the magazine also defied street conventions, including shorts, short skirts, form-fitting or whisper thin dresses (a big no no, I was told), and long skirts (OK) with equally long slits (absolutely not OK). There was also a gorgeous swim suit spread, but I had to wonder: where in India could they be worn? As far as I could tell, Western-style hotel swimming pools would be the only acceptable place.
Similar to American Vogue, the Indian version featured profiles of successful women, including a comedienne, a radical novelist, and a slough of Indian art collectors in Dubai. The issue had a very global feel – it was, for instance, the first place I glimpsed Adidas’ fresh new World Cup garment collection, which they concocted in collaboration with The Farm Brand, a Brazilian fashion label.
I wasn’t surprised by the insane number of jewelry ads; women in India are often not allowed to have bank accounts or real estate assets, but the jewelry is often all theirs (check out this NPR piece about Indian women’s obsession with gold). Read the rest of this entry »
