22/02/2012
10/01/2012
Twatter: a reaction on Twitter ;-)
Watch a twat!-
I really like Twatter. It's got a great name and I can tell people when I'm doing fucking EVERYTHING in my life.
Beff Jarr, Amazone.cock, Senior Manager
-
When I first started doing it, I thought, 'geez, not another website to worry about updating and checking', but now I'm glad I did it because I've developed an over-inflated sense of self-importance and glow smugly to myself in the bathroom mirror.
Mr Timothy Watt, Self-appointed UEBER-TWAT
-
Incredibly useful (if you glue a brick to your head and jump in a lake)
Weird Magazine
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05/01/2012
Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds
Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds
- By Brandon Keim
- May 16, 2011 |
- 6:30 pm |
- Categories: Brains and Behavior
When people can learn what others think, the wisdom of crowds may veer towards ignorance. In a new study of crowd wisdom — the statistical phenomenon by which individual biases cancel each other out, distilling hundreds or thousands of individual guesses into uncannily accurate average answers — researchers told test participants about their peers’ guesses. As a result, their group insight went awry.
“Although groups are initially ‘wise,’ knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines” collective wisdom, wrote researchers led by mathematician Jan Lorenz and sociologist Heiko Rahut of Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 16. “Even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect.”
The effect — perhaps better described as the accuracy of crowds, since it best applies to questions involving quantifiable estimates — has been described for decades, beginning with Francis Galton’s 1907 account of fairgoers guessing an ox’s weight. It reached mainstream prominence with economist James Surowiecki’s 2004 bestseller, The Wisdom of Crowds.
Study participants were asked how many murders occurred in Switzerland in 2006. At the end of each round of questioning, they were given small payments for coming close to the actual answer (signified by the gray bar). At left is the range of responses among participants who received no information about others.
As Surowiecki explained, certain conditions must be met for crowd wisdom to emerge. Members of the crowd ought to have a variety of opinions, and to arrive at those opinions independently. Take those away, and crowd intelligence fails, as evidenced in some market bubbles. Computer modeling of crowd behavior also hints at dynamics underlying crowd breakdowns, with he balance between information flow and diverse opinions becoming skewed.
Lorenz and Rahut’s experiment fits between large-scale, real-world messiness and theoretical investigation. They recruited 144 students from ETH Zurich, sitting them in isolated cubicles and asking them to guess Switzerland’s population density, the length of its border with Italy, the number of new immigrants to Zurich and how many crimes were committed in 2006.
After answering, test subjects were given a small monetary reward based on their answer’s accuracy, then asked again. This proceeded for four more rounds; and while some students didn’t learn what their peers guessed, others were told.
As testing progressed, the average answers of independent test subjects became more accurate, in keeping with the wisdom-of-crowds phenomenon. Socially influenced test subjects, however, actually became less accurate. The researchers attributed this to three effects. The first they called “social influence”: Opinions became less diverse. The second effect was “range reduction”: In mathematical terms, correct answers became clustered at the group’s edges. Exacerbating it all was the “confidence effect,” in which students became more certain about their guesses.
“The truth becomes less central if social influence is allowed,” wrote Lorenz and Rahut, who think this problem could be intensified in markets and politics — systems that rely on collective assessment.
“Opinion polls and the mass media largely promote information feedback and therefore trigger convergence of how we judge the facts,” they wrote. The wisdom of crowds is valuable, but used improperly it “creates overconfidence in possibly false beliefs.”
Images: The Euronext Amsterdam floor (Perpetualtourist2000/Flickr).
Citation: “How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect.” By Jan Lorenz, Heiko Rauhut, Frank Schweitzer, and Dirk Helbing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 108 No. 20, May 17, 2011.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/wisdom-of-crowds-decline/
29/12/2011
ARTBLOG MINUS ARTLOG
This weblog or ‘blog’ will not be a logbook on my artistic practice. I will not submit pictures of my experiments to it, keep a diary or sketchbook on the blog, publicize my works or use it as an storage for my collection of ‘inspiration sources’. Instead it will be a space for my opinion about freedom vs. controlling systems, about my opinion on blogging as a presentation of your artlogbook.
Art is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.[1] Art means to me communication; to express or apply your creativity and imagination in a visual form, which can be shown to other people and communicate a certain message, evoke a certain emotion, (re)create certain thoughts, etc. Creating something out of something.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles tells us in her ‘letter to a young artist’ that art is being the articulation of freedom.[2] And that it can reach a feeling of freedom in other people by the originality as a value of the artwork. I agree with you. For me, freedom as an artist is not just an emphasis on the word ‘freedom’. It is having the power to act, speak and think you want; the power of self-determination. Not being imprisoned or enslaved.
It is the power of listening to your own thoughts, daring to let them come out; do something with your ideas. For me, this is also a fight or struggle. It is a trial and error research, to reach the state of freedom. Trying to be in control, but at the same time, daring to fail or letting control sometimes slip away. Or showing the failure or suffering of no freedom, being stuck in the system that drags us down...
Mierle Laderman Ukeles also describes the term ‘uniqueness’ in her letter.[3] For me, the definition uniqueness means being the only one of its kind, unlike anything else; being particularly remarkable, special or unusual. Uniqueness is ‘unus’ (Latin for one). It belongs to something, connects a certain ‘unus’ with the world by its difference. For me, the position of an artist contains something of this ‘unus’ connection with the world. Taking in a different position, being a different observer, actor or reflector. Taking a step backwards, see and reflect on your environment, with your imagination and thoughts. Interfere in it. However this could be an aspect that is present in everyone.
Process means taking series of steps or actions to reach or achieve a certain goal or end. This can be seen in the steps you take during experiments in a small amount of time, but also in a longer row, within your artworks. Everything you do will be a result, whether it is something you consider as an artwork or an experiment; in the end it will be just something caused by an action. It is an outcome. I think your artworks reflect how you develop yourself as an artist, but also as a person. Concerning the choices you make, the positions you take and the reflections you do. I see the studio as a visual and/or physical part of identification of the artist, showing his or her personal work rituals, the organization, personal belongings that tell something about the artist. ‘Searching for the unity of being’ as a person and an artist; the struggle of survival or searching for your inner I. Showing parts of the artist’s reality, being immersed into this reality as an artist. The studio as a place of thinking, conceiving ideas and producing. A site for researching, obtaining knowledge; practice and reflective based. It should be a location in which the artist is able to concentrate; a place to reach the inner-flow of questions, solutions, new questions, solutions, and so on. A place where the connection between the artist’s concepts and visual works takes place.
To reach this state I need to break with daily life, forget time. To go to a certain place, a place I can define as my workplace. Having a physical place outside daily life. Creating an atmosphere in which time does not interfere. The closed door, to acquire an solitary space, helps me to reach this; an area without eyes to watch you; having no spying cameras surrounding you. It should be a place in which safety is a main key, free from outside rules, creating your own rules in your own workplace. A place in which failure and success, and the boundary between those, can be seen; containing the artist’s weakness, fragility and strength. A place where you can keep these things inside the space without having pressure from the outside, having the ability for failure.
The blog means to me a way of loosing my freedom and safety feeling as an artist. Being watched over, whenever the viewer wants. I would like to compare this with the philosophy of Foucault from the book ‘Discipline and Punish’. So I would like you to imagine the late dark ages…Imagine living in a small town…Imagine the plague…
Imagine living in a district where the plague has occurred. You will be divided from the other districts in town and being prohibited to leave the town on pain of death. Ordered to stay indoors, being a prisoner in your own house. Under the control and authority of the syndic.
You will be locked up in your house, in a fixed place. Moving will be paid with your death. You will be checked everyday by the syndic; having to state your condition, having to appear in front of the window, being seen by the syndic. Having to be completely depending on the syndics, intendants and magistrates; the authorities who decide on the plague condition and therefor your condition. Than, after the quarantine, you will be ordered to leave your house, to participate on the purification of your dominion. Using the plague as a disciplinary system; for a pure disciplined community. Regulation is forcing a way into everyday life.[4]
Jeremy Bentham created this effect in an architectural model, in which the visibility and observation of the inmate plays a keyrole. He called his model Panopticon, Greek word for all-seeing.[5] The principal exists out of two buildings; the peripherical building, and at the center a supervisor tower. The tower contains large windows, facing the peripherical building, walls on the other side to avoid back lightning. This enables to look from the center tower to the peripherical building without being seen. The peripherical building on the other hand, is divided up into cells. Each cell contains two windows, a large window facing the tower, and a smaller one on the other end of the cell. In this way light enters the cell and enables the supervisor in the center tower to have full visual control on the cells, without himself being exposed.
The prisoner has no direct contact with others, is placed in a little theatre, is a visual object; the subject for observation with no escape. Whatever happens inside the tower is not visible. A prisoner in his cell, never knows exactly when he/she is being watched, which creates the feeling of being watched all the time. The building’s mechanism alone creates this power. The tower of control is continuously the only thing the prisoner is seeing. In short: the prisoner cannot know when he is being watched, he must have the feeling of always being looked. I see the blog as a controlling system for being watched everyday, every moment on what you are doing. You are obliged to update it, to post, to prove you are still doing something; to act in a way that is suspected from you. The feeling of being watched and the obligation to keep it updated, gives me pressure, encloses my feeling of artistic freedom. It feels like there is even a regulation system in the autonomous arts you practice in your studio!
Blogging is about communication. Communication can be described as the imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium; it is about sending or receiving information. It arrives from the Latin word for ‘to share’.[6] This means a blog is a personal website in which you post your opinions, your themes and links on a regular basis and on which other members or viewers can react. This has to be done in a certain format with the help of a computer with access to the Internet. When I reflect on my work, I need to have pen and paper, being able to make mindmaps/brainstorms. I want to lie down, sit wherever I want, to walk, do everything that helps me to think and note it down. I want to be in direct contact with my work without distraction of a screen; without a virtual computer world. It is a matter of concentration, the computer distracts me, feels as another interference between me and the final paper with my reflection/notes/ etc. that I want to have.
For me, communication through the computer is about scanning quickly through the pile of images, video clips, texts, pop-ups, ads, spam, etc. I think blogs stimulate this feeling of scanning everything quickly. It’s layout and use is design for easily see the main headings and images. Especially by the use of signs like thumb up (‘I like it’) and smileys people can give a quick reaction on the quickly scanned information. You can get through a whole chapter in less than five minutes and let others know you have read something about it.
But communication also changes in this way. Because of the quick way of sending, people send a lot of nonsense on their blogs. Texts are becoming shorter with less factual or relevant information (people are just stating what they are doing, like “I’m cleaning my house”. Sentences start to exist out of a few words or even without any words by just using a smiley (A reaction on “I’m cleaning my house” could be “thumb up”). Some blogs even have a limit on the amount of characters/text length you can send per blog post. The total essential part about why and with which arguments is in this totally being left out. It also contains a social status element, the number of friends, number of ‘I like it’s’ and number of posts seem to matter.
For me this way of communicating doesn’t work. I do not want to discuss my work through the use of a blog. It works to quick; you, the artist, will make a quick picture at the end of your working day, put this on your blog with a date and will maybe get a reaction, if it matters or is interesting enough between al the other exploding information. The reactions you maybe will receive are short (maybe not even written in words) or without any arguments of the person who placed the comment. Or maybe not understood in the way they are meant. The interference of the computer is a distraction, concerning image and concentration it remove the quality. In discussing the work it is important to have a good visual representation of the work, the best is having the real work in front of you. Being able to make a good analysis and interpretation of the work with distraction of other things from your daily life. You are able to communicate in words, sounds, movements and images in a direct way. It is also a better way of testing whether the one who receives it understands your feedback correctly.
Still I am thinking about another way of sharing some of my thoughts with the other FMI students rather than just through visiting my studio. In a way that does not interfere in my safety and private zone, nor include a lot of computer work. At this point, the best solution to discuss certain problems with other students seems to me by writing a letter to them. Last assignment for the roundtable seemed to me as a good idea for a way to ask others for help or a reaction on certain problems or statements concerning my studio work. I am curious how this will turn out…
The blog means to me a way of loosing my freedom and safety feeling as an artist. Being watched over, whenever the viewer wants. I would like to compare this with the philosophy of Foucault from the book ‘Discipline and Punish’. So I would like you to imagine the late dark ages…Imagine living in a small town…Imagine the plague…
Imagine living in a district where the plague has occurred. You will be divided from the other districts in town and being prohibited to leave the town on pain of death. Ordered to stay indoors, being a prisoner in your own house. Under the control and authority of the syndic.
You will be locked up in your house, in a fixed place. Moving will be paid with your death. You will be checked everyday by the syndic; having to state your condition, having to appear in front of the window, being seen by the syndic. Having to be completely depending on the syndics, intendants and magistrates; the authorities who decide on the plague condition and therefor your condition. Than, after the quarantine, you will be ordered to leave your house, to participate on the purification of your dominion. Using the plague as a disciplinary system; for a pure disciplined community. Regulation is forcing a way into everyday life.[4]
Jeremy Bentham created this effect in an architectural model, in which the visibility and observation of the inmate plays a keyrole. He called his model Panopticon, Greek word for all-seeing.[5] The principal exists out of two buildings; the peripherical building, and at the center a supervisor tower. The tower contains large windows, facing the peripherical building, walls on the other side to avoid back lightning. This enables to look from the center tower to the peripherical building without being seen. The peripherical building on the other hand, is divided up into cells. Each cell contains two windows, a large window facing the tower, and a smaller one on the other end of the cell. In this way light enters the cell and enables the supervisor in the center tower to have full visual control on the cells, without himself being exposed.
The prisoner has no direct contact with others, is placed in a little theatre, is a visual object; the subject for observation with no escape. Whatever happens inside the tower is not visible. A prisoner in his cell, never knows exactly when he/she is being watched, which creates the feeling of being watched all the time. The building’s mechanism alone creates this power. The tower of control is continuously the only thing the prisoner is seeing. In short: the prisoner cannot know when he is being watched, he must have the feeling of always being looked. I see the blog as a controlling system for being watched everyday, every moment on what you are doing. You are obliged to update it, to post, to prove you are still doing something; to act in a way that is suspected from you. The feeling of being watched and the obligation to keep it updated, gives me pressure, encloses my feeling of artistic freedom. It feels like there is even a regulation system in the autonomous arts you practice in your studio!
Blogging is about communication. Communication can be described as the imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium; it is about sending or receiving information. It arrives from the Latin word for ‘to share’.[6] This means a blog is a personal website in which you post your opinions, your themes and links on a regular basis and on which other members or viewers can react. This has to be done in a certain format with the help of a computer with access to the Internet. When I reflect on my work, I need to have pen and paper, being able to make mindmaps/brainstorms. I want to lie down, sit wherever I want, to walk, do everything that helps me to think and note it down. I want to be in direct contact with my work without distraction of a screen; without a virtual computer world. It is a matter of concentration, the computer distracts me, feels as another interference between me and the final paper with my reflection/notes/ etc. that I want to have.
For me, communication through the computer is about scanning quickly through the pile of images, video clips, texts, pop-ups, ads, spam, etc. I think blogs stimulate this feeling of scanning everything quickly. It’s layout and use is design for easily see the main headings and images. Especially by the use of signs like thumb up (‘I like it’) and smileys people can give a quick reaction on the quickly scanned information. You can get through a whole chapter in less than five minutes and let others know you have read something about it.
But communication also changes in this way. Because of the quick way of sending, people send a lot of nonsense on their blogs. Texts are becoming shorter with less factual or relevant information (people are just stating what they are doing, like “I’m cleaning my house”. Sentences start to exist out of a few words or even without any words by just using a smiley (A reaction on “I’m cleaning my house” could be “thumb up”). Some blogs even have a limit on the amount of characters/text length you can send per blog post. The total essential part about why and with which arguments is in this totally being left out. It also contains a social status element, the number of friends, number of ‘I like it’s’ and number of posts seem to matter.
For me this way of communicating doesn’t work. I do not want to discuss my work through the use of a blog. It works to quick; you, the artist, will make a quick picture at the end of your working day, put this on your blog with a date and will maybe get a reaction, if it matters or is interesting enough between al the other exploding information. The reactions you maybe will receive are short (maybe not even written in words) or without any arguments of the person who placed the comment. Or maybe not understood in the way they are meant. The interference of the computer is a distraction, concerning image and concentration it remove the quality. In discussing the work it is important to have a good visual representation of the work, the best is having the real work in front of you. Being able to make a good analysis and interpretation of the work with distraction of other things from your daily life. You are able to communicate in words, sounds, movements and images in a direct way. It is also a better way of testing whether the one who receives it understands your feedback correctly.
Still I am thinking about another way of sharing some of my thoughts with the other FMI students rather than just through visiting my studio. In a way that does not interfere in my safety and private zone, nor include a lot of computer work. At this point, the best solution to discuss certain problems with other students seems to me by writing a letter to them. Last assignment for the roundtable seemed to me as a good idea for a way to ask others for help or a reaction on certain problems or statements concerning my studio work. I am curious how this will turn out…
[1] Definition of art, 14 – 11 – 11, 14 – 11 – 11, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/art?rskey=WUFPA5&result=1
[2] Peter Nesbett, Sarah Andress (eds.), Letters to a young artist, New York: Darte Publishing, 2006, pp. 75, 76.
[4] Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, the birth of the prison, London, Penguin Group, 1977, pp. 195 – 199. Foucault gives a detailed describtion about the quarantine of a plague stricken town and the discplinary effect and control of the regulations on the people.
[6] Definition of communication, 29 – 11 – 11, 29 – 11 – 11, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/communication?q=communication
Architectural Building Panopticon
From: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Panopticon.jpg
05/10/2011
In the southern province of Guangdong, one can drive for hours along
numerous highways that reveal a virtually unbroken landscape of factories and workers’ dormitories.[1]
numerous highways that reveal a virtually unbroken landscape of factories and workers’ dormitories.[1]
--- Edward Burtynsky
Industrial land as an undefined space made up of concrete, asphalt, container boxes and factories. The factories are unknown spaces that produce in an unknown land. Machinery can be heard and smelt. And office districts with its offices as boxes placed on top of each other, with the computer as a virtual space. Do these undefined spaces contain a heartbeat, do they breath, do they contain a soul? Or are they artificial; manufactured? Is this the reality of a living space?
I’m interested in the spaces dedicated to the capitalistic system: spaces belonging to industrialisation and bureaucracy. People are living in a world of production: making products, moving them, buying them and putting them into their homes. People live in a produced environment, whether they are at work or at home. The industrial space is interwoven with living space.
The growth of the industrial districts in Asia is at a cost of the Western-European industrial space. Especially China is creating new, fast industrial cities like Xiamen city, Dongguan and Zhejiang. Here in Western Europe the industrial spaces are becoming empty, hollow and only contain traces of the glory of production. They are fallow, forgotten and becoming unknown spaces. They must move, are torn down or being converted to office space. Offices communicate with the speed of light with the new industrial countries in the East. The fast development of technology makes it possible for us to prosume, reproduce and spread information in seconds. We are involved in the Internet, the extension of our world. We are losing the boundary between reality and fiction, between industrialisation and life.
In my work I want to observe and get in contact with these unknown spaces. Examine them as spaces where people move in, breath in, live in. I want to sense them, smell them, isolate them, feel the boundaries, concentrate on them and enter into them; experience them. Photography is used as a vision of the real spaces, my inspiration. I would like to explore the unknown spaces by means of the limits and unlimits of drawing. By drawing them I want to investigate my real observation and my imaginary one and recover the tension between what is reality and what is fictional.
I want to dismantle the machinery and production lines, stop them and search for something that is not productive or functional. Crack the system. Find out whether they have a spirit; whether they have a soul. Creating my own industrial reality.
I want to dismantle the machinery and production lines, stop them and search for something that is not productive or functional. Crack the system. Find out whether they have a spirit; whether they have a soul. Creating my own industrial reality.
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