Selective Information

via swissmiss | Are you Happy?

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (via theRSAorg)

Fascinating ANIMATED video from DAN PINK’S lecture at the RSA which discusses whether money incentives are the best way to develop ideas and organisations.

UP THERE (by The Ritual Project)

Short film looking at advertising from a different angle - from the eyes of the men who paint adverts on the sides of buildings in NY. Men who stand in the face of technological change; men whose craft is on the way out.

Word of warning, it’s also an unashamed Stella Artois advert.

Robert M. Pirsig, author and philosopher

Some times you should just let the really clever people say it, they’ve said it in the best way possible before. This is a critique of the information age if I ever saw one:

“‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the questions ‘What is best?’, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and ‘best’ was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now.

   Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.”

- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974

(via www.insidesuccessradio.com)

Julie Grahame runs the incredible aCurator magazine, an online website dedicated to showing new photography in a format which images do not often get online - the full screen.

She has also very generously written a short piece about some of my work, and I’m really happy with the way it came out. You can check it out at the below link:

http://www.acurator.com/blog/2010/05/max-colson.html

Newspaper Blackout Book Trailer

[If you want a bit more info on where you can find more examples of this new form + what I think about it, then check out my post below]

(via Austin Kleon)

Blackout Poetry. Poetry made from literally blacking out erroneous, unwanted words from a printed page. Making something new out of the before.

Art that has not yet been taken up by the establishment as of yet; anyone can do it.

[I’ve blogged about the virtues of accessibility in art before (well actually I stole a quote from the German painter George Grosz), and I think it’s really important. However, I will save that discussion for another post.]

In the meantime check out this cool new movement; this is big already, but it’s going to be even more massive.

For more info and examples, check out the Newspaper Blackout blog itself. Also check out the blog of Austin Kleon, from whom this movement seems to have sprung from.

(via ashleymangan)

This is a video of the Art Upstart, who is an abstract painter whom I have followed since I came across his social media campaign in late 2009 (which attempted to see whether he could gain as much popularity, in Google search terms, as the artists featured on the BBC’s School of Saatchi when it was running on TV). His brand was ostentatiously anti art establishment then, and now it’s even more so.

Clearly a very savvy character, James ‘The Art Upstart’ Hogan, has centred his bid for popularity by associating himself with the bid to fight against the convention which creates public artists today - the art establishment itself, or the influential tastes of an incredibly small clique.

His campaign for exposure, which markets his work by skillfully blending its exhibition online with a discussion of what is art itself (and what should be deemed ‘artistic’), is clearly territory for the social media age; a strange mysterious land in which ‘community engagement’ is of course the plat du jour. Appropriately, his campaign exists to encourage that his worth is judged not only by his actual work, but by how the public have engaged with him - his front page proudly promotes his Twitter & Flickr communities, and he has openly campaigns to have his personal brand ranked on Google. To use the words of the man himself:

“This is my chronicle of my journey as a new artist seeking to get noticed – and I need your help. You can influence my launch by conducting Google searches for James Hogan: the Art Upstart, and encouraging others to visit this blog. I’d like to give the power to make or break an artist into the hands of the public. Let’s turn the art establishment on its head.”

In successfully ‘empowering’ us, he most importantly empowers himself; appropriately he has now published a book with high plaudits from towering figures in the popular media such as Greg Dyke, Adam Boulton, and Andrew Neil, and has an upcoming exhibition in Cork Street, the bastion of London’s art scene. You might also have caught this article in the Evening Standard today.

For more on his work check out his fascinating blog, which clearly shows that his creative skills lie not only in art itself.

(Tumbled via YouTube - whoistheartupstart’s Channel)

No More Gas - A DJ Earworm Mashup (via djearworm)

Check out this mash up video by the outstanding remix artist DJ Earworm. Great song and a brilliant, highly suggestive, comment on consumer culture using snippets of itself (Rhianna, Britney Spears and all the other pop chart cheese you could ever want).

The Century Of The Self - Part 1 of 4

Documentary which concerns itself the processes and ideas behind mass communication, and looks at its past. It’s rather unsettling in quite a lot of places.