Dissing Information
Questionable priorities of archeological facts on Google Maps, divisive cross-lingual links on Wikipedia… Are the ideological distortions of history on so-called balanced online services here to stay? As I was working with Laila El-Haddad on the 2009 version of You Are Not Here, we were looking for interesting locations to feature on our mediated/dislocated tour. … Continue reading A Subtle Zionist Occupation of Gaza through Google Maps
This video is taken from a public debate between Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Dr. Israel Eldad and Dr. Menachem Brinker in 1980.
In the 50:40 minute an Israeli farmer asking what should he tell the Ismaili (apparently referring to the Biblical term used in the debate by members from the right portraying the Palestinians as the arch-enemies of the Jews in Biblical Israel/Palestine friend), who works in his farm and asks him:
“This land that you’re working, I sat in just 30 years ago… In a friendly manner he says that… How can you explain the fact you are working it now? And sometimes, with my labor… You hire me and my friends, to work for you on the land that belongs to me.”
The Israeli farmer continues…
“What will I explain to that Arab, which I want to live with in peace, that I want to reach the day in which he will think of me as a friend and will not think bad thoughts about me.”
The following is an essay I wrote together with Florian Schmitt (hi-res.net) for the Offf 2009 festival in Lisbon. Florian and I will also host a panel on Saturday, May 9th with Aaron Koblin, PES, and Joshua Davis, to discuss the ‘Fail Gracefully’ theme. Come say hi!
We fail. We all do, and our failures often say more about us than our successes do. But we hide failure, we are ashamed of it and we often just deny it altogether. For almost a decade the Offf festival have featured successful digital creators in design and experimental sound and have celebrated the cutting edge of digital aesthetics. This year, we shed some light on the dark side of success and discover the dynamics and aesthetics of failure. Continue reading “Fail Gracefully”
What Gaza teaches us of networked solidarity The web is celebrated as this new radical space that re-challenges our old definitions of identity and solidarity, beyond prejudice, beyond borders, beyond nationality. However, the war in Gaza and the mediation around it tells a slightly different story. I would like to focus a couple of blog … Continue reading Gaza and the media parasite/host reversal
Four years ago I gave this presentation about the amazing experience I had in Ars Electronica 2001 when I was invited by the guys at Team Chman (the ones behind Banja) and by the illustrator Barbara Lippe to create a Flash arcade anti-game with them called Knut. I just accidentally found this at Google Video: … Continue reading Knut presentation (2003)
A draft for a column on Israeli design for ‘Computer Arts’ magazine. Continue reading “A Short Pick at the Israeli Graphic Design Scene”
Thoughts about opt-in surveillance technologies
Unforgettable Face
I just lately came across this cool website called Riya. Riya is an image search engine that doesn’t only search the data associated with the image, but actually searches the image content itself. Riya recognizes text in the images and through it’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and human faces through it’s impressive face recognition technology. You can train Riya to know that a specific face belongs to a specific name. While image storage and managing services such as Flickr require the user to tag the images with metadata, Riya is smart, it can learn, and it can put a name to a face.
About two months ago, Galia and I were walking down 116th Street in Harlem. Being terribly late for our meeting with Dan and Ellie, we tried to walk as fast as we could. As we were walking by a little neighborhood Basketball court, something there made us stop. In the middle of the court the Basketball hoop was lying, it’s base torn off and it’s board flat facing the ground. Something about this image was so disturbing for us that we couldn’t just walk by and ignore it.
Continue reading “An Emergent Public Artwork in 116th Street”
