serial consign

I've been keeping tabs on the London-based artist Martin John Callanan for quite a while now. Martin is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans numerous mediums and engages both emerging and commonplace technology. Martin shines in the delivery and tone of his projects, his work is always decidedly deadpan and served with a dash of ennui. Some of his more well known pieces include the ambient audio installation Sonification of You, and the meta-news aggregator I Wanted to See All the News From Today (which I wrote about in my Front Page Aesthetics post last fall). Martin has just launched a new project called Text Trends, a piece commissioned by the Gallery for Internet and Media Art (GIMA), an organization that is currently setting up shop in Berlin.

Text Trends is a sendup of the ubiquitous line graphs and related information returned by services like Google Trends. The project takes the content generated by these types of X vs. Y search queries and reduces this process to its most essential elements: search terms, frequency mentioned and a timeline. In experiencing the piece, the viewer sits idly and watches animations plot out the ebb and flow (or lack thereof) of a series of search terms over the last four years. This all plays out matter-of-factly with all the passion of a market index or a readerboard. Instead of the infoglut and hyper-interactivity of emerging news mashups and aggregators, Text Trends revels in stark pans across curated comparisons while exploring topics like political figureheads, temporality and politics.

In viewing this piece, I found that it invoked a bit of anxiety and I felt a little helpless, almost as if I was watching a Hitchcock film. Rap Graphs notwithstanding, this the first visualization that I've seen in a while that was largely indifferent towards complexity, interactivity and next-level datasthetics. A few weeks ago, Rob Myers uttered a rather brilliant quip on twitter–"Data Visualization is the Socialist Realism of Neoliberalism." While not the first expression of this sentiment, I haven't heard it stated so succinctly. Being confronted by the bleakness and pacing of Text Trends has left me feeling like little more than an info-addict, eager for my next fix of visual complexity or flowing data. I'm not critiquing the work for being incredibly simple and direct, rather drawing attention to the fact that the piece makes me feel like a bit of a consumer.

It is not too often that you come across a data-based project that makes you step back and think about how you qualify and evaluate visualization. More importantly Text Trends abstracts the casual manner in which we receive, scan and process information and language on a daily basis.

This weekend a communique announcing a new release on Audiobulb Records ended up in the Serial Consign inbox. The project, entitled 1 | Favourite Places, is a compilation of "audio portraits" of specific locations from around the world as collected and interpreted by several artists including Leafcutter John, Taylor Deupree and Biosphere. Each of the contributing artists have captured field recordings from a place of their choosing and composed a piece of music around their site-specific aural fragments. This in and of itself isn't revolutionary as there is no shortage of field recording-based projects, but the overall design vision for the compilation is quite noteworthy.

1 | Favourite Places is supplemented with an interactive microsite (pictured above) which allow you to geo-locate the place that inspired each piece of music, hear the source field recordings and read brief statements from each of the artists. This flash based site is quite tasteful (i.e. no gratuitous animation) and exploring the interface definitely captures the spirit of the release. It is beyond the scope of this post to talk about accessibility and web standards, but it is worth mentioning that I had to use Safari to view the site as Firefox on OS X wouldn't work. This grievance aside, I enjoyed the piece and it definitely piqued my interest about the compilation. Beyond that (and at the risk of sounding nostalgic), I haven't seen any album specific interactive pieces like this since the heyday of Force Inc.

The microsite was designed by Andy Newman in response to the album design and packaging which was handled by Stereographic. I haven't heard Favourite Places yet but the March issue of Textura weighed in with a positive review of the compilation. It appears this release is to be the first of a series as Audiobulb has already posted a call for work for the next edition of the project.

[ruin / audiobulb fz-bulb / 2007]

1 | Favourite Places inspired some exploration of the main Audiobulb site and the label does appear to live up to its self-described interest in "Exploratory Electronic Music". The Sheffield-based imprint is run by David Newman and has been releasing ambient and experimental music since 2003. In cruising around the site it was great to see that the label is not only promoting a solid back catalog but a selection of VSTs, patches and even some hardware. Outside of overplayed discussions about distribution, it is not too often that you see a small independent record label thinking outside of the box so respect must be given where it is due. Keep an eye on this label!