-Richard Stallman
Carol Tavris – Mistakes Were Made
Audio Interview at Carol Tavris – Mistakes Were Made | For Good Reason.
Carol Tavris describes dissonance theory and how self-justification and self-deception often keep people from changing their minds even in the light of compelling contrary evidence, because the evidence is often dissonant with one’s self-image. She details the implications of dissonance theory for the persistence of psychic charlatans and other peddlers of the paranormal, and how it may explain how someone like Sylvia Brown can live with herself, and also how it may explain how believers remain so gullible about such unsupportable claims. She describes confirmation bias as a component of dissonance theory. She talks about how dissonance theory applies to the skeptic movement, both in terms of suggesting the best strategies for engaging the credulous, and in terms of fostering skepticism about one’s own skeptical views. And she argues that skepticism should be affirmative rather than destructive in its approach, and focused on both critical thinking and creative thinking alike.
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Hip-Hop Word Count™
Hiop-Hop Word Count by Tahir Hemphill:
We have developed a rubric that estimates the education level needed to understand each rhyme as well as, rates the artistic sophistication employed through the metaphors, similes, cultural references, consonantal/vocalic alliteration and overall pattern of each rhyme. We calculate the final score by averaging the syntactic (readability measures) and semantic (artistic sophistication) scores of each rhyme. On a scale from 0 (illiterate) to 20 (post-graduate degree).
here’s an except from a person who didn’t like the project in the comments:
Here’s a better idea…stop trying to measure the level of education needed to understand the components of something that is in fact an art form. I mean come on, how do you determine what is considered “artistic sophistication”? If this were applied to poetry, say Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son”, what would the score be? “Artistic sophistication” is qualitative and highly subjective, and I truly question how it’s been implemented. Although I don’t believe it’s your intent, this tool can easily be used (as I’ve already seen on grandgood.com) to compare Rakim’s vs. 50 Cent’s lyrics. Huh? What’s the purpose in that, on a site that despises Lil Wayne and 50 Cent and worships KRS-One and Immortal Technique? Reads like hip hop elitism rearing its big a–ugly head again! This rubric is being used to indicate that hip hop should be communicated in only a particular way in order to be considered more legitimate than others, and it appears that its results are used to devalue the use of slang, jargon, colloquialism in lyrics.
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Why Metrics Are Killing Creativity in Advertising
“Thing is, you cannot truly quantify creativity. And in ever-increasing fashion, our clients’ (and our own) rote dependence on the dusty world of metrics is exactly why creativity is going to hell. When marketing decisions are based on numbers, we lose completely the desire to “waste” time being creative. And heaven forbid we ever again just go with our gut feelings. Of course, I’m in no way advocating the death of metrics, just a different approach with creativity as the vanguard” — Patrick Sarkissian, AdAge, March 4 2010
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Sublime Accidents
A public service ad for a seatbelt campaign in the UK, gone viral with lots of press too. Nice tension between beauty and horror. But if I didn’t before, will I wear a seatbelt now? Or does this serve the function of reinforcement? Or merely an e-mail forward as banal statement of concern? Hard to know what to do with an aesthetic which is about drawing the viewer into enraptured spectatorship rather than pushing them away into activity.
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Provisions Library Blog
Signal Fire is the blog of Provisions Library, a non-profit learning resource for arts and social change.
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God Hates Flags
The infamous westboro baptist church visited San Francisco.
WBC’s hate-promoting signs were answered by multiple signs of randomness, nonsensical yelling, and even a unicorn. A portable stereo blared Lady GaGa, while press and people passing by ignored the WBC signs and took pictures and videos of the more entertaining signs. I was also there and turned on the video camera while holding my sign.
Via Laughing Squid
Al Gore on Creative Activism
Click to play or download here: Al Gore On Creative Activism.
A promise not satisfied
“Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity. That is why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the point. It is also why those who want to fulfill its political promise are condemned to a certain melancholy.”
Jacques Ranciere, “The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 Mar-Apr, 2002, p.151
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Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley
“we actually wanted to give our work to the audience and let them play with it.”
At the time of our interview Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray were residents at Eyebeam, the art and technology center in New York. Their work has been featured in ArtNews, on the Discovery Channel, at the Venice Biennale, and the A+C gallery in Chicago. They own an interactive design agency in New York, Submersible Design.
The Meatrix was an animated movie, spoofing The Matrix while educating viewers about the problems with factory farming. It went viral, was translated into 30 languages, and directs viwers to a website where they can learn to become advocates of family farms. DrinkPee is a project about “the role our bodies play in larger ecosystems”and includes an installation and a DIY kit for turning urine into fertilizer. DrinkPee was featured in both ArtNews, and on the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green. R&D-I-Y is project designed to crowdsource solutions to environmental problems. It’s first project was the windowfarms project.
S&S: Tell us about a project you felt was effective.
Bray: I was working for a nonprofit concerned with food issues and factory farming. While trying to educate people we realized we were showing people all these horrific pictures of factory farms. We were telling people how horrible they were and nobody really wanted to hear it. Everybody was disturbed and they didn’t want to listen.
So, we realized that we needed another angle, and decided we could use humor – as strange as that seemed – to talk about factory farming. It was 2002 and we realized there could be a fun angle on this if we did an animation and based it on The Matrix because of the crazy parallels with this very strange, alternative world of agriculture. Working on that script, we had a lot of conversations about how we didn’t want to be preachy. It was difficult because coming from the nonprofit world there was a lot of preachiness. And there were also a lot of facts, you know, “how many facts can we get in?” It could have been very long and very preachy, but we managed to pair it back to something which was just getting basic information, but trying to bring characters into it, and some sort of personality and humor. That was the Meatrix. Read More »