Marie - description

Whitney/Postmodernism/Libyan Civil War

WHAT? Whitney/Postmodernism/Libyan Civil War is an installation that consist of three different animations, each shown on a separate screen. The screen of each animation is split into two and shows all edits being made on the same Wikipedia page on two different days. The WIkipedia pages I chose are the pages of Whitney Houston, Libyan civil war and Postmodernism. I compared the Libya civil war page on the day the NATO intervened (03-18-11) with the 11th of february 2012, the day Whitney Houston died. The second animation shows all edits of the Whitney Houston page on the day she died and the day, I run the script, that was the 29th of march 2012 (ideally it would be the current day). The amount of edits varies strongly in these two animations. The third animation (Postmodernism page) compares the same days like the Whitney Houston animation. This is a page that is not dependent on current events and media attention. The amount of changes are on both days almost the same.

HOW? All edits are shown as black text on white background. Each entry is seen as long as a new edit was made. 24 hours has been compressed to 15 minutes, whereas the proportions are correct. I saved all edits from a script that can scrape all edits that have been made on one particular wikipedia page in one day.

WHY? For this project I was interested in the question "How do we remember?" And rather I was interested in the moment, when the mass media lose interest to a topic and therefor the public attention is stagnating and a topic gets no longer any attention anymore. I decided to research this phenomenon within the structure of Wikipedia. When a topic is particular current and gets a lot of media attention, the activity on Wikipedia clearly increase what means that the edits of a page will increase. But after a while the amount of edits on a Wikipedia page will fall to a lower level again.

The Train of Knowledge App

WHAT? The Train of Knowledge App is a Social Network for train passengers allowing people to get in touch with other people traveling on the same train. Users can register their profession or specify various fields of interest and search for interesting people to share the journey with. The integrated chat function enables the user to get into first contact. They can suggest what they would like to talk about and let others know what`s on their mind. And if you get along, to meet on the train is only ever a few steps away.

HOW? For the TP I designed a promoting animation. The animation shows by means of a concrete example how the Train of Knowledge App works. The initial Idea was to make this animation to be able to promote it on Kickstarter to get the App financed by crowd funding.

WHY? Inspired by Richard Floridas The Rise of the Creative Class and the lectures by Florian Cramer where we discussed the change of the Creative Industry here in The Netherlands, I was interested in how I, as a designer can be part of the Creative Industry by acting within their rules. Furthermore I am interested in systems of knowledge exchange in general and the question if it is possible to get in touch with people you would never meet in your normal life.