Los datos son aburridos, pero su libertad los transforma en algo bello. Solo por lo anterior merece la pena celebrar el nacimiento de un nuevo blog con un título tan provocador como data beatiful, que descubro garcias a vía Kazys Varnelis. Pero otra razón es su autor, Lev Manovich, uno de los teóricos más interesantes de la cultura digital y de remezcla (del que ya hablamos en Pasado, presente y futuro de la cultura de remezcla).
¿Una tercera razón? ¿Por qué querría alguien como Manovich escribir un blog?. Necesitamos nuevas interfaces para “consumir” la cultura de datos y objetos. En su About:
In his brilliant book Shaping Things Bruce Sterling talks about a possible future where every object broadcast its history, its effects on environment, etc - while people become “wranglers” who follow these objects. I love how Sterling connects design, “internet of things” and sustainability - however, one thing he does not discuss is what kinds of interfaces people will need in a world where every objects has its own blog, so to speak. For instance, if I can follow the lives of 7 billion light bulbs in my city, would I want to do this using Google Reader, NetNewsWire, or Facebook? Probably not. Similarly, if a grid of images, a photo book, and a slide show were appropriate interfaces when the numbers of images were small, why would I use them to interact with hundreds of millions of images and videos on Flickr and YouTube? Our interfaces can’t keep up with the exponentially increasing amounts of data they are supposed to reveal.
Y por si no fuesen razones suficientes, su interpretación del hackeo de su sitio web como una forma primitiva de net art (en la parte inferior de la imagen) no puede ser más acertada. Lástima que las páginas cumplan funciones y no podamos “abandonarlas” al placer puramente estético:
I discovered that manovich.net was hacked.I was thinking of leaving it as is, because this page inserted by some script reminded me of a certain well-known work of early net art from about 10 years ago…however, as my site contains links to my class syllabi used by students, I had to go and restore it to its “normal” and “socially useful” appearance. This is how my home page looked for about 2 days after it was hacked (cropped screengrab).
