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| project: TEXTPORTRAIT |
1770 days Internet Art Project “TEXT PORTRAIT“ [ German Version ] On August 22nd, 2006 the first and to this day only art project started which exclusively deals with the worldwide global networking, the internet and the therewith connected medial elements.
Later, exhibitions at historical locations, as Ground Zero, New York as well as in showcases of cafés, subway stations etc., followed. “There is no location where art could not be presented”
„The internet is a gift for democracy. Nowhere else are there less financial, technical and political hurdles to express your opinion. On the other side the quality controls do not apply as customary in print media. Oftentimes information is not proof-read and no editorial office views the material, the possibility of anonymity brings forward misuse. However, too many internet users still take everything they read on their browser window at face value [...]“
The internet is most definitely a reflection of our society and would therefore be predestined to nourish the artistic thoughts. Subject to sought and found information, the global memory will take over more space in the future and will thereby change our lives.
TEXTPORTRAIT… Text Portrait… an internet art project by Laura Maria May and Ralph Ueltzhoeffer
March 2009
Collection of press releases - 2005/06/07/08
Visible (from A.K. Simmel) Visible – aren’t we exposed to being portrayed every day? In subways, on public locations, train stations and at public and private facilities… We are being portrayed more often. Almost invisible we are being listed, ranked, categorized and evaluated. The portrait itself however, is hardly ever seen! Haven’t we always tried to be honest to one another? The initiators of text portrait – the project: A.K. Simmel 2006
The art project text portrait deals with the multi liberal handling of personal data. Personal data (photos, biographies, text etc.) was partly found fully automated and was at that time exposed to anyone!
Why am I being portrayed? What is this project about? Who or what is behind it? The project text portrait is an internet art project, that with the help of partly automated search programs, looks for biographies of public characters (Public Person) to list, rank, categorize and evaluate in order to create the visual portrait. The choice of the portrayed person is made partly by Google keywords-search, meaning, who is searched for in a specific timeline in a category.
A portrait is a painting, a photo, a sculpture or another artistic display of a person. The intension of a portrait is, next to the display of the physical similarity, is also to express the character, respectively the personality of the portrayed person. If you now extend the basic requirements of a portrait by the name, the biography, the finger print, an iris scan or the DNA, the portrayed person becomes more and more recognized without a doubt among a multitude of people. Therefore, the society can easily respond the needs of an individual.
A text portrait is a version of lettering and photo of a usual portrait, with the difference, that the text (e.g. biography) and the photo (e.g. passport picture) create an inseparable symbiosis. The fusion of two visually different components to a readable portrait – the text portrait.
NEW YORK TIMES Can the Internet Make a More Open Government? The Obama presidential campaign made groundbreaking use of social networking sites and other tools to organize its supporters. President Obama has promised to use similar technology to bring citizens into government. As in so many other areas, turning promise to policy may well be more difficult than it sounded on the campaign trail. That’s the conclusion of Peter Swire, who was a lawyer for the new media team of the Obama transition leading up to Inauguration Day. He had also worked as the top privacy officer for the Clinton administration. He has now returned to his job as a law professor at Ohio State University and as a fellow with the Center for American Progress. He published a paper Monday on the early use of Web 2.0 techniques by the administration. (The paper will be on the Web later in the day here.) The administration, at least in the early days, has struggled to replicate the responsiveness of the campaign, he argued. The paper cites a survey of new media experts by the National Journal that gave the administration’s Web 2.0 efforts a grade of C+. Mr. Swire writes that the scope of the problem became clear in the transition, which was much less responsive to comments and questions than the campaign: The campaign learned how to cope with a motivated group of just over 10 million individuals. After Election Day, the transition and later the administration had to respond to the concerns of over 300 million Americans, as well as interested persons in other countries. More important, campaigns trade in aspirational generalities. The government, Mr. Swire writes, defines the framework of rules that affect so many people. Moreover, even vague foreign policy statements are parsed for nuance. The upshot is that many government pronouncements need to be cleared by policy makers, slowing down the process of responding to queries. The consequences, Mr. Swire writes, in an extreme but not entirely impossible example, could well be dire: Now suppose a White House blogger — or someone else answering comments on whitehouse.gov — can’t get a hold of the North Korea expert and simply goes with his or her best judgment about what to say. During the campaign, that could backfire if the other candidate gets a good talking point. But in government, the consequences can be much more serious: What if North Korea didn’t like the White House comment and decided to launch a missile attack on a neighboring country? Mr. Swire lists some ways that the Obama administration has gotten around some of these constraints so far. It has extensively used Web video to communicate. Video has an immediacy, he writes, but it still essentially one-way communication. A final approach Mr. Swire cites is simply to sample comments randomly. President Obama is said to receive a purple folder each night with 10 letters he has received, by mail, fax or e-mail. I’m not sure that most people who send a letter to the president expect he will read it personally. But I do know that the campaign promise for open and interactive government is a difficult one to keep. And the promises keep coming. Citizens are invited to find and report abuse in the stimulus program using its recovery.gov Web site. Mr. Swire, by the way, also is releasing two more papers Monday: One is on the legal issues faced by government agencies that want to use social networking tools. The other looks specifically at the challenges for government in using free software and Internet services. What are some of the other ways the White House can be more responsive to more people? WASHINGTON POST Article | 06/14/2009 Re: How Does That Make You Feel? ...University of New South Wales have discovered. They've found that Internet-based therapy works as well as in-person...
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