4 Dec 2012
4 Dec 2012
Chinese Families Photographed With Everything They Own
Chinese photographer Huang Qingjun has spent nearly 10 years travelling to remote areas in China to convince people to have their picture taken along with all of their possessions. At first glance it’s striking how little they own but as you look closer at each image you’ll discover items that might be unexpected.
(via androphilia)
(Source: typethatilike, via nadroleon)
Here’s a really interesting photo, an intern from Facebook wanted to examine the locality of friendships, pulling some data from Facebook he created this image. What’s incredible is that lines don’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line is a friendship between two people, and with enough information these friendships give us a surprisingly accurate map of the world, minus Russia, apparently Facebook isn’t too big over there.
You can read more about it here.
fucking scary!! facebook is taking over the world
(via xaviersboner)
(Source: proximated, via mrrobotico)
”That thing, the vividness which is poetry by itself, makes the poem. There is no need to explain or compare. Make it and it is a poem. This is modern, not the saga. There are no sagas-only trees now, animals, engines: There’s that.” WCW
(via freeabortions)
(Source: fl-tsam, via strugglingtobeheard)
Tweenbots by Kacie Kinzer:
Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination. Because I built them with minimal technology, I had no way of tracking the Tweenbot’s progress, and so I set out on the first test with a video camera hidden in my purse. I placed the Tweenbot down on the sidewalk, and walked far enough away that I would not be observed as the Tweenbot––a smiling 10-inch tall cardboard missionary––bumped along towards his inevitable fate.
The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”
The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me, was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it’s destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.
(via yeezytaughtme)
