TheFaceStyler

Banksy does it again : New York's Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill

Guerrilla artist Banksy has opened his first official exhibition in New York. The fake pet shop aims to question "our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming".

His exhibition, at The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill, in Manhattan, features chicken nuggets with legs, busily dipping themselves in sauce.

The exhibition also features a fake rabbit wearing a pearl necklace, a robot monkey wearing headphones and watching TV in a cage, and a caged bird which has lost all of its feathers.

Banksy said: "New Yorkers don't care about art, they care about pets. So I'm exhibiting them instead."

The New York Times said: "Banksy's statements, like much of his pranksterish oeuvre, should be taken with a grain of salt. But there's no denying the show's attention to comically pointed detail."

Source : BBC News

Visualising Emotions

synopsis
pulse is a live visualisation of the recent emotional expressions written on the private weblogs of blogger.com. these emotional expressions are parsed according to a list of synonyms and transform a physical shapeshifting object, which was created analogous to robert plutchik's psychoevolutionary theory of emotion.

context
markus kison is a berlin based artist, working in the field of digital media art / physical computing. pulse was created in may 2008 during his diploma thesis in the digital media class at the university of the arts berlin. the project has been advised by prof. jussi ängeslevä, dr. des. stephan g. humer, prof. kora kimpel, prof. joachim sauter and prof. dr. siegfried zielinski.

project description
with increasing possibilities in rapid prototyping and physical computing technologies we head towards new directions in interfacing the world. new developed intelligent surfaces differ from well known news media like tv as much as the content of private weblogs differs from world wide especially for the news industry produced "pseudo events" (d. boorstin). additionally with the blur of borders between technology and art the too large relevance of rational information is contrary to the "beauty of the data" that lies within. on the one hand this project deals with this change from a concrete information interface towards an experiment about being connected in a more intuitive, emotional way and on the other hand it aims to give data an autonomous aesthetic expression that is independent from the meaning of the values.
as a consequence this is a news object concentrating on emotions: "pulse" visualizes live the recent emotional expressions, written on the private weblogs of blogger.com. those expressions are parsed using a list of synonyms, which refers to robert plutchik's psychoevolutionary theory emotion (1980). In his theory plutchik describes eight basic human emotions, which together with their weakened and amplified alternatives form a 3d cone consisting of 24 areas. this diagram is the basic shape of "pulse" which can enlarge in 24 directions. each time a synonym of pluchik's basic emotions is found in a blog entry written during the last minute the shapeshifting object transforms itself in a way that the new volume represents a tiny piece of the world's current emotional condition.
the process of neutral emotion analysis in contradiction to their semantic meaning seeks to be intuitive experienced in the materializations of glass, motors and a vulnerable shape. Source : Markus Kison