CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: Thinking in Emoji

Photo via VICE.

Garret Gilmore shares in VICE his problem with emoji and how this little cartoon icons violate the rule of arbitrariness of linguistic signs making this tendence to think in emoji an interesting study case.. "I have a problem with emojis, I think. What I mean is, sometimes I think in emojis. When I'm looking for a word or phrase to respond to things outside the contexts of texts or Twitter what pops into my head are emoji characters. My girlfriend Sarah first pointed out that this was happening to her a few months ago after she found herself unable to produce any alternative to " " as a response to an email from her boss . . . The surprise of thinking in tiny cartoon images comes from the expectation that language is going to pop into your head when you think. So what makes emoji different from written language? How do emojis mean and is it different from how words mean" Read full article in VICE. E.T.P. 7'

ABC: ARTIST BOOK CELEBRITY

With every edition one artist, one book title and one celebrity are selected to appear in an article that highlights the artworks, songs, movie scenes, and performances that made them stand out of the crowd. The principle of following the chronological order of the alphabet and of finding names that all share the same initial letter has been inspired by the German game 'Stadt Land Fluss'. To help people to remember the names easier, I create little aide-memoires from emojis (so far they have proved to be fairly efficient).

By @carolinetruyol 

 

 

Photo via Jmeshel.

Chuck (Charles Edward Anderson) Berry was born in 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri. The guitarist and songwriter is also known as “The Father of Rock’n Roll”, as he has introduced rock’n’roll some 70 years ago, while at the same time trying to merge the worlds of black and white through music. His performances such as Maybellene (1955) (watch online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvKDr8AgvK8), Roll Over Beethoven (1956), Rock and Roll Music (1957), and Johnny B. Goode (1958), are well known because of his approach to entertain the crowd according to their immediate feedback on stage. (Chuckberry.com/biography: http://chuckberry.com/biography/). Although his first notable performance was on his school's musical stage singing ‘Confessin The Blues’ (listen on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3qVbQNRjJU) accompanied by his friend, Tommy Stevens, on guitar it was not until he met Muddy Waters in 1955 when his career started to pick up. He was sentenced to prison for the first time while he still was at high school, from 1944 to 1947 for armed robbery from and again in 1960 to 1963 for transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines. In between he was trained as a hairdresser at the Poro School, freelanced as a photographer, assisted his father as a carpenter and even owned a restaurant while beginning his career as a musician. His passion for food made him choose the locations of his performances according to the proximity to the next Indian restaurant. Berry was included in several Rolling Stone “Greatest of All Time” lists and three of his songs made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. Today at the age of 87 Chuck Berry is still performing live.

ETP (5-8')

Beloved was written in (1987) by american writer Toni Morrison. The novel is set after the American Civil War (1861 - 1865). The book's epigraph reads: "Sixty Million and more," by which Morrison refers to the estimated number of slaves who died in the slave trade. Morrison's fifth novel is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner, who temporarily escaped slavery during 1956 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. After a posse arrived to retrieve her and her children Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured. Beloved's main character, Sethe, kills her daughter and tries to kill her other three children when a posse arrives in Ohio to return them to Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation from which Sethe recently fled. The tombstone of the daughters grave shows the word "Beloved". A  woman presumed to be her daughter, called Beloved, returns years later to haunt Sethe's home at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati. The story opens with an introduction to the ghost: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." Beloved is not narrated chronologically; it is composed of flashbacks, memories, and nightmares. As a result, it is not an easy read if you haven't encountered William Faulkner, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. It aims to point the difficulties victims of slavery experience to deal with the past that leads to a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. The novel received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted during 1998 into a movie of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (watch the trailer). A New York Times survey of writers and literary critics ranked it the best work of American fiction from 1981-2006.

You can read more here and here.

Photo via Deadline.

 Kobe Bean Bryant (born August 23, 1978) is an American professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He entered the NBA directly from high school, and has played for the Lakers his entire career, winning five NBA championships. Bryant is a 16-time All-Star, 15-time member of the All-NBA Team, and 12-time member of the All-Defensive team. As of March 2013, he ranks third and fourth on the league's all-time postseason scoring and all-time regular season scoring lists, respectively. Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal led the Lakers to three consecutive championships from 2000 to 2002. He is also the all-time leading scorer in Lakers franchise history. Since his second year in the league, Bryant has been selected to start every All-Star Game. He has won the All-Star MVP Award four times (2002,2007, 2009, and 2011), tying him for the most All Star MVP Awards in NBA history. At the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics, he won gold medals as a member of the USA national team. Because of his recent devastating injury Kobe Bryant's basketball career has come to an end. His new project is called "Kobe Bryant's Muse", a screening of his biography that will come out this autumn.

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo via Dazed Magazine.

Dazed Magazine has a summer project called States of Independence  where they have invited their "favourite 30 American curators, magazines, creatives and institutions to takeover Dazed for a day." One of them is Kenneth Goldsmith, author of one of the books that helped shape my thesis, my thoughts around writing in the digital era, and justifies somehow the appropriation and re-contextualization used in the Procrastinator as a way of generating new content: "Uncreative Writing." According to Dazed, he is on a mission to tell us why we should care about poetry while featuring the diet poems of Mira González, as well as some Microsoft Word poems and found poems.  In Dazed words: "artists are flocking to poetry these days precisely because it's an orphaned and evacuated space, ready to be repurposed with poetry that looks nothing like the kind of poetry you see (but don't read) drizzled across the pages of The New Yorker. Instead of sonnets, we see apps, image macros, hacked photoshopped images, found language, hardcore programming, and YouTube videos posing as poetry. Suddenly, poetry looks interesting again." Read full article and all the poems in Dazed Magazine. E.T.P. 12'

Photo: Chronicle of a summer. Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, France 1961

The BFI polled 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers in the search for authoritative answers to the question: What are the greatest documentaries of all time? Nick James believes that one of the most remarkable things about the Top 50 documentaries list is that it feels so fresh. "One in five of the films chosen were made since the millennium, and to have a silent film from 1929 at the top of the list is an absolute joy. That allusive essay films feature so strongly throughout demonstrates that nonfiction cinema is not a narrow discipline but a wide open country full of explorers." Some of the documentaries are classics like Chronicle of a summer, The Thin Blue Line, Sans Soleil and, of course, Nanook of the North. On my side, I still have a lot of documentaries to see, which is of course, great news. Read the list with comments from the curators and prepare for a well documented summer here. E.T.P. Days (months?).

Images: stills from Emoji Among Us via Laughingsquid.

"Emoji Among Us” is a nature documentary parody by stock footage company Dissolve that explores the role of emoji in the world. The parody was inspired by the work of Sir David Attenborough, and features stock footage from Dissolve’s library. E.T.P. 2' http://laughingsquid.com/emoji-among-us-a-nature-documentary-parody-exploring-the-role-of-emoji-in-the-world/

ABC: ARTIST, BOOK, CELEBRITY

The ABC for artists, books, and celebrities to fight against my name literacy through writing and creating an aide-memoire with emojis (inspired by the german game 'Stadt-Land-Fluss').

By @carolinetruyol

 

The New Zealand born artist Billy Apple (now 78 years old) studied at The Royal College of Art in London and is one of the first artists to use neon lights in art work. Apple is best known for his involvement in the New York and London Pop art movements of the 1960s (see Four Billy Apple Trademark Classes at Frieze Magazine) and with the conceptual art movement in the 1970s (see 2 Minutes 33 seconds at the Auckland Art Gallery). He was included in the important 1964 exhibit 'The American Supermarket', a show held in Paul Bianchini's Upper East Side gallery. The show was presented as a typical small supermarket environment, except that everything in it - the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc., was created by prominent pop artist of the time, including Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, and Jasper Johns.

Read more here. E.T.P.: 5'

Pictures via University of Michigan.

As I Lay Dying has been named one of the 100 greatest novels of all Time by The Guardian. American author William Faulkner wrote it in 1930 over the course of six weeks from midnight to 4am while he was working at a power plant. The book is narrated by 15 different characters over 59 chapters. It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her family's quest and motivations - noble or selfish - to honor her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 (listen to an audio recording of William Faulkner's Banquet Speech additional E.T.P. 3' (headphones recomended). The Grammy-nominated metalcore band 'As I lay Dying' derived its name from this novel. In 2013 writer/director James Franco released a film adaption of the novel (Trailer here, additional E.T.P. 1.20').

Full E.T.P. (5-8')

Image & Content via Forbes.

Just 24 years old, the Swedish DJ notched the best year of his career in 2014 on the strength of his debut album "True". The record included "Wake Me Up," which became the first electronic song ever to move more than 4 million units in the United States. He continues to clean up on the road, taking home six-figure sums every time he spins at a club, which he did 80 times during our scoring period alone (watch the official video additional E.T.P. 4.32').

Fulll E.T.P.: 3-6'

DESIGN, INNOVATION & BUSINESS

Photo: Meron Gribetz, CEO and founder of Meta, by Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

We love the beginning of this Wired article: "Meron Gribetz wants to build a version of Google Glass that doesn’t make you look like an idiot." So far, all the polemic revolves around the ethic and legal considerations of this gadget that is not even for sale yet. Nobody has considered the aesthetic side yet, except Meta, Gribetz's company. Meta’s basic mission is to create computerized glasses that are everything Google Glass is not — stylish, cool, and non-distracting. Read all about it here.


Image: Screenshot of Slack.

Named by FastCompany as an "email killer",  a team of cofounders that designed Flickr launched Slack, a tool for office collaboration and communication that integrates various external services, bringing all communications (Google Docs, Dropbox, GitHub, Crashalytics, Zen Desk, etc) into one interface. Slack represents a "15-year slow-motion disintegration of Microsoft's hegemony over the workplace" states Stewart Buttlerfield, one of Slack co-founders. Boom. Read the complete interview in FastCompany and/or give Slack a try right here.


Photo: Volkswagen via Wired.

The Volkswagen Microbus is Officially Dead, but as Wired says 'not that you knew it was still alive.' Volkswagen’s official moniker was called Kombi or the Type 2 and to commemorate its disappearance V-Dub conspired with its Brazilian arm to create 600 Last Edition Kombis with white wall tires, special blue paint, an obnoxiously awkward grille, and a subtly reworked interior. Read about full article in Wired and don't worry for the Kombis out there, they'll all go to hippie heaven.


Illustration: Breaking Bad S05E09, part II, by Zoe Mendelson via Wired.

Commissioned by Fast Company, Broolkyn based writer Zoe Mendelson, created an amazing summary of the first episode of the last season of AMC's Breaking Bad using just emoticons. I personally always liked storytelling using emoticons, when Hotmail's Messenger was alive I used to make some, and I shamelessly used to call them MSN Art. But this if these can be called art, Meldelson is definitiely some sort of Da Vinci. Have a look at the whole episode in FastCompany.

And if you'd like to give emoticons a go, but are too lazy a new app by VoidWorks, a Singapore-based app development studio, allows users to transform boring photos into pop art pieces by replacing pixels with colorful emoticons. Read about it in Wired.