Floating tagcloud + projection of the oilspill twitter tool at Onomatopee:

releasing the tweets

INTERVENTION #02 - 01 JULY 2010 - OPENING@ONOMATOPEE - 20:00

Live Twitter event at Onomatopee in Eindhoven including blue birds and floating tagcloud... You are invited!

—
On the first of July I will talk about my project Like the #oilspill and present a floating tagcloud at Onomatopee's project space in Eindhoven. Afterwards we will boost the topic #liketheoilspill together through live tweeting. It all starts at 20:00, hope you can make it and in the mean time... turn #liketheoilspill into a trending topic on Twitter!

INTERVENTION #01
http://www.onomatopee.net/pages/oilspill/oilspill.html

#liketheoilspill is a Twitter topic introduced by Kim de Groot to discuss the livestream as a media form that seems absent of any editorial process. Yet on the other hand shows an overdosis of distributive options such as 'Liking it' through Facebook or 'Sharing it' through Twitter.
The topic is inspired by livestreams of the BP oil spill such as livestream.com/wkrg_oil_spill and cnn.com. The exclusive content that contextualizes these streams are Twitter feeds or comment sections; raw data immediately hits metadata.
Join me in turning #liketheoilspill into a trending topic by twittering your thoughts and reactions on the transformation of editorial processes and the role of metadata such as tweets and comments in the news!
Is the livestream a form of news without editorial process? Or has news reporting turned completely political since the broadcaster can turn it's live channel 'on or off' at any time? Has the Tweet, as a kind of headline, replaced the main article, the reporter and thus some kind of middle ground?
—

The image above is a screenshot of the tool I made for this intervention. The tool shows the livestream of the oilspill and next to it, the twitter channels: #oilspill, #bp, #gulftour and #obama, the topic that are mentioned most in the context of #oilspill.
I was asked by Onomatopee to intervene in the ongoing exhibition, The Form and the Frame in which two editorial boards critiqued the editorial design of media such as the Elsevier, Vrij Nederland, De Groene Amsterdammer and HP de Tijd.

Between the 4th of june until the beginning of july I will be working on an intervention at the Onomatopee project space in Eindhoven as a part of the Form and Frame project.

Whereas politics and printed media used to speak with the voice of authority, we are now taking matters into our own hands. For example by continually posting comments online, writing blog entries, or twittering. The authority of the traditional media like newspapers is increasingly judged by what it can immediately provide us with: what we see is what we judge. The classical top-down cultural regulation through dissemination to the masses has become inoperable because of its one-to-many construction without any flexibility for editorial positions.

However, the traditional media can only be judged from the margins, by commenting on articles. Outside of these traditional media, authority increasingly transforms itself from a central organ into a hybrid body of metadata: stacking multiple layers of information, and formed in a decentralized and modular way.

Which forms of opinion are allowed by online media? Does the form of online media permit a sufficient amount of nuance that prevents opinion from remaining an ‘expression of thought’, and the grading of commentaries via the ‘Like’ button? The new construction of online authority includes, among others, the following questions about editorial and visual design:

What exactly is the position of the editor/reader in the metadata game: how does it support the construction of a new type of authority?

What is the form of online opinion?

Which forms of opinion are possible within the decentralized metadata structures?

Kim de Groot researches and creates images about metadata culture in which text, image, and opinion are superimposed. Within the context of ‘The Form and the Frame,’ Kim will (re)design several infrastructures for opinion in which the evolution of form and frame through new media will occupy a central position. Starting June 4, she will elborate on above questions as a supplement to the exhibition ‘The Form and the Frame.’