In Cognitive Surplus, which I started reading finally, Clay Shirky discusses how media has evolved so radically in just a generation’s time. Media was once, by popular definition, communication done by professionals. This was largely because the ability to broadcast messages publicly was available only to those who owned the risky and expensive means of production—television stations, printing presses, radio stations and other mass distribution channels. This was only 30 years ago. Clay recounts a story in which he tries to convince his students at ITP that there was once a time when the average citizen did not really have a public voice. That if you had something to say out loud, there was literally no way to say it aside from holding a sign on a street corner. His students (who I assume were all around my age) had a hard time empathizing with this experience.

Now we have the Internet, and the world is a different place. (It is hard not to take it for granted, sometimes.) Now, you no longer have to be approved by the stamp of professionalism to put your message out in the public. Anybody that has the means of consumption (a computer and an ISP) also has the means of production. Anyone can hit “publish,” including one 39-year old cancer sufferer who decided to take his most personal final hours and share it with the world on Reddit.

I am floored.

I’m floored both emotionally by the courage of this man (and no, I don’t think it’s a hoax… how cynical can you get?) and intellectually at this amazing example of the power of networks. Within hours, not only has his message reached thousands, but he’s received a veritable outpouring of support from all over the world. A spontaneous group effort sprung up to create a global map of pictures and stories, to help the dying man fulfill his wish of a final “world tour.” Heartfelt discussions got started, centering around the delicate issues of death, fear and mortality. Stories both humorous and gut-wrenching were passed around. For the next 51 hours, the world will feel much smaller.

To me, there is no better example of why I am so intrigued by the Internet. For one, it is enabling new forms of human relationships, right before our eyes. I call them new because, when in the past course of human history has someone made 3000 friends in a few hours, Dunbar’s number be damned? And I daresay we are just getting started.

Or perhaps it isn’t so new after all. Clay Shirky suggests that whenever a behavior surprises us, we shouldn’t ask whether something new has come along, rather we should suspect that the impetus has existed all along but the right conditions haven’t. This would imply that we as human beings have always wanted to reach out indiscriminately to each other in times of need. That’s heartening.

Tomorrow, when Lucidending self-administers his fatal dose of medicine, I feel certain that he will have recouped some of the dignity and clarity he is looking for. I’m also thankful for his post on Reddit. It’s living proof that amazing things are about to happen.

Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko is best known for his large-scale video projections of everyday people onto monuments and other public edifices. These projections often portray these ordinary volunteers candidly telling stories of their lives and experiences, usually centered around painful ordeal or personal suffering. His work has been installed and shown in public spaces in over a dozen countries, ranging from the town squares of authoritarian governments to right here on our National Mall in D.C. Wodiczko also designs technological devices or machines worn on the body that help construct situations in which people can share their personal stories with others.

Nearly all of Wodiczko’s work follows a socio-political theme. For instance, in his monumental projections work, he chooses to film people whose lives have intersected with war, conflict, homelessness, social inequity, gang violence. In all these works, the melding of private and public spheres is immediately obvious.

Imagine the face of someone, who could be anyone, looking plainly out at you from the pinnacle of the Washington Monument at night. You can hear every tremor or modulation of his voice through amplified loudspeakers. It is surreal, otherworldly, and you cannot pull away. The video is simple and raw, as is the sound recording; the viewer is made immediately aware that this is not a film but a snapshot of someone’s personal reality, magnified and displayed. But the display does not feel invasive; it’s a willing participation. Watching these works, (and not to make light of them) you feel somewhat like you have been invited into the home of a minor diety to listen and to their tale and share in a common humanity.

Not all of Wodiczko’s work about personal storytelling involves monumental projections. The melding of public and private can happen on a more intimate scale. During his talk at the MFA, Wodiczko described a project he did where he equipped a young Japanese woman with a device that continuously filmed her eyes. This video stream was them fed to a LCD monitor worn behind her back. The woman, a volunteer, had experienced a personal tragedy when her father left the family and created a gaping wound in her life. In Japanese society, young people are often expected to hide and suppress their personal feelings, especially with regard to delicate family problems. Equipped with this machine, which allowed her to make eye contact without showing her face, she mustered up the courage to approach strangers and tell her difficult story. Wodiczko filmed the young woman approaching a trio of wealthy businessmen not unlike her ex-father, and she began her story with her back turned towards them so they could only see the video stream of her eyes. It was not long before their eyes clouded with tears in sympathy and sorrow for her. The story allowed her to both reach out and fulfill a personal emotional need, and, just as importantly, break through the culture of silence encouraged tacitly by her society and her peers.

There are several things that really impress me about Wodiczko’s work: one is the use of technology to utterly surprise people and fundamentally reconfigure the way people interact. It has extraordinary possibilities for breaking through social norms that can be damaging if taken too far. Another is his ability to get ordinary people involved, empowering them to become the storytellers and art-makers, while Wodiczko plays the role of an enabler or mitigating factor. It’s telling that he calls his own work “interrogative design.” Finally, the public response. I am used to people drifting through art galleries with a dazed look on their faces, clutching their rented audio guides like it was their last lifeline to a world that makes sense (in many cases it is). Well, Wodiczko’s work can be experienced without any audio guide or degree in art history; all you really need is a human heart. That said, it is also neither trite nor catered towards the lowest common denominator. It just gives you a lot to think about in its simplicity and straightforwardness. Documentation of Wodiczko’s work shows viewers of an unexpectedly wide-ranging demographic in various states of awed attentiveness, some obviously fighting back tears, others with brows knitted in thinking. The emotional impact of his work is huge, and I really believe that what impacts the heart ultimately impacts the mind.

Given all this, you can imagine how happy I was to see that he had new work up at the I.C.A. I went with Yang and Joel yesterday to see it and, in classic Wodiczko fashion, it gave us moment for pause. Wodiczko’s work here, titled Out of Here: The Veterans Project, consisted of 2 parts. One was a series of outdoor video projections and amplified audio depicting the words and voices of medics, soldiers, and others involved in the Iraq war. The other was an indoor projection that transformed a darkened gallery space into a convincing interior of an abandoned warehouse. The projections show only a ring of high windows with dirty glass, beyond which the inscrutable sounds and images of a civilian-military confrontation play out. Like a miniature movie with an ambiguous plot, it dares the viewer to imagine the consequences and fill in the blanks of what it means to be in a war.

The latter part of this series was for me more interesting. It really did feel a bit like you’re standing in a warehouse in Iraq, but with a thick veil thrown around all your sense of comprehension. It conveys the confusion, doubt, and fear of war better than any news report of “events in the region” ever could. I had a hard time snapping out of that state of mind even walking out of the Wodiczko gallery into the adjoining one (which contained a show of really academic, self-referential painting-photographs on wood panels… A jarring contrast to the evocative, emotionally charged and frankly accessible work I just walked out of.  Sorry, but after Wodiczko, I honestly did not particularly care for its impassive pretensions.)

There are those out there who applaud art for art’s sake. There are those out there who prefer formal explorations of color, shape, and material. Personally, I have grown more and more to prefer art that espouses a a message grounded in the concrete, whether this is found in nature or human affairs. I also like art that could be simple without being simplistic. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything at all against art that is intentionally ambiguous or multi-layered in its message, or that references the art world in a self-aware way (I do find Jeff Koons’ antics hilarious and noteworthy). Nor do I always rule out art that seeks to stretch the boundaries of representation or process or whatnot. But it takes a certain perceptiveness and intellectual talent to create art that has reach, that can influence people in a way that leaves them feeling like something was revealed to them, rather obscured from them, when they leave the gallery. That’s the kind of art I learned that I wanted to make in junior year, when I heard Wodiczko talk. Coming back from the I.C.A. yesterday, I was reminded again of why I went to art school, what I got out of it, and what I have to keep doing, even as I work my daily job as a commercial designer making everyday practical things.

By and large, it was a very predictable show. We saw an abundance of visual tropes inspired by war propaganda depicting activist/culture-jamming themes in a super-flat, high-contrast style. We also saw a preoccupation with sumptuous Asian and Middle-Eastern decorative motifs, as well as those spirograph-like things on money. But none of this is meant in a disparaging way. There were several things that I found amazing about the show.

For one, he has an amazing uniformity to his work. Usually when you go to see a big one-person retrospective like this, the several rooms are each devoted to a different period of the artist’s developing career, and you can see each room as encapsulating a new idea or new territory that they have explored. For Fairey, you can sense that they have tried to organize his work around a few themes—music, war, “early work,” and so on—but for the most part it seems like he found his mature style right away and then stuck to it. On the one hand, I could see why some disillusioned critics say he’s a “one-trick pony,” but on the other, this consistency has allowed him to get ridiculously good at what he does. If there’s nothing else to take away from this show, you could definitely still marvel at the man’s dogged, single-minded pursuit of the possibilities afforded by red, black, and off-white (and sometimes other colors too).

Honestly, it is amazing how good he is both technically and compositionally. He clearly has a good handle on graphic design (despite what some folks might say about him not being a “legit” designer). I furthermore am bordering on appalled at how perfectly flawless the screenprints are (yes, even given the fact that many of them were executed by apprentice-lackeys, but you would expect that he was the one who taught them to print so well). And all those curves, flourishes, and spirographs… you must have had a really really steady hand. If one of his aims truly is to quote Warhol quoting slickly perfect machine-age mass media (and not just the Institute reading too much into his work), then he is doing it pretty damn well.

As for the message, the actual content, in his work… I’m not quite sure what I think of them yet. Clearly something special is there, because otherwise he would just be a master stylist and technician, nothing more. But of the many many obscure street artists who do political, questioning, parodying work on the sides of buildings, is what he is saying really that unique? Yes, there is Andre the Giant, a theme that he has explored from every angle and then some, but underneath the heavy eyebrows, it is a very familiar message: question giving in to media control, watch out for those in control.

Yet clearly there is something special about Andre because of his sheer ubiquity and persistence. The traditional ways of evaluating art are to look at the style, the process, the message contained, and/or the life and times of the artist. Maybe with Shepard Fairey you have to look at something else altogether, like the way he has sought to distribute it or the method by which he tried to engage his audience. Again, stickering and mass-postering are not unheard-of techniques… but if we see these acts of “promotion” as part of his deliberate artmaking process, it sort of becomes clear why Andre the Giant (as a gigantic performance or act, and not as a single print or design) is such a masterpiece to the curators at the ICA.

Yang is falling asleep listening to me type—always a good sign to stop before I drown in the swirly sea that is “rambling about art.” =) But those are my thoughts roughly. Overall I thought the exhibit was well worth seeing, and I would go back again because we were rushed out at closing time. Also, I do want the exhibit catalogue, if there is one. I think keeping some of Fairey’s work on my shelf will keep me motivated and determined to get really, ridiculously good at something.

Another great graphic designer talk from TED (they have oh so many). I like this one because Milton Glaser talks more about his process than about his higher overarching ideals. Also I enjoy his irreverant attitude.

Many times I’ve felt that same urge to humorously pontificate the “meaning” of this or that design, mostly to poke fun at designers’ tendency to take themselves too seriously. I would have if I thought I could get away with it. It must help to be an esteemed, established designer, which I am anything but. =)