Yes Men and Data Mining Response

Yes Men

The Yes Men exhibit was interesting. The main video they had playing throughout the exhibit pretty much tied in with most of the exhibits in the rest of the room. The screen was surrounded by what seemed to be men putting on a seminar. It was mostly a commentary about capitalism and it trying to distract us from important things, or disregarding life in general. The video was a parody of world leaders pretending to give a damn subtitled comedically, but the majority of the programming was advertisements for pointless products such as a suit that lets you sit and watch television comfortably anywhere and anytime. They also had a singalong about oil, and an advertisement for the recycling of McDonald's food as a strategy to reserve food supply. Basically they used the video as satire and it tied itself in with the rest of the exhibits. There was also another small video playing in the other room that acted kind of like a powerpoint presentation for rich executives in an office.

Data Mining

Data Mining was more artistically satisfying to me. One of the videos playing was co-created by Lev Manovich. The video documented the evolution of the covers of Time Magazine and mapped it out in various graphical ways. That was very interesting to me because there was definitely and interesting visible trend in every way it was mapped out on the screen. Another video they had up was a ragdoll comprised of different pictures of Pamela Anderson found on the internet. It was interesting to see how the internet collectively displayed Pamela Anderson in different intervals. The random house music generator was also interesting and it was neat to see the graphical representation of it. I did not quite understand the mood generator as it seems the incorrect video was playing, or an incorrect tag was placed next to it. The tag talked about a ragdoll reacting to the stock market data, but the screen just showed a woman drinking coffee. Anyways, the exhibit was interesting and there were many monitor based works at the data mining exhibit to draw inspiration from.

(Charles Cole)