O/I

My final project for Journalism 4551: New Media Culture is a recycled item sculpture of Shiva Nataraja, the Hindu "Lord of the Dance". It's titled "O/I", both for Object/Information and binary code (0/1).

There are three main themes to the piece. The first is a recent idea, that as new media take over from old media, it changes the people and societies that interact with it. The second is as old as the worship of Shiva, that in order to create, we need to destroy. The third theme is where I see the first two colliding/conflicting, because using digital media creates objects that are endlessly costlessly replicated, and I think this is going to have a bigger impact on society that a lot of people recognize.

New Media/Old Media

I tried to show that new media engulfs and takes over old media when it arrives by making the structural elements of the piece out of artifacts of "old" media, a pile of paper for the base and coaxial (cable-TV) wire for the middle of the aureole, and separated CAT-5 Ethernet cable for Shiva and the flames around the aureole.

Changing media change people and culture, and the web does that by not only being immensely useful, but increasingly accessible. By making the body of Shiva out of a smartphone, I tried to show that because technology that puts the internet in our hands makes each of us part of the web.

Creation/Destruction

In Hindu legend, Shiva represents destruction and transformation. In the traditional Nataraja sculptures, he holds a drum in his upper right hand to signify the sound of creation, for my version I used two speakers.



Shiva's upper left hand traditionally holds fire to represent the prerequisite destruction for creating anything, but in my version he has a CD burner made out of a circuit board from a tape deck and a blank DVD. This is to represent what I see as the difference between the world of old media and the world that new media is building, with new media, copies are easy and cheap/free to make, and this lack of scarcity is a big difference from the competitive environment we evolved and grew up in.

Objects/ Information

This discussion might seem to be relegated to things most people don't consider things, movies, music and other audio/visual media, but more and more of the physical world is ending up on the web, and we need to think about the implications of this.



There are online projects that aim to link data instead of pages on the web. They're creating a web of meaning and knowledge that is going to be very powerful once their databases are more extensive and we get better at using the data. I used printouts of the data on turtles for the base from dbpedia, one such linked-data project.

Another way real world objects are being connected to the web is through things like QR codes. QR codes are small two dimensional barcodes that can contain information that people can read with their smartphones. They're usually used to link to webpages or other data. Shiva's face is a QR code for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nataraja.








Shiva's left hand is pointing to his raised left foot, showing us the way. I'm not sure which way the way is, but it sure looks like it's going to be interesting.






Me after about 2 days of nothing but winding and unwinding wire with the final product. Shiva played the final joke on me and proved that physical objects aren't really relevant anymore, he isn't exactly very stable on the one leg and can't make it to the Journalism mailroom, so this blog post is going to serve as me turning it in. I think it's pretty fitting.