PHOTO: In case $6.1 billion wasn’t enough incentive to be the next Steve Jobs…
Source: CNBC - President Obama, Season of Progress
Any suggestions for The President on what kind of incentive you would like to be the next Steve Jobs?
NYU professor, and 2007 Chicago Tribune Artist of the Year, Wafaa Bilal has outdone himself.
I’m not sure if many people recall the live art piece from 2007 in the video above. It was dubbed a few different things:
Whatever the name of the project was, it was inspired by the death of Bilal’s father and brother in Iraq, and was intended to raise awareness about Iraqi life, and the violence they face on a daily basis. The premise was simple. Bilal would lock himself in a studio for 30 days, and let strangers control a paintball gun attached to a robot, via the internet, and shoot him with it. The gun was fired 60,000+ times in the 30 days.
Now Bilal is back, and has decided to donate his body to another contemporary work, in conjunction with the opening of the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar on Dec. 30.
In the video below, you will see that Bilal now sports a titanium camera-mount surgically implanted into the back of his head, and will shoot one still image every minute for a year. These images will begin to appear in the project’s website, dubbed The 3rd I beginning December 15th, along with GPS coordinates. Bilal states that “a project like this is meant to establish a dialogue about surveillance.”
NYU has stated that they had privacy concerns about the project, and will require Bilal to cover the lens when teaching on campus.
In another recent piece called …And Counting, Bilal had his back tattooed with a map of Iraq, which was dotted once for each Iraqi and American death (about 105,000 dots in total). Dots for the Iraqis were represented by green UV ink only visible under black light, while Americans were represented by permanent ink, to illustrate his opinion that Iraqi deaths are invisible to the American public.
Whether you agree with his politics or not, his conviction and passion are as impressive as his creative use of technology to create art, and drive awareness. How far would you go to prove a point?
3 teens in Columbia are dead in the last ten days, and they had something in common. Their names all appeared on a ‘hit-list’ on Facebook.
Authorities are struggling to determine who put the names on the list, or why. Indications that the deaths are gang-related are surfacing. It is also unclear whether the killings were drug-related, or perhaps even politically-motivated.
Two lists appear on the site, containing 100 names between them.
Authorities also are offering 5 million pesos (around $2750 USD) for information on the killings.
This begs the question, what steps can social media providers take to help prevent something like this from happening again?
