The New Conversation

A neat exhibition that’s opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) explores the underlying dialogue that goes on with so much of what  permeates our everyday lives, focusing on designs that expand the communication possibilities between people and technology.

With interaction taking the place of the old maxims of form and function as a means of relevancy in the 21st-Century’s digital culture, Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects, illustrates how contemporary designers enhance society with integrated combinations of purpose and meaning.

The nearly 200 projects also include more idiosyncratic works like “Kageo” (top left), Japanese for “little shadow,” which creates mysterious and mischievous little creatures from the reflections of common objects, via a webcam and hidden projector. “Pretty maps, Beijing, Manhattan and Tokyo” (middle), sort of an artsy version of Google Earth, is an interactive map that renders multidimensional views of different locales, with cities morphed into colorful abstractions. “El Sajjadah” (bottom) is a rug embedded with a compass module that points the prayerful in the direction of Mecca; the carpet pattern glows brighter as it gets closer to its exact position.

Explaining some of the challenges that lie ahead for this new generation of communication designers, Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA told the New York Times: “There is still an imbalance between theaesthetic value of some projects and their functional value, and designers need to make much more effort to explain what they are doing. This field is moving so fast, but we are still dealing with the old clichés and still adding new ones.”

Some of it weird, all of it mind-provoking, Talk to Me runs through November 7  at MoMA.

Smart Art

Another Google-launched initiative, this one related to the arts, shows how its influence continues to extend beyond just technology. Google Goggles (logo at left), a smartphone application that debuted in late 2009, serves as a “visual” search engine, replacing keystroke searches with pictures taken on Android-enabled devices and iPhones. (Blackberry availability still to come.) Pop a photo of the Washington Monument, for example, and the app returns related details, no search query necessary. (It’s also useful when you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at.)

Photo of Frida Kahlo's "Frieda and Diego Rivera" (1931) -- with Goggles results

Now, thanks to Goggles, the search engine’s announcement of a partnership with the J. Paul Getty Museum in California will make the days of self-guided audio tours at museums seem quaint. The Getty is the first to provide Google with images (about 300 paintings are included) and prepared content designed to complement any visit to its Los Angeles venue.

A photo of a painting will provide such features as commentary by artists and curators, and even characters in the artwork itself, as in an animated conversation with a human-like pig in a 14th-Century rendering of the Adoration of the Magi. Amazingly, the algorithm developed by Google is sensitive enough to detect subtle differences, for example, between Claude Monet’s multiple depictions of Rouen Cathedral, other versions of which hang at museums like the National Gallery of Art and the Musée d’Orsay, in addition to the Getty. (It should be noted that the Goggles venture is separate from the ambitious Google Art Project begun earlier this year, which currently provides virtual tours of several major repositories around the world.)

Needless to say, the instant and tailored information provided by the simple snap of a picture will provide rich enhancement to the on-site experience at museums such as the Getty (right), with others sure to follow.

Just remember to turn off the flash.

“Found” & Foundering

I picked up Found: A Daughter’s Journey Home, by Tatum O’Neal, after watching her and father Ryan O’Neal on several talkfests plugging their reality show Ryan & Tatum: The O’Neals, finding myself curiously fascinated by the train wreck of a relationship that’s the basis for both the book and the series on the OWN network.

Though Found is essentially a vehicle to promote its TV counterpart, you can still sense an underlying honesty at the heart of O’Neal’s attempt to find harmony with the man she calls “Ryan” …and rarely, “Dad.” Oscar-winning child actress, ex-wife of John McEnroe, mother of three, and a lifelong struggler with addiction, O’Neal went over some of the same material in her previous A Paper Life (2004), but the hook here is her determination to make amends after a 20-year distancing from her father, precipitated by his relationship with the late Farrah Fawcett.

Happier times: “Paper Moon” (1973)

“Golden Boy” star of such films as Love Story, What’s Up Doc? and Barry Lyndon in his ‘70s heyday, Tatum recounts that daddy Ryan considered her the apple of his eye until the pivotal time of his involvement with twin “Golden Girl” Fawcett, a relationship that began in 1979, setting off the estrangement that divided them for decades.

”I had been his favorite, his girl, his constant companion,” O’Neal writes. “Then I wasn’t anymore.” (Ryan, for his part, claims Tatum forced him to choose between her and Farrah.)

It was in 2007, when Fawcett was seriously ill, that Tatum was able to make peace with the love of her father’s life, in a quiet and heartfelt visit at her bedside in Los Angeles. In a tragicomic twist, this was followed by Tatum’s encounter with O’Neal Sr. at Fawcett’s funeral two years later, where he laid a pick-up line on his daughter, whom he didn’t recognize, as she greeted him outside the church – a story he denies.

The idea to present their lives as a docudrama fit into O’Neal’s larger desire to explore the dysfunctional dimensions of the father/daughter relationship, seeking answers to issues that have plagued her since childhood. But in reality, excuse the pun, it really should have been a family affair. As much the conflicted daughter that Tatum was, brother Griffin (involved in an infamous shooting-related fracas with his father in 2007) and half-brother Redmond (O’Neal’s son with Fawcett) aren’t chump change in the troubled-child department, either.

Olé!

Red scarves herald the start of the San Fermin Festival, and the running of the bulls,
in Pamplona, Spain 7/6/11

(Photo: Eloy Alonso/Reuters)

Pop Culture Musing for a Tuesday 7/5/11

Bad Mommy: As I write this, it’s the end of a day (an apoplectic Nancy Grace graces the TV screen) consisting of long hours of debate after the conclusion of the Casey Anthony trial. Not having followed the proceedings (was I the only one?) I can only venture a superficial impression or two based on limited attention. Though everyone seems shocked by the outcome, I find the verdict, with no forensic or DNA evidence linking the accused perpetrator to the crime, more understandable than the Simpson travesty of 1995. Why this woman waited a month to report the child’s initial disappearance, however, seems more damning than anything else. Still, I don’t get the feeling that whatever happened was premeditated murder. Looks like the prosecutors may have “overcharged” their case — with resulting overcharged exoneration by the jury.

An Artsy Fourth

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) titled this painting July 4th (1957), marking the date of
its completion.