Infra-Ordinary

People often stage their lives for social media, and they use Instagram’s own and third party image editing tools to refine the aesthetics of their images in ways that in the 20th century were only available to professional photographers.

Humans are always looking for signals standing out against noise. But as modern society developed techniques to generate progressively more data, this became particularly important.

In view of these characteristics of social media, what does our frame captures? Some of it is the exceptional as news define it – but that’s only a one part. The rest is something else, but it is not Perec’s infra-ordinary. People often carefully construct their “ordinary” for Instagram. And they also do share what is exceptional to them: birthday ... See more

Creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by siloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place.

The metaphor of mining suggests that you recover what is valuable and discard the rest. But what if we reverse the procedure?

It is fascinating how everyday places that through turmoil, have come to mean something else to those that frequent them.

She has come to see, too, the universal in the specific. “All the months that I had been filming, I’d thought that there were so many ways of living, of inhabiting the park,” she says. “I wanted to know as many configurations as possible, all the strange and unique ways. But lately, as I went over the scenes again and again, smoothing their edges, ... See more

Over last ten years, the geometry of the cities did not change much, so it determines our movements as much as it did in the 1960s. But what did change is the presence and role of maps. Digital interactive maps are now built into tens of thousands of apps for mobile devices, and we use them daily. Looking and working with the geometry of the cities... See more