Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know and becoming friends with Jonathan Harris through all sorts of different avenues, projects he has done, and more recently the times we’ve found ourselves in the desert in Jordan together. He’s truly one of the most thoughtful, inspiring, and talented folks I know. And I meet a lot of people.
Site favorite and JS friend Jonathan Harris just launched his latest project entitled The Sputnik Observatory. It’s the result of a two-year collaboration with NYC based Sputnik, Inc, an organization that documents contemporary culture through intimate video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences, and technology worlds. There are about 200 videos on the site today, and there will be thousands more added over the coming weeks, months, and years.
In Jonathan’s words:
The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them.
Psychologist Carl Jung once talked about the “collective unconscious”, what he described as “a reservoir of the experiences of our species.” It’s kind of like how all children of the ’80s intuitively know an Autobot from a Decepticon. What Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs are trying to do with Twistori — their online social experiment — is find a sort of collective unconscious on Twitter. Inspired by our friend Jonathan Harris and his We Feel Fine project, Twistori uses Summize to tag conversations with key words like love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish. These convos are then grouped together on a scrolling Web page of innermost feelings. Now you can never say, “I never knew you felt that way.”
If you consider yourself a graphic designer, you’ve probably heard of Joshua Davis. As one of the first adopters of Flash, a significant new media artist, an author, and one of the design world's weightiest members, Joshua Davis is a name that rolls off many tongues during discussions regarding progression, experimentation, and development. A pioneer in the word's most technological sense, Joshua has never been one to find a niche and stick with it, instead choosing to find what's next — or in what's often his case, to create it. We chatted with Joshua about things like Praystation, philosophy, and his plans for the future, and wound up feeling a little bit like we do when we look at one of his mathematically composed graphics. In other words: utterly enthralled.
Joshspear.com: For our readers who aren't as familiar with your background, can you give us a brief rundown of your life up until today?
Joshua Davis: My name is Joshua Davis, born 1971 in San Diego, California, moved to Littleton, Colorado where I pretty much grew up. I had always been interested in art and in high school I entered a statewide competition and took second place in the state for painting. After spending ‘89, ‘90 in Huntington Beach, California skateboarding and ‘91, ‘92 moving back to Colorado living in Frisco to do some snowboarding, I moved to New York in November 1992 and eventually attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. At Pratt I worked on Design and Illustration and through fellow classmates got into working on the web in 1995 (Netscape 1.1). When Netscape 3 was released (at the end of 1996) I had a moment of clarity to use technology and the web to create my work. 13 years later I run Joshua Davis Studios where I use design and technology to create work for corporate clients, private collectors, galleries, museums, and personal exploration.
Back in October, I raved about Whale Hunt, the latest project from Jonathan Harris, friend and JS regular. Finally, the project is online and is a must see for anyone interested in the art of story telling. If you missed it when we posted earlier, the whale hunt is a project in which Harris went up to Alaska, shooting photos at 5-minute intervals and faster when his heart rate sped up as he witnessed a traditional whale hunt (a 1000 year old ritual). The photos are incredible, but what’s even more amazing is the organization of the content. Seriously, go spend some time on The Whale Hunt and read his beautiful statement about the project. Congratulations Jonathan!
The highlight of today’s first session entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness” was seeing friend, JoshSpear.com regular and sure-fire genius Jonathan Harris present one of his latest projects entitled The Whale Hunt. Whale Hunt tells his story of visiting the Northern most part of Alaska to witness, and observe, a traditional whale hunt. Jonathan took photos at 5-minute intervals throughout his 11 days up there (even while sleeping) and more often at more exciting moments. The result is basically a giant meta-story with multiple sub stories which can be organized by different themes of the story, locations, and characters. There are 3124 pictures in total.
But the Whale Hunt project is really more than just the story of a white guy from Brooklyn living with Eskimos and taking pictures; Jonathan’s work continues to explore new and engaging platforms for story telling, and ways to cross reference characters, events and emotions.
No word on when the site will be live, but I’ll let you know as soon as it’s up to see.
Last week I wrote about Jonathan Harris‘ amazing new project entitled Universe– I saw him give a passionate and amazing talk at TED earlier this month. The guys at Cool Hunting have a nice video (available above in HD) where he walks through his thinking on the Universe project as a whole, as well as a look into his journals and style of story telling– so great, check it out!
One of my favorite talks last week was by Jonathan Harris, an artist, designer, and borderline genius living in Brooklyn, NY. We saw the potential of his work a while back with project We Feel Fine and I guess it was only a matter of time before he really took it up a notch. His latest project just launched is called Universe. In his TED talk he spoke about how he loved spotting the constellations as a kid but always wondered why we don’t have modern versions? “As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be?” Explaining Universe isn’t easy, it’s divided into nine stages: Stars, Shapes, Secrets, Stories, Statements, Snapshots, Superstars, Settings, and Time. I implore you to visit and play with Universe– it’s a new way to view how connected we are in people, news and events around the world. This project is a true push forward into the realm of information discovery and I applaud Jonathan on his work– just breath taking.
TED was not only described to me as inspirational, passionate and unique, but also as mind boggling– sometimes almost exhaustively so. Today started early, I attended the pre-conference breakfast where TED Prize winners from last year updated attendees on their progress, issues and steps towards ultimate success– I encourage you to check out some of their wishes and how far they have come, it’s quite amazing. Not long after the breakfast, the real conference kicked off with one of the most passionate, heart-felt, and moving presentations I’ve seen in a very, very long time by none other than John Doerr, one of the, if not THE most well-known venture capitalist. His speech was about how scared he was for the future of the world– how his generation had put his children, and his children’s children in such jeopardy. He spoke about how despite all the positive work on eliminating CO2 and harmful emissions in places like Brazil, and around the world– it still was not enough, and the current efforts were not even close to what’s needed. I met him later in the afternoon to thank him and he said simply, we must do something now tochange this or we’re not going to last much longer on the earth. I look forward to re-watching his presentation when it’s available online– it’s not to be missed.
Doerr was followed by Nogozi Okonjo-Iwela a surprise addition to the program for many. When she took the stage I had absolutely no idea who she was or what she was here to talk about– and that unexpectedness was greeted with a humbling look into Africa like I’d never seen before. Nogozi is the Former Nigerian Finance Minister, and her short 18 minute speech honestly left me with a different view of the financial situation in not only Nigeria, but Africa as a whole. Nigeria and much of Africa is further along in their economic growth than they’re given credit for. Her speech was packed full of interesting growth statistics and ended leaving me in thoughts about Africa as a place for entrepreneurs, and a place for immense positive change. She left saying Africa is Open For Business.
Other highlights from the first session included Zipcar founder Robin Chase talking about mesh networks, the poet Rives obsession with the phrase “4 in the morning” and how it repeats itself throughout history. The first session called ‘Open For Business’ ended with Lawrence Lessig– founder of the Creative Commons movement. His presentation was absolutely fantastic and really spoke to me. That’s going to be a fabulous TED talk when it’s up on the internet for everyone to view!
The second session of the day was much different, it was called Truth & Invention. Although Erin Mckean, Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford American Dictionary was fascinating, and Nano-technologist/author Ted Sargent equally so– A humble and passionate Artist and Designer by the name of Jonathan Harris stole the show for many. We covered his project WeFeelFine many moons ago and it’s not surprising he has been working full-force on his latest project called Universe, slated to be online sometime next week! Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft was also great. He spoke about penguins, photography, dinosaur hunting and much more– and in 18 minutes gave me both the realization and validation that knowing a little about a lot of things is okay, like becoming a mini-expert on everything that interests you.
The third session was called simplicity– presenters like designer John Maeda and illustrator/artist Maira Kalman spoke so passionately about what they do and why they do it. Alan Kay debuted new revelations about the $100 Laptop initiative. By this third session the mind-boggling feeling had fully kicked in for the day.
The final session was the most important of the whole conference, it’s the session called I Have a Dream, where three prize winners get to present their individual wishes. The three prize winners were photographer James Nachtwey, author and scientist EO Wilson, and former president Bill Clinton. What was so interesting to me was that on one hand each of these individuals do such drastically different work, while they’re very, very similar on the other. Nachtwey’s speech was very moving– the war time photographer in my eyes is likely the most important photographer of my lifetime, if not the entire 21st century. When he took the stage he admitted how difficult receiving this award in front of so many people would be, as he has spent a majority of his life being invisible–blending into crowds of people, troops, etc taking photographs on the front line. The best way to describe his speech is to give you a quote by him: “I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.” His wish was for us to help him break a a story that the world needs to know about in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age. He hasn’t yet shared the story he is working on– but I have my guesses. You can read more about his wish and what he needs to make it a reality here.
EO Wilson’s acceptance speech was very different, he said at first he stood on stage speaking on behalf of the ‘little things in the world’, the insects, bacteria, etc. His scientific studies have led him (and many other scholars) to believe that if we destroy the insects in the world, the rest of the world won’t function properly, and therefore will not continue and cease to exist. His wish was that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life. You can read more about his wish and what’s needed to make that happen here.
Last but certainly not least was a speech and wish by President Bill Clinton. His speech was fairly casual and refreshing– Every other time I’ve ever seen the former president, let alone any president speak it has been with a teleprompter in a suit and tie with an American Flag pin on their jacket. I think he obviously hit his stride with his Clinton Global Initiative momentum. He spoke about, no surprise to many, Rwanda– but what was most interesting is that while solving the major issues in Rwanda he wants to create a foot print and system that can be deployed in thousands of other places around the world in need. His wish was for us to help create a better future for Rwanda by assisting his foundation, in partnership with the Rwandan Government, to build a sustainable, high quality rural health system for the whole country. Clinton’s words resonated with me because I recently saw an interview where he was asked what, if anything, did he regret about his time in office– and he said he felt like he could have and should have intervened and stopped the genocide in Rwanda– but he didn’t. You can see more details about his wish here.
Presentations like these really put life, and what we spend our time doing throughout it into a serious perspective…
Word Count, an oldie but goodie shines a positive light on information gathering. There are so many different ways of presenting information and with a large enough dataset, that presentation’s impact is even more substantial. Jonathan Harris’s application combs the British National Corpus database of more than 100 million words and takes the most 86,800 commonly used words in the English language. Word Count then sorts the words by order of frequency and presents it in a minimalistic left-to-right scrolling format. Aside from a numeric ranking, the words are sized by order of importance, with larger fonts representing more commonly used words. Lastly, you can search the database by either word or ranking. Visit the site today and scroll through the first dozen or so words. You may (or may not) be surprised at what you find.
Jonathan Harris, the driving force behind the visual-based news website 10×10, is at it again. This time with a project called Phylotaxis–developed by one of our favorite publications, SEED Magazine. Phylotaxis is “an expression of the space where science meets culture.†The project was derived from the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Ratio. Phylotaxis repopulates every few hours, merging art and design to create a visual representation of the most current science news. You can find it on the Seed magazine website or at the Phylotaxis site.
