Meral Agish

Tonight was the private view of LCC’s BA Sounds Art and Design students degree show. It was in a massive warehouse called the Hotel Elephant Gallery. This venue could indeed sleep multiple elephants.

At the cost the LCC technical tutors sanity (he looked on the verge of nervous collapse after installing 32 nearly graduates incredibly complex artworks into a semi-squat), the show looked spectacular. As is usual at Sound Art private views - you couldn’t hear that much - but it looked really great.

So I share with you my photos of works that made a particular impression on me. Don’t be sad you couldn’t hear them - I didn’t either. 

The show is open until Saturday - so go and check it out if you’re London based. Names of the exhibiting artists can be found with a description of works on this link:

Whilst this isn’t technically a data visualisation or an infographic, it almost certainly pays great homage to both. 

Influenced by old astronomical text books this video plays with the formats to create a beautifully captivating animation, making me want to jump into my rocket ship and explore space some more.

What does your world SOUND like? 

After Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 images of death and destruction flooded into the media, but photographer Paolo Woods focused on a subject close to our heart — radios.

Since 49% of the adult population of Haiti is literate, most people rely on local radio stations to get their local news, listen to kompa (traditional Haitian music) and figure out what’s going on in their community.

It takes about $2,000 to start up a basic station, but that won’t get you broadcast as far as NPR; it’ll just reach your town.

In Kenya, Using Tech To Put An ‘Invisible’ Slum On The Map

If you were to do a search for the Nairobi city slum of Mathare on Google Maps, you’d find little more than gray spaces between unmarked roads.

Slums by nature are unplanned, primordial cities, the opposite of well-ordered city grids. Squatters rights rule, and woe to the visitor who ventures in without permission. But last year, a group of activist cartographers called the Spatial Collective started walking around Mathare typing landmarks into hand-held GPS devices.

In a slum with no addresses and no street names, they are creating a map of what it’s like to live here.

Read the rest and listen to the story on Morning Edition.

The great Joan Didion has won a National Humanities Medal, and in the lead-up I interviewed her (and tried not to faint while sitting in her living room) for a bio-profile just out in Humanities Magazine. 

I promised myself I wouldn’t stay at her place more than 45 minutes. Even in that short time, she said many, many interesting things that didn’t fit in the allotted space. Some of my favorites:

She once told The Paris Review that none of her novels are particularly autobiographical. I mentioned this, and she said The Last Thing He Wanted, her last novel, was an exception.I wondered whether she found quasi-autobiographical fiction more difficult to write than other kinds. She said she did. “Why is it so much harder?" I asked her. “I don’t know," she said, “but it is." The Last Thing He Wanted was “depressing to write."

She’s written about clothing and linens and furniture, about her mother’s and grandmother’s influence on her tastes. I asked if she saw a relationship between her aesthetics in writing and her aesthetics in the rest of the world. Did they seem related or like two different spheres? “No, they don’t seem like different spheres," she said. “I have a hard time thinking about it now but I spent a huge amount of my childhood and adult life finding a way to incorporate my family’s ideas into my own…. It seems to me everything you write is so wrapped up in everything you’ve been told and everything you do that it’s hard to separate it."