Duran Duran and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts Launch HereRightNow.Org: An Experiment to Visualize Our World
Band encourages people around the globe to participate in their mission to promote cultural literacy
Duran Duran and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), a civic-minded nonprofit focused on building an appreciation for and participation in digital culture, have teamed up to create the “Here Right Now” experiment – an online data visualization project inspired by Duran Duran’s new album entitled “ALL YOU NEED IS NOW.”
The band will invite fans to log on to HereRightNow.Org and upload images in response to weekly single-word prompts, chosen directly by the band members. Their goal is to visualize, photo by photo, the different perceptions of common words, ideas, and events from around the world. The project begins by asking fans to share their interpretations of prompts like “Sunrise”, “Information”, and “Red.” The result is a series of narrative postcards, each representing a unique interpretation of a simple, shared idea or experience. The postcards can then be accessed on the site by anyone in the world, and will include information about who shared the image and where they’re located. Fans will also be able to share their postcards on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter using the hashtag #rightnow.
Gray Area Researchers Gabriel Dunne and Nik Hanselmann designed the project by combining location data and user-submitted art, giving meaning to simple, but engaging ideas.
Duran Duran keyboardist, Nick Rhodes, said of the project “The idea evolved from some discussions we’d been having within the band about how to visually represent what different people around the world thought about certain things at different times – what they needed, what they wanted and how that changed over time. So we started looking for a team to help us bring the project to life and were introduced to GAFFTA – who were the perfect partner. We would love to think that perhaps some patterns will emerge, that will tell us something about what people are thinking and feeling – but part of the appeal of this project is that we have no idea what will come out of it. What we do know, however, is that it will ultimately become a shared, global initiative that will be constantly evolving, and that in itself is very exciting to us."
"When Duran Duran approached us to create a project that allowed fans to share visual depictions of what they were thinking or feeling, we knew we were about to embark on something special. A single image or photograph can communicate an incredible amount without the use of words, and in addition to geographic location, images have the potential to reveal themes on a global level," said Gabriel Dunne, project lead. "As this collection grows, we will also be encouraging coders to create their own visualizations with the projects public API."
