WRLDs is an organization which develops projects within a web 2.0 framework, addressing a specific field or discipline, helping to create transparency and understanding for the broader public. The first project addresses the financial markets. Future projects will address the sciences.
Professionals from the humanities (exceptional artists, writers, and other creative’s), as well as those from the Project Field, (i.e. exceptional hedge fund managers and traders from the financial markets), work in collaborative teams and connect to a social networking site, where they generate data as sharable virtual 3D objects, called Social Objects. The program parameters which collect this data, are structured to reveal information about the ‘human” and how they interact with complex information in their field. Participants function as experimenters, generating data in a laboratory environment.
The shareable virtual 3D objects can be printed at any time, capturing and freezing moments of information as artifacts, and distributing them to a retail location. The retail location serves as a store, museum, and laboratory, all rolled into one. It also serves as a natural extension of the online activity. Within the retail space, data becomes a topography of objects. Each object can be purchased, and the objects change, as the data changes. Consumers buy these forms because they are aesthetic objects and because a larger story is conveyed in the stores about the project field. This brings the consumer into a new relationship with their market-based economy. Markets can now become about identifying meaning in complex information though the vehicle of aesthetics. Consumers carry the artifacts into their homes and offices, generating more questions. This is why they are called Social Objects.
The role of physical objects is changing. In publishing, Amazon is usurping the role of traditional publishers, by creating a vertical market from content producer to reader. But there is still a role for the physical forms of print as a form of artifact. For instance, after the Obama election, the New York Times printed an additional 50,000 copies which were quickly purchased. We tend to treat information we want to save or consider further, as physical objects. The role of the artifact and the role of retail locations are transforming and merging.
We are a global culture based on markets with increasingly shorter life spans. Markets are impacted, and even created and dissolved through social media. As the technologies advance, retail locations become more like “containers” or empty fields in a database. As citizens in a society based on free markets, consumption is required for the economy to thrive, but this does not mean consumerism needs to be frivolous or useless. We participate in the stock market, whether we intend to or not, as the companies whose products and services we use are public companies. Yet we know little about the markets or how they operate. This is because specialized fields use language that is opaque and complex. WRLDs allows the public to enter into the layers of language of specialized fields, through Social Objects.
WRLDs fundamentally changes the relationship of the consumer to their culture based on the generation of free markets. It uses markets and retail, as a way to generate and disseminate information. It relies upon the consumer to physically carry Social Objects into the places where they live and work, generating questions about the project field, making complex information transparent.
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