July | 2006 | dérive

July 29, 2006 • 7:03 pm 1

is usability dead??

GLEN MURPHY
Usability is not dead, it’s never going to be dead – it’s so multifaceted and universal that by its very nature, it can’t die, no matter how many designers fire silver anti-vampire bolts at certain people.
This tension between ‘usability experts’ and designers is borne out of fanaticism from both camps – the self-proclaimed ‘experts’, eager to prove their new religion, brandish ‘authoritative’ notes, decrying anything which conflicts with their view on ‘how it should be done.’ The designers cry foul, angered at the sudden encroachment upon what was once their exclusive territory.  But this shouldn’t be the case – usability is an integral part of the design process, it always has been – on the web, even if you can make pretty pictures, it doesn’t mean squat if you don’t know how to let people navigate to those pictures. Designers have learnt usability through time and experience. All these experts are doing is showing us the way, alerting us to potential mistakes before we make them (and now that some sites cost over a million dollars to build, we can’t afford to learn by trial and error anymore.) But instead of swallowing our pride and accepting their words, we arrogantly turn up our noses at the insinuation that we need to be told what to do.  As someone who takes great interest in different forms of interaction, I believe that the web’s still too new and large for usability to be qualified in such a simple, 400 page ‘bible’, and so I believe that usability in its ‘Jakob Nielsen Extremist Fad Franchise’-style form will continue to exist for many years to come, which is little a shame, as it’s little more than hotair, wafting off a layer of redundant words describing how to build for the lowest common denominator.  The book isn’t geared towards designers, and therein lies the same problem I’ve spent the last three paragraphs unnecessarily repeating (guess this isn’t a very usable theory 🙂 – usability is being promoted as a separate branch of the development process, where currently, there are already too many branches – we have development and design, the backend and the frontend, and it’s this separation which is causing so many problems. We can’t continue with our current methods of building sites – we get designers to build pretty pictures and menus, we get the developers to build fantastic database driven systems, then we whack them both in the same directory and expect it to work.  And does it work? No, it often fails miserably, and as internet companies around the world began to lose revenue due to user-unfriendly pages, usability came to the fore as a solution, except somewhere along the way, some people went a bit overboard and came out with self important comments like:  ”In the future, first of all, websites will be designed by my guidelines … for the simple reason that if they don’t, they are dead.” – Jakob Nielsen.  Ignore it.  I guarantee you that there are usability experts out there who hate Jakob and his over rampant ego, who believe that he’s destroying whatever credibility usability has. Please, for the love of god, don’t base your stereotype of usability experts on him; he’s an aberration. Closing your mind only makes you as bad as him.  Usability is new to the web, the web is new to usability, let the kinks iron themselves our before we start baying for blood, lets mold usability into something we want it to be, rather than bitching and moaning at it until it grows into something immoveable, bitter and wrong.  Regards, Glen Murphy :: Design Lab: http://glenmbox/ sausage internal] Kaput.org: http://kaput.org/ _______________ /

AARON HARPER   Usability©  By Aaron Harper For “Theory” on Designiskinky.net  Instinct Personal instinct distinguishes how useable a website is. The usability of a website or navigation should be taken into account when the project is in the design stage. The designer should be asking him/herself “who is my target audience?”. A website for public consumption, like a commercial site, should have an instinctive usability to someone who isn’t used to features outwith the norm. If the site is aimed at the new media or design world, then the sky is the limit. The website can afford to be much more exploratory and less obvious, yet still instinctive to the target audience. Navigation or features should not be so obscure that the page has to include instructions or a demonstration. I like to see minimal things that are not obvious, yet your mind unconsciously spots them and you know what to do or where to go.Should I stay or should I go? I find myself tiring quickly when I come across a site that involves dragging something into another to activate changes. What seems to be a novelty on the homepage soon becomes tedious on lower levels. More often than not, sites that have a challenging usability factor don’t have the content within to sustain the user’s interest enough to explore the site further. The magnetic and interest qualities of a website are decided in the user’s mind within 30 seconds of them opening the homepage. If they can’t get to grips with the navigation or are bombarded with so much that they become confused, will they stay? – Probably not. Mind you, every now and then, a site will come along and it will go against exactly what I just said. These are the sites that grab our attention, make us sit back from our monitor and pause in awe. Sites like Yugop, which inspire the creative minds of both designers and developers. Innovative navigation ideas and interactive toys to keep you amused for most of your lunch hour. Mind you, saying that, I remember tiring of having to waggle the mouse to reveal streams of text on the site. I have to admit, even the likes of K10k doesn’t inspire me to delve further because a fear of getting lost. I mostly use k10k for their news and reviews, probably logging on five or six times a day.
C*nted When I’m designing a site, I always consider navigation, usability and the design at the same time. Whether it’s a project at work or a personal site like konspiracy or cunted. A lot of designers tend to design how a site will look first and the navigation takes back pew. Sometimes, not even tackling the navigation until the site is in the hands of the developer/author. If the designer isn’t involved with the building of the site, he/she should discuss options or ideas with the person/people who will be. More often than not, they can throw in new ideas or suggest ‘toys’ they have been developing. Authors like their fun too.
Criticism The best test of usability is to get someone who isn’t involved with the project. They can cast a fresh eye over the work and usually point out things that have been overlooked. If someone who isn’t a designer or author casts judgement on any of my work or points out faults, I don’t take it as an insult, I’ll take it as a point to ponder and probably resolve. I have had a lot of positive feedback about the simplicity of design and usability of i.am/cunted. This site was dreamt up in a day and was built over a weekend. The navigation was born from a JavaScript source online which made me stop and think “nice and simple”. The design side of the site just basically reflected the simplicity of the site and the functions needed.  No clutter, no fuss, no bright colours or distractions and arial.Conclusion? I hope this has been an informative read, I’ve just been sitting typing whatever’s been coming into my head while supping a beer. If you oppose my views, or if you’re with them, I have hopefully provoked some new trains of thought.
aaron harper http://www.konspiracy.co.uk http://i.am/cunted designer / author at http://www.blackid.com

THOMAS BRODAHL
“Is Usability Dead?” Lets start out by defining what we understand as usability. For my purposes, I will limit my comments on usability to that which pertains to the internet. Usability is the measurment of how well the user interacts with and navigates a website. Although there is a wide range of usability levels, I feel it is safe to say that all webpages are usable in some way, shape, or form.   If usability was dead, you would not be reading this page, you would not be online, the web would not exist without usability. Anything that triggers a reaction from the user is usable. But as with anything, there are different levels of achievment within the confines of usability.   Navigational systems and user interfaces may change, but usability will always be maintained. Jakob Nielsen dictates that usability is at its maximum when we stick to designs and interfaces that resemble yahoo and amazon. This may be correct for websites targetting first-time users, but more and more people are moving into their fourth, fifth, sixth year of using the internet.   As people continue to become educated in the advancement of online communication, designs will push the envelope further, developing new and interesting methods of user interaction. People are smart, they can handle change, they learn, they adapt. 30 years ago, the remote for your Television had 1 button, now it has 60. People have grown with the technology, and will continue to do so as technology advances. New experiences, new ways of presenting them, and new levels of understanding from users will continue to make usability more sophistocated. We are in the fetal stages, looking to evolve into a full grown industry. It just takes time..
Thomas Brodahl - Surfstation

Filed under: academic, graphics, new media, research

July 29, 2006 • 12:36 pm 0

Phd Comics

Piled Higher and Deeper

Filed under: academic, research, thesis

July 29, 2006 • 12:23 pm 0

Mobile Asia Competition 2006

MOBILE ASIA COMPETITION 2006: ORGANIZED BY ART CENTER NABI, SEOUL, KOREA :: The progress of mobile technology characterized by mobility, connectivity, and dispersion seems to resonate with the diasporic experiences of Asians who are mobile, dispersed yet connected with each other through socio-cultural dynamics and relations. With the mobile market and its culture expanding beyond Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan to the Southeast Asia, the need should be raised for reflecting upon the currency of culture and the urgency of new identities that are evolving with mobile technology in Asian region.

Mobile Asia Competition 2006 hosted by Art Center Nabi pays attention to the role of media makers and artists in articulating and expressing the Asian mobile cultures. Artists and media makers always appropriate and challenge the given technology through creative ideas and critical practices to broaden the space of possibilities. Especially, the recent emerging ubiquitous mobile environments requires both popular sentiment and critical thoughts. Mobile Asia competition 2006 investigates the new forms of Asian identities and cultures in the creative works of artists and designers who dare to experiment, play, and wrestle with the mobile technologies.

Reconfiguring Place and Space in New Media Writing

Editor’s Introduction: Reconfiguring Place and Space in New Media Writing

Jay David Bolter titled his influential study of the history of writing, the computer, and hypertext Writing Space [1991] in part because he believed that computers present us with a fundamental shift in the nature of the conceptual and material space of writing. Bolter wrote that while the writing space of medieval handwriting and modern printing was the printed page, the computer’s writing space is “animated, visually complex, and to a surprising extent malleable” and that electronic writing offers a new conceptual space “characterized by fluidity and an interactive relationship between writer and reader” (11). It is perhaps emblematic of the progression of the field of new media writing that among Bolter’s more recent projects is Four Angry Men, [2003] a “single-narrative, multiple point-of-view augmented reality experience,” in which the user sits at a table in a physical space while experiencing an abridged version of Twelve Angry Men from the point of view of one of four jurors. The other characters appear as texture-mapped video in the other three chairs at the table. The multimedia writing space has extended from the computer back into the physical world.

From the earliest hypertext fictions written in Storyspace and the interactive fictions of the Infocom era, space and place have had distinctly different and in many ways more prominent roles than setting typically plays in the structure of print narratives. From the spelunking of Adventure and the Zork series onwards, interactive fictions are always in a fundamental sense about the description of imaginary spaces, and the readers’ role is to navigate from one space to the next, solving riddles as they proceed. Hypertexts written in Storyspace software, such as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl [1995], used that program’s capacity to visually represent hypertext nodes as configurations of boxes connected by links to present visual maps of writing spaces. Patchwork Girl and Jackson’s webwork My Body & — a Wunderkammer [1997] both also integrate woodcut imagemaps of the protagonists’ bodies, which the reader can click through to stories describing or related to each organ or appendage.

In most hypertext fiction, the role of chronology in structuring the narrative is greatly diminished in comparison to print fiction conventions. In the absence of chronology, the authors of fragmented multilinear narratives need to offer their readers other tools for navigating the text. In an environment described as cyberspace, developed with home pages on web sites, geographical metaphors make almost intuitive sense. Any textual link is of course itself a means of navigation, but authors of web hypertext typically offer readers other orienting strategies as well. In addition to a calendar and character-based means of navigation, Bobby Rabyd a.k.a. Robert Arellano’s network novel Sunshine 69 [1996] also provides a map of the San Francisco Bay area, enabling the reader to organize their reading geographically. The reader traverses Matthew Miller’s “Trip” [1996] by first choosing a state in the US and then by choosing specific interstates to change course. The collaborative hypertext novel The Unknown [1999] likewise used geography as an organizational strategy, and the road trip as a trope. Stuart Moulthrop’s Reagan Library [1999] can be navigated both by textual links and by moving through a three-dimensional Myst-like Quicktime VR world. In Moulthrop’s most recent work Pax [2003], the user clicks on bodies rising and falling through space, momentarily visiting each avatar’s consciousness in the process of assembling a patchworked story of American consciousness during the war on (or in) terror. The collective narrative project Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood includes hundreds of individual contributions of short fiction and nonfiction set in specific locations all over New York City. The reader can navigate to stories by selecting a New York neighborhood or by zooming in on a satellite map of Manhattan to the specific street address where the story takes place.

Since the 1980s, there have been a number of installation-based new media writing projects, including Jeffrey Shaw’s Legible City [1989], which had the user navigating a labyrinthine city of words by riding a stationary bicycle. Installation-based forms of new media writing typically utilize the user’s body as an instrument in revealing, uncovering, arranging, or modifying the text. In Camille Utterback & Romy Achituv’s Text Rain [1999], users catch and play with letters as they fall like rain on the users’ mirror images in the projection in front of them. In Noah Wardrip-Fruin et al.’s Talking Cure [2002], the user’s face or body is projected as a text field that reveals one layer of a three-layer text centered on Anna O, Joseph Breur’s patient that gave him and Freud the idea of the talking cure. Another layer of the text is created by the user’s voice translated by a text-to-speech engine. Recently, Robert Coover has led a series of CAVE writing workshops at Brown University, which have produced a number of literary pieces designed for that fully immersive three-dimensional environment, including Noah Wardrip-Fruin et al.’s Screen [2002-2005] and William Gillespie and David Dao’s Word Museum [2005]. CAVE installations give the user the sensation of being inside a computer-generated environment. Words and graphics become material forms that can peel off the wall and fly at your head, or can be approached from many angles like a sculpture in a museum.

While installations and VR environments have increasingly liberated the user’s body from the seated-in-front-of-screen-at-keyboard position and brought the body inside the ontological space of the work itself, mobile computing and communication technologies are increasingly powerful and pervasive. Writers, artists, performers and “puppet-masters” are employing network writing strategies to deploy a variety of projects that extend from the network into the real world. Projects such as Teri Rueb’s Itinerant [2005] make use of mobile and locational technologies including GPS and RFID to create narrative experiences affected by the user’s movement through the physical world. In the case of Itinerant, as users walked through Boston Commons and surrounding neighborhoods they experienced an interactive sound work that re-framed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Projects such as Yellow Arrow [2004-Present] pair coded stickers with text messaging, enabling users to write and read brief personal narratives about locations tagged in the physical world. Implementation [2004] is a fragmentary novel published on stickers that was deployed and photographed by participant readers around the world. Surrender Control [2001] utilized SMS as a performance medium, sending its users a series of directions as text messages, ordering them to perform a variety of absurdist actions during the course of their everyday lives. Similarly, the phenonmenon of flash mobs makes use of text messaging to assemble groups of people for alternately absurdist and political activities. Extensible web technologies such as Google Maps paired with GPS coordinates also offer narrative possibilities, as evidenced by projects such as the “Memory Maps” group on Flickr, whose users have created personal narratives of places through coordinate-tagged photographs accessed through interactive maps.

This installment of the Iowa Review Web explores the function of place and space in recent new media writing. Each of the four interviews concern works that in some way attempt to reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between space and storytelling. Each of the primary works discussed in these interviews also pushes space in another sense, in that each attempts to explore a new “possibility space” on the boundary between different forms and fields of multimedia experience: between story and game, between game and drama, between literature and conceptual art, between game and performance.

Nick Montfort and Jeremy Douglass discuss Montfort’s new interactive fiction Book and Volume [2006], a work that casts the player character as a kind of cross betweeen a flâneur and Pavlovian functionary, a computer tech completing the quotidian tasks of working life in the grid city of nTopia. The work explores the nature of the phenomenological experience of life in the city, among other aspects how the idle chatter and white noise of city life affect our experience of the polis as place. Montfort says “These things are sort of irrelevant to you as a human being in an ontological world, but nevertheless are going on all around you in the city, and reminding you of the existence of city life. So, in addition to there being a literary purpose for wanting these amusing texts to appear once in a while, there is also a connection to the atmosphere and experience of a city.”

Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas discuss with Brenda Harger the process of writing and programming their groundbreaking interactive drama Façade. The 2006 Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Award-winner, Façade [2005] is a game in the form of an interactive one-act play. The player character, an avatar in a partially three-dimensional environment, arrives one night at the apartment of two old college friends, now married, in the midst of a fairly tense argument. You as the player become embroiled in their argument, cast into the role of referee. Insofar as there is a goal in Façade, it is to moderate a therapy game and manage the intractable marital discord of your hosts, as you navigate the anxious and awkward spaces of both Grace and Trip’s small urban apartment and the crumbling edifice of their relationship. Mateas highlights Façade’s inversion of the commercial gaming conventions of vast virtual environments that players wander having shallow interactions with “objects and non-player characters–dodging, jumping, running, shooting, etc.” to a more intimate environment that fosters “deep interaction.”

Shelley Jackson offers a discussion of her recent work in print, electronic, and epidermal media. Jackson is the author of the print fiction collection The Melancholy of Anatomy [2002] and the forthcoming novel Half Life, electronic works including the canonical hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl and the webwork The Doll Games [2002], and most recently the story “Skin,” [2004-Present] which is being published on the skin of 2,095 volunteers in the form of single word tattoos. The interview focuses in particular on the various ways that Jackson has thematized the intimately alien space of the human body. Jackson writes “I am feeling my way through some sort of impossible topological figure here, probably a Klein bottle, to explain the outside-inness of my sense of self, but there are other ways to put it. Let’s see if this is simpler: there are some parts of me that are permanently unknowable, and one of those things is the very basis of knowing: the body.”

Jane McGonigal is a designer and practictioner of alternate reality games. McGonigal provides a discussion of massively collaborative play and performance in everyday spaces. Alternate reality games such as I Love Bees [2004] and the Go Game are cross-media experiences, typically played both via the web and other communication technologies and in physical real-world environments. Players perform the games based on the clues and prompts of “puppet-masters.” In navigating the path of challenges laid by the puppetmasters, players uncover and in a sense help to author a controlling narrative, while simultaneously developing the emergent narrative of their own experience of the game. McGonigal writes that “Stories linger in the places after we experience them. And the stories we tell about our personal experiences in a place help us own that space, to feel comfortable there, to make others comfortable there, to feel alive there. I believe the job of the designers of reality-based games like big urban games and alternate reality games is to figure out: What kind of story would players want to be able to tell about this space?”

Montfort’s Book and Volume and Mateas and Stern’s Façade are both featured works in this installment of the Iowa Review Web and are available for your download, play, and interaction. I hope that these new works and interviews will give you a window on four very different ideas of the function of place and space in new media writing and will perhaps inspire some other writers to take advantage of some of the vast potentialities of creating new writing spaces at the intersection of virtual environments and real-world geography.

Filed under: academic, architecture, art, locative, mobility, new media, research, situationist, social, space/place, technology, urban

July 29, 2006 • 12:15 pm 0

CALL FOR PAPERS_MOBILE/ IMMOBILIZED

networked_performance: MOBILE/ IMMOBILIZED: Art, biotechnologies & (Dis)abilities

Call for Papers

MOBILE / IMMOBILIZED: Art, biotechnologies & (Dis)abilities :: Call for Papers for the colloquium :: Montréal, October 2007 :: Please submit, to the Centre Interuniversitaire en arts médiatiques :: gram[at]uqam.ca :: a short biography (15 lines) :: an abstract of 250 words maximum :: before September 1, 2006.

A human being would lack nothing, if one were to admit that there are a thousand ways to live. – Canguilhem :: Following the activities that took place within the framework of two colloquia, “Interfaces et Sensoralité” (2003) and “Arts & Biotechnologies” (2004), and based on the work with the handicapped conducted, over several years, by the group at Cyprès in Marseille, we believe it is opportune to provide a site for insightful reflections on questions relating to (dis)abilities. At the intersection of several contemporary art projects, bioscientific research and technological innovations, the notion of deficiency seems to be one of the most fertile and troubling forces. It certainly has a pronounced affect on the experimental art scene, where it generates a significant array of creative, phantasmagorical and symbolic artworks.

Redesigning the Human

Indeed, it seems important, at the present time, to evaluate how technologies and biotechnologies affect the condition of viability, of autonomy and disability of people, and to observe any signs of evolution that signal an increase in cognitive, mental, imaginary and symbolic capabilities. All disciplines involved in the redesigning of the human being are included within the framework of this colloquium. On the one hand, these disciplines occupy the central stage, determining and illuminating the orientation and objectives of the project Mobile / Immobilized, and on the other hand, they serve as a gauge, allowing one to evaluate the techno-anthropological and political impact of practices exerted by humans on humans.

The Augmented Body

Increasingly, technological developments give the impression that human beings are inadequately equipped. This section of the colloquium concentrates on artistic works whose orientation and experimental factors open up conceptual possibilities as well as practical applications for people with deficiencies or constraints (Virtual reality, biofeedback, motion captures, interactivity, synthetic voices, sound, technological extensions, implants, etc.) Artworks will also be presented by people with disabilities who have, because of their deficiencies and their differences, strengthened their sensorial capabilities, and so produce unique poetic and phantasmagorical worlds with technological tools (images, digital photographs, video…). Since such works are adapted to particular disabilities, in certain cases they may result in technical or technological solutions that offer potential uses for the broader
public.

Art as a Life Laboratory

The question here is the study of artistic approaches that propose an important slippage towards a centre of gravity different from the site of current art practices. It is a matter of considering new artworks and artistic processes as cognitive tools, charged at one and the same time with an emotion and with indissociable cognition, artworks that permit one to conceive of strategies for inventive learning and adaptation in order to try to find new symbolic and sensory forms. These approaches permit one to redefine artistic activity in terms of the laboratory of life by actively participating in the development of tools that work for, and in concert with, handicapped persons. This can be done by considering specific imaginaries, unique forms of creations and creativity, and modes of global communication.

Artists, theorists, (bio)scientists, and (bio)engineers) working in related fields are invited to present their artworks, ideas and research, as well as certain developments and applications in this domain.

Filed under: architecture, art, conferences, locative, mobility, new media, research, social, space/place, technology

July 29, 2006 • 12:09 pm 0

CALL FOR PAPERS_Transubstantiate

Transubstantiate

Call for Submissions

Transubstantiate: a peer-reviewed, online journal for performance technologies praxis :: Call for submissions :: Deadline: November 1, 2006 :: Transubstantiate welcomes submissions for its inaugural issue on the theme of Disruptive Innovation. We seek examples of new thinking and practice that overturn and / or reassess existing performance technology praxis. Submissions may be presented as papers, reviews, audio, visuals (stills / video) and code. Authors may use multiple formats in a single submission.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Networked performance * Disruptive innovations & discourse * Pedagogy, ontologies and epistemologies * Choreography for iPod. Choreographies for iPod must be specifically devised works and may take the form of: * Video / stills * Audio description / instructions * Text description / instructions * Soundscore with text description / instructions.

Transubstantiate encourages submissions that take an alternative stance on established modes of mediated performance. Submissions should be equivalent to 3000 – 8000 words in .doc, mp3, .jpg or .mp4 (video) format.

The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2006. For more information or to submit please contact the editorial & curatorial board via curators [at] transubstantiate [dot] org.

The liminal is limited; transubstantiate

via turbulence.org/blog

Filed under: academic, art, conferences, locative, mobility, new media, physical computing, research, social, space/place, technology

July 29, 2006 • 12:06 pm 0

SPAM ARCHITECTURE_alex dragulescu

alex dragulescu – dynamic for the people

The Architecture of Spam

Alex Dragulescu has some extremely interesting projects up on his website right now. For the most part, they’re “experiments and explorations of algorithms, computational models, simulations and information visualizations that involve data derived from databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets.” However, this one – called Spam Architecture – totally blows me away: “The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.”

Applying this to large-scale architectural design would be endlessly and hypnotically fascinating – not to mention quite profitable if you turned it into a kind of immersive, 3-dimensional version of Tetris. You turn digital photographs of your last birthday party into architectural structures; your Ph.D. thesis, exported as an inhabitable object; every bank statement you’ve ever received, transformed into a small Cubist city. Your whole DVD collection, informationally re-presented as a series of large angular buildings.

Of course, you could also reverse the process, and input CAD diagrams of a Frank Gehry building – thus generating an inbox-clogging river of spam email. The Great Wall of China, emailed around the world in an afternoon. The collected works of Frank Lloyd Wright. In any case, Dragulescu currently works at the Experimental Game Lab at UC-San Diego – the same institution at which Sheldon Brown developed his Scalable City project.

(Thanks to Brent Kissel for the tip about Dragulescu – and you can read more here – and to Brian Romer for Scalable City). [blogge by Geoff Manaugh on BLDGBLOG]

via turbulence.org/blog

Filed under: architecture, art, graphics, new media, research, space/place, technology

July 29, 2006 • 11:38 am 0

Theory of the Dérive

The Library at nothingness.org/Theory of the Dérive_Guy Debord

One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science — despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself — provides psychogeography with abundant data.

The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.

In his study Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” In the same work, in order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives . . . within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.

Such data — examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions (in this particular case, outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited) — or even Burgess’s theory of Chicago’s social activities as being distributed in distinct concentric zones, will undoubtedly prove useful in developing dérives.

If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of a dérive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered by dérivers may tend to fixate them around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.

An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a town chosen by lot: Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. But this mindlessness is pushed much further by a certain Pierre Vendryes (in Médium, May 1954), who thinks he can relate this anecdote to various probability experiments, on the ground that they all supposedly involve the same sort of antideterminist liberation. He gives as an example the random distribution of tadpoles in a circular aquarium, adding, significantly, “It is necessary, of course, that such a population be subject to no external guiding influence.” From that perspective, the tadpoles could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the surrealists, since they have the advantage of being “as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality,” and are thus “truly independent from one another.”

At the opposite pole from such imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities — those centers of possibilities and meanings — could be expressed in Marx’s phrase: “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”

One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes, and in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale.

The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The starting and ending times have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.

But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, a dérive rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside an hour or two at the beginning or end of the day for taking care of banal tasks; and toward the end of the day fatigue tends to encourage such an abandonment. But more importantly, a dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or it may last for several days without interruption. In spite of the cessations imposed by the need for sleep, certain dérives of a sufficient intensity have been sustained for three or four days, or even longer. It is true that in the case of a series of dérives over a rather long period of time it is almost impossible to determine precisely when the state of mind peculiar to one dérive gives way to that of another. One sequence of dérives was pursued without notable interruption for around two months. Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior that bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.[1]

The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives.

The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough dividing line: If in the course of a dérive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with a personal trip outside one’s usual surroundings. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism.

In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure — the residence of the solo dériver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).

The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones — along with their correction and improvement. It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighborhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and soon fades away.

In the “possible rendezvous,” on the other hand, the element of exploration is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. The subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this “possible rendezvous” has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a “possible rendezvous” for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never even have seen the other person before, he will be encouraged to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the “possible rendezvous.” In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn’t know where the first “possible rendezvous” has taken him, in order to ask for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime.

Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.

The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draw up the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.

Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended and indistinct bordering regions. The most general change that dérive experience leads to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.

Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment:

“The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours.”

(To be continued.)

Bibliography

A slightly different version of this article was first published in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956) along with accounts of two dérives.

Filed under: architecture, art, ethnography, locative, mobility, new media, research, situationist, social, space/place, urban

July 28, 2006 • 6:23 pm 0

metamanda>>weblog: being interdisciplinary

So, zephoria posted about interdisciplinarity and set me off thinking about what it means to be interdisciplinary, and what is a discipline anyway. Now, given what the topology of my mind is like lately, it takes just the slightest nudge in that direction and I tumble down that slope with every-increasing velocity.

A few months ago we had a little panel/seminar on interdisciplinarity, since Informatics is a pretty interdisciplinary department, inside of a School of Information and Computer Sciences (sort of an Information School + CS program smushed together… yes, there is a little culture clash). Now of course, the terms “cross-disciplinary” and “multi-disciplinary” and maybe even “extra-disciplinary” came up, as well as these illustrations: (first image)

I doodled most of the way through, which doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not paying attention (often my class notes are just informative doodle) but I did end up a little disappointed in what some folks had to say. (People from UCI will have fun trying to guess who said what.)

One opinion expressed was along the lines of “doing anything interdisciplinary is too risky until you’ve gotten tenure,” which I think exhibits a profoundly poor understanding of what it means to be interdisciplinary. I think zephoria is right, (you DID read her post that I linked to, right?) it’s at least partly an identity thing. I would be profoundly unhappy if I tried to limit myself to mainstream CS for my whole graduate career, and also feel incomplete if I only did design, or sociology. Besides, wait till you have tenure and the methods and assumptions of whatever discipline you were in will be so thoroughly entrenched in your mind that it will be difficult to do really good interdisciplinary work.

Another guy seemed to think that some people are just constitutionally interdisciplinary. This view I can understand and appreciate. But he also tells stories like “I walked 3 miles in the snow to physics school, and then another 5 miles to art school, and then another 6 miles to the studio where I was apprenticing under a master welder who beat me daily, and it was uphill all three ways, and did i mention it was snowing that whole time and i was too poor to own shoes because of all the tuition i was paying.” He would conclude that basically if you don’t have the nads to stick it to the man the way he did, then what are you even doing trying to be interdisciplinary? He thought he was very cool. I respect his efforts a lot, but ultimately that attitude isn’t constructive. No researcher is an island. Struggle is fine, being un-mainstream is fine, but without a community or any mentorship, your research will suffer.

Another guy said that in his vast industrial experience, when someone says they’re “interdisciplinary” they really mean they are dilettantes. The classic “jack of all trades master of none” stereotype. That struck a nerve. It’s a perception that I think we interdisciplinary types struggle with a lot, and we should. It’s too easy to have breadth and no depth. I experienced that in my interdisciplinary major as an undergrad (actually, the problem there was largely breadth and no synthesis/connection). Zephoria mentions being disappointed in the job talks she saw for a high-quality interdisciplinary program. It’s too easy to make a successful career social-sciencing to computer scientists, and designing it up amongst the social scientists, and being technical amongst the designers, and looking good without knowing your shit very rigorously. I am constantly afraid that I am doing this. And I am constantly trying to avoid being like that. We are valuable bridges between disciplines and communities of practice, but I don’t think we can settle for being only that. We have to have rigor, and depth. We have to know the methods and theories used in these various disciplines… know them well and then be creative enough to understand where they can be applied that maybe no one thought to apply them before. And in order to be that good, I think we do have to be hard on ourselves, and other have to be hard on us too sometimes.

So yeah, I’m always questioning myself. Do I know enough? Is my ethnographic research just full of shit? Am I a good enough programmer? Would this prototype fly in a real design program? Have I read enough books this quarter? And that is as it should be. When I meet interdisciplinary researchers or practitioners who aren’t wigging out like this, who seem self-satisfied… well, I don’t trust them.
But the whole thing just made me call into question what a discipline is anyway. Computer Science is a young discipline, and as best I can tell it used to be one part mathematics and one part building shit. I keep thinking back to that paper I read earlier about boundary work and defining science during the Victorian Era. “Science” is not a static concept. What we mean when we say “science”, “philosophy”, and “art” has changed over the centuries. If disciplines are not static, then how do they change and form over time? And how does “interdisciplinarity” play into this changing landscape of thought? How do issues of culture, social networks and funding influence interdisciplinary collaborations?
This is what I doodled: (second image)

Of course, there’s always the danger you’ll end up hip-deep in bullshit.
Now there is a certain crass humor in likening disciplinary knowledge to piles of shit. But, it’s something we produce. And shit can be gross and stinky and make you sick… hey, so can academia. But it also makes the crops grow. So, I’m not trying to be insulting here.
In the end, I’m most at home in the in-betweens. I’m quite visibly hapa, so maybe it’s built in to my sense of self (as z guessed in her entry). It’s not (usually) an identity crisis for me, it’s just how I am.

Filed under: academic, art, new media, research, social, thesis

July 28, 2006 • 4:50 pm 0

Media Art Net | Aesthetics of the Digital | Cybernetic Aesthetics

Recent theory, which is influenced by cybernetics and information theory, grasps information as a key concept for the understanding of aesthetic processes. By formalizing the latter, the intention is to build up a contrary position to idealistic, neo-Kantian, and metaphysics-oriented aesthetics. For that reason, several theories based on the fundaments of cybernetics are described here, for instance the theories of information aesthetics, cybernetic aesthetics, generative and participative aesthetics, as well as of reception aesthetics, whose developments were closely associated with the computer art emergent at the same time. All these theories are concerned with the fundamentally transformed functions of the artist, with the concept of art itself, and with the role of the viewer.

Filed under: academic, art, graphics, new media, research

July 28, 2006 • 9:36 am 0

springer|in: Collective Amnesias_Property and Theft in the Infosphere

springer|in – heft 1/06: Collective Amnesias

Property and Theft in the Infosphere

On the conference »World-Information City«

Christa Benzer

The southern Indian IT metropolis of Bangalore was both the venue and the subject of the conference »World-Information City«, which focused on the way access to knowledge and information is restricted by Intellectual Property- and copyrights.

If you have a valid visa in your European passport, you will have no problems getting through the international airport in Bangalore. But what is much more difficult is crossing a street there, with hundreds of rickshaws and motorbikes contending with another, rather loudly, in the city’s unregulated traffic system.

For this reason, the large foreign IT companies and call centres that have set up shop in Bangalore in recent years have again been considering moving to other Indian cities. So Bangalore’s completely overloaded infrastructure became one of the topics at the conference »World-Information City« – organised in part by the Vienna-based group Netbase – where international theorists, activists and artists examined the global consequences of current digital information politics.

In fact, the huge software parks of IBM, Siemens, HP, Intel, Infosys etc. stand like fortresses in the so-called IT corridors, which are largely detached from the city itself. According to David Lyon, an American surveillance researcher, who was able to gain access to a call center years ago, multiple internal security precautions also ensure a highly monitored exchange with the city, whose name is now synonymous with the large-scale outsourcing of business and labour processes to low-wage countries.

Until December 2004, the greatest concern of the transnational corporations based there was the protection of their »intellectual property«: their technologies, trademarks, patents, and, not least, their business processes, which can now also be patented. When India joined the WTO, however, it was also obliged to implement TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), whereas up to then a special patent law had allowed the production of cheap medical imitation products. Now that India is also bound to respect the rules of the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation), the production of these so-called generic drugs, which used to go mainly towards medical care in Africa, now entails high license fees.

The fact that the old redistribution struggles are taking on completely different forms owing to the digital technologies was in fact the main theme of the conference. One of the main speakers – the Indian urbanist Solomon Benjamin – talked about unprecedented forms of dispossession caused by a ruthless »colonisation« policy on the part of the IT industry. In his analysis of the structural changes in the city brought about by technology and globalisation, he focused on the digitisation of the land register, often presented as an advance that makes it easier for small farmers to gain access to extracts from the register and thus to loans. Benjamin however spoke about the new alliances between the real estate industry and the IT industry that have arisen because of this; both sectors, he said, were very adept at exploiting this »open« access to the land register as a promising profit-making investment offer from the city.

During a tour of the city with a commentary provided by Benjamin, the concrete consequences of these complex property issues were obvious, as was the social fragmentation of the city, which David Lyon, in his talk entitled »Surveillance, Security and Social Sorting in the City«, defined as a characteristic of an »information city«. He related how, at the call centres, the postcodes of the callers are noted before their wishes are heard. In this way, he said, people are categorised before they can even express themselves, and orders or complaints were welcome only from people living in the better (global) areas. According to Lyon, this common practice has far-reaching consequences, as this consumption-oriented recording of data is also used in urban planning. This means that those urban residents who have no voice in the consumer world remain unheard in other democratic political processes as well. As for the attempts by the champions of intellectual property rights to increase criminal legislation in this area, Lyon fears even worse consequences: he predicts that social practices in societies could change radically if an act of solidarity such as »sharing« were now to be described as a criminal offence.

Solidarity, at least of a symbolic nature, is doubtless one main reason why Solomon Benjamin, and other speakers as well, often stressed the importance of the shadow economy (e.g. in the slums), which, they say, helps considerably in the fight against the digital »data lords« and »intellectual property regimes«: in their everyday practice, the illegal media networks and software pirates create manifold forms of alternative media use and thus »pass on the wealth of the information era«.
The media theorist Felix Stalder took a less idealising view of things than his Indian fellows in his explanation of the specificities of the informal sector, then went on to demand a comprehensive redefinition of creativity: according to his theory, intellectual property rights will be dropped in the long term only when ideas are no longer directly connected to products.

At present, widespread and highly financed illegalisation campaigns are demonstrating that the world is not yet ready for this step. For this reason, a public poster campaign initiated by Netbase was also an important part of the project, alongside exhibitions and workshops. And while the anti-illegalisation campaign »Delinquents« of Ulrike Brückner warned of the increasing criminalisation of society, Sebastian Luetgert was conspicuous in the urban space with his »Good Questions«. »If Intellectual Property Is Just Borrowed From The Public Domain Then Why Can’t The Public Claim It Back?« was one of his questions, which deconstructed some of the central myths regarding the alleged necessity of copyrights.

The fact that free access to knowledge and information and thus active involvement in shaping social processes is at present being increasingly promoted in India as well was also made evident at the conference: the active participants included not only the representatives of the Indian institutions that co-organised the event (Saria, Mahiti, Alternative Law Forum), but also young Indian academics and small initiatives like the UNESCO-backed project »voicesforall«. Taking a central idea of the open-source movement as its point of departure – that information is not used up when several people share it -, its community radio, based in a small village near Bangalore, focuses on the joint reappraisal and distribution of locally relevant knowledge and critically analysed information. After security reasons were put forward as a pretext for banning the initiative from going on the air, the inhabitants of Budikote and four other nearby villages are now linked via television cable or public loudspeakers.

http://www.world-information.org
http://www.mahiti.org

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Filed under: research, social, urban

July 28, 2006 • 9:26 am 0

springer|in: Theory Now_ Will Google eat itself ?

springer|in – heft 2/06: Theory Now

The friendly-looking search engine and advertising company is again under attack by activist artists. The »Google Will Eat Itself« project, which critically explores the relations between the new click-based economy, technology and society, has recently succeeded in gaining the attention of a larger audience and was also nominated for the Transmediale festival award at the start of the year. Hans Bernhard, Lizvlx (both UBERMORGEN.COM), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural.it) and Paolo Cirio (epidemic) do not like the label »hacktivists« – they tend rather to call themselves »digital actionists«. The idea of the GWEI project is sophisticated, but at the same time simple: for every click on ads on registered partner pages of Google, both the company and its partner get a micro-payment from the advertisers. By hosting Google ads on many of their own hidden websites, the creators of GWEI are earning money with which they automatically buy Google shares. It will take a long time but, in the end, artists will own Google – a growing information and advertising monopoly that, due to its power and attitude, is becoming a dangerous element in our information society.
When the Google company found out about this endeavour, it cancelled some of the partner accounts and erased the GWEI website from its database. However, the other accounts remained untouched and the project continues: from now on, it will take 3,443,287,037 million years until GWEI fully owns Google.
From its early days, net.art has functioned as a kind of parallel counter-movement to the traditional art scene. Now, the situation is different: besides the online version of GWEI, the team has also put on several exhibitions in galleries (Johannesburg, Berlin, São Paolo, Sydney). It seems as if we are entering a period of »complex art«, where the manifestation of an idea can take on many forms, using various media.

Slavo Krekovic: How did you have the idea of a self-referential Google parody, and how did the team get together?

Lizvlx: I don’t know if it really is a parody. Probably not, as GWEI is not actually funny, is it? I don’t regard it as funny that one can make money with a company that lives on a system of fake/non-fake click rates, posing as a kind of pseudo-governmental information provider. I think that’s sick. What does money really mean anymore if a company that lives from commercial pixel-arrow-relations is worth a thousand times more than, let’s say, a food chain, or if you like, even a bank? I think that GWEI is in fact very serious and that Google seems to be a parody of the capitalist definition of »money«.

Hans Bernhard: In 2004 the net.art world was flooded with Google art projects. They all dealt with search-engine results, the image-database or other Google services. Our artistic strategy is to search for the weak points within strong and large-scaled systems and exploit them aggressively. We first met at the 2004 »Read_me« Festival in Aarhus (Denmark). It took us more than six months to adjust our focus to the core principles of Google, to reduce and to remove all interfering material. GWEI is a conceptual work with a high degree of reality. It involves the simple step of understanding that we can build a simple model in which the giant becomes a cannibal of itself. It is a self-referential game and conceptual hack of the second New-Economy bubble.

Alessandro Ludovico: I’ve talked with lots of artists in the past, but Hans Bernhard was (surprisingly for me) the first to come back after we’d exchanged some ideas. And from then on, I really felt in sync with him in a fruitful, intellectual kind of way. All this happened after I had spent more than a decade analysing and critiquing the artistic work of others. This is the first time I am getting my hands dirty with art as an »artist«. We all live quite far apart (Bari, Turin, Vienna, St. Moritz), but at the moment this does not seem to be a very important aspect.

Slavo Krekovic: The more people use the Google search engine, the more powerful it is. If you are not listed, you do not exist. However, open-source and non-commercial search engines (such as Mozdex) are too weak to provide a real solution. Can the detection of »evil processes« hidden behind the nice Google face change the situation? What are the biggest dangers of Google-style info-monopolies?

Alessandro Ludovico: What Google makes possible is a two-faced brand awareness. On one hand, you have this »porcelain« interface – funny and totally clean – that everybody likes and that is immediately recognized, accompanied by a number of »positive« rumours. On the other hand, you have all these services established by the same corporation, which is becoming a standard, a monopoly. This mechanism, which also seems to trigger the rise in Google shares, may make Google an unstoppable machine forming an almost complete interface to the net services. With everything you do, you would be better off conveying your information via the Google servers, leaving your unavoidable traces. They are establishing themselves as a thin, global and almost invisible layer for accessing the whole net.

Hans Bernhard: We are not changing the situation and we do not want to. Google is part of a oligopolistic market (along with Yahoo and msn). We are simply developing strategies to symbolically attack such market giants. These are practical (technical) and formal (aesthetic) games. We try to publish all the information we gather during such an experiment. We like Google, we use Google, we fuck with the minds of the Google users and Google employees. Google’s position is dominant right from the moment when they enter a new business field with a new service. It’s the »Google effect«: creating consensus in a new business field, even if they instantly take the dominant position. The greatest enemy of such a giant is not another giant: it’s a parasite. Our working thesis: if enough parasites suck small amounts of money from this embodiment of self-referentiality, they will empty this artificial mountain of data and its inner risk of digital totalitarianism. By establishing the GWEI model, we deconstruct the new global advertising mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal, click-based economic model. The reality is that Google is currently valued at more than all the Swiss banks together! Google earned 500 million dollars with advertisements in 2005, and is projected to earn 1.5 billion dollars in 2006. Google has used the knowledge of the economic internet-avant-garde. Those who come on the scene later always have a serious advantage over the pioneers. They have efficiently put together a technical high-performance invention and a super-clean business model. They had the best product at the right time. But mainly they just profited from the crisis of search engines, the blown dotcom energies and visions, and the fucked-up business plans.

Lizvlx: I would just like to add that we do our job as artists in order to ask questions, and not to provide answers. I don’t want anybody believing in my ideas, I would like people to believe in their own thinking abilities.

Slavo Krekovic: There are not only artists, but also journalists and theorists among you, actively dealing with electronic culture. So how would you describe the development of relations between art and technology in recent times and how would you position your project within them?

Hans Bernhard: After the nearly futurist approach to drugs and technology in the early net.art days (for example, the works of etoy, 1994-1997), a group of actionists grew out of the general net.art scene. A large array of digital actions was launched during the second net.art period (1998-2001). For me, GWEI is a new manifestation of digital art. We do not primarily use mass media (media hacking); the project is basically a conceptual piece (with practical, technical applications) produced for the fine-arts market. The objects we create from this experience are large-scaled paper sculptures, diagrams and the GWEI-seal (pseudo-governmental icon, digital print on canvas).

AL: Personally, I think that GWEI is really a child of its time. It makes manifest some of the biggest contradictions of the immaterial era: the extreme volatility of the economy, the globally abstract and, at the same time, personal involvement in the net-content economy, and the risk of monopoly that is always around the corner.

http://www.gwei.org
*[V]ote-Auction; http://www.vote-auction.net

Filed under: research, technology

July 28, 2006 • 9:14 am 0

Drifting Through the Grid: | Brian Holmes

Drifting Through the Grid: | Brian Holmes – springer|in 3/04: World Provinces

Great social movements leave the content of their critical politics behind, in the forms of a new dominion. This was the destiny of the revolt against bureaucratic rationalism in the sixties. The Situationists, with the practice of the dérive and the program of unitary urbanism, aimed to subvert the functionalist grids of modernist city planning. They tried to lose themselves in the urban labyrinth, while calling for the total fusion of artistic and scientific resources in »complete decors« –»another city for another life«, as the radical architect Constant proclaimed. With the worldwide implementation of a digital media architecture – and the early signs of a move toward cinematic buildings – we are now seeing the transformation of the urban framework into total decor (Lev Manovich: »In the longer term every object may become a screen connected to the Net, with the whole of built space becoming a set of display surfaces«. What kind of life can be lived in the media architecture? And how to explain the continuing prestige of Situationist aesthetics, in a period which has changed so dramatically since the early 1960s?

Today, the sensory qualities of the dérive are mimicked by hyperlinked voyages through the datascapes of the World Wide Web. The decades-old imaginaries of the Silver Surfer still permeate our computer-assisted fantasies. Within this commercialized flux, the proponents of »locative media« – like Ben Russel, the developer of headmap.org, or Marc Tuters, of gpster.net – propose to add a personalized sense of place, a computerized science of global ambiances, using satellite positioning technology. In this way, the »geograffiti« of GPS waypoint marking seeks to promote a new kind of locational humanism, tailored to the worldwide wanderer. »Know your place« is the ironic HeadMap motto. But what would it really take to lose yourself in the abstract spaces of global circulation?
Not long ago, utopian maps portrayed the Internet as an organic space of interconnected neurons, like the synapses of a planetary mind. Data-sharing and open-source software production have effectively pointed a path to a cooperative economy. But a contemporary mapping project like »Minitasking« depicts the Gnutella network as a seductive arcade, bubbling over with pirated pop tunes and porno clips. The revolutionary aspirations of the Situationist drift are hard to pinpoint on the new cartographies.

In the wake of September 11, the Internet’s inventors – DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – conceived a new objective: »Total Information Awareness«, a program to exploit every possible control function that can be grafted onto the new communications technology. Here’s where the innovation lies: in »Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery«, »Human ID at a Distance«, »Translingual Information Detection«, etc. Fortunately for American civil liberties, Congress still had the constitutional power to quash this distorted brainchild of a convicted political criminal, the retired admiral John Poindexter. But the Pentagon has clearly caught up to the commercial surveillance packages that took the initiative in the late nineties: workstation monitors, radio tracking badges, telephone service recording, remote vehicle monitoring (advertising blurb: »From the privacy of your own computer, you can now watch a vehicle’s path LIVE using the new ProTrak GPS vehicle tracking device«). Military strategist Thomas Barnett has learned the lesson of the freewheeling 1990s, when individual autonomy developed at the speed of high technology: »In my mind, we fight fire with fire«, he says. »If we live in a world increasingly populated by Super-Empowered Individuals, then we field an army of Super-Empowered Individuals.«

In »The Flexible Personality« I tried to show how networked culture emerged as a synthesis of two contradictory elements: a communicative opportunism, bringing labor and leisure together in a dream of disalienation that stretches back to the 1960s; and an underlying architecture of surveillance and control, made possible by the spread of cutting-edge technologies. The contemporary manager expresses the creativity and liberation of a nomadic lifestyle, while at the same time controlling flexible work teams for just-in-time production. The Yes Men have made this figure unforgettable: impersonating the WTO at a textile industry conference in Finland, they unveiled a tailor-made solution for monitoring a remote labor force, what they called the Management Leisure Suit. The glittering lycra garment might have recalled what NY Times pundit Thomas Friedman once called the »golden straitjacket«, forcing national governments into the adoption of a neoliberal policy mix; but the yard-long, hip-mounted phallus with its inset viewing screen is just a little too enthusiastic for private-sector discipline! Transmitting pleasurable sensations when everything is going well on the production floor, it allows the modern manager to survey distant employees while relaxing on a tropical beach. The conclusion of the whole charade is that with today’s technology, democracy is guaranteed by Darwinian principles: there’s no reason for a reasonable businessman to own a slave in an expensive country like Finland, when you can have a free employee for much less, in whatever country you chose.

What happens when the freedmen revolt? Today all eyes are on the soldier. Thomas Barnett has drawn up a new world map for the Pentagon: it divides the »functioning core« of globalization, »thick with network connectivity,« from the »non-integrating gap« of the equatorial regions, »plagued by politically repressive regimes«. The gap is where the majority of American military interventions have taken place since the end of the Cold War. It’s also where a great deal of the world’s oil reserves are located. And it’s mainly inhabited by indigenous peoples (in Latin America) or by Muslims (in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Indonesia). Barnett’s solution: »Shrink the gap«. Integrate those people, by force if necessary.

Jordan Crandall seems to grapple with this question of integration in one of his installations, »Heat Seeking«. The piece is full of menacing violence; but one scene shows a passive, unconscious woman being fed, apparently under the influence of a radio transmission. This disturbing image gets under the skin of the new media architecture, exploring its relations to psychic intimacy. What kind of subjectivity emerges from exposure to the contemporary networks?

I think we should conceive the worldwide communications technologies as Imperial infrastructure. These are systems with strictly military origins, but which have been rapidly liberalized, so that broad sectors of civil society are integrated into the basic architecture. Everything depends on the liberalization. The strong argument of Empire was to show that democratic legitimacy is necessary for the spread of a reticular governance, whose inseparably military and economic power cannot simply be equated with its point of origin in the United States. Imperial dimension is gained when infrastructures become accessible to a new category of world citizens. The effect of legitimacy goes along with integration to the »thick connectivity« of which Barnett speaks.

What happens, for example, when a private individual buys a GPS device, made by any of dozens of manufacturers? You’re connecting to the results of a rocket-launch campaign which has put a constellation of 24 satellites into orbit, at least four of which are constantly in your line-of-sight, broadcasting the radio signals that will allow your device to calculate its position. The satellites themselves are fine-tuned by US Air Force monitor stations installed on islands across the earth, on either side of the equator. Since Clinton lifted the encryption of GPS signals in the year 2000, the infrastructure has functioned as a global public service: its extraordinary precision (down to the centimeter with various correction systems) is now open to any user, except in those cases where unencrypted access is selectively denied (as in Iraq during the last war). With fixed data from the World Geodetic System – a planetary mapping program initiated by the US Department of Defense in 1984 – you can locate your own nomadic trajectory on a three-dimensional Cartesian grid, anytime and anywhere on Earth (Defense department dogma: »Modern maps, navigation systems and geodetic applications require a single accessible, global, 3-dimensional reference frame. It is important for global operations and interoperability that DoD systems implement and operate as much as possible on WGS 84«).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this satellite infrastructure is that in order for one’s location to be pinpointed, the clock in each personal receiver has to be exactly synchronized with the atomic clocks in orbit. So you have an integration to Imperial time. The computer-coded radio waves interpellate you in the sense of Althusser, they hail you with an electromagnetic »hey you!« When you use the locating device you respond to the call: you are interpellated into Imperial ideology. The message is that integration equals security, as exemplified in the advertising for the Digital Angel, a personal locative device pitched to medical surveillance and senior care. It’s a logical development for anyone who takes seriously the concept of the »surgical strike«: give yourself over to the care of the machines, target yourself for safety.

In light of all this, one can wonder about the limits of the concept of conversion, developed extensively by Marko Peljhan in quite brilliant projects for the civilian reappropriation of military technology. Can we still make any distinction between a planetary civil society articulated by global infrastructure, and the military perspective that Crandall calls »armed vision«? The urgency is social subversion, psychic deconditioning, an aesthetics of dissident experience. Most of the alternative projects or artworks using the GPS system are premised on the idea that it permits an inscription of the individual, a geodetic tracery of individual difference. The most beautiful example to date is Esther Polak’s »RealTime« project, where GPS-equipped pedestrians gradually sketch out the city plan of Amsterdam, as a record of their everyday itineraries. But the work is a fragile gesture, fraught with ambiguity: the individual’s wavering life-line appears at once as testimony of human singularity in time, and proof of infallible performance by the satellite mapping system.

All too often in contemporary society, aesthetics is politics as decor. Which is why the Situationists themselves soon abandoned Constant’s elaborate representations of unitary urbanism. »Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence«, wrote Althusser. It’s what makes you walk the line, to use his image. Has the ideology of our time not become an erratic, wavering pattern of crisscrossing footsteps, traced in secure metric points on an abstract field? The aesthetic form of the dérive is everywhere. But so is the hyper-rationalist grid of Imperial infrastructure. And the questions of social subversion and psychic deconditioning are wide open, unanswered, seemingly lost to our minds, in an era when civil society has been integrated to the military architecture of digital media.

An initial version of this text was presented at the RIXC »Media Architecture« conference in Riga, May 16-17, 2003.

Filed under: academic, architecture, art, locative, mobility, new media, research, situationist, social, space/place, technology, urban

July 28, 2006 • 8:26 am 0

Filmmaker puts movie in hands of soldiers

/ Documentary gives unique angle on war

A buzz-generating documentary opening today in the Bay Area presents a new way to approach the national conversation about the Iraq war, a debate that often gets derailed over whether the real story is being told there.

The filmmaker’s solution: Give video cameras to the soldiers on the ground and let them roll tape for a year, nearly uncensored.

The result is “The War Tapes,” a 94-minute film culled from 1,100 hours of footage, which is revolutionary on several levels. Not only is the film created in the same raw, user-generated manner that is powering the explosion of blogs and video-sharing sites on the Internet, it is bypassing the traditional media gatekeepers who some soldiers — and, for different reasons, anti-war activists — think are not telling the war’s true stories.

Filed under: ethnography, research

July 26, 2006 • 6:56 am 0

Innovis Research – PhylloTrees

an alternative algorithm for the hierarchical data tree layout, based on phyllotactic patterns in nature, which provide a non-overlapping, optimal packing when the total number of nodes is not known a priori. the word “phyllotaxis” translates to the arrangement of lateral organs on plants. these can be leaves, needles, on a cactus, or seeds on a sunflower. several data visualizations, called “PhylloTrees” show how this algorithm was applied for the layout of large, hierarchical datasets.

Filed under: graphics, research, technology

dérive