Soul Sphíncter

HABITUS: Objects, Behaviours, Rooms by Justin Ascott

2013-05-16T13:11:00.001+02:00

Habitus' explores - through a creative dialectic - the way human consciousness is shaped by the compartmentalised structures of the places we inhabit -- primarily the home and workplace - and the habituated behaviours we perform within these various nodes. The mechanical actions we carry out each day -- lead to feelings of disillusionment and disengagement with social reality. The only objects and 'tools' that have the transformative power to expand consciousness are those commonly used by shamans in ritualised contexts - to induce altered states of perception for the purposes of healing, transcendence and revelation.

Habitus refers to lifestyle, the values, the dispositions and expectation of particular social groups that are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life. Perhaps in more basic terms, the habitus could be understood as a structure of the mind characterized by a set of acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions and taste. The particular contents of the habitus are the result of the objectification of social structure at the level of individual subjectivity. The habitus can be seen as counterpoint to the notions of rationality that are prevalent within other disciplines of social science research. It is perhaps best understood in relation to the notion of the 'habitus' and 'field', which describes the relationship between individual agents and the contextual environment.

Pierre Bourdieu elaborates on the notion of Habitus by explaining its dependency on history and human memory. For instance, a certain behaviour or belief becomes part of a society's structure when the original purpose of that behaviour or belief can no longer be recalled and becomes socialized into individuals of that culture.

Recent Images

2013-05-12T18:56:00.001+02:00

The Sonic City

2013-05-10T17:09:00.001+02:00

On Monday at 1.15 pm in HUMlab at Umeå University Shannon Mattern, Associate Professor at New School, New York will give a seminar on “Hearing Urban Infrastructures: A Sonic Archaeology of the Media-City”. The abstract is:

Abstract: For over a century, scholars and designers have acknowledged the existence of a spatial form commonly known as the “media city,” which encompasses both the modern city as represented through photographs, film, and digital technologies; and the city as shaped by those same technologies. In this seminar I argue for the need to acknowledge the longue durée of the “media city,” and to move beyond ocularcentric models of urban history. Drawing on the growing body of research on infrastructure that’s emerging from across the design fields, and on work in “media archaeology” within my own field of media studies, I’ll argue that we need to “excavate” the deep history of urban mediation, and I’ll take as an example an aspect of the media city that wouldn’t seem to lend itself easily to excavation. I’m referring to the “sonic city” – the city of public address and radio waves and everyday conversation. How does one dig into a form of mediation that seemingly has no physical form? What can we learn about how our cities have functioned as material sounding boards, resonance chambers, and infrastructures for various forms of sonic communication?

I have heard Shannon speak before, have been following her work and have met her as well. This will be a killer presentation for anyone interested in urban space, audio studies, transmediality, digital media and media archeology. If you are in Umeå or within 500 kms of it I suggest attending in person. For others there will be a live stream open upon the hour; http://live.humlab.umu.se/

Shannon Mattern is an Associate Professor at New School, New York. Her research interest include relationships between the forms and materialities of media and the spaces -- architectural, urban, and conceptual -- they create and inhabit. Additional areas of interest include, generally, media and design history and theory; and, more specifically, media form and materiality; media reception (especially reading) and the spaces in which we store, access and consume media; textual theory; and media and spatial poetics. Shannon keeps a lively blog here: http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/

Punk Enough For Ya?

2013-05-08T15:59:00.000+02:00

I am featured in a special in The Guardian online on what Punk really means for those who were there. The sterile and still Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective on Punk seems stupid when one considers what Punk was really about; basically freedom, self-expression, non-conformity and anti-boredom. In the UK and the USA these tenants of Punk lasted about 6 months once it had moved beyond the squats, crowded venues and warehouses where things were considered 'dangerous' into the streets and TV screens of the nations.

By the mid-1980s I was a huge fan of Talking Heads, The Cure, The Smiths, The Clash, as well as local Australian bands like The Saints, The Stems, The Hoodoo Gurus, The Screaming Tribesmen, The Wreckery, The Birthday Party, and even Midnight Oil (which was more hardcore at the start).

Living in Queensland, Australia was another reason to be punk. The atmosphere in the state by 1990 was one of cultural siege if you were interested in any form of expression that breached the walls built by 25 years of single party government that was Conservative in the fascist sense of the word. For more on how it was living in Brisbane and being punk in the late 1980s and early 90s the chapter Rock Against Work in Andrew Stafford's Pig City: From The Saints to Savage Garden (2004) contains many references to venues, bands and even gigs I remember.

Punk hit Brisbane like no other city in Australia. The tentacles that grew out of New York and London from the musical explosion of 1976 affected the receptive waiting enclaves in each major city around the globe in varying ways. As the music and images of the Ramones, Patti Smith, early Pere Ubu, Television and the Sex Pistols were heard and seen, bands formed, systems started and the word spread. Brisbane was different, for two main reasons: we had Bjelke-Petersen and The Saints. Bjelke-Petersen represented the kind of crypto-fascist, bird-brained conservatism that every punk lead singer in the world could only dream of railing against. His use of a blatantly corrupt police force, and its heavy-handed response to punk, gave the scene a political edge largely absent in the other states. And The Saints were the musical revolutionaries in the city's evil heart - Tales from Pig City

By the early 1990s I was Punk! I had fled Queensland (or Queersland and my friend Monty and his band would have had it). In 1992 I moved to Sydney and spent many nights seeing this band:

Nunbait were a punk band.

Nunbait first formed in Sydney in 1989. The band’s first release was 500-copy run of a self-pressed single, “Track Trauma” (1990). After winning a battle of the bands at Sydney’s Lansdowne Hotel, Nunbait secured a contract with Australian underground label Waterfront Records, which resulted in a mini-album, “The Hub” (named after a Newtown porn theatre), in 1990. Nunbait opened for Butthole Surfers (Burland Hall Newtown, 1991), Mudhoney (Phoenician Club Sydney, 1990), Einstürzende Neubauten and The Beasts of Bourbon (Phoenician Club Sydney 1991), Nirvana (Selinas, Sydney, February 1992), Helmet (1991), Fugazi (1991) as well as performing tours/shows with Superchunk and Australian underground acts including Tumbleweed, Cosmic Psychos, and the Celibate Rifles.

Punk is about freedom and autonomy. Not fashion.

The Online Letter Archive

2013-05-07T13:18:00.000+02:00

The online letter archive seems to be a popular project for humanities researchers. Such archives offer the correspondences of either a well known individual, or of people who experienced a historical event and wrote letters about it. The online archive is a model for the digital organization of of a collection and a brief survey of a few current online letter archives reveals some interesting tendencies, features and limitations to the present format.

The Darwin Correspondence Project (DCP) "exists to publish the definitive edition of letters to and from Charles Darwin". The site promises; "you can read and search the full texts of more than 7,000 of Charles Darwin’s letters, and ﬁnd information on 8,000 more. Available here are complete transcripts of all known letters Darwin wrote and received up to the year 1868. More are being added all the time."With such a vast amount of material an efficient search system is essential. The basic search system on DCP is keyword motivated. As such it is an efficient but limited system. For example, in the general search window, by searching for the keyword "Galapagos" it returns 170 entries. More fine-grained search is available, with a) People, b) Places, c) Keyword (with four fields available; 1. All Content, 2. Only Summary, 3. Only Transcript, 4. Only Footnote) and finally d) Time Range. Entering "Galapagos" in the Places field only returns 59 entries; which seems odd. There is no graphical interface available (that I could find anyway) on the site for place correlation, such as a map that imposes time over place, to see some progression in the movements of Darwin, and thus connecting the letters together in another searchable field (i.e. place). There are a number of glossaries in the website for DCP, the most interesting of which is perhaps the Physical Descriptions. Here the original artefacts are coded according to genre and materiality (eg. original, handwritten, condition status etc). The coding of genre and materiality is an efficient way to present something of the objects it is representing, but it would be good to have seen at least some scans. There is however the Darwin Behind the Scenes virtual exhibition, which is linked from the site on the News section, where you can see high resolution images of some of the objects. Searching for Galapagos on the Behind the Scenes website brings 0 returns, but the images are stunning.

The Olive Schreiner Letters Online (OSLO) project "is funded by the ESRC. It will transcribe, analyse and publish the complete extant Olive Schreiner letters presently in archival locations world-wide". There are currently 4800 letters from Schreiner known to be in existence. The letters presently in the archive are organized alphabetically around the surname of the recipient. There is a general search function. Searching in it from the Index page for "Churchill" returns 10 entries, from letters not addressed to anyone by the name of Churchill, but that do contain the name within them. There seems to be an element of virtual portraiture to the OSLO, with the How to Use section stating; "Essential Schreiner' features Schreiner's 'Must Read' letters, letters concerned with transitions and turning points, and those which show the lighter side of her letter-writing practices, as well as an outline chronology of events and happenings in her life." A personality behind an archive always helps with relating to the materials within it. Interestingly, the OSLO contains "two indexes. The first is a list of all the letters in which she mentions or discusses her writing, including both particular publications and also her comments on writing as an activity, her work. The second is a sub-set of this, and it lists those letters which discuss publishers and editors and her dealings - not always very happy - with them." How these are cross-referenced is unclear. These is also an index of letters by topic, and this is an invaluable addition to the system. It is in the Letters by Topic section that we get a good overview of the possible uses for the OSLO. In the Letters by Topic we can see how rich an archive we have here, with a very broad range of possible applications.

We have chosen to include Letters from the American Civil War (LACW) as it is a good example of attention to the artefacts represented in the archive. The archive is actually a portal to a number of other archives. The letters are reproduced both visually and textually; with images of the letters and their envelopes (including addresses and stamps) alongside clear copies of the letters. These is no notation in the archive.The LACW archive is an archive at its most basic in terms of infrastructure, but the use of images of the represented artefacts adds a historical and material dimension that is lacking in many online letter archives.

The final archive in this collection is a recently created one from Sweden. Hjalmar Bergman Korrespondenser (HBK or Hjalmar Bergman Letters) contains hundreds of letters written between 1900 and 1930 by the Swedish writer. What is interesting about the archive is how the material is organized: i. from the date, ii. from the town it was sent from, iii. from the address, iv. from the people who are named in the letter, v. from works that are named in the letter, vi. from the genre of works named in the letter, vii. from where the letter is kept today and viii. from visual reproductions of the letter in the archive. In this way the HBK archive covers many of the possible search combinations in the organizing of the material. Tagging is of utmost importance to the organizing of materials in digital archives. Footnotes are included in each reproduction of text of letters. There is no general search function in the archive website that we could find. We think this is very interesting; instead of relying on a general search, the material is tagged to such a degree that users are directed towards specific themes in the archive.

To summarize, we thought it was interesting that none of the archives offered downloadable content. The result is materials cannot be extracted from the archives and worked with 'off site'. In this sense the archives as they appear online function more as interfaces than spaces to work in. However, as they are online and accessible, they do allow controlled access to materials and the opportunity to work from outside institutions for anyone interested in the subjects they cover. We would have liked to have seen more Creative Commons or Open Access statements attached to these archives. A design that allows linking and uploading to research that reference the archives, and feedback from users would have also been useful. The organization of digital artefacts is an important element in the management of events and the archives discussed here provide inspiration for the possibilities for storage, access (include searchability) and distribution for any materials stored online. In our discussions in the workshops next week the concept of 'The Archive' will feature, and we hope this short post inspires some consideration of the role of the archive in event management and the dissemination of research.

(This was originally posted on the SMKE Website).

'Run with the Heart of the Blind' (2013) A Critical Reading

2013-05-05T21:47:00.001+02:00

On a large screen projected onto a wall, a body assumes postures surrounded by sharp lines and hard edges, sheer right angles create the effect of broad cross-hatching or boxes. To the right and left large wall screen projections drags the viewer down abandoned corridors, by doorways that open to empty classrooms, past deserted desks and ancient specimen cases. The school is closed, but the cleaner remains. The sound of footsteps fills the space, footsteps and the grind of trolley wheels. The relentless head-height corridor and classroom scans unwind to the left and right. Straight ahead is the Butoh stillness of a body trapped by the architecture that surrounds it. The sound of footsteps sets a hypnotic rhythm, which after a time begins to be mirrored in the breathing of the viewer.

Gabriel Bohm Calles’ Run With The Heart of the Blind at Umeå School of Art is a room size, triptych video installation that explores and questions important concepts of movement and space, the body and architecture, along with the themes of discipline and control.

The School is an architecturally constructed space that performs a defining role in the lives of millions of people. In Run With The Heart Of The Blind school corridors, the long rectangular prisms that do not bend (literally and metaphorically) are blistered by dozens of glass panes that allow visual access to other rooms. These rooms are empty classrooms, closed in by low ceilings, small doors and beige flooring. In these spaces Bohm Calles performs exaggerated maneuvers in slow motion, often with cleaning utensils; mops, dusters, brooms. In each sequence the body occupies a foreground position in the inflexible extended rectangle of the corridor, time flows away into the distant background of the space. We the visitor/viewer share the same space visually with the body, as we are at equal head height with Bohm Calles, we see the intimate contrast between the soft form of the body and the building-sized box in which it and we are packed.

The tasks performed by people in architectural spaces are most often regulated by the space itself. The classroom is the perfect example of the regulated space in form and purpose, and one that we have all experienced. The classroom is utilitarian in form and function, divided by desks, chairs, and tables for working, with the relatively large teacher’s desk as a monumental point. In Run With The Heart Of The Blind the human body defies the structures of the space. This defiance is accomplished by the sense of time generated by the movement of the body, and the visual field in the side images down the corridors. This movement is a slow paced progress, not unlike what one would imagine is the final walk of the condemned prisoner. Bohm Calles caresses a mop head for minutes with a vacant stare into the middle distance, rubs his head along the frame of a window in a sensual act of body dusting, follows the reflections in the glass of windows with a mop handle (or is his reflection following him?), sits in the posture of a child, as he straddles a javelin-like broom, with a cocked head, seeming to listen to the thin line in the eternal corridor, waiting for some signal from far away. Finally the desk is violated, as Bohm Calles lies half-fetal upon it, a soft non-geometrical form dressed in black and collapsed upon the shiny cold surface.

The floor, the wall, and the utensil are mixed with the body in Run With The Heart Of The Blind. We can join with Bohm Calles in asking, “What can this be other than a mop?” but I think the answer to the question is more complicated than the choreography offered by the artist. The mop remains a mop even with the repurposing by Bohm Calles, it does take on a broader visual range of possibilities in the manipulations of the performance. But it is not altered in itself. What is more dramatic in the performance are the visual and spatial juxtapositions between the body, the utensils and the architecture. The results of the interaction between the audio of the heavy footsteps and trolley wheels in a loop, the two moving images of the corridor on opposite walls and the third screen of the body of Bohn Calles in contortions (often with utensils), are a enclosed claustrophobic feeling for the viewer, accompanied by the sensation of being drawn apart in ones own body. The footstep is the point the body touches the world, the continuous monotonous rhythm of the heady thud-thud-thud of the fall is symbolic of the transfer point between the body and the world. With Run With The Heart Of The Blind the tools we are given have failed. There is no work going on, only a slow agonizing struggle with the space around the body.

Michel Foucault wrote famously of the school, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (Discipline and Punish 1977 Alan Sheridan trans. p. 228). The controlled space of the school encases the body in a finite range of possibilities for movement, posture and visual appearance. Within this constricted space Bohm Calles extracts a limited range of movement, postures and actions, which do not make sense when framed by the structures of the school and its utensils. In achieving the range of postures and actions the structures of the space are not disturbed permanently. Elements of the space are remixed for as long as Bohm Calles occupies the space, and then the vacant classrooms and empty corridors return to silence and immobility. These structures await the next group of students they will train. These structures await the next group of students they will train. Amidst this collection of tensions within the space and how it forms behavior, are the actions of Bohn Calles in conjunction with the space as a field operating as signs, indicators of the history of formalized space designed to provide training. A specimen case of glass, filled with preserved birds, stands at the end of a corridor. The glacial-cleaner slides past the case and continues to struggle with the asphyxiating lines around him. The stock-still birds in the glass case watch through the dusty glass. They are stacked and packed. They are arranged and disciplined in their display. The birds are totally visible, totally controlled, totally perfect and totally dead. The apparatus of the classroom is the same machine.

Run With The Heart Of The Blind is the anti-panopticon. But its tragedy is how small the actions are, how little space there is to move within the boxes we build to educate our children in. Between the rows of desks and sharp lines of the corridors, there are small possibilities to find new ways to stand. The heavy footsteps and trolley dragging through the center of my brain after two hours of sitting with Run With The Heart Of The Blind convince me I am in a machine of infernal intention; but on the other side of the room I see a friend, who seems to be fashioning a statue from his own body and the tools he was loaned to work with. From between the straight lines around us emerges a single shaking curve, trailing away into an uncertain distance. It is very difficult to see, but possible.

-------------------*---------------------

James Barrett

Umeå March 21 2013

YANG Yi "Uprooted"

2013-04-29T18:09:00.002+02:00

Galerie Richard (more amazing images from link) is pleased to present the New York debut solo exhibition of Chinese photographer YANG Yi (b. 1971). Yang was born in Kaixian, a small town overlooking a tributary of the Yangtze River. In 2009 Yang’s hometown was completely submerged underwater due to the Three Gorges Dam Project, which displaced over 1.2 million people and destroyed 11 cities. Using photography with digital editing techniques, Yang creates strikingly truthful portrayals of Kaixan and its inhabitants in a submarine universe. The “Uprooted” exhibition opens on Thursday, May 2nd with a public reception from 6 to 8pm.

Upon first view of Yang’s photographs, one’s eyes first adapt to the photographs’ darkness with a sepia rendering. You see a mysterious landscape with few people, adorned in masks and snorkels. The light comes from the upper part of the photographs, expanding into shadows on the walls of a submarine city. These disconcerting images question the viewer in a manner similar to Gregory Crewdson’s photographs.

YANG Yi’s digital manipulations of the photographic medium are particularly relevant because they are deeply connected with his personal life. His work raises the question, how can one build one’s life when one’s home, roots, and childhood memories have been lost forever? Yang replies by recreating the past in capturing the remaining scenery before it disappears forever. Even after the artist transformed the image by submerging the landscape, the villagers display wit and poise.

"It is about all that we have in common there: our accent, our spicy coriander, the nod we give each other, a friendly signal to say hello when we pass one another on the street, these streets that we have traveled alongside our ancestors, that have herded us along together... this series was created for all of that. It will be my personal memoir."

Yang captures and preserves the nuances that once distinguished this beloved village as an expression of defiance to imposed plight and destitution. Inspired by dreams, the visual documentation opposes the physical reality of the expropriated site. The confrontation between the past and present transforms the topology of the landscape into a place of curiosity and apprehension. Yang’s series records a haunting legacy that proves the fortitude of the human spirit.

The Uprooted series has been recently exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art, California and the Katonah Museum of Art, New York in the exhibition “Rising Dragon – Contemporary Chinese Photography.” YANG Yi has exhibited throughout Asia, Europe, Canada and Mexico. The artist currently lives and works in Chengdu China.

The Country House Revealed as Monument

2013-04-25T10:43:00.000+02:00

"The balance of forces between monuments and buildings has shifted. Buildings are to monuments as everyday life is to festival, products to works, lived experience to the merely perceived, concrete to stone, and so on. What we are seeing here is a new dialectical process, but one just as vast as its predecessors. How could the contradiction between building and monument be overcome and surpassed? How might that tendency be accelerated which has destroyed monumentality but which could well re-institute it, within the sphere of buildings itself, by restoring the old unity at a higher level? So long as no such dialectical transcendence occurs, we can only expect the stagnation of crude interactions and intermixtures between 'moments' — in short, a continuing spatial chaos. Under this dispensation, buildings and dwelling-places have been dressed up in monumental signs: first their façades, and later their interiors. The homes of the moneyed classes have undergone a superficial socialization' with the introduction of reception areas, bars, nooks and furniture (divans, for instance) which bespeak some kind of erotic life. Pale echoes, in short, of the aristocratic palace or town house. The town, meanwhile, now effectively blown apart, has been 'privatized' — no less superficially — thanks to urban 'decor' and 'design', and the development of fake environments. Instead, then, of a dialectical process with three stages which resolves a contradiction and 'creatively' transcends a conflictual situation, we have a stagnant opposition whose poles at first confront one another 'face to face', then relapse into muddle and confusion"- Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space p223.

“social space is not a thing among other things" - Lefebvre

2013-04-23T21:27:00.000+02:00

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Keijo: WHNZ:57:WAMAWA

2013-04-17T18:30:00.000+02:00

The Blues as the expression of a coherent poetics, or the ‘theory’ or how one can explain the meshing of technique with ideas and images, is based on a limited set of principles. “Midnight Truth: Billie Jo relates the bitterness she feels over her Ma's death, her father's indifference and the dust”. In The Blues these principles include the reconciliation of supposed opposites; repetition and variation, improvisation and planning, dialogue and monologue and progression and stasis. These principles all meet in the music of Keijo, with a perpetual memory tuned to The Blues eternally at play.

In the music of Keijo dissonant forms communicate with each other; a wailing guitar is surrounded and given fresh meaning from a mass of insect-like pulses xylophone from deep in an imagined summertime forest. Attention to low-fi recording techniques gives a blues harp the scratchy wail of a treasured field recording, while drums and diaphragm-mic vocals bring the listener to some lonely railway siding in the mean summer of 1935. “Out of the Dust: Billie Jo sneaks out in the middle of the night with a little money and a little food.” It’s all the same in the temple of sound. It is not about either/or, it is about the balance and harmony of each part, growing and forming a single auditory space. The shadow and the shake, repeated cycles of sounds that expand outwards into improvised landscapes of color and light. “Gone West: Billie Jo has been on the train for two days. She's burned up and frozen.” There you find the moment of your own listening. It is there that time collapses and everything is true and everything is permitted. But nothing is real.

Keijo produces here seven tracks of transportation. We go beyond time, here there is but the sound and how it hits you. This is tinder dry journey folk wandering out of the woods after hard seasons to take their chances on the road or the coast. Where travel and starvation are better than hanging on to hope and having nothing change. By learning the tempo of your own foot fall the heart can be stilled to a relaxed pace and the air becomes easier to breathe. The Blues becomes the rhythm of your body and you are healed; to the earth is born a true one.

Shine on.

James Barrett (aka Nada Baba)

Stockholm Sweden April 2013.

www.soulsphincter.com

Virtual Worlds, Machinima and Cooperation over Borders (Published in 'Sans Public')

2013-04-17T17:33:00.002+02:00

Image of the avatars of Isabelle Arvers and Jenna Ng from the upcoming publication Understanding Machinima

Cooperation over borders between individuals and groups is possible using online three-dimensional virtual worlds. This cooperation occurs in the production of art, research, teaching and learning, and performance as well as in building social, professional and personal contexts. The borders that are crossed can be geopolitical, generational, spatial and embodied. In order to maintain coherence for people to meet, talk, build, write, perform and exchange in virtual worlds, a sense and understanding of place is required. Such human activities as meeting are reliant on a shared space and place. This chapter integrates the idea of sharing places in examples of how virtual worlds can provide common spaces and places from a series of projects involving art, documentation, teaching and communication. By using examples of one artist’s project and several machinima – videos made using screen-capture software on computers, to film places and avatar actors in virtual worlds – I argue these virtual worlds can enable cooperation over a variety of borders through sharing.

FULL ARTICLE AVAILABLE HERE

Fear and Loathing in the Attention Economy

2013-04-17T11:04:00.002+02:00

"Many are saying that it is disrespectful to do what we are planning to do. I can see the point, but while I do not wish to dishonour Thatcher as a person, I can see no other way to protest at the kind of send-off she is getting. I wish she were getting a quiet family funeral, then I would have stayed away." - Message posted on Facebook about turning away from the Thatcher Funeral cortege

The bombing of the Boston Marathon Finish Line is delivered as spectacle violence

Over the past few days two events have been represented globally that are themselves symptomatic of the attention economy developing around us. The Attention Economy is ably defined by Wikipedia:

Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport and J. C. Beck define the concept of attention as:

Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.(Davenport & Beck 2001, p. 20)
As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information. Attention economics applies insights from other areas of economic theory to enable content consumers, producers, and intermediaries to better mediate and manage the flow of information in light of the scarcity of consumer attention.

The two events I refer to are

1. The Bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon.

2. The Funeral of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Both of these events, while very different in terms of effects, are examples of what I see as a virulent attention economy which all of us are forced to participate in. The above two links are evidence of this, both leading to live news blogs updated by the minute from major media conglomerates.

What has disturbed me the most about the Boston Bombing, apart from more senseless bloodshed and suffering, is the total spectacle nature of this act of violence. Bombing the finish line of a mass sporting event (a considerable time after the 'main event' - i.e. the winner and so on - has actually finished) does little other than appropriates mediated spectatorship, turning it into a visualization of carnage, fear, panic and death. With no demands issued or responsibility taken thus far, this looks like a heinous attempt to spread fear and nothing else. Whoever is behind this violent act is using the spectacle offered by the marathon to spread fear and anguish.

Within the context of the attention economy we can see the Boston Bombing as an example of attention without a message. Central to this attention without a message is the flow-on effect of the mediated compulsory witness perspective. By 'witness perspective' I mean that the addressee is positioned by the media in a temporal and spatial perspective that is immediate and present in relation to the events depicted.

Even a cursory search online for accounts and explanation of the Boston bombing returns reconstructions, looped videos of the blasts, eye-level street views of the explosions and the scenes immediately afterwards and piece to camera from on-site witnesses. These images combined with live updates (often containing inaccurate information) and resulting in an uncritical sense of distance from the events. There is little commentary or reflection in live updates and streamed images.

Compared to the horrible events in Boston, the funeral of Margaret Thatcher is a more contentious spectacle. Here the mediation of history is being constructed through digital rhetoric and authority. An example of this contention is Prime Minister David Cameron urging the populace to participate in the perspective he supports by claiming "We are all Thatcherites now".

Many lining the streets for the Thatcher funeral cortege are expected to turn their backs on the hearse. This is an act of embodied resistance to the witness perspective as it is arranged according to authority. The above opening quote from Facebook, spoken by a woman intending to turn her back on the cortege is interesting in how the spectacle of the funeral is contrasted with Thatcher "getting a quiet family funeral". In the 'quiet family funeral' there are no witnesses outside the 'family'. The spectacle and subsequent demands made on attention are severely limited by this structure.

The implications of large scale events mediated in the ways described here for a global attention economy are dramatic and important. In the case of the Boston Bombing I feel ill at the thought of random acts of violence conducted in order to catch the attention of as many people as possible. In a grim prophetic comedy, this scenario reminds me of the bombings conducted in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil;

                         INTERVIEWER
                         Deputy minister, what do you believe 
                         is behind this recent increase in 
                         terrorist bombings?

                                     HELPMANN
                         Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless 
                         minority of people seems to have 
                         forgotten certain good old fashioned 
                         virtues. They just can't stand 
                         seeing the other fellow win. If 
                         these people would just play the 
                         game, instead of standing on the 
                         touch line heckling

                                     INTERVIEWER
                         In fact, killing people

                                     HELPMANN
                         In fact, killing people  they'd 
                         get a lot more out of life.

               We PULL AWAY from the shop to concentrate on the shoppers. 
               Helpmann's voice carries over the rest of the scene.

                         INTERVIEWER
                         Mr. Helpmann, what would you say 
                         to those critics who maintain that 
                         the Ministry Of Information has 
                         become too large and unwieldy... ?

                                     HELPMANN
                         David... in a free society 
                         information is the name of the 
                         game. You can't win the game if 
                         you're a man short.

The funeral of Margaret Thatcher stands as an attempt to establish a place in history for a political figure. As witnesses to the spectacle of her funeral people must adopt the position offered by an invisible 'Ministry of Information'.

"The Conservatives' attempt to enforce a national day of mourning for their former leader was announced so far in advance of the key event as to be macabre but at least half of the public aren't buying it" Laurie Penny, The New Statesman.

By turning away from the funeral cortege the 'turners' (not a pun perhaps on the famous 'The lady's is not for turning' quote from Thatcher) bypass that perspective but they do not alter it. If we consider the insidious mis/use of the eye witness perspective which has already resulted from the Boston Bombing, perhaps it is all the more vital that alternatives are developed to the enforced temporal and spatial code of the mediated witness today. Whoever bombed Boston wants the kind of attention to the event that a funeral of an ex-Prime Minister is getting across the Atlantic today.

Ann Pendleton-Jullian "Design Through Gaming"

2013-04-13T19:12:00.001+02:00

Architects and designers of buildings, cities and landscapes- or systems and institutions even- work within physical and cultural sites in which value and meaning exist as embedded entities. As embedded entities, they are manifest in matter (material and the form it takes) and energy (systems of interaction and exchange of people, things, information), both of which may already be in play or exist as potential. To realize that which is potential within a complex and changing system of meaning, material, and exchange requires the ability to approach the problem as an interconnected fabric of definitions, frames, constraints, and opportunities, and to work (or play) within this fabric, making meaningful form emerge.

About Ann: Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, educator, and writer of international standing. Her design work negotiates the overlap between architecture, landscape, culture, and technology. Her work is motivated towards internationalism as both a concept and a reality.

Occupying the Commons - Theater Valle Occupation

2013-04-11T16:15:00.001+02:00

Occupying the Commons is a project supported by the International University College of Turin (IUC http://www.iuctorino.it/), a program dedicated to the study and practice of the Commons. The aim of the project is to explore the connection between the occupation movements of 2011 & 2012 with the paradigm of the "commons."

The first part of the series begins with an Occupation in Rome at the Teatro Valle, the oldest theater in Italy and one of the most important theaters in all of Europe: http://www.teatrovalleoccupato.it/.

Interview & Director: Saki Bailey
Filming & Production: Tommaso Dotti

Music by: Errichetta Underground and Et_

See: http://www.commonssense.it/s1/?page_id=938

Historicizing Public Space with QR-Codes

2013-04-10T10:50:00.002+02:00

Historicizing Public Space with QR Codes from Jim Barrett

In the fall term of 2012-13 a group of museum studies students at Umeå University in Sweden were challenged as part of their course to make a museum installation in a public space using Quick Response (QR) Codes.

This is a short photo-essay of the results.

The Open Book

2013-04-08T18:16:00.000+02:00

THE CONTEXT // From makerspaces to data wrangling schools to archives, the digital is being remixed by the open – and it is changing society as we know it. The Open Book <http://theopenbook.org.uk> is an ambitious project to explore these emergent understandings, put together by The Finnish Institute in London as a part of the critical Reaktio series <http://bit.ly/ZvrLn8> with the help of the Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org> and a global team of contributors and mentors.

THE BOOK // Inspired by the world’s first Open Knowledge Festival <http://okfestival.org> this fall in Helsinki, The Open Book explores the social and technological manifestations of this movement for the first time, featuring over 25 in-depth thought pieces written by pioneers of openness around the world from London to São Paulo - many of whom were suggested by you! Also included is “The Evolution of Open Knowledge” <http://bit.ly/YGwj7N>, the world’s first crowdsourced timeline of openness from 1425 to the current day which we asked you to contribute to <http://bit.ly/122EuLV> earlier this year.

THE CONCLUSIONS // Due to the divisive nature of such an experimental publication, we do not attempt to present any single argument on what ‘open’ is. Instead, we hope The Open Book will serve as a platform for discussion and a launching pad for new ideas about the future of a global open knowledge movement in a time of rapid technological progress.

THE LAUNCH // As many of you already know, The Open Book was officially launched at FutureEverything in Manchester last month: <http://bit.ly/146xxwf> Many thanks to everyone who came and showed their support - it was a great event! Here's a summary by Antti Halonen, Head of Society at the Finnish Institute: <http://bit.ly/ZvqHjj>

GET YOUR COPY // Web: The Open Book is now available online for free as a PDF (CC-BY-SA license) at <http://theopenbook.org.uk>. Print: You can also grab a beautiful print copy at-cost via Amazon: <http://amzn.to/ZcZ2xn>. Please share with colleagues and friends!

Two Presentations on Gameworld Space

2013-04-04T21:45:00.003+02:00

HUMlab will be streaming two presentations on gameworld spaces from the Connecting the Dots: Movement, Space, and the Digital Image conference held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. The session will be streamed live in HUMlab X (The Arts Campus) as part of the Lunchbox Learnings series.
This is a chance to hear two very interesting papers on game space in the popular games Minecraft and The Sims (see abstracts below) by two well-known scholars: Dr Seth Giddings, new media and game studies lecturer and Programme Leader for Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Creative Industries from the University of the West of England (co-editor of New Media: a critical introduction (2009), editor of The New Media and Technocultures Reader (2011), and author of Gameworlds: virtual media, everyday life (forthcoming)); and Dr Alan Blackwell, Senior Lecturer in neuroscience and Human Computer Interaction with The Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.

We will be starting a little earlier at 11:15 am on 12th April, Friday, and we will end at about 12:30 pm. Even though this is a streamed session, there will be plenty of chances to ask questions and take part in the discussion.

All welcome!

Useful Links:
Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/585271961485244/
Website for Connecting the Dots: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2069/
Digital Cultures Research Center: http://dcrc.org.uk/
Seth Giddings: http://www.sethgiddings.net/
Alan F. Blackwell: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/

ABSTRACTS:

“The Metaphysics of Minecraft”
Alan F. Blackwell
University of Cambridge

Minecraft is a popular computer game of the “sandbox” genre, where players explore and build in a virtual world. The user typically experiences this world as a “first person” view, from the point of view of a virtual avatar. The screen shows an imaginary landscape of hills, grass and trees, or when mining, dirt, gravel, coal and various ores. The player can grasp a variety of tools in his or her virtual hand, and controls these pickaxes or other implements with the computer mouse. The contents of the world may be shared with other players, via one of many Minecraft servers, each of which contains its own virtual world, with the avatars of other players on that server exploring, mining or creating around you.

This kind of virtual world sandbox game is not unusual. Much attention was paid by media and media scholars to the game “Second Life”, originally launched in 2003, 6 years earlier than Minecraft. Second Life also allowed the player to interact with the avatars of other players, explore and create houses or products. But the distinctive nature of Minecraft is the lack of realism in this virtual world. Unlike the animated fantasy world of online games such as Second Life, the graphics of Minecraft have extremely low resolution, looking intentionally crude. The virtual world is constructed of cubic blocks, nominally a metre on each side, meaning that the player can make rapid progress felling blocky trees for timber, digging blocky mines for coal, and assembling blocks into houses, farms or larger structures. Unlike the fine textures of realistic virtual worlds in multiplayer online role-playing games, the large blocks of Minecraft seem like giant digital Lego. Players can rapidly collect building materials and tools for ambitious construction projects, or even deploy an inexhaustible supply of digital blocks in a non-competitive creative mode. Lack of realism results in a system that is democratic and generative to a degree not seen in comparably popular games.

The freedom offered to players extends well beyond facility of movement in the virtual world. The Swedish creator of Minecraft, known as Notch (and his company Mojang), have intentionally allowed fans to decrypt and modify the Java language source code of Minecraft itself. A determined player can substitute new pieces of code for any part of the Minecraft system – a practice described as “modding”. Mods are shared among players, allowing individuals to choose more and more mutated versions of the game world – with different tools, materials, plants, animals or monsters, as well as magic powers for the player. For those without sufficient skill to write Java code, it is still possible to change the world by replacing the block surfaces or the appearance of their own avatars with alternative textures. And where players are inclined to tinkering, it is possible to create automated machinery and gadgets in the Minecraft world itself – using redstone (a fictional kind of semiconductor) with switches, pistons – and even virtual computers inside the computer, that can be programmed in their own simple language to make robots do the mining and building on your behalf.

These facilities reconfigure space in the virtual world of Minecraft in surprisingly profound and reflexive ways. Rather than a literalistic re-construction and re-presentation of “virtual reality”, Minecraft offers a democratised spatial poetics – an Open Work, in the sense defined by Umberto Eco. The boundaries between coal and code are permeable to an extent only previously imagined in the dream allegories of Neuromancer and the Matrix. Minecraft players not only inhabit the worlds of each other’s imaginations, and collaborate to redefine the game they are playing, but blur the bounds between the product itself and their own media culture. They share advice on recipes and mods via active support communities and wikis. But even more prolifically, they use screen recorders to make videos of their avatar playing the game, with voice-over narration explaining their constructions and adventures, or giving advice to new players. Minecraft players may spend as much time watching videos of other people playing as they do playing themselves. And the machinima affordances of the Minecraft world lead to players creating their own homages to popular films such as the Hunger Games, with the original narrative re-located into the block world of Minecraft. As with building and modding, the blocky low resolution is liberating to young creators who could never emulate professional animation standards, but probably didn’t want to. Older players gain YouTube followers by using custom mods or additional animation software to create meta-narratives – postmodern commentaries on the genre and its communities – such as the Egg’s Guide to Minecraft series.
At the time of writing, the emergent media ecology of the Minecraft community is racing ahead of critical commentary. This abstract has attempted to set out the scope of reconfiguration between space and action. But the children currently playing Minecraft seem likely to become a new generation holding radically altered expectations of digital space.

————————————-

“Sim You Later: at play across virtual and actual space”
Seth Giddings
University of Western England

Current developments in mobile and locative media, and in augmented / mixed reality media (for instance at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol) take the permeability of virtual and actual space as a given. Digital space is thought of not as the worlds within worlds of virtual reality or cyberspace as imagined in 1990s, but rather as ‘content’ or experience delivered to – for instance – a smartphone user as they navigate their everyday environments. If the separation or transcendence of the actual lived world was the technological imaginary of virtual reality, then the dissolution of media technology into an augmented everyday is the promise, or dream, of pervasive media.
However the interpenetration or layering of digital and actual space does not dissolve the specific media/technological forms of digital space. Rather we see a mixing or layering of heterogeneous domains, some the quotidian environments of streets, homes and playgrounds, some the intangible domains generated from databases, algorithms and user interfaces, some rendered in the Euclidean geometry of game engines, others in the text-constituted spaces of chat and Twitter. To understand these composite realities, I would argue, we need to pay attention both to the technological nature of digital spaces as software and hardware, and to particular events in which virtual and actual spaces are generated.

The presentation will draw on microethological studies of the play-testing of pervasive media games, and of children’s videogame play across digital and physical gameworlds. Microethology is a theoretical and empirical method of participant observation in intimate events in technoculture. The presentation will suggest key concepts for studying emergent behaviours of, and in, the mixed realities of emergent digital media cultures. It will argue that digital space should be understood in relation to three significant factors:

behaviour – both human and nonhuman;
time – particularly the speculative and iterative time of simulation;
play – both serious and phantasmagorical.

The Immersive Internet: Reflections on the Entangling of the Virtual with Society, Politics and the Economy

2013-03-27T20:09:00.002+01:00

"The Immersive Internet provides the first omnibus account of the emerging world-view of people who spend most of their quality time mediated by computer-based technologies. It should be taken seriously by anyone trying to design a liberal arts curriculum for Humanity 2.0." – Steve Fuller, University of Warwick, UK

The Immersive Internet Reflections on the Entangling of the Virtual with Society, Politics and the Economy will be released by Palgrave Macmillan on Friday 29th March 2013. The internet has begun to develop into a much more immersive and multi-dimensional space. Three dimensional spaces and sites of interaction have not just gripped our attention but have begun to weave or be woven into the fabric of our professional and social lives. The Immersive Internet – including social media, augmented reality, virtual worlds, online games, 3D internet and beyond – is still nascent, but is moving towards a future where communications technologies and virtual spaces offer immersive experiences persuasive enough to blur the lines between the virtual and the physical. It is this emerging Immersive Internet that is the focus of this book of short thought pieces – postcards from the metaverse – by some of the leading thinkers in the field. The book questions what a more immersive and intimate internet might mean for society and for each of us.

Contents

1. Postcards from the Metaverse: An Introduction to the Immersive Internet; Dominic Power and Robin Teigland
2. Niggling Inequality: A Second Introduction to the Immersive Internet; Edward Castronova
3. The Distributed Self: Virtual Worlds and the Future of Human Identity; Richard Gilbert and Andrew Forney
4. Meta-dreaming: Entangling the Virtual and the Physical; Denise Doyle
5. Individually Social: Approaching the Merging of Virtual Worlds, the Semantic Web, and Social Networks; Francisco Gerardo Toledo Ramírez
6. Virtual Worlds as Radical Theater: Extending the Proscenium; Anthony M. Townsend and Brian E. Mennecke
7. Virtual Worlds and Indigenous Narratives; James Barrett
8. The Immersive Hand: Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Environments; Smiljana Antonijević
9. Discovering the 'I' in Avatar: Performance and Self-Therapy; Alicia B. Corts
10. Reflections and Projections: Enabling the Social Enterprise; Steve Mahaley, Chuck Hamilton and Tony O'Driscoll
11. Added Value of Teaching in a Virtual World; Inger-Marie Falgren Christensen, Andrew Marunchak and Cristina Stefanelli
12. Play & Fun Politics to Increase the Pervasiveness of Social Community: The Experience of Angels 4 Travellers; Maria Laura Toraldo, Gianluigi Mangia, Stefano Consiglio and Riccardo Mercurio
13. Framing Online Games Positively: Entertaining and Engagement through 'Mindful Loss' of Flow; Müberra Yüksel
14. Inhabitants of Virtual Worlds, Players of Online Games - Beware!; Antti Ainamo and Tuukka Tammi
15. Relationships, Community, and Networked Individuals; Rhonda McEwen and Barry Wellman
16. Gemeinschaft Identity in a Gesellschaft Metaverse; Cynthia Calongne, Peggy Sheehy and Andrew Stricker
Sorting out the Metaverse and How the Metaverse is Sorting Us Out; Isto Huvila
17. On the Shoulders of Giants: Understanding Internet-based Generative Platforms; Jonny Holmström
18. Social Norms, Regulatory Policies, and Virtual Behavior; Andrew Harrison, Brian E. Mennecke and William N. Dilla
19. Self-organising Virtuality; Rick Oller
20. Making Currency Personal: The Salutory Tale of the Downfall of the DomDrachma; Matthew Zook
Afterword; Tom Boellstorff

NITLE's Bryan Alexander speaks on Digital Humanities and Liberal Education

2013-03-17T22:56:00.006+01:00

The senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, Bryan Alexander speaks on the ways in which the digital humanities can affect the liberal arts institutions and how digital tools are changing the way we learn.

Seeking

2013-03-17T20:41:00.001+01:00

The blonde heavy breasted mannikin stares at me from the Facebook sidebar advertisement, telling me that thousands of women just like her are seeking men over 40, 'just like me'. I remain unconvinced that she is looking for a man just like me, as I would ask her to dismantle the apparatus in which she is caught, disband the hope and fear cycle which defines her, empty the erotic bath of desire and cease believing in the images that compose a reality I have no wish to be part of. But then again, choice for both of us is limited in the well-lit digital temples through which we are both forced to travel. I would however try, before she became too angry with me, to compose music dedicated to our mutual release from the capitalist prison in which we both find ourselves. A lament for the loss of our creative spirits in the harsh glare of specialist production and the meaningless repetition of hollow and senseless consumption masquerading as sex.

Film Showing: Bradley Manning Had Secrets

2013-03-17T20:12:00.004+01:00

I will be a speaker at the showing of 'Bradley Manning Had Secrets', a short film that focuses on Bradley Manning, accused whistle blower and political prisoner. I will be making a statement, or perhaps it will be a declaration, anyway I will be speaking in HUMlab X 12:15pm Friday 21st March (Arts Campus) on the notion of private and public within an network information architecture. I suggest coming along!

"Bradley Manning, not as accused for leaking information to Wikileaks, but as a young American soldier, who question his gender identity and simultaneously goes through a crisis of conscience''.

Animated film by Adam Butcher, (7min, 2011, USA). Short interview with the filmmaker will follow.

Lunch Box learning is a series of film screening events at the HUMlab-X, Arts Campus. Just get your lunch box, scrunch in bean bags and enjoy the screening. There will be a coffee as well.

This time held by HUMlab-X, Arts Campus and Campus Royal - student film club at the Umea University.

More information about organizers:
www.humlab.umu.se
www.cinema.campuskortet.se

Rethinking the Human Sciences

2013-03-13T07:38:00.003+01:00

Panel discussion at Rethinking the Human Sciences conference, March 30, 2012, at Columbia University in the City of New York.

Chair: Aunpama Rao (History and ICLS, Columbia University)
"The Problem of Scale: Narrative Universals in the Human Sciences"

Srinivas Aravamudan (English, Duke University)
"What is 'the Human' about the Humanities today?"

Rosi Braidotti (Centre for Humanities, Utrecht University)

Respondent: Lydia Liu (East Asian Languages and Cultures and ICLS, Columbia University)

Frankenstein for the Now

2013-03-09T01:24:00.003+01:00

Neo, the hero of The Matrix is rebuilt following his release from the controlling program

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus published in 1818 is seen as a historical and literary divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is today recognized as a significant reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism.

The monster of Frankenstein is an abomination that results from the misguided belief in science. Victor Frankenstein believes that “The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ” But he is wrong with the monster, his creation murdering a child. Victor hunts down his creation and attempts to destroy it.

In contrast we have the contemporary figure of Neo, the young hacker turned savior in the Matrix trilogy. When Neo is rebuilt it is very suggestive of the unnatural birth of the monster in Frankenstein. In this context the reborn man is released from the illusional world of the computer program that holds all humanity in a 'neo'-platonic grip. At the same time Neo has mastered the illusion; he controls technology because he is as one with it. As a telekinetic child says to Neo in the first Matrix film; "There is no spoon." For Neo there is no technology, only extensions of his own self. For this reason he can control the space around him, but at the same time the space around him must be controlled.

The huge difference between Neo and the monstrosity created by Victor Frankenstein is that Neo is here to save humanity; science and poetry have at last joined. Neo is that union. Avital Ronell in conversation with Werner Herzog said, “One text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.” But the digital revolution that has Neo as the Chosen One is the marriage of science and poetry.The monster in Frankenstein is Neo's sibling that was abandoned when science no longer needed poetry and poetry stopped understanding science. This occurred when poetry got obsessed with form. Science lost interest in poetry when it began splitting atoms.

For Neo poetic form and atoms are the same thing. Reality is one great poem, a dance of code that can be read, interpreted and responded to with a Will to Power:

"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on"- Nietzsche, The Will to Power.

The lie of the matrix is not the illusion of material reality, it is the will to power, the desire to master the space. While the power of the matrix could be use to liberate minds, it is being used to control space, in a violent and ongoing war, waged with the same technology that provides the awareness of reality - which is defined by the struggle to control it and so on ad infinitum.

Poetics of the Spectacle

2013-03-08T09:42:00.001+01:00

Remix and Resistance in the Work of William S. Burroughs

2013-03-03T07:36:00.001+01:00

Remix and Resistance in the Work of William S. Burroughs from jim on Vimeo.

Short excerpt from the film The Source (1999)