Serial Consign

David Parry on Emerging Media

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:19:47 +0000

FlowTV is a great resource for scholarly-but-accessible thinking about all manner of media. I've professed my love for the site in the past and it has delivered once again by publishing a concise and lucid text by David Parry that debunks the "newness" of new media.

[ARPANET Interface Message Processor / photo: carrierdetect]

Parry's post bounces between our relationship with a range of media artifacts that include the card catalog, the Google search box and social networks to parse how "novelty" relates to technology. The text includes a nice swipe at the digital native model that postulates that youth intuit prowess with recent technology through immersion and instead suggests it is a lack of critical engagement that inspires proficiency with (and complacency towards) firmly established protocols/networks. Parry on his classroom strategy:

I have been teaching “digital stuff” for about eight years now and in those eight years I have noted a rather significant shift. While it used to be the case that when we would discuss the internet, social media, and the digital network, students would approach it with a certain lack of familiarity — “What is this strange object before us?” Now they simply take it in stride. There is nothing particularly strange/odd or even noteworthy to many of them about the practice of having a Facebook page. (Indeed this is the second semester in a row where nearly all of my students have a Facebook page.) I used to approach teaching these matters as the question of looking at the strange and contextualizing it in terms of the familiar. I now find that my job is to take the familiar and make it strange, or as Siva Vaidhyanathan observed during an online discussion about this issue, “I use the ‘I’m teaching fish about the ocean’ perspective. I try to make it weird again.”

Making strange, defamiliarization – these sound like good tactics for any educator to employ. Parry's short essay concludes by comparing the spread of the printing press and network culture while carefully considering the utility of "novelty" for framing media. For those looking to dig deeper into this topic, I highly recommend the excellent New Media Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (2006), edited by Wendy Chun & Thomas Keenan.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://serialconsign.com/trackback/456

Visual Interpretations - CFP

Greg J. Smith — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:44:10 +0000

[Ben Fry / The Preservation of Favoured Traces / 2009]

Madeleine Clare Elish at the MIT Hyperstudio (a digital humanities lab) recently pinged me with details regarding an interesting symposium on information visualization that will be taking place this coming spring. Visual Interpretations is scheduled for May 20-22 and will consider the "aesthetics, methods, and critiques of information visualization" in the humanities and social sciences. The call frames the event as follows:

How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research? HyperStudio’s Visual Interpretations conference will bring digital practitioners and humanities scholars together with experts in art and design to consider the past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities. The goal is to get beyond the notion that information exists independently of visual presentation, and to rethink visualization as an integrated analytical method in humanities scholarship. By fostering dialogue and critical engagement, this conference aims to explore new ways to design data and metadata structures so that their visual embodiments function as "humanities tools in digital environments.” (Johanna Drucker)

This all sounds quite promising and I appreciate the way that the event is contextualized – especially the desire to focus on the "past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities." The word past suggests this will be much more than a visualization trade show. Some highlights from the suggested topics posed by the organizers:

Expressive and artistic dimensions of visualizations
Cultural history of visual epistemology
2D and 3D visualizations of historical/social/political data
Visualization across media and the archive
Relationships between database and interface
Alternative modes of data representation.
Digital visual literacy* & accessibility

You can get more information on the symposium CFP here – the organizers can accommodate a range of presentation formats (papers, workshops, and something called a 6/4 which is either an odd time signature or a PechaKucha-style speed talk).

I'm leaning towards submitting a proposal – perhaps I'll see some of you folks in Cambridge this May.

*An issue that I prattled about during my tenure at ScienceBlogs last fall.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://serialconsign.com/trackback/455

8-bit Rockers

Greg J. Smith — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:05:57 +0000

[Gijs Gieskes / Eye, still / 2004 ]

I've been fixating on "failed" and subverted media of late. No doubt this fascination has been largely inspired by my reading of Caleb Kelly's Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, but this interest also extends out of some writing that we recently published on Vague Terrain.

PLAYLIST is an exhibition organized by curator Domenico Quaranta that is currently on display at LABoral in Gijón, Spain. The show brings together a few dozen projects that explore musical production through lo-fi and obsolete technologies. The exhibition features work by a range of artists including Paul B. Davis, Tristan Perich, Paul Slocum, Raquel Meyers – a cast of characters who repurpose "dead" media, either with a soldering iron or through ROM hacking. A superficial reading of PLAYLIST might result in the show being dismissed for capitalizing on (unwavering) chiptune-chic, but the selected projects are far too smart and nuanced to have to solely rely on nostalgia or kitsch to resonate with an audience. I'm not so interested in focusing on the show itself (see Régine Debatty's coverage here and here) but pointing out the excellent catalogue essays by Quaranta and Ed Halter that we republished on the Vague Terrain blog. These two texts do more than simply frame a body of work, they each provide a toolkit for thinking about technology.

Quaranta's "PLAYLIST. A Reader" opens by invoking the dead media of Bruce Sterling and the notion of planned obsolescence invented/advocated by Brooks Stevens. Quaranta on the life and death of consumer electronics:

Media rarely die in the same way – more often, they are just sent to the garrett, the home version of the Elysian Fields. There, they wait to be brought back to the living room by that very emotional investment we made in them. There, they wait to be brought back to the living room by that very emotional investment we made in them. If my Powerbook had a strong influence on the way I see the world; if, during its lifespan, it changed the way a wide community of people see, listens to music, interact with other people, etc., obsolescence won't be a form of death – it will be, instead, the main gateway to eternity.

The notion of emotional investment is leveraged to describe artists working with obsolete technology as "collectors" and Quaranta points to the persistence of the demoscene as a related model of liberated (retro)engagement with technology that blurs the distinction between visual art and musical production.

Halter's "The Matter of Electronics" is a rich examination of lo-fi aesthetics that builds bridges between materialist filmmaking and artists working with obsolete media. Halter on the recognition of the true nature of a medium:

The very moments that indicate the specificity of the medium occur when that medium starts to break down, to suffer and reveal imperfections. The technology becomes visible through its failures. Glitches and errors constitute evidence of its origins; we see the material through disruption.

Halter surveys a number of video pieces from the exhibition and in doing so he develops a playbook for considering their material qualities - how the works relate to the devices they were generated on and the grain of digital formats.

I've only really provided cursory summaries of these essays so cruise over to Vague Terrain if I've piqued your interest. I'll have more news on the VT front soon as Vague Terrain 16: Architecture/Action (curated by Joshua Noble) will be launching in the next few weeks.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://serialconsign.com/trackback/454

.txt/100201

Greg J. Smith — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 04:21:54 +0000

[original photo: Napalm Filled Tires]

Recently noted:

Fred Scharmen's Procedural Buff (pictured above) proposes a foursquare-like workflow that operates as "social network, internet archive and street game" while producing a mural.
Given all the bland pad-scrutinizing we were subjected to last week, it was refreshing to read Navneet Alang's consideration of the magazine and how the medium functions as a machine – this is some sharp supply chain and cultural assemblage thinking.
Walter Benjamin enthusiasts should note Richard Prouty's The End of Something, a series of posts on "the Paris Arcades and the culture of the Naughties." I'm about halfway through the 22 short texts and thus far they have been excellent.
Robin Sloan on telling stories with interfaces – there are loads of great links here.
Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes at mammoth compile an out-of-control list of the most interesting architectural projects of the decade and (gasp) many of them are not buildings.

I post .txt dispatches bi-weekly to highlight noteworthy content from across the web. Feel free to subscribe to my Google Reader shared items or add me to your delicious network if you want to tune in to the material that I'm bookmarking.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://serialconsign.com/trackback/453

Keiichi Matsuda: Augmented (hyper)Reality

Greg J. Smith — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:01:19 +0000

It is near impossible to keep up with the torrent of hype and cheerleading regarding Augmented Reality (AR). I have to admit that don't pay much attention to most of the content on this topic that streams through my news reader – I'm simply not interested in the marketing-focused slant applied to anointed technologies of the moment. As Bruce Sterling warned in his At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry talk last summer: "get ready for the trough of disillusionment" as it is the next phase of the hype cycle for AR. Remember VRML? What about Second Life? The design community certainly dined at those troughs.

With that disclaimer out of the way, please note the above video by Keiichi Matsuda, who is currently studying at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Matsuda's short animation Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop depicts a disturbing culinary interlude where every inch of surface area is plastered with advertising. Space is further sliced up through intrusive informational displays that bombard the occupant with the every minutiae of quantitative information available on their possessions and activities. This is definitely amped up to an absurd level as one of the displays (like those of The Sims) tracks the hunger, thirst and bladder capacity of the individual whose perspective we are experiencing this space through. In another equally cynical moment, an interface is presented to our subject where they can control the "ad saturation" of their space and be compensated accordingly. There are also suggestions as to how users might interpolate between domestic space and an updated 3D version of the traditional desktop GUI (recognize the wallpaper background of that scene?). This is all delivered with a wink and after suffering through countless optimistic/uncritical AR vignettes it is great to see one with a sense of humour. [via: ReadWriteWeb]

Trackback URL for this post:

http://serialconsign.com/trackback/452

Destroy Consumer Electronics

Greg J. Smith — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:02:09 +0000

[Martin Tétrault at MUTEK 2008 / photo: DIS-PATCH Festival]

I hear that Apple Computer Inc. had some kind of product launch today. I spent some time on the Internet this afternoon but unfortunately I couldn't find any information about this alleged event. So, instead of doting on glossy locked-down consumer electronics why not read my review of Caleb Kelly's Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction on Rhizome. Kelly's book functions as a prehistory of glitch aesthetics that is explicitly focused on material culture—phonographs and CDs—and the manner in which 20th century artists subverted "playback technologies" to make provocative objects and glorious noise.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://serialconsign.com/trackback/451

James Der Derian: Virtuous War

Greg J. Smith — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 03:58:29 +0000

This past Thursday evening the York Centre for International & Security Studies hosted a talk entitled "The Culture, Technology and Ethics of Virtuous War" as part of an ongoing lecture series on dillemmas in Canadian Security. The featured speaker at this event was James Der Derian (of the Watson Institute for International Studies), an Oxford educated scholar who examines military strategy in light of flows of information, visual culture and ethics. I was only obliquely familiar with Der Derian before the talk but it was extremely accessible for me as he very much framed his thinking regarding American warfare in relationship to the work Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virillio – simulation and speed were both frequent points of reference.

[Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial Media Entertainment Network (2nd Edition), video trailer]

Der Derian's talk presented a nuanced reading of the idea of the "virtuous" war by focusing on a range of contemporary techniques for managing the battlefield that included predator drones, embedded anthropologists and recent shifts in the tone of military training. He also presented a few exciting film projects that were packed with interviews with leading military thinkers and strategists. The following notes provide a general overview of his informal lecture:

Der Derian opens talk by pointing out that the phrase virtuous war is a "felicitous oxymoron".
His scholarship is particularly indebted to Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin. The focus of the latter on of the mass production of objects and images is more relevant than ever.
While Baudrillard famously stated that "The Gulf War did not take place" to suggest that the 1990-91 conflict was emblematic of a new type of warfare. In pinpointing the origins of this new "simulated" battlefield Der Derian cites a slightly earlier moment: February 1989 – as Gorbachev announced governmental reform in the Soviet Union, American soldiers were busy battling the Krasnovians (a fake Russian regiment) in war games at Fort Irwin, George Bush was present at this event and the following transpired: "Kitted out in a photo-opportunistic ensemble of camouflage jacket, pin-strip trousers, and wing-tip shows, Bush used a radio link to tell the 2,689 players spread-out over the Mojave Desert that "we are pleased to see Chairman Gorbachev's proposal to expand steps towards pluralism in the Soviet Union." Inspired, the "Soviet" 197th Krasnovian Motorized Rifle Regiment made borscht out of the U.S. Third Brigade..." (quote culled from Der Derian's "The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars").
The Military-industrial complex is an antiquated concept and the commercial sector/defense assemblage is better described as the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (MIME-net). [See also Ed Halter's From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Videogames]
Drone attacks have quadrupled under Obama.
Shock and awe as media performance. Note the brilliant montage of Wesley Clark, Arthur Cebrowski and Virillio from 6:00-8:30 in the video embedded above. Cebrowski dismissing the idea of equality on the battlefield: "That is not the American way of war. We love Super Bowls – we want to see the opposition swept off the field."
The last third of the talk addressed the controversial Human Terrain System project which embeds anthropologists and social scientists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are numerous ethical questions posed by this endeavour as it (arguably) "weaponizes" the social sciences and attempts to instrumentalize American cultural engagement in foreign countries. Der Derian (and collaborators David and Michael Udris) have recently completed Human Terrain, a documentary examining this troubled initiative.

The above smattering of bullet points does not do Der Derian's presentation justice – I wasn't in top note taking form at this event and I admit to cherry picking the topics that most interested me. Rest assured that the recently updated Virtuous War has been added to my "to read" list.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://serialconsign.com/trackback/450

Continuous City: Tori Foster's The Impossibility of Understanding

Greg J. Smith — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:21:55 +0000

I was recently asked to write an essay to mark the occasion of Tori Foster's The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian being installed at the convenience window gallery here in Toronto. This was an exciting opportunity for me to wrap my head around the implications of Foster's project as she has prototyped a brilliant workflow for building super-composites out of thousands of photographs documenting a drive, bicycle ride or walk. The project functions in a similar manner to Google Street View but exploits the distortion of perspective and time to re-present an abstracted "continuous city" as a series of side-scrolling videos. The above photographs document when the piece was displayed at Toronto Image Works last summer and the project was also featured (at a prototype stage) in Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE.

The above image is a detail from one of Foster's videos and the smear on the right of the frame is registering a decrease in speed – these videos are as much about tempo and rhythm as the density of built form.

An excerpt from the essay:

…Foster has positioned herself as an urban curator – a collector of paths, routes and navigational idiosyncrasies. Rather than author a personal impression of the city she has devised a means of re-encoding the movement of others. By handing the reins over to three (ultimately) anonymous individuals – each with their own agenda and mode of transportation – Foster removes herself from the equation. It is precisely this absence that is one of the most compelling qualities of The Impossibility of Understanding, as rather than build a world around the "essential egotism" of an individual flâneur, the project instead foregrounds the homogeneous nature of the city as experienced on a moment-to-moment basis.

You can learn more about The Impossibility of Understanding via Foster's page documenting the project (where you can also download a PDF of my essay) – be sure to watch the demo video. The work will be up at convenience through February 13th.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://serialconsign.com/trackback/449

DIY Monster Institution - The Pinky Show

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:23:43 +0000

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing a "human representative" of The Pinky Show give a talk contextualizing their work. For the uninitiated, The Pinky Show is an American social justice-focused animated series starring a group of cats. Winnipeg Free Press writer Alison Gillmor succinctly described the web video series as "Noam Chomsky by way of Hello Kitty" and this definition works – each episode tackles heavy issues and carefully considers their complexities in a manner that is both accessible and (morosely) entertaining. Past shows have examined formal education, illegal immigration, the legality of the Iraq War, GMOs and the nuances of these charged topics are thoroughly researched and parsed very finely. The show has an explicit interest in language and watching any of the above episodes will illustrate how attentive the writers are in peeling back dominant cultural narratives and reconsidering definitions that we sometimes take for granted.

Due to a few sharp curators, The Pinky Show has recently popped up on the radar of the Canadian art scene and the team behind the project just launched show at the Toronto Free Gallery entitled "Class Treason Stories". This video project is presented in an exhibition context as a series of large format prints of Pinky, Bunny, Mimi and Kim – the all-feline cast of the series. Yesterday John (no last name given) gave a talk that presented the backstory of the team's foray into web video and how their project has evolved over the last five years.

[Pinky & Bunny / I'M ON UR LAND / MAPPIN UR DEMIZE, from the On Native Land series / 2008]

A recurring theme within the "Class Treason Stories" artist talk was the struggle for financial subsistence. Since The Pinky Show is not a standard publication, art practice or child-friendly animated series, obtaining funding for the project has proved difficult. The project is registered as a non-profit and has two full-time writers/producers, a half-time "organizer" and the only source of revenue has been (meagre) merchandise sales, donations and a few timely grants. A defining moment in the early life of the project occurred when one of their 2007 episodes was featured on the front page of YouTube – this video now has more than 750,000 views and the YouTube channel for the project has reached 7.5 million people. Granted, there are countless videos on the Internet that have reached an audience of a hundred thousand but given that this project deals with touchy subjects like ideology or the definition of war crimes, how has the show managed to cultivate such a large viewership?

[Pinky & Bunny / I'M ON UR LAND / MAPPIN UR DEMIZE, detail]

John confessed that he was still quite perplexed by the success the show had enjoyed in certain countries and networks but was quick to point out that the daily routine at The Pinky Show HQ consisted of being rejected for grants and answering hate mail. He also expressed confusion regarding the fact that the project appealed to the art world but seemed a little more comfortable with the idea of turning the research and iconography associated with the show into "sellable artifacts" rather than strictly relying on merchandise sales to fund the project. It was fascinating to hear the care that goes into the writing of The Pinky Show applied to an on-the-fly contextualization of the project and John concluded that people "accepted" the show precisely because it was animated – nobody demands to know the academic history of a hand drawn cat. While this point was delivered as a punchline, it underscored an intense suspicion of institutionalized education and academic credentialing.

Another reason that the show is somewhat accessible is that it appropriates one of the qualities most valued online—cuteness—and subverts it to serve as a delivery device for cultural commentary. I'M ON UR LAND / MAPPIN UR DEMIZE (shown above) is a brilliant example of a generic Internet meme being redeployed to highlight connections between cartography, power, historical narratives and the plight of the indigenous peoples of North America.

What I found most appealing about this excellent talk was John's description of something he referred to as the "monster institution". During the presentation there were many references to (past) frustrations that The Pinky Show team had while working as educators – they felt that between administration and departmental infighting they had no time remaining to dedicate to their own learning. Rather than continue working in an institution they no longer had faith in, they created their own (the show) where the primary mandate was to spend each and every day researching and bettering themselves while developing quality content. John warned that the danger of the monster institution is that nobody will take you seriously for years but their project is a shining example of how good, self-published content can find an audience.

"We Love Museums...Do Museums Love Us Back?" is probably my favourite episode of The Pinky Show as it skewers museum/gallery culture and all the expertise associated with programming it. I urge you to check out this great video series and if you're interested in learning more about the project you should track down a copy of this month's issue of FUSE magazine (as it has a feature article on Pinky & Co.).

Trackback URL for this post:

http://serialconsign.com/trackback/448

.txt/100115

Greg J. Smith — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 02:50:39 +0000

[MQ-1 Predator UAV / photo: Danger Room]

Recent infosnacks:

Nathan Hodge draws connections between some recent developments in drone technology related to multi-camera arrays and the telestrator [see also Jordan Crandall's prescient 2003 essay Embedded Reporters, Predator Drones and Armed Perception].
Parisian photographers, filmmakers and inventors have been tinkering with 3D imaging for over 150 years. Film/art researchers Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell are currently visiting "The City of Light" – check out their summary of their experience viewing a number of obscure early/mid 20th century 3D films. Thompson: "The first color 3D film was shown: Motor Rhythm, made by Charley Bowers in 1940 for the Chicago Exposition and distributed by RKO. Using a combination of pixilation and 3D, the film shows a car jauntily assembling itself to a musical accompaniment, with many of the parts moving out toward the camera before attaching themselves in their proper places."
Liz Losh outlines how virtual currency from FarmVille is being used to bait gamers into petitioning against the American healthcare bill.
Sean Smith provides a snapshot of Yoko Ono's Play It By Trust (1966) as a gateway into some of his past writing on sports, gaming and the body.
Not a text, but a syllabus - David Nolen's fall ITP class dedicated to considering and constructing drawing machines [see Tom Armitage's related thoughts over at the BERG blog].

Trackback URL for this post:

http://serialconsign.com/trackback/447