new media : ryan peter andre tobin

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Contributors

Andre - Winter Reading Review

Posted on April 16th, 2007 by Andre De Pape.
Categories: Andre • Reading Reviews.

Reading Review -
Relational Aesthetics - Nicolas Bourriaud

with additional resources:
- Flash In Japan: Brian Massumi on Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Amodal Suspension 2003
- Public Warning in the Networked Age: Open Standards to the Rescue? by Art Botterell and Ronja Addams-Moring March 2007
- Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics and the Art of Meaning by Edward A. Shanken 2000

The writings of Nicolas Bourriaud on the subject of Relational Form takes a broader look upon the structures of art in contemporary society. Bourriaud’s main focus is on the relationship between the artwork and the cultural space in which it was created. The cultural space that art now inhabits is so distant from a hundred years ago that it must be looked at with an entirely new set of understandings. It’s become more important now that ever before to understand that art is in a constant state of flux, and it is this environment of change which gives life and meaning to art.

Bourriaud focuses on the role of modernity in shaping the way we relate to society in contemporary times. While modernity had a teleological view of a utopian life, engineered through the great technological advances of the industrial revolution, contemporary society has abandoned this pursuit for a more realistic path. It’s understood now that we have inherited the history of our ancestors and instead of reengineering the world we live in, we attempt to improve our situation while slowly ameliorating our current social structures. Modern art attempted to present us with the world of the future, the ideological world of modernity, in a revolutionary movement. The art of today investigates the world as it is, and focusing on societies state of constant change.

In the article Bourriaud uses Michel de Certeau’s term tenant of culture to describe the role of the artist in contemporary society. The artist as a proponent for social understanding is a interesting concept. The artist has always been a cultural force, yet in modern times, culture has been appropriated by our capitalist system, so the artist is a different type agent within this system. Since culture is it’s own unstoppable force at this point, the artist is really just branching out of existing cultural spheres as opposed to crafting it’s own cultural niches. In the article “Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics and the Art of Meaning”, Edward A. Shanken discusses the interplay of technology with art practices. In reference to a 1978 report by Nora and Minc in regards to The Computrization of Society, he discusses how this great advancement of technology holds great potential in crafting our future society. They inferred that this technology will either bring way for greater freedoms, or facilitate greater control by ruling factions. This idea of freedom vs. control is addressed in Bourriauds analysis of art and urbanization of society. He goes onto explain that as we become less isolated and open up to the world, the artwork reflects that freedom. Art becomes less of a commodity and opens itself in a more free and experiential way. Art becomes less centralized around ideas of ownership and becomes a more decentralized area of exploration and investigation. This moves art closer to the ideal situation that Nora and Minc we’re reffering too, a “system of connections that will allow information and social organization to progress together.”

This libration of art, from an object, to an interconnected telematic experience has changed the fundemental relationship between the audience and the work. In Relational Form Bourriard explains:
“Unlike an object that is closed in on itself by the intervention of a style and a signature, presen-day art shows that form only exists in the encounter and in the dynamic relationship enjoyed by and artistic proposition with other formations, artistic or otherwise.”
Bourriard see’s this new relationship as a “collaborative elaboration of meaning”. He sees art becoming a sort of web in itself. It is no longer an autonomous being, it needs to be fully connected with the world around it. Looking at the work “Amodal Suspension” by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, this relationship becomes very apparent. In an article about the piece, Brian Massumi declares that it “makes visible the re-arising of reemergence of specifically human communication, in its first flush, ot flash, seen for what it is: a nonlinear crowd phenomenon”. Amodal Suspension is an interactive outdoor installation involving text messages and lights which act as visual carriers for the messages, as they travel from sender to receiver, touching on a number of different complexities within telematic communication. Massumi describes the interaction of the piece as “a visual analogue of human language, that reattaches language not only to a particular cultural evolution but also to the biosemiotic background from which it emerged”. He touches on the concepts of relational form, as he describes Lozano-Hemmer’s piece as a cultural evolution, reacting to a constant state of change, reaffirming Bourriard’s assertions on the role of the artist today. These characteristics in the piece emphasize the idea of a new mode of interaction with art, where the audience truely is a vehicle for meaning. Bourriard’s description of the audience in contemporary art can practically be applied directly to Amodal Suspension:

“This is the precise nature of contemporary art exhibition in the arena of representational commerce: it creates free arena, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the “communication zones” that are imposed upon us.”

At the heart of Lozano-Hemmer’s piece is this detachment from everyday social communications and opens up new ways of thinking about our existing social structures. As collaborative systems are being adopted in the exhibition of contemporary work, it becomes more than ever a fundamental element of modern art. Collaborative practices are now being adopted in other areas of art and design in a groundbreaking way.

In Art Botterell and Ronja Addams-Moring’s article Public Warning in the Network Age: Open Standards to the Rescue?, they go on to discuss the use of open-source warning systems for emergencies and hazards. While this discussion does not revolve around the art world, it poses a significant issue for design. Our current systems of warning revolve around centralized areas of broadcast, with each area of broadcast developing it’s own methods of warning. With the prevalence of the internet and mobile technology, there are open source initiatives that can unify the way we communicate warnings to the population. Botterell and Addams-Moring present some online use of wikis, blogs and websites dedicated solely for the communication of warning. These open technologies allow for easy implementation and access to tools of communcation. They make the poignant statement that natural disasters have no respect for borders, and thus our warning techniques should be open and free of borders. This universal attitude towards warning systems presents a design solution to a serious problem. They present the possibility that we can perhaps have international warnings, visual, auditory, that can be open standards compliant and be easily reproducible on a multitude of devices. This is a very real application of the technologies of the information age. We have potentially been underselling these technologies by simply focusing on new ways to watch tv and listen to music, when we could be exploring new ways of governing and learning.

In the investigation of the topic of networking, a theme kept creeping into my head. The idea of collaboration as means of deepening experience and meaning. This is the most powerful consequence of the information age. Having a system which enables extremely easy access to information, and at the same time creating new forms of rapid communication, creates enormous possibilities in furthering humanitarian pursuits. We choose to spend so much of this technology in finding new ways of entertaining us, while increasing the complexities of our daily lives. The world community is now in near perfect communication with one another, and with the masses connected, there should be nothing holding us back to begin to develop worldwide projects for the amelioration of human life. Taking for example the global project of the open source operating system Linux. It presents a great model to what an open source community can do. With the sharing of information and code, people around the globe have spent time making a computer platform that is 100% free and accessible to anyone. These sorts of projects are largely dismissed by north american government, while some european nations are beginning to adopt it at greater rates. With our capitalistic system degenerating our way of life, it could very well be a new open community of ideas and information that present new ways of living in the 21st century.

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Tobin’s Winter Reading Reviews

Posted on April 14th, 2007 by Tobin Stewart.
Categories: Tobin • Reading Reviews.

Lovejoy, Art as Interactive Communications: Networking Global Culture (from Art in the Electronic Age), 2004

Lovejoy’s thesis for this chapter is delivered poignantly in its first paragraph: major changes in communications systems foster enormous shifts in societal connectivity.

She begins dissecting her argument in reference to ideas laid out in the 1930s in Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer, in which he suggests a transformation in the main function of artworks toward an emphasis on social function – Benjamin would propose the idea of spectator as collaborator. He would urge artists to challenge the system and transform it, as opposed to simply supplying it. Shying away from being overtly idealistic, he was also aware of the potential that technologies possess in regard to their ability to end up controlling us, and would stress among his ideas the possible dangers if artists were to create without fully understanding their role in the use of new technologies. As art now begins to be distributed on the Internet, Lovejoy continues along Benjamin’s train of thought, asking us: can we control it?

Lovejoy claims that the participatory aspect of the Internet supplies the grounds for a communications revolution – a new kind of dialogic public space that holds great promise, though she does not shy away from admitting of the great challenges it simultaneously presents. As its form lacks fixed entry points and narratives, Lovejoy understands how content and context, terms that have previously been so strictly defined (particularly in regard to the exhibition of artworks), have become entirely interchangeable characteristics. As the interplay between form and dialogue has come to forge new unpredictability to the aesthetic territory in which artworks lie, what occurs is the allowance of dialogic imagination, where the work begins to pertain to an arena of consciousness and feeling that did not previously exist – shared authorship and social exchange.

As metaphors for networks or webs have come to be defined as the infrastructure in which telematic communication occurs, Lovejoy draws attention its non-confined, open-endedness, where previous conceptual systems based upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity are replaced. She cites Roland Barthes’ From Work to Text, which suggests that “…knowledge no longer exists in fixed canons or texts with epistemological boundaries between disciplines but rather it exists as paths of inquiry seeking integration and meaning by passing through them without any precise limit or location…” She continues by referencing Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, in which they further Barthes’ claims, leaning toward an orientation for knowledge based upon the desire of chartering unforeseen directions. Their ideas cater to those “…who have a certain taste for the unknown, for what is not already determined by history or society…” She goes on to reference the work of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (exploiting the phenomenon of the power of communication technologies to be able to mix spaces or exchange spaces), making clear their goal of being able to “…experience new ways of collaboration and co-creation, with geography no longer a boundary…”

Lovejoy goes on to describe the potential that creative networking can possess to build links between communities previously unable to communicate with each other – to generate “…a more participatory culture in order to engage and stimulate the collective imagination…” She makes note of the fact that interactive new media artworks travel with the viewer, providing greater potential for the creation of meaning. The Internet, thus, becomes a form of collective social consciousness.

Though Lovejoy is certain that the Internet embodies a certain promise of democracy (ideally being available to anyone, anytime, anywhere), she is also aware of the issues it poses seeing as though it is inextricably linked to commercial and corporate influence – access is also a matter of filtration. In regard to such issues, she poses some very interesting questions: Will there be cultural dominance and language dominance by those who have greater access to technology? Will selected access to powerful technologies create elitism? She suggests that it is the public’s responsibility to establish acceptable uses of the new technologies. Otherwise, she claims, powerful monopolies will continue to determine what is fed into the cultural mainstream.

Lovejoy’s concluding thoughts return to Benjamin’s thesis: artists are vital to the development of the process of cultural response to the new technologies. She finishes with a quote from Stephen Willats’ Art and Social Function:

“…the realization that all ‘art’ is dependent on society – dependant on relationships between people and not the sole product of any one person – is becoming increasingly important in the shaping of future culture…”

Johnson, See What Happens (from Emergence), 2001

Johnson speculates on they type of data the networks of the future will be transmitting. Specifically, he references the development of Will Wright’s latest creation, The Sims Online, a game that allows players to collectively build cities as part of a massive network collaboration. Every single citizen of these virtual worlds will be controlled by actual human beings, logged into the system from all around the world.

An early draft of the of the game displayed a neighborhood-creation system that seemed to Johnson to be straight out of the pages of Jane Jacobs – defined from the bottom up, and encouraging shorter blocks, livelier sidewalks, mixed-used zoning, and pedestrian-based transportation.

Contrary to popular speculation, Johnson does not see our newfound access to virtual cities on the computer screen abating our appetite for real-world city living. Rather than delivering the deathblow to city living (finishing a forty-year process that had begun with the suburban flight of the postwar years), Johnson claims the digital revolution to have turned out to be a tremendous energizer for dense urban centers. He understands that industries driven by ideas naturally gravitate toward physical centers of idea generation, that bright minds with shared interests still flock together, even when they have wireless modems and broadband in their living rooms. He suggests that even in an age of instant data transmissions, that the old-style self-organizing city is today as vital and relevant as it has ever been.

Rowland, The Need to Communicate (from Spirit of the Web), 1999

Rowland begins with a history of the Greek alphabet – it was not invented until about 730 B.C. He notes that through archeological evidence, it appeared rather suddenly, and was used from the beginning for what we now refer to as ‘literary purposes’ rather than for accounting, list keeping and other trade and business functions.

He discusses how until the coming of Greek writing, literacy was entirely elitist, and that as a communications technology, its failure to penetrate beyond the ranks of the professional would severely limit its impact on society at large. Rowland compares the situation to the nascent days of personal computer communications, when only the highly skilled ‘computer whiz’ had the means and capacity to make use of the technology.

Rowland suggests that as the Greek alphabet disintermediated the notion of literacy, it would simultaneously provide for profound and unpredictable effects upon the civilization that would be forced to embrace it. He claims that the alphabet would make possible the evolution of the detached intellectual state that makes possible the ability to philosophize and think abstractly – a shift that would make way for rational inquiry, inevitably leading to the scientific method.

Rowland understands that communications media are not neutral, but that they rather ‘colour’ or ‘shade’ the information they carry to greater or lesser degrees. He states that they possess the inherent potential to shape the very consciousness of their users by their emphasis on a single sense or set of senses, to the outright exclusion of others.

Davis, Crossed Wires (from TechGnosis), 2004

Davis suggests that by their very nature, information and communication technologies (or ‘media’) are technocultural hybrids. He argues that on one hand, they pertain to crafted, material mechanisms that are conceived, constructed, and exploited for gain, though, he continues, they are also animated by something that has nothing to do with matter or technique. Davis feels that information technology, more than any other invention, transcends its status as a thing, simply due to its allowance for the incorporeal encoding and transmission of mind and meaning.

He feels that, in a sense, this hybridity reflects the age-old sibling rivalry between form and content . He states that the “…material and technical structure of media impose formal constraints on communication, even as the immediacy of communication continues to challenge formal limitations as it crackles from mind to mind, pushing the envelope of intelligence, art, and information flow…”

Rowland also suggests that the new interfaces that have come to emerge between the self, the other, and the world beyond has forced media technologies to have no choice but to become part of this self, this other, and this new world. They have come to form the foundation for what we now increasingly refer to as the ‘social construction of reality.’ He continues, claiming that by submitting ourselves to the robot of science, technology, and media culture, we will continually cut ourselves off from the richness of the soul and from the deeply nourishing networks of family, community, and the local hand.

Word Count: 1544

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MindHive is Born

Posted on March 22nd, 2007 by Ryan Varga.
Categories: Interconnected.

We covered some major ground today. We have merged JMyron blobDetection with our code, and have a functioning emergent system influenced by network data and controlled via FTIR interface.

see comment for code

2 comments.

mindHive processing code

Posted on March 19th, 2007 by Peter Horvath.
Categories: Interconnected.

pastebin

0 comments.

Interconnected

Posted on March 12th, 2007 by Andre De Pape.
Categories: Tools & Resources.

So here at the moment we’re addressing where we need to take the project.

We’ve developed a proof of concept with the multi-touch surface, and with proper lighting the FTIR effect should be more than sufficient.

We’ve developed our conceptual framework around conciousness and the functional systems involved with it. We are interested in noise and the convergence of specific frequencies into a harmony, a signal, and thus a concious awareness of information.

We’ve investigated emmergence, and it’s peculiar ways of developing out of seemingly random number patterns. We see the potential of emmergant systems within a network of information and we understand that through visualization we can bring a new level of awareness to the relationships of data.

We are building this peice inside of networked space, requiring up to three locations, working in a symbiotic relationship. With each location having a complete dependency of the other to make it a successful peice.

So the question becomes, can we incorporate all these concepts into a coherent, intriguing and ultimately fulfilling experince?

Concerns that are unavoidable are as follows:

1) the multi-touch and it’s relationship to the other location’s lack of one.

2) making emmergence and conciousness work together, especially with data

3) the data itself, what are it’s characteristics and how can we use it to drive the peice.

4) the functionality of the multi-touch, will it help the concept, and will it work technically how we expect.

These problems can all be addressed, but we need to figure out how.

Tobin and I have discussed areas which are of interest and what type of production we would take on relating to the interests.

In partcular, we are interested in developing an atmosphere which is completely related to the concept of conciousness. The tension between noise and harmony, through multiple senses, light, sound, and potentially smell. Conciousness is thus reduced down to the idea that all we experience is through our senses, and the senses we share with one another contribute to our collective conciousness.

So with a willingness on the part of the group, we hope to focus on this aspect of conciouness and what it means in a sense of shared atmosphere.

Now if there are other elements that we choose to add, i think it’s totally open and we can develop this further.

One potential direction we might want to consider is to make two somewhat related but autonomous peices. Just to have a clearer focus on concept and not to try and complicate ideas.

Another potential is to find some way to build a second multi-touch like dave suggested, thus insuring a cohesive connection between the two locations.

So many ideas still yet to discuss, so we look forward to everyones input. In any case, Tobin and I are very interested in the idea of networked atmosphere and hope to incorporate that into the project.

1 comment.