Category: Multimedia Theory

Zielinski: Deep Time of the Media

Image of Cover Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media (translated by Gloria Custance, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, c2006) is an unusual book that pokes into the lost histories of media technologies in order to start “toward an archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical means” (as the subtitle goes.) Zielinski starts by talking about the usual linear history of media technologies that recovers what predicts what we believe is important. This is the Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson type of history. Zielinski looks away from the well known precursurs towards the magical and tries to recover those moments of diversity of technologies. (He writes about Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium as a model for media technologies – ie. that we have bursts of diversity and then periods of conformity.)

I’m interested in his idea of the magical, because I think it is important to the culture of computing. The magical for Zielinski is not a primitive precursor of science or efficiency. The magical is an attitude towards possibility that finds spectacle in technology. Zielinksi has a series of conclusions that sort of sketch out how to preserve the magical:

Developed media worlds need artistic, scientific, technical, and magical challenges.  (p. 255)

Cultivating dramaturgies of difference is an effective remedy against the increasing ergonomization of the technical media wolrds that is taking place under the banner of ostensible linear progress. (p. 259)

Establishing effective connections with the peripheries, without attempting to integrate these into the centers, can help to maintain the worlds of the media in a state that is open and transformable. (p. 261)

The most important precondition for guaranteeing the continued existence of relatively power-free spaces in media worlds is to refrain from all claims to occupying the center. (p. 269)

The problem with imagining media worlds that intervene, of analyzing and developing them creatively, is not so much finding an appropriate framework but rather allowing them to develop with and within time. (p. 270)

Kairos poetry in media worlds is potentially an efficacious tool against expropriation of the moment. (p. 272)

Artistic praxis in media worlds is a matter of extravagant expenditure. Ist priviledged location are not palaces but open laboratories. (p. 276)

Fluxus Portal

Diagram of Fluxus

I was down in Chicago for the MLA convention and visited the Art Institute of Chicago. Besides the spectacular collection, they had a small display of materials related to Fluxus – a conceptual art group of the 1960s that is still going (depending on who you believe.) Fluxus was influenced by John Cage and included artists like Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Pack. Fluxus believed in “intermedia” – the confrontation of media. The Wikipedia entry summarizes their philosophy:

  1. Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.
  2. Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found & everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
  3. Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
  4. Fluxus is fun. Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.

I picked up a strange book by a Fluxus poet, Emmet Williams, A Flexible History of Fluxus Facts & Fictions that contains digitally remastered kunstfibels or art inventions. It is a inventive history of Fluxus that is itself annotated art, but also, as Williams explains, a primer (another sense of “fibel”.) For a contemporary sense of Fluxus see the  Fluxus Portal from which the diagram above comes. Diagramming their history and influences is one feature of the exhibit that attracted me. Fluxus founder Macunias was diagramming the flow of their history back in 1966. See Visualising Art History.

Gibson: Spook Country

Spoiler Alert
Book Cover ImageLast weekend I read William Gibson’s new book, Spook Country. Like most of Gibson’s book he does a great job imagining the evolution of computing technologies. He is the master of close-future forecasting. In this case he looks at GPS (Global Positioning System) or, more specifically its use for what is called locative art or augmented reality. One of the parallel plots of the story has the main character Hollis follow an artist and look (through a special visor) at virtual works superimposed over real locations like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death where it really happened. Gibson in Q&A with the Boston Globe calls it graffitti (compared to current locative art which is mostly audio-cellphone based.) Gibson has put his finger on something important – the way GPS and WiFi enable an outdoor virtual reality superimposed on where you are.

What I find dissappointing is the increasing predictable passivity of Gibson’s characters. In Spook Country he has three witness zombie characters who essentially move around the plot watching the real protagonists and reflecting on them. That Hollis would by sheer luck (and her having been part of a defunct band) get invited to witness and talk to the protagonists becomes unbelievable at the end. I can see no reason why either Bigend or the old man would involve her as they do based on Gibson’s prose. Likewise the character Milgrim is dragged along to witness the far more interesting character Brown. The strange passivity of such central characters spoils an otherwise very smart book. Gibson is trying too hard to avoid a third-person point-of-view so he creates unbelievable witnesses.

One thing Gibson does well is science fiction of the here-and-now. Spook Country takes place after 9/11 and in the shady reality of contract intelligence. It reflects in the way that speculative fiction can on what we are worried we will become. Washington Post reviewer Bill Sheehan rightly compares Gibson to Don DeLillo, both of whom write “fiction that is powerfully attuned to the currents of dread, dismay and baffled fury that permeate our culture.”

Recipes and Generative Codes

Screen shot from web siteChristopher Alexander of Pattern Language fame has developed a second generation of pattern language that focuses on process rather than outcome.

A generative sequence may be thought of as a second generation pattern language. (From the Pattern Language Website)

Reading around the web sites I am struck by how Alexander has woven computing into his second generation ideas. Could it be that Alexander was influenced by the way computer scientists responded to his pattern language ideas?

Now a sequence is something that looks very very simple and is actually very very difficult. It’s more than a pattern; it’s an algorithm about process. But what is possible is to write sequences so that they are easy. You follow the steps in a sequence like you follow the steps in a cooking recipe. (From A Just So Story)

Reading A Just So Story (subtitle “How Patternlanguage.com got its name”) suggests to me that the way the computing community took to his ideas led Alexander to think about processes and code. In his The Origins of Pattern Theory) 1996 address to the OOPSLA he calls the overlap of ideas “a deeper coincidence in what you are doing in software design and what I am doing in architectural design”.

It is also worth noting how Alexander describes generative sequences as recipes (which we have been using to help people understand text analysis):

After all, every recipe is a sequence of steps. Is a generative sequence anything more than a series of steps like a recipe for cake or omlets. (From Uniqueness of Generative Sequences)

Elsewhere he talks about unfolding and recipes synonymously.

I think there is an interesting thread to pursue through the criticism of Alexander’s sometimes naive mysticism while also experimenting with its application to methods in the textual disciplines. Patterns and recipes are evocative and useful, I’m not sure I buy the Heideggarian philosophy the Alexander thinks they are grounded in.

The web materials under Patternlanguage.com are, to make matters worse, confusing to browse. (They are under “method” to begin.) Alexander has another site, Building Living Neighborhoods which is much better organized and is aimed at the neighborhood activist. It illustrates what he is talking about better than the home site.

Book Cove4rI need to say something about Alexander’s site and books. They are poorly designed and undermine his message. If he followed a process for developing his web site I would call it the “use frames when you don’t need them, use tables within tables so that people can’t help but see them, and randomly add things when you think of them.” Consistent navigation or design is not a priority. The second series of books The Nature of Order, published by The Center for Environmental Structure, also suffers. At CAD $100 a book it feels cheap and the images reproduced often look like they were scanned from newspapers. If you look at the nested boxes on the cover (click on image) of his second series of books you can see how attached he is to coloured tables and boxes. If you look closely at the cover you can also see how sloppy it is. I wish Alexander and The Centre would practice in web and book design what they preach for architecture. These ideas are too important (and too close to mysticism) to be tainted by cheap and amateur design.

As Alexander puts it in a strange misspelling about the shift from patterns to sequences,

In fact, both A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way Of Building say that the pattern language is to be used sequentially. In practice, however, this feature dropped out of site, and was not emphasized in use. (From The Origins of Pattern Theory)

Did it drop out of “sight” or out of the Patternlanguage.com “site”?

The Walrus » Driven to Distraction

The Walrus has a story, Driven to Distraction by John Lornic (April 2007) about new research showing how always-on communications technology is distracting us. The article references a research site interruptions.net with links to papers on interruption, which seems to be emerging as a focus for cognitive studies and HCI. See, for example the reports by Daniel McFarlane who defines interruption thus,

Human interruption is the process of coordinating abrupt change in people’s activities. (Interruption of People in Human-Computer
Interaction: A General Unifying Definition
of Human Interruption and Taxonomy, PDF)

Interruptions are not necessarily bad, and there is evidence (the Zeigarnik Effect) that we are better at remembering incomplete or interrupted tasks better than finished one, but when interruptions become the normal state we lose the ability to finish anything and become addicted to perpetual interruption. Interruption is the fundamental possibility of interactivity, it is the cutting into the continuum that surprises us.

bastwood.com: Aphex Face and transcoding

Image of Aphex Demonbastwood.com has a good page on images found in sound starting with the demon face in Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker”. It turns out the demon is really an inverted version of the Twin himself. The site goes on to discuss how to find such images and how to create sound from images using common software.

There are some uses for image/video sonnification tools other than putting surprises in tunes. See the The vOICE synthetic vision software site which sells systems for the visually impaired.

Thanks to Alex for the link.

Epstein: Dialectics of “Hyper”

Mikhail Epstein Hyper in 20th Century Culture: The Dialectics of Transition From Modernism to Postmodernism (Postmodern Culture 6:2, 1996) explores “the intricate relationship of Modernism and Postmodernism as the two complementary aspects of one cultural paradigm which can be designated by the notion ‘hyper’ and which in the subsequent analysis will fall into the two connected categories, those of ‘super’ and ‘pseudo.'” (para 7) Epstein plays with “hyper” as a prefix meaning that excess that goes beyond a limit then reflecting back on itself. Modernist revolutions overturn the inherited forms in a search for the “super” which in their excess zeal pass a limit becoming simulations of themselves or “pseudo”. The hyper encloses both the modernist search for the super truth and the postmodernist reaction to the simulations of modernity. The postmodern play on the excess depends on the modernist move for matter to the point where it serves to heighten (another meaning of hyper) the super-modern. Super and pseudo thus become intertwined in the ironic hyper.

In the final analysis, every “super” phenomenon sooner or later reveals its own reverse side, its “pseudo.” Such is the peculiarly postmodernist dialectics of “hyper,” distinct from both Hegelian dialectics of comprehensive synthesis and Leftist dialectics of pure negation. It is the ironic dialectics of intensification-simulation, of “super” turned into “pseudo.” (para 60)

Epstein looks at different spheres where this hyper-unfolding takes place using the word “hyper-texuality” in a different sense than how it is usually used for electronic literature. For Epstein hypertextuality describes a parallel process that happened in Russia and in the West where first modernist literary movements (Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism) stripped away the historical, authorial, and biographical to understand the pure “litterariness” of literature. The purification of literature left only the text as something “wholly depednent on and even engendered by criticism.” (para 21) “Postmodernism emerged no sooner than the reality of text itself was understood as an illusionary projection of a critic’s semiotic power or, more pluralistically, any reader’s interpretative power (‘dissemination of meanings’).” (para 25)

Epstein quotes Baudrillard about the net of mass communication replacing reality with a hyperreality, but doesn’t explore how the hyper in his sense is connected to the excess of networked information. It is in another essay, “The Paradox of Acceleration” that we see a clue,

Each singular fact becomes history the moment it appears, preserved in audio, visual, and textual images. It is recorded on tape, photographed, stored in the memory of a computer. It would be more accurate to say that each fact is generated in the form of history.
…
Ultimately, inscription of the fact precedes the occurrence of the fact, prescribing the forms in which it will be recorded, represented, and reflected.” (p. 179)

The ironic tension of the modern and postmodern is magnified by the hyper-excess of automated inscription. The excess of information is deadening us to the human in history as an unfolding. We are in a baroque phase where the only thing valued is the hyper-excess itself. Excess of archiving, excess theory, excess of reference, excess of quotation, excess of material, excess of publication, excess of criticism, excess of attention … but no time.

What next? Will we see the burning of books or a “simple thinking” movement? How do people react to an oppressive excess?

The essay in PMC is excerpted from an essay, “The Dialectics of Hyper: From Modernism to Postmodernism.” in Russian Postmodernism; New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture. Ed. M. Epstein, A. Genis, and S. Vladiv-Glover. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999. p. 3-30.

The essay on acceleration is, “The Paradox of Acceleration.” also in Russian Postmodernism. p. 177-181.

Towards a pattern language for text analysis and visualization

One outcome of the iMatter meeting at Montreal was . I have started a white paper on TADA that tries to think towards a Pattern Language for Text Analysis and Visualization. This white paper is not the language or a catalogue of patterns, but an attempt to orient myself towards what such a pattern language would be and what the dangers of such a move would be.

Interactive Matter Meeting

iMatter LogoThis weekend I participated in an Interactive Matter (iMatter) meeting at Montreal. The meeting was to figure out next steps on the project after our SSHRC proposal was unsuccessful.

Lynn Hughes and Jane Tingley of Concordia organized meetings at and tours of some of new media organizations in Montreal including:

  • Hexagram where we saw the textile labs, robot palace, machine shops, rapid prototyping lab, computer-controlled looms and so on. Very impressive facilities and research projects.
  • OBORO, a new media artists centre with great video and sound facilities.
  • Fondation Daniel Langlois where we got a tour of the Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D) which collects materials (including grey matter) about new media art. I was dissappointed to learn that, on the issue of new media preservation, they haven’t really advanced past the The Variable Media Network discussion published in Permanence Through Change in 2003. They are just storing digital things in a cold dark room for the moment and concentrating on documentation.

One thing that is clear is the critical mass of artists, independent game developers, historians, philosophers, and organizations in Montreal. Montreal even have a Cit?© Mltim?©dia where the city is revitalizing an old industrial quarter to be a multimedia incubator. This public investment in multimedia arts, technology, and organizations stands in contrast to the lack of interest in cultural industries elsewhere.

Harpham: Science and the Theft of Humanity

American Scientist Online has a provocative essay by Geoffrey Harpham on Science and the Theft of Humanity. In it he argues that the humanities that take “human beings and their thoughts, imaginings, capacities and works as its subject” (Page 2) are experiencing a poaching from certain sciences and that this is a good thing. This poaching is “the most exciting and unpredictable unintended consequence of disciplinarity” as new disciplines that don’t fit with the old “gentleman’s agreement” as to who studies what begin to cross boundaries. (Page 3)

They–we–must understand that while scientists are indeed poaching our concepts, poaching in general is one of the ways in which disciplines are reinvigorated, and this particular act of thievery is nothing less than the primary driver of the transformation of knowledge today. (Page 4)

This poaching is not just a counterattack from the sciences threatened by the “debunking attention” of humanities disciplines. It is a symptom of how the disciplinary divisions encoded in the post WW II university don’t fit fabric of current research. Humanities computing is but one case of an emerging discipline that doesn’t fit the humanities, science division. (For that matter I don’t think computer science does either.)

One of the most striking features of contemporary intellectual life is the fact that questions formerly reserved for the humanities are today being approached by scientists in various disciplines such as cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, robotics, artificial life, behavioral genetics and evolutionary biology. (Page 3)

I found this looking at the ASC (Autonomy | Singularity | Creativity) site of the National Humanities Center.