Category: Multimedia Theory

Unless you’ve been asleep, you will have noticed the spread of Christopher Alexander’s pattern theory through computing. In The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, And The Generation of a Living World (a talk given in San Jose, California, at the 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA)) he reflects on the theory and how it has taken root in computing.

The pattern language that we began creating in the 1970s had other essential features. First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence in the things which are made with it. And third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence, morally sound objects, and encourages and enables this process because of its emphasis on the coherence of the created whole.

Continue reading Pattern Languages

In issue three of intermÈdialitÈs, new journal about “history and theory of the arts, letters, and techniques”, there is an original article, Le centre d’indÈtermination : une esthÈtique de l’intÈractivitÈ by GrÈgory Chatonsky.
In it Chatonsky presents an theory of interactivity riffing on Bergson (the journal issue is titled “devenir-bergson”) and how the body is the possibility of causality and the new. He connects this to interactive art where what is new is that the “spect-acteur” have to move to cause the aesthetic experience.

The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord, theorizes what McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride animated – the way our society is dominated by spectacle and representation. The media is the message, and viewing the screen is the paradigmatic spectacular activity. Computer games, I would add, are way our culture has adapted to the 60s critique of media and spectacle by the likes of McLuhan and Debord. Games have sold us on manipulation.
Continue reading Debord: The Society of Spectacle

Paul Levinson’s, Cellphone; The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything! is a breezy book on the mobile phone that raises interesting points without doing much else. For example, it doesn’t systematically tell you the story of the development of the cellphone or tell us about the market for cellphones. The book has a good annotated bibliography.
Continue reading Levinson, Cellphone

The Globe and Mail reports that a Street named after ‘rogue scholar’ McLuhan
was designated in a celebration yesterday. A portion of St. Joseph’s street in St. Michael’s college was named, Marshall McLuhan Way. Now we need a median so we can say, “the median is the way of the message.”
Continue reading McLuhan’s Way

Rex Murphy (surely one of the best ironic columnists around) has a column in The Globe and Mail on Ouellet’s stamp is cancelled which starts with the inscription on the Central Post Office building in New York which we all know the start of: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” What is interesting is that this is an adaptation of Herodotus and Rex reminds us that communications technologies often present themselves as heroic and honourable when they are launched. Surface mail today seems outdated and far from the heroic braving of the elements.
Continue reading Post-Post: Stamp Communication and Rex Murphy

Hermopoetics is the art of automatic (computer-generated) text generation, whether for interpretative or poetic purposes. Hermopoetics is the intersection of humanities informatics and creative digital practices.

There is a convergence of humanities informatics and robotic poetry. Humanities informatics sets out to develop computer assisted aides to interpretation – whether algorithms that prove things about texts or tools like concordances that provide new views on texts. Robotic poetics is the development of processes that generate poetry, or new fictional texts. As these two trajectories overlap we are seeing a middle line which I will call “hermopoetics”.

There are three principles to hermopoetics:

1. MachineText. Any text generated from another (or not) is a further text in a relationship to others described by the processes of generation. There is no a-priori difference between an interpretative text and an creative one.

1.1 We can call the new text a “chimera” as it is typically a monster created through the breaking down (analysis) of input and building up (synthesis) of a hybrid for output under the control of the intervenor.

1.2 There is no such thing as a completely new text, there are only interventions of various complexity that get treated as unities and which have a history of production, edition, and consumption. These unities can have relationships of explicit interpretation to another unity or they can have relationships of poetic general to other works, code, and input.

1.3 It is difficult to know where text stops and machine starts. There are exhibits, experiences, interpretations and reflections. One interrupts another. MachineText is the matter of hermopoetics.

2. Multimodal Machines. Data is without a priviledged poetic form. Data has a material instantiation, but is logically multimodal – capable of being rendered in different human sensory modes.

2.1 Just rendering data to an output device for human consumption is a translation, interpretation and generation. The computer is therefore a hermopoetic machine interpreting and creating in its most basic operations towards us.

2.2 Code is text and text is code. The control of the machine described in code is itself a hermopoetic text. This code is part of the discourse field from which all new text comes and can in turn be translated and interpreted as text.

2.3 There is no priviledged process once we question the difference between creative and interpretative practices. Every process needs to be tried and justified, if at all. There is no essential difference between processes of generation, translation, reflection and interpretation, except in discourse about those processes. For that matter there is no failed process, error, interruption, bug, or crash except unless interpreted as such.

3. Excess MachineText. We now have an excess of text, code, and processing which we have to deal with creatively and responsibly.

3.1 With the Internet we now have a critical mass of machine readable, and computer accessible text from which to generate new works. The availability of excess text, growing faster than we or machines can assimilate, erases the difference between hermeneutics and poetics, between reinterpreting and creating anew.

3.2 Likewise we now have an excess of code, not that code is different from text. And likewise the excess erases the difference between writing, marking up, and programming – practices that have traditionally followed different roles.

3.3 We also have an excess of processing that is likewise growing faster than we can imagine uses for. There is therefore also an erasure of difference between machine processing and human practice.

3.4 Text is therefore not text unless interpreted that way. Code is not code unless rendered as code. Processing is neither a human and computer practice. All we have is the choice to work through and between machines. These are ethical choices – choices about how to live, create and interpret the world.

All work is no longer either art or research except when represented that way through exhibition or publication. We are no longer artists or researchers, but research creators – hermap(hr)odites. Hermopoetics is the deliberate practice of machine-assisted interruption. We interrupt the processes to deliberate and interrupt deliberation to create. The availability of excess text and processing, and the multimodal character of that excess, leave us with a freedom of choice through which to think. The reflective and communal experimentation with those choices is hermopoetics.
Continue reading Hermopoetics

IST Results – Facing the future of intuitive interfaces is an article about the COMIC – COnversational Multimodal Interaction with Computers project which is developing interfaces that deal with different sensory modes of interaction. It is interesting that they are returning to a dialogue model. See also NLP, Sheffield – dialogue.

laserpiano.com is a site that sells a LaserPiano for color music performances. The site has good links to information about colour music, its history and synesthesia. I remain a bit mystified as to exactly how the LaserPiano works and what you get. The LaserPiano makes explicit how color music has become entertainment – from light shows to music to planetariums that coreograph visual productions to music.
Continue reading Color Music: LaserPiano

On Totalitarian Interactivity is an essay by Lev Manovich that talks about interactivity and interruption.

For the West, interactivity is a perfect vehicle for the ideas of democracy and equality. For the East, it is another form of manipulation, in which the artist uses advanced technology to impose his / her totalitarian will on the people. (On modern artist as a totalitarian ruler see the works of Boris Groys.) Western media artists usually take technology absolutely seriously and despair when it does not work. Post-communist artists, on the other hand, recognize that the nature of technology is that it does not work, will always breakdown, will never work as it is supposed to…

Continue reading Manovich and Interactivity