So, after getting a huge number of comments to the post about organising a conference all about stories, I’ve managed to book a venue – The Conway Hall, London – and a date – Friday February 19th, 2010 – and built a website – www.thestory.org.uk

All suggestions for speakers, offers for help, etc gratefully accepted!

thanks!

Right then. It looks like I’m going to actually have to do this.

I tend to go to a lot of conferences, and most of them are focused on specific business sectors or platforms. At the Edinburgh TV Festival this year, I had a chat with Emily Bell and Dan Hon, bemoaning the fact that these conferences attract silos of people who would never go to each others events – the delta between Edinburgh TV festival and something like Dconstruct is tiny, for example. In fact, I think it might just be Dan Hon.

There’s obvious reasons for this, as most conferences are commercial events aimed at a certain sector. But at the Edinburgh TV festival, loads of people were raving about David Simon’s talk about The Wire, mainly because he wasn’t talking about platforms, distribution models or business models (well, he did talk a bit about the latter) but because he was talking about storytelling. Then Jeremy Ettinghausen and I were asked to do a talk about storytelling at PICNIC in September, which seemed to go down well. So I started to think more seriously about organising something around Stories and Storytelling. Then I tweeted the barely-baked idea this morning, and got such an overwhelming response, with loads of good ideas, so I’m going to actually get around to doing it.

The ideas i’ve had from people on Twitter include – Storytelling in UX design, storytelling in music, murder ballads, the Hakawati master storytellers of Syria (might be a big ask, that…), Marina Warner and the Scottish Storytelling Centre, using boardgames to teach computer game programming, projecting stories onto 3D paper-mache maps, the stories companies tell about their culture, storytelling in user research, the work of brilliant collaborative storytellers like coney/punchdrunk/hideandseek/et al, magic and storytelling, transliteracy in digital storytelling (might have to get Meg to explain that one to me), storytelling to explain complex theories/ideas, storytelling and data (obviously). I’ve got a personal wish list of a few friends who I want to ask along (like Tim Wright to talk about his Kidmapped! project), but I’ve been overwhelmed by the good ideas i’m getting in, and offers of help. So i’m getting really excited about it already…

This won’t be a big, expensive conference with loads of sponsors and keynotes flown over from the US of A. In fact, I’ll probably go down the Interesting/Playful route of hiring the Conway Hall, a tea-urn and some bunting. It’ll probably be around February/March next year, as I have a day job, and it will take me that long to organise. Here’s my current plan:

1 - write a blog post to capture lots of good ideas from people [done! always good to start a to-do list with something you've already done...]
2 – Check out the Conway Hall at Playful and find out if its available in Feb/March
3 – Start soliciting speakers and hassling friends and friends-of-friends to speak
4 – Work out how much its going to cost and set up eventbrite to let people buy tickets
5 – Build a page for the event and get tickets on sale [note to self - persuade wife to do some illustrations for the site]
6 – Panic
7 – Ask Russell where he got the tea-urn from
8 – Panic again
9 – Get the bunting up
10 – Have a really fun and inspiring day that makes me want to get excited and tell stories
11 – Take the bunting down
12 – Stop panicking

So – if you’d like to come to an event like this, or have ideas about who/what you’d like to see/hear, then let me know in the comments here.

Thanks!

[This is the third part of a short series, based on a talk I gave at MIPTV in March 2009, sharing some insights from our commissioning social media projects at Channel 4 Education]

We’ve had a couple of projects this year – like Yeardot and Battlefront - that run live for 9 months to a year. It’s incredibly hard to keep hold of people’s attention over such a long period of time, and to be honest, we didn’t expect to. The web is a smorgasbord of distraction, so you have to be realistic about how often people will come back to your project. This poses real problems for an ongoing narrative project – do you start a project with a big bang to capture attention? How do you deal with people coming late to the project? What if people drift away for weeks and then come back to the project again?

Designing a narrative structure that can cope with such diverse patterns of attention is really tough. Its probably easier for factual projects than fiction, partly because we’re used to drifting in and out of our friends’ online streams, so its simple to replicate this in factual/documentary projects. Its no accident that the first popular fiction projects – like Lonelygirl15 and its early precursor Online Caroline – used self-authored video and text to tell the story from the protagonists’ point of view.

Most users now carry with them a strong conceptual expectation about how stories are ‘read’ online, developed from their experience of following their friends’ lifestreams on Facebook et al. So it makes sense to follow a few simple principles to take advantage of these  assumptions, rather than working against them and confusing your users:

Keep it simple, and signpost clearly
We massively overdesigned some of our projects when we first launched them. We tried to create too much atmosphere through strong designs, and the general response from user groups was “this looks great, but what *is* it?”. Through many iterations, we ended up simplifying all our sites a lot, with clear explanations of what the project was, who was speaking there, what you could do, and what was new. You probably have only a few seconds to engage someone before they move on – don’t risk being enigmatic, unless you’re dealing with a brand or project that the audience already knows and loves. If its a completely new thing, explain the project clearly and keep the navigation simple and consistent – most users will probably not come through the main site/home page, so the project’s purpose needs to ring clear from every possible interaction.

Have a clear voice for the project
Erika Hall’s Copy As Interface rightly points out that most navigation of the web relies on text, not images or video. For social media sites, this text is not the neutral voice of a machine or nameless authority, but vernacular, oral speech, written as if it were a conversation with a friend. As Erika puts it – “we’re not writing, we’re speaking with text”. Again, this is inherited from the fact that most of our interactions on the web now are with friends, not ’sites’, meaning that we respond better to projects that use vernacular language. We find such language more engaging, approachable and interesting -  as Erika Hall quotes Walter J Ong – “Orality knits persons together into community”. The single most effective thing you can do to engage your users and keep their attention is to have a clearly identified, oral, vernacular voice for the project. Ideally, this would be a named person, real or fictitious. On Battlefront, we have the excellent Orsi, who blogs for us on Bebo and generally gives the site a sense of idenitity. Incidentally, I think Battlefront’s tag line - ‘You’re Already Involved’ – is one of the best bits of copywriting on any of our projects.

Make it easy for people to leave footprints in the project
There are two good reasons for this – if users contribute to a project, no matter how small, then they’re more likely to remember it and come back. Secondly, a site with lots of user activity looks busy and active for other users – just like restaurants, people are more likely to stick around on a busy site than one that feels like you’re the only visitor. There is a third aim – to get some personal data that means you can regularly communicate with the user, but this can be a real barrier until people have spent a fair bit of time with the project and feel like they’re getting value. You can use promotional competitions as a shortcut to get user data, but I don’t think this is that valuable, as it drives a wave of attention that mostly just drifts out again like a tide once the competition is over. Ideally, you want your users to gradually increase the size of the footprint in the project as they get more immersed. This could mean initially clicking a simple vote or poll, then friending on a social network, subscribing to a newsletter, commenting and finally creating or embedding content in their own social spaces. On the home page of Battlefront, we’ve got a really simple interactive word-cloud with issues that users have uploaded for others to vote on, creating an immediate call for participation to new visitors. In fact, most new visitors seem to come through Facebook, meaning that they’re responding to specific call to action from the individual campaigners. On Yeardot, we deliberately tried to move users through to the individual contributors pages on Myspace, thinking that this is where the real conversation would happen. But we underestimated the complexity of this journey, and also the social barriers many feel in leaving a comment on a total stranger’s Myspace page, so after a few months we redesigned the main hub site to encourage commenting there as well. I don’t think we’ve really explored this yet, though, and we’ll be looking at the entry and exit routes through these projects to understand more about how to gradually encourage and feedback on activity from users – the user journey needs to start from their streams, not our site, and end up back in their streams again.

Or, you could just make games…
If you really want to engage people, get them to participate, and get them to return again and again, you might as well make games. As Aleks Krotoski pointed out in her talk at Dconstruct last year, there has been a baffling lack of communication between web design and game design, although this is now happening, and quickly. My fellow commissioning editor, Alice Taylor, knows far more than me about games, and is commissioning some excellent projects, such as Bow Street Runner, Routesgame, and a project with SixToStart that i’m incredibly excited about that will launch later this year. I hope Alice will write about her experiences commissioning these projects more on her blog in the next few months. But we should all learn from how the best games drag you in without having to read a manual; encourage early, simple interaction which is rewarded out of proportion to your effort; and then sets you iterative challenges that get the balance between effort and reward just right. Amy Jo Kim and Jane McGonigal have both written inspiring accounts of how gaming metaphors can be applied elsewhere on the web, and in real life. Sometimes I think its only a matter of time until gaming becomes the main metaphor for most of our social interactions. And then  sometimes, I think its already happened…

In the next essay, I’ll talk about the holy grail – turning users’ attention into valuable interactions. For many, this will mean getting money out of them, but as I work for a public service broadcaster, I’m going to talk about more intangible things – how you know if people are learning about themselves, their lives, the world around them; and whether they’ve been inspired to act upon and change things as a result. Not too much to aim for, then…

Lovely nugget on digital lifestyles hidden in Paul Ford’s ‘Real Empires Ship’ over at Ftrain:

“This is all part of the digital lifestyle, coming at the middle class like a division of Panzer tanks. First they came for the vinyl, and I said nothing. Then for the cassettes, and the CDs, and the VHS tapes. Still I was silent. And now they will come for my books, sad little volumes trembling on their shelves. I look at my friends the books and I think, sorry, fuckers, for the iBrary is only a few dozen failed product launches away. Eventually (waves hands) this will all be stripes on disk.”

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I chaired/spoke at the rather excellent We Love Technology conference in Huddersfield the other week. Apart from being an opportunity to see old friends, it was a fantastically well programmed conference, with a wide range of things and ideas that seemed to gel into a coherent arc, without seeming over-curated. Congratulations to Lisa and Abby for organising such a great day, and to the inspiring speakers (Matt, Troika, Regine, Dan&Tuomo, Stuart, etc)

The conference helped me pull together some strands of recent thinking about a number of things, such as vernacular media, new forms of craft and the role of artists in technology research. Anyone who has read some of the (rare) posts on this blog will appreciate that these are recurring passions of mine, and so the conference was like a personal wish-list of speakers and topics.

I gave a very loose introduction, with my top ten favourite reasons why I love technology (which I’ll try and write up here later) and then summarised the day at the end. After discussing with Matt Webb the various really cool ways to sum up conferences that we’d seen over the years, I did nothing cool at all, and just pulled out four themes that I thought had developed in the various presentations. Here they are, in all their hand-waving glory:

Getting away from the screen
I’ve always thought ambient or Tangible interfaces have been one of the asymptotic futures of tech research, always promised, but never delivered. But we’re in the middle of an exciting bubble of activity in this area, from tiletoys to nabaztags. Information overload is the usual driver for this kind of research, but the real market driver seems to be presence – Matt Webb showed a lovely interface for IM that used a pop-up toy to quickly indicate whether someone on your network was available or away. I think this is linked to the adoption of mobile phones, which has introduced subtle kinds of haptic or tangible interface (vibrations, etc) into the mass market. Tangible presence interfaces might really tip over into the mass-market in the next few years, driven through mobiles and broadband games consoles.

Transferring interaction vocabularies across contexts
Tangible interfaces offer opportunities for untapping lots of learned experiences in users from other contexts. So much of the experience of digital interaction is limited by the WIMP metaphor, or the even more opaque UIs of one-off consumer devices like video recorders. Matt Webb used a term – body thinking – to describe the learned behaviours we have from our experiences with the tangible world (I think Roland Barthes wrote about this as well, but can’t remember in what book).

For me, the opportunity with tangible media is not to try and find perfect physical metaphors for digital interactions, but to think about the learned behaviours people have, and how they might be useful in other contexts. Just as WIMP is a desk-bound metaphor that has been stretched to encompass all sorts of tasks that are not normally associated with desks, tangible interfaces can unlock a new vocabulary of interaction behaviours that aren’t limited to waving vaguely in front of screens – for example – Matt showed his hack of the iBook’s accelerometer so that he could ‘bump’ his laptop to scroll through files hierarchies. My dad’s a carpenter, and has over 40 years of experience in how to hang a door, and the subtle interation of materials and tools. Yet programming a VCR makes him feel like an idiot. Why can’t interaction design tap into his areas of expertise, rather than making him feel stupid? It reminds me a bit of a Steve Job’s quote that Matt Jones linked to:

” There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, People couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.”

Well, that’s one approach to interaction design, I guess. But I think there are whole libraries of experiences that we could use out there, and I’d rather they didn’t die out before interaction designers started using them.

Not trying to be *really* useful
This is a slightly more vague insight, but a lot of the products shown were very playful in their design. Not useless, but playful. The difference is between an interaction design that is ruthless in its efficiency, and therefore tries to second guess you all the time to prove its intelligence (eg Microsoft Clippy) and one that provides clear, simple functions, yet has an openess that encourages further play and discovery. Flickr is the poster child here – its advanced features reveal themselves to you through you interaction with the interface and its social features. You might notices the notes feature on other people pictures, then find out how to use them yourself. Sociability is key to this kind of design – letting users social play unveil new actions and incorporating them into features.

Dan & Tuomo are really keen on this approach with Tile Toy, which is immensly playful, and have open-sourced the hardware and software to let users find what they want to do with it. There is something more sustainable and ‘thing-ness’ about this approach to design – the resulting tools feel like they have been worn-in through use, rather than being hard-wired out of the factory. Its also worth reading Bijker and Pinch’s Social Construction of Technology for a more theoretical understanding of how user’s create and adapt tools – their analysis of how the common chain-driven bicycle design developed through interaction with user-groups is very illuminating. But the key thing here is the balance between playfulness and functionality – purely playful interfaces are fun, but the appeal tails off, but tools that are playful *and* useful will become core parts of the user’s tool-sets.

The changing nature of Play
Linked to the above was the changing nature of play, and what this meant for the role of art in technological development. When I used to be a digital art curator, there were productive collaborations between artists and technology labs, best illustrated by the work Char Davies did with SoftImage. In the late 80’s/early 90’s, when technology was still prohibitively expensive and access was limited, these kind of collaborations allowed tech companies to imagine other uses for their products, and for artists to develop new kinds of aesthetic practise. In Regine’s talk, she showed a lot of tangible and wearable media projects that are examples of this kind of ‘imagineering’.

But things have changed now. Technology is hell of a lot cheaper, much of the core infrastructure has commodified, and digital media users are in the majority, not a tiny artistic elite. There are still projects that are commissioning this kind of purely artistic ‘play’, but I think the research needs of the sector have moved on. Artists no longer need to ‘rehearse’ possible technological futures, because you can now launch your idea into a real market at relatively low cost. Flickr came out of a publicly-funded project that was originally a purposeless game, but quickly found its niche as a mass-market product.

Play has now crossed the line from R&D, and become an integral part of a mass-design process – the cliched ‘perpetual beta’ of all web 2.0 companies. Rather than a single artist imagining a future and delivering it as a purely aesthetic experience, playful interaction designs are launched onto a market with the understanding than users will invent their own futures for them. Again, TileToy is a good example of this.

This is quite refreshing for those of us who have been dabbling in the borders between art, technology and innovation over the last decade or so. For most of that time, we were happy to spend our time rehearsing potential futures, playing behind the scenes, but not expecting the curtain to ever rise. Well, there’s an audience out there now, and they love technology. We’re not playing anymore – a scary, but liberating, thought. The challenge now is for artists and designers to capitalise on this.

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One of the nuggets of Murdoch wisdom at the end of Wired.com’s current interview is very interesting:

CONTENT VS. DISTRIBUTION
Distribution was nearly king – you couldn’t get a cable channel going in this country without John Malone. But when real broadband arrives, owning distribution will be less and less important.

There’s a lot of signs that Murdoch really gets the new media space at the moment, but content vs distribution is an old battle, and this perhaps demonstrates how much his strategic instincts are still honed to fight old wars.

Content vs Distribution was the imaginary battleground of a war called ‘convergence’ that, like so many wannabee generals playing Risk or Age of Empires, occupied the executives and strategic thinkers of blue-chip media/comms companies for the last 10 years or so. Large bets were placed on whether it was more important to be at the centre of a huge content network, or a huge communication infrastructure. The riskiest gamblers (*cough* Aol *cough* TimeWarner) tried both, betting that this illusory convergence would create a new battlefield, and they would be the centre of it.

There were a couple of problems with this. The glamour of content hid the fact that its actually (in its hit-driven, pre Long Tail version) incredibly economically inefficient. Andrew Odlyzko’s excellent essay ‘Content is not King’ exposes this reality, landing a couple of really important facts, as well as some prescient predictions.

One of the facts is about the economics of content consumption. Odlyzko points out that the content sector is actually dwarfed by the communications sector in terms of average US consumer spend. He goes further, to point out that nearly all forms of content are subsidised for the user – ie, the user does not bear the full cost at the point of consumption, as costs are ameliorated by advertising, concessionaries, or indirect taxation (eg – the license fee). Conversely, consumers seem happy to pay way over the odds for some forms of communication, such as SMS.

In other words, we value gossip highly, and content rarely.

Of course, in our media 2.0 world, content can be conversation, and vice-versa. Murdoch might understand this, but it looks like he’s still placing his chips on the Head, not the Long Tail. Elsewhere in the Wired article he talks about building MySpace profiles for NewsCorp films and other content as a way to start to derive attention and revenue from MySpace into his Big Content properties.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how content operates in conversational spaces. In a recent post on his Long Tail blog, Chris Anderson challenges Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that “Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They’d have nothing to blog about.” Using Technorati to find out how many posts actually index Big Content brands, Chris concludes that the blogosphere is actually writing about almost anything *but* the New York Times. in fact, the top big media brand reference in blog posts (the BBC) is still only referenced in *0.3%* of blog posts.

Imagine a party with 1000 people in it. Murdoch would like to think that by walking into the party, people will start to talk about *his* movies. In fact, at best only three people will bother… That’s quite a cold, hard statistic if you’ve just spent half a billion dollars hosting the party.

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You know you’re writing about esoteric stuff that nobody else is interested in when – you’re googling for an image about, say, elizabethan writing rings (used to etch illicit messages on windows as a form of early graffiti) and the top entry is your own essay…

maybe i should write more about kittens or web 2.0…

*MAD magazine used to have the title of this post as their masthead. Seemingly ignoring the inferior CRACKED…

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Our second child – Olivia Grace Locke – was born last night at 11.18pm in Brighton. When Rose was born I did a quick bit of Google futurology to see what lay in store. Well, I know now – its lots of photo opportunities, and very little time to maintain a blog! Expect this site to go from its one-post-every-two-months average to something like 2-3 posts a year… I think my Flickr account is going to see some action, though…

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Ashley Highfield, Director of New Media & Technology at the BBC, shared a platform with Bill Gates for the Keynote speech at Microsoft’s Mix06 conference. He showed a prototype of ‘MyBBCPlayer’ – an on-demand TV platform – built within Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. Its well worth checking out the webcast of the speech (Ashley comes on about 36mins in) it shows the player as a widget on the desktop – demonstrating the kind of ‘beyond the browser’ interface that we’re building on the Innovation Labs. There’s also a news article in the Guardian on how the BBC plans to work with external partners to overhaul its website for the Web2.0 era. Well worth reading to see how BBC New Media is committed to external innovation, and to give a strategic context to projects like Backstage and Innovation Labs.

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I’m currently in a hotel in North Yorkshire with 10 new media companies, helping them develop ideas for new web services, and build a pitch to BBC commissioners by Friday. We’ve got mentors from the BBC and experts in user-centred design who have worked at places like Xeroc Park, Sapient and Ideo. We’re at the end of the second day now, and most of the teams have already gone through about 4 or 5 iterations of their idea, looking at it from the perspective of the technology, the user, or the BBC, and getting feedback from everyone on their idea and pitching style. Its pretty intense, but good fun, and really creative – my brain hasn’t had a workout like this for some time.

This is all part of a project I’ve been developing over the last year called Innovation Labs. Its a pilot initiative to try and see how the BBC can work with new media indies across the UK. We had a call for ideas in late autumn last year, and recieved over 170 ideas from the three pilot projects in Yorkshire, London and the North-West. 29 ideas were selected, and we’ve been giving feedback to the teams over the last few months, preparing them for the rapid-prototyping exercises they’ll be doing in the week-long Lab.

Its a bit like a foo-camp, but with commissioning opportunities at the end. Even though the companies here are effectively in competition, there’s a huge amount of collaboration and sharing going on, as people give advice and suggestions across teams. Tomorrow, two commissioners from the BBC internet team – Jem Stone and Jason Daponte – turn up to give advice prior to the pitching, so things might get a bit more ruthless then…

We’ve redesigned the Innovation Labs site to reflect the week long events, with live blogs by mentors and participants at the Labs (although everyone seems too busy working at the moment to blog, so I might have to offer other incentives…)

Its an interesting and exciting project, but will only be worthwhile if it ends up in more good ideas being developed and commissioned by the BBC from outside companies. We’ll know by the end of March – after the third and final Lab in London – whether this has happened, but the signs are good, and I’ve already been talking to other regions across the UK about hosting Labs, so hopefully we can do it again, but make it bigger and better. Personally, I’m loving spending so much time discussing ideas with creative people, and would love to do it again next year.

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Of course, I’m a bit late to this and many other bloggers have already circulated it wildly, but I’m really, really pleased to see the second of the BBC’s Creative Archive projects go live – The Open News Archive.

There’s some fantastic footage there, making this far more interesting to browse through than the footage released for the Radio 1 Superstar VJ competition. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets used in creative projects, though.

When we were first kicking around ideas for how people might want to use the Creative Archive a few years ago, one of the key decisions was whether to make content available under a single project site, or to tie individual projects to existing brands. I think the latter has been the right choice, as creativity works best within a context. A context-less archive would be bigger and more flexible, but only advanced users would really benefit from that flexibility. Having a specific context and even a brief – as with the Radio 1 competition – provides more than simply a blank page for people to start with. Hopefully, this will encourage more people to engage with the content.

Of course, ideally we’d have both – a inspiration from familiar contexts for people to start with, and then open buckets of good stuff for more advanced users to play around. The Backstage discussion list have already been talking about how to build tools to aggregate the content from different CA projects, so hopefully one user innovation project will be able to help out another!

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This is hardly the most frequently-updated blog on the block, but leaving it nearly three months between posts is stretching it, even for me. In mitigation, i’m getting more work done at the moment than I have for years…

And the thing i’m working on most of the time is fantastic. Please go and check out the site for BBC Innovation Labs. This is a kind of sister project to Backstage, aimed more at independent UK new media companies, rather than individual developers, although I expect the backstage and labs communities will have significant overlaps.

Labs is a pilot project to help build better opportunities for indies and the BBC to work together on innovation projects. Tom Loosemore and I have been working on lots of ‘open innovation’ projects aimed at various communities – developers (backstage), and indies (labs) were first, with other projects in development.

The Labs process works like this – we invite proposals to a research brief from indies, and select around 10 projects. The teams behind these projects are then invited to a week-long residential rapid-protoyping workshop, before pitching their ideas at the end of the Lab to the controllers for internet and iTV at the BBC.

Its a simple process, but effective. It helps the BBC hold a conversation about its strategies and priorities with hundreds of indies in an open and discursive way, and encourages rapid development and decision making so that ideas can be turned into things that actually happen. Hopefully, i’ll be able to talk about 30-odd fantastic prototypes that have come out of the Labs around the end of March next year…

We’re holding launch events at the moment in the three pilot regions – the second London launch is this Friday, and the final event in Manchester next Monday. If the pilots are successful for everyone invovled, we’ll try and roll out the project to more regions across the UK next year.

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The BBC has launched the first product from the Creative Archive. In a collaboration with Radio 1, around 100 clips are available as part of a project to encourage creativity amongst ‘vjs‘. the clips are a heady mix of wildlife, urban environmental and fantastic ‘futures’ footage from old Tomorrow’s World programmes.

It’s good to finally see an output from the Creative Archive, and I know there’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears behind this relatively modest start. But I’m sure this launch will open the floodgates for lots of similar projects in the coming months.

The Creative Archive has carried a huge burden of expectations since Greg Dyke’s slightly premature announcement in Edinburgh almost exactly 2 years ago. Many people expected the BBC to just dump tons of stuff online, but I think that the decision to place archive material in the context of other BBC brands (like Radio 1) is the right one. Our audience already has a relationship with the BBC through these brands, and it makes sense to use these to encourage people to experiment with the archive, rather than creating a stand-alone brand just for the archive.

It also gives production teams in broadcast divisions the opportunity to see how creative our audiences can be, and the incredibly exciting possibilities for mixing user-generated content and BBC output. Radio & Music interactive are doing fantastic stuff at the moment, from podcasting to SMS takeovers, so it makes sense that they should be the first partner for the Creative Archive.

Huge congratulations to Paula Le Dieu, Paul Gerhardt and Jennifer Rigby, the people most responsible for making this happen.

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Surprisingly, I actually did it. London to Brighton, 54 miles, on the hottest day of the year. It was a bit better than I thought – I got cramp quite badly at about 35 miles, but managed to cycle through it, and even the slightest hill after the halfway point made my thighs ache – but I didn’t really get to a point where I thought ‘I can’t do this’. It was a fantastic day, and the support of the people along the route offering home-made cakes, drenchings with water pistols, or just encouragement, made it even better. Best of all, the British Heart Foundation have raised over £3M from the 27,000 (yes, 27 thousand) people who did the ride on Sunday.

If I haven’t cajoled you into donating already, there’s still time…

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James Purnell, the creative indsutries minister, gave the keynote at an IPPR event this morning on the theme of ‘Creative Britannia’. The speech announced the successor to Chris Smith’s ‘creative industries task force’ – a new policy initiative to support the creative industries in the UK. Most of the speech was quite routine, but he did announce a new project to deliver the Government’s manifesto pledge to review the copyright/IP laws for a digital world.

There was a report a week or so ago that he was in favour of extending some copyright limitations to 100yrs. He didn’t actually announce that in the speech, but instead was quite careful to emphasise the need to both renew IP laws in light of the digital age, but also to preserve ‘the easy exchange of ideas’. A few people (including Will) tried to get him to be a bit more explicit on this, but he artfully avoided saying anything.

Adam Singer gave a response from the stage that was full of fantastic rhetoric, describing the emerging market for 3D printers as a harbinger of a world in which all creative IP is under threat from piracy: “It doesn’t matter if the button says ‘print’ [in reference to 3D printers] or ‘burn’ – all design will become simply a file to be shared”. He saw strong IP as the “intellectual hygiene of a networked world”, suggesting that IP law should be taught as the “new domestic science” in schools, as it was the most important future skill for creative entrepreneurs. His rhetoric, although very entertaining, was from the dystopian end of the telescope – “each time bandwith increases, another industry will fall [because of IP theft]“. You could try to unpick all the false assumptions in that last sentence, but frankly, its not worth it. Just sit back and bask in the warm glow of his fire and brimstone. In fairness, Adam Singer is far more measured and informed than the above quotes suggest (despite describing Lawrence Lessig as the “Martin Luther of copyright” that the music industry had failed to burn…), but he’s a great public speaker, and it’s his job to provoke.

I asked a question to the panel about the kind of industry trends that the DCMS were looking into when developing new IP models for the creative industries. Writers like Henry Chesbrough and Eric Von Hippel have documented trends in ‘old’ industries like Pharma and Engineering towards ‘open innovation’ models. Emerging best practise is to maximise your return from IP through a range of licensing models outside your own company, moving from old models of patent enforcement to open licensing models with peer companies and even Von Hippel’s ‘Free Revealing’, where IP is given up in order to drive other competitive advantages.

It would be a shame if the DCMS assumed that a monolithic protectionist approach was the best model for the creative industries, whilst ‘older’ industries were moving towards models that maximised the return on IP through more flexible approaches. Creative Commons, Backstage and the BBC’s Creative Archive License are breaking new ground in this area, and the DCMS should be encouraging more experiments like this, not discouraging them.

UPDATE - good article by David Rowan on the same event in the Times today. He makes a similar comparison to other industry models, pointing out that patents are restricted to 20 years to encourage innovation, so why do the creative industries need up to 5 times as much protection?

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Grennan & Sperandio, the artists known as Kartoon Kings, have a new comic book out, created in participation with young people from the South Coast. As a Brighton/Hove resident, I’ll be rushing along to the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (one of the co-commissioners) to get a copy.

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I used to have a personal trainer a year or so ago, and for the 18 months of our twice-weekly sessions, I was the fittest i’ve been since my early twenties. Since then, I’ve only managed the (very) occassional bike ride or jog along brighton beach, and i’m starting to notice the effects.

So, with foolhardy recklessness and in the hope of re-igniting my desire to keep fit, I’m doing the London to Brighton bike ride in a few weeks. It should be ok, but i’m already fearing that i’ll be the least fit of our group, dragging behind and pushing my bike up the hills. The only consolation is that I’ll be able to go straight home afterwards for alcohol and a warm bath, instead of having to schlep back up to london with my bike.

I’m doing it in aid of the British Heart Foundation, so go on – sponsor me. At least that way the suffering will be worthwhile…

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There’s lots of fun projects using tags on Flickr, but most of them I find interesting for their cool use of tech, rather than their aesthetics. But the ‘50 people see’ project is just beautiful. It takes 50 pictures that share a tag (ie ‘eye’, ‘mountain’ or ’shadow’) and maps them onto each other. The resulting images have a beautiful, scratchy surface, a bit like an abstract version of a Dave McKean illustration. I’d love to see these printed up large in a gallery.

[thanks to Kim for the link!]

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Ben Hammersley has the best commentary, but let me be probably the last person to welcome Backstage into the world. Backstage was a project that was passed around a couple of times before finally sneaking under the wire and into the world. I think Tom and Matt were the original parents, before handing it to me. I did very little except come up with the name ‘backstage’ before handing to James, who did a fantastic job of actually getting it somewhere, before Tom returned to bring in the fantastic skills of Ben, helping James and Ben get it over the finishing line. So essentially, it was vapourware until the A-team of Tom, Ben & James actually knuckled down and built something. They deserve all the plaudits and free pints that the blogosphere can throw at them.

Which in a way is the message of backstage, and what they should probably put as its tagline (paraphrasing the cult kids TV show) – Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go [Online] And Do Something Less Boring Instead?

Ah! – Backstage – the kids TV programme! Its only a matter of time! (For our US viewers, imagine a cross between Sesame St and O’Reilly’s Make magazine…)

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Clay, picking his way through the exchange of posts about the significance of wikipedia, suggests there are two perspectives on technological innovation. One group of commentators use ‘Radial’ maps when describing innovation, valuing vectoral shifts out from a central point; whilst others use ‘Cartesian’ maps that value the final destination. Put in other terms, radial people get excited about iterative progress, and cartesian people look for the endgame. He suggests that writers like himself and Cory Doctorow are ‘radial’, whilst Danah Boyd and myself are ‘cartesian’, and that explains our different takes on the potential and limits of folksonomies.

At the risk of sounding even more ‘cartesian’, this is a ridiculous over-simplification, and artificially polarises the debate we were having about the impact of folksonomies as an innovation. I’m surprised that Clay – who I’ve long admired for the elegance and sophistication of his writing – has proposed such a binary opposition. It misinterprets some of the questions Danah and I were asking, dismissing them as symptoms of our cartesian worldview and us as being out of step with ‘an era of radial triumphs’. He then extends the cartesian analogy to explain why only companies who have a monopoly – or think they do – engage in pure research, as cartesian approaches to innovation require more resources over longer periods of time.

As someone who is currently engaged in an review of the entire R&D function where I work, this presses a number of my buttons at the same time. The lapsed academic in me wants to dig into Clay’s binary opposition and tease out a more complex model of innovation, whilst my work brain wants to demonstrate that current innovation best practise is to invest in a broad range of innovation and R&D strategies, some ‘cartesian’ and some ‘radial’. The second part will have to wait until after I can talk more publicly about the strategies we’re devising, so first of all, lets look at some alternative theoretical models for technological innovation.

Until quite recently, histories of science and technology have been polarised along similar lines to Clay’s radial/cartesian analogy – science discovers and technology applies. But in the last 20-30 years, researchers have been looking at the sociology of science and technology, mapping the dynamics between the two communities and the effects these dynamics have on innovation. Any period of innovation you care to choose has scientists who ‘do’ technology, and technologists who ‘do’ science – but the missing chapters in our technological histories describe the social networks that acted as crucibles for these communities and their products.

Bijker, Hughes and Pinch’s excellent ‘The Social Construction of Technological Systems’ proposes a new model for appraising technological innovation based on mapping the different professional and amateur communities that shared innovation problems, and tracing how the interaction of these communities led to the solution we now recognise as the ‘innovation’. Using the invention of the bicycle as an example, they demonstrate how innovation develops in a series of saccadic moves, nudged this way and that by the specific needs of each community. In the early development phase of the bicycle, many opposing solutions were available, but our traditional quasi-linear history describes a line between the boneshaker, penny farthing and the bicyclette, with other ‘failed’ options described as dead ends off this path. [click here to see this illustrated in a pop-up window]

Bijker et al propose a model that asks ‘why did some variants die whilst others survived?’. Their model explores the different social groups who shared the ‘problem’ driving the innovation. In the case of the bicycle, this includes the male audience targetted by bicycle manufacturers at the time (“Bicycling is a healthy and manly pursuit with much to recommend it, and, unlike other foolish crazes, it has not died out”), but also women (“From the number of [Safety Bicycles] adapted for the use of ladies, it seems as if bicycling was becoming popular with the weaker sex, and we are not suprised at it”) and even anti-cycling protest groups (“…stones are thrown, sticks thrust into the wheels, or caps hurled into the machinery. All the above in certain districts are a common occurrence, and have happened to me, especially when passing through a village just after school is closed”) [all quotes from contemporary sources quoted in Bijker et al].

The ‘Social Construction of Technology’ approach describes each group’s specific problem and aligns them to variant innovations that existed at the time. This approach introduces other factors other than the purely technological into our understanding of innovation:

“This way of describing the developmental process brings out clearly all kinds of conflicts: conflicting technical requirements by different social groups; conflicting solutions to the same problem (for example, the safety low-wheelers and the safety ordinaires); and moral conflicts (for example, women wearing skirts or trousers on high-wheelers). Within this scheme, various solutions to these conflicts and problems are possible – not only technological ones but also judicial or even moral ones (for example, changing attitudes toward women wearing trousers).”
[Bijker et al; "Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts"]

This is a far more sophisticated approach to understanding the drivers for technological innovation – closer to the PEST/PESTLE analysis used in scenario planning than the technological deterministic rhetoric that tends to dominate contemporary debate. Instead of innovation being depicted as a single line, it is a complex network of innovations and communities [click here to see this illustrated in a pop-up window].

I would propose this model is closer to the ‘map’ that Danah and I are using to discuss wikipedia and folksonomies than Clay’s reduction of us to a ‘cartesian’ perspective. Bringing other potential actors or drivers to the debate is not symptomatic of a worldview that fetishises ‘end-goals’ at the expense of iterative progress, but instead looks to make the fascinatingly complex network of existing actors even richer and more diverse. If anything, this approach is anti-cartesian, as it seeks to create a plurality of possible end-states, without fetishising one at the cost of the others. It values the iterative achievements of innovation communities, but puts them in the context of other actors and communities that might currently be invisble to them.

Ironically, this approach is a better conceptual fit to the radical commons-based production models we’re debating than the techno-centric ‘radial’ models Clay describes. As massively social forms of production become more and more significant, we should by all means celebrate the technological glue that enables them, but we should also start to examine the social communities that are simultaneously their users, creators, adapters and abusers.

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Clay makes some very valid points on my recent post about the limits of folksonomies, not least to point out the difference between personal taxonomies – as in tags that are only meant for one user – and vernacular taxonomies (Clay uses the example of theives’ slang from the 18th Century) that are shared between a group of people. Delicious, Flickr and other tagging services allow people to share personal taxonomies, and therefore to benefit from the amplified signals that emerge out of the unstructured noise.

But – and this is the important bit that I missed – those amplified signals have no infrastructure to support them. They exist without the community having to agree them, even in adhoc forms. They are simply amplified feedback. There are no politics in folksonomies, as there is no meta-level within the system that allows tagging communities to discuss the appropriateness or not of their emergent taxonomies. There is only the act of tagging, and the cumulative, amplified product of those tags. As Will Davies would probably put it – there are public goods, but no public realm.

This is truly radical, but brings me to the second point that Clay makes. He asks why Danah Boyd and I worry about ‘exclusion’ in these kind of systems. My first response would be to blame my art school/lit crit background, and say that years of exposure to critical theory creates a knee-jerk reaction to ask questions about access and inclusion. But its not really about political correctness, but rather a curiosity about how things like folksonomies play out as their scale increases.

In my post I suggest that folksonomies are valuable only whilst nothing is at stake. I might rephrase that, and say – what happens when folksonomies develop a political realm? At what scale, or in what contexts, will this occur? Can these structures retain their radical visibility and accessibility within political contexts? How might that help overcome some of the barriers to participation in exisiting political realms?

Wikipedia is a useful example of a ‘folk’ project that is having to grapple with politics. It has a very active meta-level debate about the value and authority of its texts, but by applying the same conditions to this meta-level as the content itself (everyone can participate, everything is visible), it seems to be able to cope with the demands of its emerging politics. Clay has raised this issue a lot , asking how we might signify these meta-narratives at the level of wikipedia content. But he’s also aware that the solutions that work now might not work at the next level:

“One of the mysteries of scale is that there’s no such thing as scaling well. You can make something 100 times bigger, and if it works, you think you’ve got it licked. But the next power of 10 can kill it. So I don’t know whether or not openness and co-creation are incompatible at Wikipedia scale.”

Personally i’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic about whether folksonomies can scale succesfully. I’m just curious. Wikipedia feels to me like the last toll booth on the ‘information superhighway’ – that vision of the internet as a network of monolithic libraries & information repositories that large organisations (like Time Warner and [*cough*] the BBC) got excited about in the 90’s. After wikipedia, its not highways any more, but dirt paths as far as the eye can see. Wikipedia straddles this border – its an off-ramp from the serene knowledge fantasies of the internet superhighway to the noisy, playful web of folksonomies.

But, as more and more people take the off-ramp, the dirt paths have a habit of becoming roads, and border towns turn into cities, and suddenly we’re having to think about governance, authority, access, and representation again. This hasn’t happened yet with many folksonomy projects, but it will. What kind of solutions will we come up with to solve these problems of scale? What kind of public realms will we create to discuss the politics of the playful web?

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Chris Anderson, in his excellent Long Tail blog, uses basic physics to elegantly place technology hype in its appropriate context. Referring to a recent speech from Michael Wolff hinting that because of the power of the web, Consumer Report (the US Which?) was now a marginal business model, Anderson tries to seperate the facts from the hype:

Actually, Consumer Reports says it has about 4 million subscribers, which by anyone’s estimation makes it non-marginal (although I don’t get the magazine, I do pay $26/year to subscribe to its excellent website). Vanity Fair, or for that matter Wired, would love to have anything close to that. But I think I know what Wolff meant. To understand his claim, you have to realize that there are three kind of people, which being a science geek, I will describe in physics terms (that noise is the sound of a readership stampeding for the exits):

Category C people think: “They lost 200,000 readers in three years! Consumer Reports is dead.”

One of the most linked-to posts on this blog was an attack on Wired Magazine’s tendency to report acceleration more than velocity or position. Anderson, a Wired writer, makes a defense of this tendency, saying that it is the raison d’etre of the magazine. That’s a fair enough comment, but my beef is with the volume, in terms of numbers and noise, of Category C people within technology circles.

Anderson points out that any emerging blip might be the germ of something that changes industries, or nothing whatsover, and ‘end-ism’ (as in ‘this means the end of radio/tv/print media/work/etc’) is an appropriate rhetorical device to report the potential acceleration of any disruptive element. But for me, this vision of pure speed, of a potential world measured purely in terms of disruption and acceleration, is not only exhausting, but also tends to provide a limited lens to imagine the future.

In her excellent book ‘When Old Technologies Were New’, Carolyn Marvin uses the term ‘cognitive imperialism’ to describe the future visions for electrical products and services that were published in electrical engineers’ journals in the 19th Century. In her analysis, most contemporary writers imagined futures in which their own skills and expertise were transformative and increasingly valuable, changing the landscape of the world and transforming business models. In the case of electricity, they were broadly right, but not in the ways they imagined. It is usual in our culture to project acceleration in a straight line forward, without taking on board other drivers that might affect its path. But are there other ways of thinking about the future that place less of a focus on acceleration, and more on position?

An article in The Guardian’s Life section last week reported on the Aymara people of the Andes, who seem to refer to the past as ‘in front’ of them, and the future as ‘behind’. Researchers have been filming conversations with Aymarans and recording how their speech and hand gestures signify their position within a reverse timeflow, with the future moving from behind them whilst they face the past. The reason for this might give us a fascinating insight into why we are so locked into our ‘end-isms’, forever seeing the future rushing forward to erase the past:

Núñez [one of the researchers] thinks that the reason the Aymara think they way they do might be connected with the importance they accord vision. Every language has a system of markers which forces the speaker to pay attention to some aspects of the information being conveyed and not others. French emphasises the gender of an object (sa voiture , son livre), English the gender of the subject (his car, her book). Aymara marks whether the speaker saw the action happen or not: “Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it).”

If these markers are left out, the speaker is regarded as boastful or a liar. Thirty years ago, Miracle and Yapita pointed to the often incredulous responses of Aymara to some written texts: “‘Columbus discovered America’ – was the author actually there?” In a language so reliant on the eyewitness, it is not surprising that the speaker metaphorically faces what has already been seen: the past.

It is interesting to compare how the word ‘vision’ is used here – for most of western culture, ‘vision’ is seen as something moving forward, penetrating the murky depths of the future; a ‘visionary’ is someone who can trace accelerating paths from the random matter of the everyday. For the Aymara, vision is literal truth – the ultimate arbiter of experience and therefore the benchmark for claims about the past or future. As the past can be claimed to have been directly experienced, it has more weight, more gravity, perhaps. Marta Hardman, one of the anthropologists working on the study, thinks there are advantages to the way the Aymara think: “We pretend [the past] is not there, yet we’re lugging it with us as we go”.

Perhaps the attraction of Anderson’s Category C thinking is the feeling of freedom we get from pretending we’re not carrying this weight, and that we can just focus on the dizzying acceleration instead. But this is an illusion, and risks the ‘cognitive imperialism that Marvin illustrates. We should instead use Anderson’s ‘physics of hype’ equation as a tool, and encourage a rhetoric in which position is as important as acceleration. After all, to slightly paraphrase, objects in the rear-view mirror may be closer than they appear…

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Deitch Projects – the gallery of uber-art-scenester Jeffrey Deitch – is launching ARTSTAR, a reality TV show based on the lives and practises of contemporary artists:

ARTSTAR is the first-ever unscripted television series set in the New York art world. Selected from this open call, eight artists will have the opportunity to participate in a group exhibition at Deitch Projects, and may have a chance to land their own solo exhibition with Deitch Projects. ARTSTAR will document these eight artists as they interact with leading critics, collectors, curators and artists in New York, while making new artworks as part of a historic collaborative exhibition at Deitch Projects.

My first response is glee, as I’d imagine the programmes would be a glorious litany of tantrums, egos, posing and naked desire. But looking through the (limited) information on the website, I see that Christopher Sperandio, part of the artistic partnership Grennan & Sperandio, is listed as an executive producer.

I’ve long been a fan of their work, which involves an almost ethnographic immersion into an exisiting community, with the final artwork as a collaborative production with people from the community. Recently, their work has focused on comic books that illustrate the lives of people in specific communities. They did a version of this project with people in York for the Photo 98 festival, when I was production manager at Impressions Gallery.

The comic books are perfect vehicles for the vernacular stories they uncover, and are seen as mainstream products, distributed by Fantagraphics or DC as well. In the light of Sperandio’s involvement, ARTSTAR is an extension of their practise, using another vernacular vehicle – the reality TV show – to uncover the invisible lives and stories of a particular community – the NY art scene.

The success may hinge on whether this is as empowering an intervention as most of their work. Starting with their ground-breaking contribution to the show ‘Culture in Action’, where they worked with the unionized employees of a Chicago chocolate factory to design and market their own chocolate bar, their work has used cultural production as a tool of empowerment. Will ARTSTAR do the same? We will see artists taking power of the medium to wrest control of the artworld’s economic hierarchy? Or will it just focus on the most telegenic spats and hissy fits and synch them to a retro-punk-funk soundtrack?

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Deitch Projects – the gallery of uber-art-scenester Jeffrey Deitch – is launching ARTSTAR, a reality TV show based on the lives and practises of contemporary artists:

ARTSTAR is the first-ever unscripted television series set in the New York art world. Selected from this open call, eight artists will have the opportunity to participate in a group exhibition at Deitch Projects, and may have a chance to land their own solo exhibition with Deitch Projects. ARTSTAR will document these eight artists as they interact with leading critics, collectors, curators and artists in New York, while making new artworks as part of a historic collaborative exhibition at Deitch Projects.

My first response is glee, as I’d imagine the programmes would be a glorious litany of tantrums, egos, posing and naked desire. But looking through the (limited) information on the website, I see that Christopher Sperandio, part of the artistic partnership Grennan & Sperandio, is listed as an executive producer.

I’ve long been a fan of their work, which involves an almost ethnographic immersion into an exisiting community, with the final artwork as a collaborative production with people from the community. Recently, their work has focused on comic books that illustrate the lives of people in specific communities. They did a version of this project with people in York for the Photo 98 festival, when I was production manager at Impressions Gallery.

The comic books are perfect vehicles for the vernacular stories they uncover, and are seen as mainstream products, distributed by Fantagraphics or DC as well. In the light of Sperandio’s involvement, ARTSTAR is an extension of their practise, using another vernacular vehicle – the reality TV show – to uncover the invisible lives and stories of a particular community – the NY art scene.

The success may hinge on whether this is as empowering an intervention as most of their work. Starting with their ground-breaking contribution to the show ‘Culture in Action’, where they worked with the unionized employees of a Chicago chocolate factory to design and market their own chocolate bar, their work has used cultural production as a tool of empowerment. Will ARTSTAR do the same? We will see artists taking power of the medium to wrest control of the artworld’s economic hierarchy? Or will it just focus on the most telegenic spats and hissy fits and synch them to a retro-punk-funk soundtrack?

In Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Starr’s excellent book Sorting Things Out, they investigate the creation of the Nursing Interventions Classifcation (NIC) by a group of nurses in Iowa. The NIC was created to address the lack of visibility and accountability of nursing work in hospitals. As information technology became widespread within hospitals, nursing work needed a standardised vocabulary in order to be adequately recognised and compensated by hospital authorities. This was resisted by some nursing professionals, who argued for a more flexible taxonomy that preserved the ‘natural’ language of nurses.

This illlustrates well the issues currently being raised by the growth of informal tagging and taxonomy infrastructures in services like delicious and flickr. Some commentators have hailed these informal or ‘folk’ taxonomies as a revolution in classification methodology, whilst others, like Danah Boyd, have argued that ‘folksonomies’ don’t help taxonomists address questions about the meaning and impact of classification:

Folksonomy isn’t asking the questions about the implications of collective action classification. Who benefits? Who becomes marginalized? What priorities bubble up? How does pressure to homogenize affect the schema and the people involved? How are some people hurt or offended by decisions that are made? Should moderation of classifications occur? If so, what are the consequences?

This is precisely the tension described by Bowker and Star. Their book investigates the interface between the ideology and practise of classification, and how this affects professional and social behaviour. One of their central themes is ‘invisible work’ – the act which creates taxonomies, like history, but is not represented in the final outcome. The NIC is an attempt to make the invisible work of nurses visible, but also to keep the process as visible as possible, via workshops with nurses around the US, and regularly revisions via contributions and conferences.

It is this visibility that is lauded in folksonomies, with wikipedia being the prime example. The exponential network effects of the internet enable mass vernacular collaboration, and systems that can make visible the creation and revision of taxonomies that are simultaneously ‘in play’ as working infrastructures. Does this represent a revolution in classification processes? Does this visibility allow people to resolve the tensions inherent in any taxonomical structure, or make its implementation any more effective?

One of the most contentious issues in the NIC was the classification of social functions, such as ‘mood management’ (preparing a patient for grief or stress before an operation) and even ‘humour’. How could humour be represented in a taxonomy? How could you reimburse or measure it? The resulting classification might help to make visible this work, but it sits uneasily as a classification, as illustrated by this exercept:

ACTIVITIES:
Determine the types of humour appreciated by the patient
Determine the patient’s typical response to humour
Determine the time of day that patient is most receptive
Select humourous materials that create moderate arousal for the individual
Encourage silliness and playfulness

Are these useful classifications? Who do they best help? The practising nurse or the administrator? Do you think these descriptions could be productive for a conversation between the two? Or would they perhaps impose artificial boundaries on the improvisational nature of this kind of care?

Perhaps this illustrates the limit of folksonomies – they are only useful in a context in which nothing is at stake. Folksonomies are, in essence, just vernacular vocabularies; the ad-hoc languages of intimate networks. They have existed as long as language itself, but have been limited to the intimate networks that created them. At the point in which something is at stake, either within that network or due to its engagement with other networks (legal, financial, political, etc) vernacular communication will harden into formal taxonomy, and in this process some of its slipperiness and playfulness will be lost.

Digital networks have massively increased the scale of the intimate networks we can potentially create, and therefore have increased the number of participants that can create and share ad-hoc vocabularies. The internet has created tools that preserve the loosely-connected, the playful, the ad-hoc, vernacular, or amateur – the conditions of the infinite, rather than the finite game.

But this is a revolution of scale, not the erasure of tension between formality and informality. That boundary still exists, and will be just as sharp, if not sharper, as it will be negotiated between thousands, rather than a handful, of participants. Whilst folksonomies are used to create loose taxonomies of leisure pursuits (photography, music, websites, tv, etc) there is little at stake, and even a participant group measured in millions can happily share these loose infrastructures. And yes, there are business models that have been made possible by the exponential increase in scale that would have been untenable before digital networks transformed our intimate relationships. But this is an increase in scale of an already existing set of behaviours, not a new set of behaviours in themselves.

Bowker and Star identify three values that are in competition within classfication structures: comparability, visibility and control. Folksonomies have elevated visibility, but at the expense of comparability (being able to translate classifications across taxonomies or contexts) and control (the ability of the classification to limit interpretation, rather than interpret ‘emergent’ behaviour). Whilst nothing is at stake, and there is little lost by not being able to transfer taxonomies from one context to the other, or users are not disadvantaged by the need to independently assess and contextualise meaning, folksonomies will provide a useful service.

At what point will visibility not be enough for these emerging folksonomies? Jimmy Wales has already discussed spinning off ‘hard’ versions of wikipedia, so that users who are less interested in playfulness and more interested in authority can feel more secure using the service. As a purely social service, Flickr might be able to stay playful for longer, without users worrying too much about the uses and abuses of classification.

This, then is the question we need to ask of folksonomies – how revolutionary is the ability to play? What are the real benefits to users? What are the costs? And more importantly, who is able to play, and who is excluded?

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Ingenious is a new website from the NMSI – the consortium of UK museums that includes the Science Museum, National Museum of Photography, Film & TV, and the National Railway Museum. Its got an interesting mix of articles, images and debates that are structured on a kind of ‘ican’ style participation curve, from READ to DEBATE to SEE to CREATE.

There’s a lot of good stuff in there, particularly the photography collctions from the NMPFT, where the lovely autochrome of a young girl above comes from. Its from 1910, but looks strangely contemporary, almost like a faded kodachrome from the 1970’s.

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Remember ‘The Beast’? the game that was secretly launched around the movie AI? It seems that there is another similar augemented reality game currently being developed, and the rumour is that it is linked to the launch of Halo 2 on the xbox.

go to ilovebees for the mysterious launch pad for the project, and this message board to catch up on the game’s progress. At the moment, players are converging at a number of GPS points across the US, where they are expecting something related to the game to take place. Although there is equal scepticism that this is just a large puzzle publicising Halo 2, and not a fuly-fledged Augmented Reality puzzle at all. I’m sure all will be revealed over the net few days…

Cloudmakers, the group site for people solving The Beast, is a great resource for online/AR gaming.

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Dan Hill points to this marvellous article from harlem.org on how the amount of information we have about the music we listen to is decreasing rapidly as we embrace digital formats. We’ve gone from the LP, with the luxurious space for liner notes, credits and shout-outs, to the bare few lines of metadata in the itunes database, often only containing artist, title, and release date, and often factually incorrect.

This boils down to a trade-off between access and serendipity. In order to increase access, we streamline the product to its bare minimum – an optimised algorithm of ones and zeroes. But serendipity is about getting snagged on the extraneous data, about following the forking paths that link one item to the next.

This isn’t just a romantic paen to the esoteric pleasures of old vinyl. When I was more actively collecting records, I used to recognise producers from albums I liked, and take that as a hint for new discoveries. Beat-diggers often value the producer or label over the artist, as they are the more responsible for the particular qualities that make a good break than the person playing the instrument.

I remember first realising that a lot of records I loved on the Cadet label – from Terry Callier, Rotary Connection and Minnie Riperton – where produced by Charles Stepney in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I started to look for Stepney’s credits on records in second-hand stores, and recognised his epic, experimental production style on tracks from compilations. In this case, Charles Stepney was the key bit of metadata, the root connecting me to lots of other interesting artists. In fact, he actually created Rotary Connection as a front for his studio experiments. How would you come across this information without being able to pore over music sleeves, etc?

Ok, so this is still a real minority interest, and most users are more than satisfied by being able to type ‘Coldplay’ into a search box and downloading the results, but the products of these twisting paths of metadata sometimes find their way back into the mainstream. Beat-digging has returned the forgotten contributions of visionaries like David Axelrod and Galt MacDermot to public attention, whilst the huge amounts of beats sourced from obscure music library records from the 60’s and 70’s has gained long-overdue credit for artists like Alan Hawkshaw, Nino Nardini and Cecil Leuter. Metada isn’t just about search, but about noise. The more there is, the more signals you can extract from it.

My favourite music-medata discovery? After a long search, I managed to track down a copy of Labi Siffre’s rare album ‘Remember My Song’ for the killer track ‘I Got The…’, which has a *huge* break sampled by, among others, Eminem on ‘My Name Is…’ Checking out the credits on the album, I noticed that bass and guitar players where none other than Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock, popular english session musicians at the time. That meant that one of the fattest bass breaks in hiphop was played by a member of the oft-derided cockernee novelty act Chas & Dave. As a spurs fan, this was priceless…

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My daughter, Rose Esme, was born today at 11.05am. As a way of celebrating this fact, I thought I’d do a google search for predictions about how life in the UK might change over her first 21 years. Lots of the searches yield mostly generic business plan predictions, so i’ve tried to pepper them with odd little statistics or facts. I’ll post the results up in groups of 7 over the next few days (assuming I get time, that is…)

2005 – Rose is 1
‘Chip and PIN’ cards will be rolled out across the UK
BT will have Broadband across 100% of the UK
Hearing Screening for Newborn Babies will be available across the country

2006 – Rose is 2
Power cuts will be crippling the UK
The Water Vole will be extinct
It will be against the law to discriminate job candidates by their age

2007 – Rose is 3
Wiltshire will be the safest place to live
There will be a new pill to help men with premature ejaculation
God will be working in all twelve areas of the UK

2008 – Rose is 4
Cannabis shops will have opened for business
There will be 2 credit cards for every adult in the UK
The amount of obese children in the UK, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands will be the same as the US (16%)

2009 – Rose is 5
The £2 coin will commemorate the 350th anniversary of temperature measurements
Linear TV will be dead
The RAF will get new Joint Combat Aircraft
[2009 seems to be a very unpopular year for predictions. Maybe its an odd number to target, or perhaps it'll be a very dull year.]

2010 – Rose is 6
3% of the UK’s energy will come from renewables
There will be over 4 million people with diabetes
There will be double the number of Brown Hares (Lepus europaeus)

2011 – Rose is 7
The Subway sandwich chain will have more than 2,00 stores
4.6 million people will be over the age of 75
De-beaking of hens will be prohibited

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Thomas Haywood is a London-based photographer, working mainly in colour medium-format. His website has a selection of his work, including the fantastic series Alpha Male – pictures of men lying prone in urban locations, looking like drunks or perhaps sunbathers who have fallen asleep. Also lovely are the photographs in the Twilight and Passing Through series. This is the kind of stuff that I imagine thingsmagazine and cityofsound would love…

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A few weeks ago, I attended a conference at Tate Britain to launch the book New Media Art: Practise and Context in the UK 1994-2004. Steve Dietz gave a very good introductory speech, with a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the ‘YNMBAs’, the Young New Media British Artists who had developed under the diverse support from funding and commissioning agencies like Film & Video Umbrella, FACT and Locus +. Using Lev Manovich’s assertion that we live in a keyword-driven database culture, he regrouped the work produced over the last decade in a number of arbitary thematic or formal categories, pointing out in passing how diverse and international a group the putative ‘YNMBAs’ actually were. Having mapped out many possible narratives, Dietz asked why there was so little discourse around New Media Art. There are many mailing lists like Rhizome that keep the global digital media community active and connected, and magazines like MUTE that place digital media within a wider political and cultural milieu, but, for Dietz, there is no debate about the artworks themselves to compare with that of mainstream contemporary art. By casually inventing a handful of taxonomies, Dietz demonstrated how few critical theories there are around the aesthetic qualities of new media art, and how few arguments there are about the ones – like Manovich’s The Language of New Media – that already exist.

Unfortunately, the rest of the conference failed to take this challenge, and felt like a series of unconnected panels alternating between lectures and presentations of artists work. Most disappointing was the session with Charlie Gere and Geoffrey Batchen. I’m a huge admirer of Batchen’s writing on vernacular photography, and had hoped that he would have taken the opportunity to expand this to digital media. Instead, he presented a revisioning of Lev Manovich’s description of the historical relationships between film and computers, extending back from Manovich’s citation of Konrad Zuse’s early use of film as memory storage, to the use of lace – created on the programmable Jaquard loom – as a referent for Fox-Talbot’s early photograms. This was fascinating, and would have been an excellent stand-alone lecture, but was far too historical to meet the challenge that Steve Dietz had set in the morning. Charlie Gere’s response was similar, tracing the history of British computer art to the creation of the technical and trade craft colleges in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Both talks felt tangentially linked to the main themes, as if the speakers had been invited to talk, but not given a strong enough brief, leaving them to present some current research of interest to them rather than really engaging with the conference aims. There was a brief Q&A after the Batchen/Gere session, when Batchen rose to a question about the potential political impact of new media art and called for artists to be far more engaged in contemporary political issues, saying that no other contemporary art form had as much potential for political debate. This was the kind of debate that I expected from the whole day, so it was frustrating to see it only twice – in Dietz’s opening speech, and in a 10 minute Q&A halfway through the day.

So – an opportunity missed, but it inspired me to try and write more about digital art. I owe Marisa Olsen an essay on vernacular culture and digital art, partly based on Batchen’s essays, so I’ll endeavour to finish that now and publish it here (I think i’m about six months past my deadline for Marisa, so she’s no doubt given up on ever seeing the text). I’ve also thought more about turning TEST into a location for commissioned texts on digital art, perhaps inviting Steve and others to write or respond to specific works. When I was an art student, I used to devour copies of October magazine, and the critical writing of Rosalind Krauss, Martin Jay and Douglas Crimp hugely influenced my views on modern art. October used to occassionally hold ’round table’ discussions on particular artists or artworks, and maybe that would be a good approach to kickstart the kind of debates Steve Dietz is calling for. In the meantime, I took a number of medium-format black and white portraits at the event, capturing a good cross-section of the UK ‘new media scene’ of the last 10 years, including Craighed & Thomson, Fiona Raby, Pauline Van Mourik Broekman, Peter Ride, Susan Collins and Beryl Graham. I’ll post them up in groups of threes over the next few days.

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Four pictures from The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson at the Tate Modern

View of the Bridge, facing away from the ’sun’

View of the ceiling mirrors

Looking directly up at the ’sun’ from below

Looking from behind the ’sun’ at the ceiling mirrors

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Blast Theory, the innovative performance art/gaming/mobile research company, have just launched I LIKE FRANK, the first 3G street game ever launched. They’re in Adelaide, Australia at the moment on a residency, so the game takes place simultaneously on the streets of Adelaide and online. You can play online and track street players as they search for the mysterious Frank…

The only problem is, the project runs each day from noon, Adelaide time, which is 1.30am UK time… If anybody manages to stay awake to play, please let me know what you think!

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At ConConUk, Will Davies gave a short commentary of his ‘Software for Skyscrapers’ presentation from this year’s ETCON. The presentation looks at how social software might help residents in Skyhouse - a new residential tower block proposed by London Eye designers Marks Barfield. Davies and co-author James Crabtree set themselves an interesting problem – how could social software help increase social capital amongst a community who share nothing except an entrance hall? In their analysis, most ‘generic’ social software creates bottom-up communities around shared interests, whereas social software for skyscrapers would need to create top-down motivations for shared responsibilities.

The presentation defines three levels of social interaction, and explores whether social software could help each one. The first is infrastructure - admin blogs could help communicate to residents about maintenance to the building, but could lead to a culture of complaint (“when is the bloody lift going to get cleaned?”). The last is culture - the holy grail of a community, where individuals feel strong levels of identification with both place and people. These kind of strong linkages run the risk of becoming accelerated into ‘cliques’ through social software, a result familiar to many mailing list or message board owner.

The middle level – tasks – is identified as the most promising for social software. Tasks are exchanges that lend themselves to taxonomies and economies of exchange – squash leagues and babysitter recommendations are given as examples of how communities confer trust or expertise based on real face-to-face exchanges. Like ebay’s recommendations ratings, defined tasks are a good basis for representing trust, as the ability to ‘rate’ others is dependent on some form of actual exchange, limiting the scope for ‘gaming’ the system in the ways so familiar to purely virtual communities. Top-down intermediaries can help to confer trust by establishing the rules of exchange, then representing the community back to itself according to these rules – a feedback mechanism that could increase face-to-face exchanges across the community.

Whilst this is an intelligent and well-argued proposal, I couldn’t help thinking that something had been missed out. At ConConUk, I asked if the type of community they were adressing – a diverse group with little in common except physical proximity – could not be compared to offices, where there are similar issues about motivation and community? Could they not learn as much from Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange as we could from Friendster and Meetup.com?

When I thought about it again a few days later, I remembered the tenantspin project that has been running for the last three years in Liverpool. Started by FACT’s innovative collaboration programme and Liverpool Housing Action Trust, Tenantspin is a web-tv channel set up by residents of Coronation House, one of Liverpool’s oldest high-rise blocks. I was in Liverpool as part of an Arts Council panel appraising FACT’s activities two weeks ago, and we got a chance to meet up with some of the residents who have been working on tenantspin over the last few years. Most of the participants are over 50, and few of them had any experience of using technology before they joined the project. FACT teaches them to use cameras, sound equipment and RealProducer, then provides the infrastructure for the production and transmission of their programmes.

Over the last three years, they have produced over 200 shows, including interviews with Margi Clarke, Lord Puttnam, Bill Drummond and Will Self. But the residents were quick to point out how Tenantspin had helped them explore issues relating to their building and city, as well as entertainment. Recent webcasts include a debate with Liverpool Echo journalists about Liverpool’s City of Culture bid, and the live streaming of a Tenant Liason meeting. Asked about their motivations for participating, the tenants said they were all curious about media technology, but also had found their outlooks changes by their acqured knowledge – many of them said they viewed mainstream print and broadcast media very differently now they appreciated the mechanics of framing and editing. They often use tenantspin as a way to further explore the sensational headlines of the Liverpool Echo (who they thought were far too quick to criticise their city) or to get a local perspective on a national news item such as asylum seekers.

Tenantspin is a far more haphazard and bottom-up project that Davies & Crabtree’s Skyhouse proposal, but comes with the added bonus of increasing media literacy as well as creating social capital. By providing access to tools of production and distribution as well as participation, tenantspin lets the means find their own ends, rather than predicting desired outcomes and then finding the tools to achieve them.

If Skyhouse is to succeed in building social capital, it might want to learn a few things from Tenantspin, namely that self-expression is about more than just listing transactions or tasks, unless you believe that Ebay is an adequate model for all social exchanges. Culture might not be perfectly expressed through social software, just as it is equally ill-served by broadcast media, but in both cases teaching people how these networks actually work is just as vital as teaching them how to consume their products. In a mediated society, ‘media literacy’ and ’social capital’ are ideas that are unavoidably linked. ‘Top-down’ solutions that seek to create one without supporting the other are as doomed to failure as the hard concrete architectures of 1960’s tower blocks.

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A few weeks ago I spent 3 days in Amsterdam, at Shell’s offices, taking part in a workshop for their Scenarios team. Shell produce new scenarios every three years, and use them to facilitate planning and investment decisions in all five of their business groups. The Amsterdam workshop focused on the impact of technology over the next five years, with other workshops in Europe and the US focusing on social and economic/political impacts, although these distinctions seemed pretty artificial by the end of the workshop.

Over the last 10-15 years, Shell’s scenarios have shifted significantly. Like all futurism, they’re as much a litmus test for their time as they are insights into the future. The 1980’s scenarios focused on the oil crisis and its impacts, but by the ’90s the seductive ‘end of history’ rhetoric of Fukuyama led them to ‘TINA’ – ‘There Is No Alternative’ – where the forces of technological progress and globalisation would sweep all before it. The only question to be considered was *how* globalisation would happen, not *if*. Most of the 90’s scenarios focused on exploring the TINA theme, but by 2000 the cracks start to appear, and Shell recognise the three ‘Rs’ that complicate the TINA scenario – The regulations behind liberalisation, The rules of globalisation, and the restraints on technology.

The current scenarios focus on two stories – Business Class, about a connected global elite harnessing the power and mobility of technology for their own benefit; and Prism, in which ‘multiple modernities’ exist in parallel, rooted in local cultures, histories and values. In both scenarios, technology is a key driver, connecting the global elite in ‘Business Class’, or enabling translation and exchange between the multiple communities of ‘Prism’.

Our Amsterdam workshop set out to look at the impact of technology through four key themes:

Continuous interaction
How everything and everyone shares information proactively, reactively, overtly or covertly

Sensing and making sense
How we and our environments acquire information about each other and how we use and visualise this data

Smaller and distributed
How multiple micro and nano technologies will impact our world and what they will enable

Future of business
How the way in which individuals, organisations and societies will operate, interact and transact in the future

I’ll be posting up some summaries and comments from the workshop over the next few days, but generally the outcome was that technology will not be as important a driver in the next 20 years as it has been for the last 20. The workshop group – about 20 people – included experts from a range of technologies, including media/communications (Nokia, BT, BBC), material science, nano-technology, food, the built environment (Ove Arup) and neuro-science. Particularly in the media/communications sectors, there was a feeling that we have seen all the radical technological innovation over the last 10-15 years, in particular the growth of the web and mobile communications, and that the next 15-20 years will be about innovation in services and business models.

There was more significant innovations likely in neuro-science and nano-technology, but this would still be limited to lab work, and would only start to have a market impact at the end of the scenario period in 2025. Innovation in food/health cross-overs was potentially the most likely, as there are huge market drivers for this, with consumers wanting convenience, but without the negative impact on health. But scalability was an issue here – most of the innovation in the food industry over the last 20 years has been about mass-production and distribution, so although the technology is there to produce niche or personalised products to address specific health problems, the economies of scale will mitigate their impact on the market. Lower-cholesterol margarine is a reality, but we’re not about to see Tescos organising their supermarket aisles according to your health profile.

The dominant theme of the 3 days was the impossibility of separating technology drivers from the social or political drivers that surround them. This is really the story of a post-revolutionary society, after the ground-breaking explosion of a new technology, having to deal with aftershocks and attempting to understand what has changed. Regulation was a real issue – how will we understand what kind of regulation we need to adjust to new social behaviours, or to old social behaviours translated onto new technological networks? How do we ensure fair and open markets where these markets haven’t yet formed into stable economies? How do we define and protect public values when we are only just begining to see mass public use of these technologies?

One of the problems of the workshop was its western focus. The questions above are important to developed, western economies struggling to adapt to new information economies. Apart from the possibility of using information technology to ‘leap-frog’ development stages, most of the discussion of developing countries focused on the sustainability of their economies and use of resources – not ‘technology’ questions at all. A speaker from Shell showed a fascinating slide linking resource use and GDP per capita. Most developed economies have seen a gradual increase in resource use as GDP increases, with the strange exception of the US, which has seen resource use decline, albeit from a x3 height compared to EU countries. China currently is going through a huge surge in resource use, but with little increase in GDP. Is this an acceleration effect, like flooding the engine with petrol before starting a journey, or is it an unsustainable curve? One model would predict that this is only sustainable if the effects start to impact on GDP per capita – as this increases, more of China’s population can start to engage with global markets, opening up cultural and economic exchange opportunities. With a centralised economy that doesn’t pass benefits of investment to the wider population, growth depends on state planning rather than entrepreneurism.

Anyway. I’ll try and cobble together some vaguely cogent highlights from my scrabble of notes, pdfs and memories, and post them over the next few days. One thing that did work well – Innovaro, who did a fantastic job of facilitating the sessions – gave us all a 64mb USB keydrive with copies of all the presentations and digital photographs of the working notes. That’s a highly recommended way of capturing the outputs from such an intense workshop and distributing them to the participants. So much better than walking away with a hangover, an ID tag and a bag full of tchotchke.

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The essay I recently posted on text messaging, poetry and touch is now online at Vodafone’s RECEIVER on-line journal. There’s some other interesting texts by far better writers, including Timothy Druckrey, David Toop and Matt Adams from Blast Theory. Best of all is Tom Charity’s essay on how mobile phones have been represented in films, from Wall Street to Minority Report. He makes a good point about sci-fi’s wrong futurism at the start:

“We didn’t see it coming. In all the many tens of hundreds of science fiction movies which unspooled over the twentieth century – from “Metropolis” to “Star Wars”, “Blade Runner” to “The Time Machine” – you won’t find one which envisages a general populace babbling to itself, as if in the throes of some giant collective nervous breakdown. Who could have imagined even 15 years ago, that public space – the bus, the train, the street – would be overrun? That the social sphere, which for centuries dictated certain civil proprieties (decorum, discretion and deferment), should fold in on itself almost overnight, leaving only solipsism rampant?”

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Billy Kluver, pioneering artist/engineer at Bell Labs and founder of Experiments in Art & Technology, died last Sunday at his home in New Jersey. Billy could rightly be called the godfather of contemporary media art. After training as an electrical engineer in Sweden, started working with artists, initially with Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, before becoming staff scientist at Bell Labs in 1958.

It was at Bell Labs that he combined his interests in Art, Film and Technology, fostering collaborations between the engineers at Bell and artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, John Cage and Frank Stella. These collaborations led to Kluver staging ‘Nine Evenings’, a series of interactive performances held in New York in 1966. Nine Evenings presented artists and engineers as equal partners, an attitude that characterised the work of EAT for the next 40 years.

Billy Kluver was invited over to Leeds in 2002 for the Evolution festival, and I had the great pleasure of chairing some of his sessions and spending a few days escorting him around the city. He was already quite frail, but his informal presentation of his projects – peppered with anecdotes about working with Warhol, Johns, Cage and other art-world luminaries – enraptured a packed audience, most of whom wouldn’t have been born when he was starting his pioneering career in New York.

In conversation over those few days, he seemed quite pessimistic about the historical significance of the work he’d done, and for the future of media art. He was quite critical of contemporary computer technology, feeling that it divorced artists from a real understanding of what technology actually contributes to an artwork. His collaborations were always informed by a real sense of the material logic of technology – how the bits and atoms worked together to create something sublime. I think he despaired of artists using off-the-shelf packages that emulate some of the ground-breaking combinations of media that he pioneered in the 60’s, without giving the artist an insight into what those combinations actually mean.

His pessimism about his historical significance was misplaced, however. He was received rapturously at the Evolution festival in Leeds, and introduced recently remastered documentary films of the ‘Nine Evenings’ performances, as well as a touring exhibition on the history of EAT. Hopefully this documentation will now be distributed more widely, and a new generation of media artists can learn from his work.

Most of all, I remember Billy for having a very European dry wit. He scarcastically cut through some of the more florid praise heaped upon him at the festival, and spent the evenings entertaining us over dinner with gossip and anecdotes about the famous artists he had worked with. As I walked him back to his hotel one night, he observed the traditional northern english female dress code (very short skirts, barely-there tops, even in the bitter cold and driving rain), and demanded “Take me where those girls are going!” The idea of taking Billy to one of Leeds’ less salubrious night clubs was very appealing, but his wife Julie managed to convince him otherwise. He probably would have spent the evening investigating the lighting rigs in any case, saying that he did far more spectacular stuff in the 60’s…

As media art grows up and enters the mainstream, and the technical innovations of previous generations become hidden under slick interfaces, it becomes more and more important that we recognise and learn from the pioneering work of people like Billy Kluver. Technological culture suffers from a fetishisation of the new, erasing recent history as its welcomes new innovation.

But the history of the last 30-40 years that Billy represented gives us a new way of looking at contemporary practise, a perspective that helps us realise that the new isn’t so new, and that people were asking the same questions about culture in the 60’s as we are now. It was this perspective that Billy urged the audience in Leeds to maintain, and his legacy of cultural innovation will now stand as a milestone in art and technology history, as well as an endless mine of inspiration for future artists.

Billy Kluver was a hero to a lot of people I knew, especially William Rose and Dennis Hopkins, whose visits to New York to meet Billy prior to inviting him to Leeds were almost an act of pilgrimage. I’m incredibly indebited to Dennis and William for the chance to meet a personal hero, and hope that their work will continue to celebrate Billy’s work, and give many other people the chance to be inspired by him.

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I’m in the middle of writing an essay that I should have finished months ago, so updates on this site are going to be rare for a while. In the interim, here’s three things that have caught my eye lately:

02 ESCAPE PODS
02 have a service enabling people to set up their own text services over SMS. You can create a POD online with info, announcement or voting functionality, and then invite people to join. It seems to have been running for a while, as one of the listed pods is about who will win last summer’s Big Brother. Very interesting service, and amusing to see the pods already created – jokes, gossip and organising beer nights seem to the be the most popular uses, but its impossible to tell if these have been set up by users or planted by 02. It would be very handy if you were organising a football club or other regular social gathering, though. Swiss ‘e-fashion’ company SKIM used to provide a similar service, and I used their version for the first SMS project I curated in 2000. Blimey – I’ve just been to the SKIM site, and was amazed to find they still exist, although they seem to be less interested in clothes and more in networking/communications.

4LUV
4Luv is a project by Siobhan Hapaska and Fiddian Warman (from SODA). Taking a cue from lovers carving their names in trees, 4Luv consists of SMS pagers built into boxes and mounted on trees in Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park. You can text messages to the trees and see them displayed there, although the screen looks a bit small in the photo. Its a bit like the public caches idea that I wrote about a while ago, but much better realised for basing itself on an already existing vernacular writing (or carving) activity. No info about when the work was installed, or if its currently working, though. Anybody see the work in action?

SOCIAL CIRCLES
Finally, Marcos Weskamp has just launched Social Circles, a flash app that maps in real time the activity on a number of mailing lists, including Rhizome and Nettime. He says it’s an attempt to help new members of the list identify the social factors – who posts the most, and who gets the most responses to the posts they send to the list. It seems to be pretty early stages at the moment, as some of the visualisations are pretty simple for a well established and complex list like Nettime.

A nice experiment, though, which will no doubt get hijacked by the those people who periodically infest lists like Rhizome as some kind of email performance art-work, spamming loads of rubbish in the name of art. I’m not on most of these lists these days, but it was interesting to look at the social circles diagrams and recognise some names that were active when I was on the lists a few years ago. I also checked the web archives of the EMPYRE list recently, as they are having a very interesting discussion with Noah Wardrup-Fruin and Nick Montfort about historicizing new media art. There were a number of familiar names from Rhizome and other media art lists, like Brett Staulbaum, Patrick Lichty and Simon Biggs. I wonder where they find the time to participate in so many communities…

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For reasons that are far too boring to go into here, I am a huge baseball fan despite being born in the UK, and follow the Boston Red Sox, the natural US partner to my similarly tragically underperforming football team, Spurs. So inevitably, this article in MIT’s Technology Review caught my eye.

It seems that Curt Schilling, the Sox’s new starting pitcher, is a great fan of chatrooms and forums, regularly contributing to discussions on boards like Sons of Sam Horn. The RedSox owners have also been posting news and opinion on the boards, leaving ESPN and other news outlets in the dark. This enlightened approach to connecting with their audiences has pissed off the broadcasters, as Schilling found out:

Schilling was involved in a chat session when he heard that the hosts of “The Big O“ sports talk show on WEEI were bad mouthing him for privileging the internet over broadcast media. He picked up the phone and called in to fire back. Beginning by saying that he felt that he could get his message out to his supporters most effectively through two channels — the internet and radio — he proceeded to discuss the gatekeeping function of traditional media and the ways they selectively filtered out what he was trying to say. He talked about the power of digital media to cut across hierarchies and to include the public more fully in the process. He talked about the challenges of identity theft online and the steps he’s taken to make sure his fans know it’s really him when he posts things. And he told the reporters that it was their job to track down the news, not his job to hand it to them. “Maybe this is a medium you’re going to have to start following if you want to get the story,“ he said.

Its fantastic that a sport star – not normally respected for their intelligence – should be clued-in to the radical nature of digital media, let along passionate enough to defend it in public and *also* raise some cogent points about idendity theft in the bargain. All we need is a Howard Dean style campaign, and we can make him MVP before the new season even kicks off. Go Schilling! Go Sox! Go Interweb!

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BlinkMedia and Centrifugal Forces, who have just missed out on a BIMA award for their SMS project CityPoems, have announced a new project for early next year – Surface Patterns:

SURFACE PATTERNS is an evolving archive of local history which uses mobile phone technologies and the internet to bring to life and celebrate communities’ unique hidden histories. Sympathetic signage will be used to indicate to pedestrians that a site has been tagged. By texting a keyword, registered mobile phone users will be able to access text, sound files and even photographs revealing how the site has transformed over the years. A living archive will evolve as users are invited to give contributions to add to the archive of oral history accounts. Information will be collected on a website featuring an aerial map allowing visitors to see at a glance the physical map of urban development and community memories and watch the growth of the site as it evolves.

Looks really interesting – I remember having a conversation with Rachel Baker about a similar idea when she was doing a residency in Hull. There’s a lot of people interested in augmenting and tagging real space with mobile data, but few examples that have built any real momentum. There’s real potential for this kind of augmented reality social software, but the trick has always been developing an interface that will make sense in such a rich sensual environment. The simple ‘tags’ proposed in Surface Patterns make more conceptual and aesthetic sense that GPS or other attempts to fix messages in a virtual space. Why bother triangulating positions on virtual networks when you can just slap a sticker on a wall?

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The Merz Akademie run a really interesting looking programme of courses in applied arts and electronic media, with a roster of excellent lecturers, including Judith Barry and net.art pioneer Olia Lialina. The reason I’ve found this out is that my refferer logs have been full of links to posts from the Merz Akademie’s internal webmail clients over the last week or so. I don’t get a huge amount of traffic here, so any new links that generate a lot of traffic sticks out a mile (eg Cory linking the ‘Things of the Past’ post on BoingBoing). I assume this traffic means there is a discussion going on that refers to one of the essays on this site. I’d love to participate in this – anyone at the Merz Academie want to email a summary?

I’ve really resisted making ‘meta’ posts on this blog, as I want to use it more as a way of collecting stuff I write, rather than writing about the process of writing a blog, but in this case I’m just too damned curious. Apologies – normal service of increasingly obscure, long-winded and pretentious writing about ‘digital culture’ will resume as soon as possible.

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Phil provides an excellent excerpt from a mid-19th Century studio photographer talking about how he conned customers into taking other people’s pictures as their own:

Once a sailor came in, and as he was in haste, I shoved on to him the picture of a carpenter, who was to call in the afternoon for his portrait. The jacket was dark, but there was a white waistcoat; still I persuaded him that it was his blue Guernsey which had come up very light, and he was so pleased that he gave us 9d. instead of 6d. The fact is, people don’t know their own faces. Half of ‘em have never looked in a glass half a dozen times in their life, and directly they see a pair of eyes and a nose, they fancy they are their own.

It seems incredible think that people once were so unaware of what they looked like in our image-conscious age. How many people these days could be passed off with another’s photograph as their own? Most of us probably look in mirrors half a dozen times a day, let alone a lifetime. But even so, we often have misconceptions of what we look like – people rarely like images of themselves, perhaps having a mental image of someone better-looking. Roland Barthes described this as the ‘image-repetoire’; the condition of never being able to see yourself as others see you – a dynamic, mobile subject – but instead as a fleeting series of glimpses captured in the lens or mirror:

“But I never looked like that!” – How do you know? What is the “you” you might or might not look like? Where do you find it? – by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body?
You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repetoire of its images.

This is from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, a late work produced before his famous Camera Lucida, and equally melancholy and poetic. Its a kind of autobiography, but structured – like A Lover’s Discourse – as a series of aphorisms, preceded by a small photo album and the handwritten introduction:

“It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel”

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I was reading WIRED for the first time in ages the other day, and found myself getting annoyed all over again at the breathless prose they use in their articles. In particular, they have a house style that creates an illusion of an asymptotic revolution – every innovation is just about to change the world for ever, a viewpoint that might have been reasonable in the long-boom era, but seems almost naive now.

In particular, this article on sleep medication included some really lazy cliches, from ‘kiss your xxx goodbye’ to ‘xxx is a thing of the past’. This last phrase struck me as probably the key metaphor for Wired’s breathless optimism about the future – no matter what the technology, it is truly ‘wired’ if it can promise to relegate some part of our dirty present to the dustbin of history, making way for a cleaner, brighter tommorrow.

So, I started wondering exactly what this wired future would look like. One quick search query later, I can now give you an exclusive preview of what you should be excising from your life if you want to be truly cutting-edge. According to WIRED, all these things will soon be history. Use this list to guide your consumer purchasing, stock holdings, personal relationships, or whatever decisions you might need to make about your future. In the event of this future failing to materialise, please direct your complaints to Wired’s editorial team. I’m merely the messenger here…

Incessant calling and voicemails might become a thing of the past
Long delays in counting absentee ballots would be a thing of the past
Housework is already a thing of the past
In just 20 years, chores will be a thing of the past
Hard landings would be a thing of the past
Paying royalties for George Gershwin tunes could become a thing of the past
Remembering long lists of website passwords [will be] a thing of the past
Chronic insomia could be a thing of the past
Could the deafening roar of gas-powered engines become a thing of the past?
Entertainment as a passive group experience is a thing of the past
Devices that serve us for 10 or 15 years are becoming a thing of the past
Capacity problems might indeed be a thing of the past
Fear of public singing in karaoke bars may soon be a thing of the past
System outages should become a thing of the past
Pirated software will soon be a thing of the past
Responsible journalism seems to be a thing of the past in the U.S. [!]
The concept that a writer will get paid for writing may soon be a thing of the past
Web searches and their ten pages of useless results [will be] a thing of the past
Downloads and slow surfing [will be] a thing of the past
The friendly corner betting shop could eventually be a thing of the past
Good sound will be a thing of the past
Needless pain and surgery may be a thing of the past
Fixed pricing is a thing of the past
Modern warfare will soon be a thing of the past
Twenty years from now paper will be a thing of the past
Writer’s cramp is soon to be a thing of the past
Editors [will] be a thing of the past
The home user buying a personal computer will be a thing of the past
Burnt toast is now a thing of the past
Murdoch’s distribution plans are a thing of the past

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Steina Vasulka

Woody Vasulka

Takahiro Iimura

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Cory Arcangel

Dennis Hopkins

Malcolm Le Grice

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MIT Press have recently published New Media: 1740-1915, an excellent series of essays looking at the social effects of various ‘new’ media from history, from the status of zograscopes as ‘virtual reality’ in 18th C England, to the reception of early telephone systems in Amish communities.

One of the most interesting essays is Ellen Gruber Garvey’s ‘Scissorizing and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating’, an account of the vernacular use of newspaper and magazine material in personal albums and collections. Garvey makes comparisons between the process of making scrapbooks and personal websites, but there is an even more striking comparison to weblogs.

Scrapbooks were a ‘coping’ strategy for old media at a time when distribution via railroads and cheap printing processes led to an overwhelming surplus of popular magazines and newspapers. Garvey describes them as “a new subcategory of media – the cheap, the disposable, and yet somehow tantalizingly valuable, if only their value could be seperated from their ephemerality”. Scrapbooks were one just one strategy for indexing and archiving cuttings, including commercial clipping services, but scrapbooks represented a private, vernacular response to this information revolution. This remaking of popular media is clearly a precursor of the current blogging phenomenon, and Garvey’s analysis of scrapbook making introduces some concepts that are useful in discussing blogging as part of our contemporary media culture.

Reading as ‘Gleaning’
Garvey draws on Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘reading as poaching’ to describe the cutting and recompiling of published texts, but takes issues with the aggressive, macho overtones of de Certau’s ‘poaching’, as the scrapbook maker seeks to recombine and redistribute as well as to reclaim.

She introduces the term ‘Gleaning’, taken after the practise of picking up that which is consciously left behind. Gleaners were peasants who gather spare grain or fruit when farmers had followed (biblical) advice not to harvest all their crop, but to leave some for those who needed it most. In a similar fashion, scrapbook makers ‘harvest’ residual meanings or signification from the printed word, recombining it into new, vernacular, forms.

Is ‘gleaning’ a useful term to describe the process of selection, re-contexualisation and re-distribution that we see in weblogs? The ‘gift economy’ ideology of gleaning would be something that most bloggers would endorse, arguing that the protection of intellectual property rights through DRM technologies limit the future cultural mutation of information, and stifles innovation. But this argument often falters on the binary definitions of digital copying as piracy/freedom – perhaps ‘gleaning’ is a useful term to describe a model of ‘fair use’ that can’t be reduced by its opponents to total anarchy?

Exchanges
Where most scrapbook production was for private consumption, some of this practise was reflected in professional publishing. Newspapers would pick up and run stories from other regions, and editors would send ‘exchange’ editions to encourage this practise, carried by the post office for free. These exchanges were seen as a healthy part of the distribution of information, not a form of piracy or plagiarism. Garvey quotes a contemporary journalist: “A man who reads the daily exchanges of the country may see an idea travel from the Atlantic slope to the Pacific and from the Pacific to the Atlantic as visibly as a train of freight cars runs over the Vanderbilt system”.

The ‘exchanges’ of today are the blog indexing systems – the daypops and technoratis that allow us to track memes as they spread – or the uber-blogs at the top of the power curve. Garvey describes a quote from a missionary, suggesting that ‘[even if one column] of interesting religious matter could be introduced into each of [the nation's many] papers, it would be equivalent to the annual distribution of more than sixteen hundred million tract pages”. The missionaries of today, selling tales of consumption rather than redemption, are already trying to find ways of using blogging as marketing, and to harness the power of its exchanges.

Scrapbooks
The material forms of scrapbooks also have echos in their modern, digital counterparts. Some people used old books as the basis of their scrapbook, leading to a palimpsest of original text and jumbled scraps, with columns overlapping columns and sentences running together. Soon, custom-made books were created for clippings, some with classifications like the ‘Scrapbook Systems’ advertised in 1891, with separate volumes for ‘Personal; Politics; Social Sciences; Health; Biographical; History; Book Reviews; Christianity; The Bible; Sermons; Temperance & Miscellaneous’. With the exemption of the latter religious headings, we can see echoes between these classifications and the structures of many a portal or weblog.

As well as classifcation, books were produced to aid in the production of scrapbooks. Most successful was Mark Twain’s Patent Scrap-Book, a volume with ready-gummed strips in columns, produced in different versions for authors, children, newspaper clippings, pictures, or even ‘druggists prescription books’. Twain’s scrap book earned him more than $50,000, more than any other book he published. The creators of contemporary blogging tools are following a distinguished historical line of authors-turned-entrepreneurs.

Vernacuar media as ‘parergon‘
So what is different about blogging? When so many similarities join the victorian aesthete clipping news articles into Mark Twain’s scrapbooks and the 21st century blogger linking news articles from the BBC or ZDNET, why are we getting so excited? Why do we think that blogging is democratising media? Haven’t we been here before?

Many media technologies started with significant vernacular cultures alongside their professional ones. 19th Century photography was used for both family memento and scientific record, with its technological progression being driven by the former as much as the latter. In his essay on vernacular photography, Geoffrey Batchen uses Derrida’s term ‘parerga’ [literally 'next to main work'] to describe the personal, intimate photographies that have fallen outside the canon of ‘proper’ photography. But as post-modernism has criticized the idea of the canonical text, these vernacular practises have been analysed for their role in defining our culture:

“As a parergon, vernacular photography is the absent presence that determines its medium’s historical and physical identity; it is that thing that decides what proper photography is not.”

At first glance, it might seem as if blogging has been anything other than an ‘absent presence’. The amount of commentary it generates in relation to actual activity looks like hyperbole, and that alone differentiates it from the invisible, domestic production of scrapbooks. Predictions of blogging’s cultural impact focus on the point at which its radical connectedness will overthrow the slower, centrally-editorialised journalism of the media dinosaurs. Clay Shirky’s influential work on Power Laws has shown that in massively distributed systems, the cream rises to the top even faster than when there are clear definitions between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ output. This mass-amateurisation does not lead to equality, but to an accelerated focus of attention, a hype-tornado that quickly blows the strongest memes to its apex.

But the value of blogging will not just be measured by the few ‘winners’ who manage to compete or succeed the incumbent media hierarchy. Previously the economies of mass distribution have meant that the wider social practises of ‘new’ media have been invisible to history for many years, whilst academics fought over the establishment of a ‘canon’, authenticating the practise within an accepted cultural milieu. Vernacular media – the scrapbooks, family photo albums and intimate mementos – have lain in attics, trunks and cupboards for years until time gives them a patina of curiosity worthy of a critic’s attention. It is only then that these ‘absent presences’ are discovered, and the single line of media history bifurcates into a messy, branching network of amateur and professional innovation.

With blogging, we have the opportunity to study the vernacular as it happens. As critics, we should be embracing the whole power curve – looking at the stars at the top for their interface with professional media, the ‘exchanges’ in the middle to see how the network shares its own influences and resources, but also to the long, dark tail of vernacular production.

It is rare to be able to find such a wealth of social and cultural production with such ease, but worrying that this material is less likely to last than the gummed strips of the 19th Century. The technological ephemerality of this medium means that we will not have the luxury of stumbling across these intimate mementoes in 100 years time. There will be no scrapbooks lying in attics, no photographs enamelled onto tombstones. One of the most enlightening social documents of our age wil be erased by the very attention-economy that pushes its brightest stars into the history books.

We do need to ask questions about how blogging might change the landscape of journalism, broadcast media or politics, but we also need to notice how it is affecting the lives of its millions of practioners, every day, in subtler ways. How is this vernacular practise helping people make sense of their lives? How is it affecting their concept of family, friends, work or home? How is it changing the grammar and discourse of language itself?

History tells us that we won’t get the answer to these questions from the loudest voices, as power is inextricably linked with assimilation. Only by listening to the gleaners, those picking at the forgotten edges of the field, will we understand the real beauty of the landscape we are creating.

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Inevitably, Google has the answer.

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University of London
Department of Cultural Studies

MS201 – Media, Culture and Identity Examination Paper
Date: 15th May 2018
Time: 2.00-4.00pm

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES
Answer TWO questions. Each question carries equal marks, Do not use substantially the same material in more than one answer. Search technologies are allowed, but indicate the resource locator, or search query and product used, for each reference. Please read questions carefully.

1) “Identity is the product of your networks” – Discuss this assertion, referencing historical debates around trust and reputation in technological communication.
2) To what extent did the rise of mobile communication networks in third-world countries between 2005-2010 affect the media industries in: The Former United States of America; Sub-Saharan Africa; Iraq; Australasia; The Celtic Union?
3) What was ‘Scheduling’? Discuss giving examples from the major linear media of the late 20th Century.
4) Some analysts argue that individual privacy should not be linked to economic activity. What possible other solutions exist for state validation of citizens’ cultural consumption? What are the pros and cons of these solutions?
5) How has the dissolution of Google led to the ‘balkanisation’ of information? How would the information industry have developed had the company remained a globally owned public utility?
6) Describe 3 of the following content formats for popular media, and their impact on society: Reality Feeds; Anytime Radio; VoteSport; Extreme Celebrity, NeighbourhoodWatch.
7) In 2016, the average UK citizen had over 30 petabytes of media storage. This would have equated to over 500 years of continuous media consumption at typical consumption rates in the year 2000. How have simultaneous viewing technologies changed the way in which media is produced and consumed in the UK? Describe the impact of the ‘Media Revolutions’ of the last 10 years, in particular the demise of News International in 2008, the formation of the World Cultural Trade Organisation in 2010, the ‘G21’ group of independent media nations, and the rise in decentralised media terrorist networks.
9) How has PersonalJournalism affected notions of ‘integrity’ and ‘truth’ in news production? In your opinion, have these changes been beneficial or detrimental?

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The University of York

POLITICS B – THE WORLD OF POLITICS

Answer THREE questions, at least one from each section.

SECTION 1: THE DISCIPLINE OF POLITICS

1. Describe and assess the impact of two of the following political theories: Marxism, Capitalism, Fundamentalism, De-centrism, Radical Consumerism.
2. Discuss the following historical political concepts, and the key drivers behind their demise: State, Parliament, Manifesto, Election.
3. What contribution does decentralised network theory make to our understanding of politics?
4. Why has religion been such a central preoccupation and focus of debate in political science over the last 20 years?
5. Identify the main contributions, if any, of either environmentalism or ultra-local militancy to the study and practise of politics.

SECTION 2: WORLD POLITICS

1. What are some of the important factors that have contributed to the current division between the ‘conscious’ and ‘agnostic’ global political networks?
2. What role have assassinations played in political history? Discuss citing either Sweden, 2003; Tokyo 2005; Rio de Janeiro 2008 or London, Marseille, Frankfurt, Porto & Dublin, 2012.
3. Has the rise of CityStates in China contributed positively or negatively to the development process?
4. How did EasyPolitics lead to the rise of Radical Consumerism in Western Europe? Discuss giving examples of European Chief Executive Stelios Haji-Ioannou’s use of mass-media and ‘just-in-time’ politics.
5. “There is no such thing as money, only differences in your personal value network” – discuss in relation to the phasing out of the Euro and Dollar in 2015.

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Like Matt Jones, I’ve been asked to produce a few illustrations of potential futures for my work. Unlike Matt, I find it incredibly hard to try and synthesise the huge number of potential scenarios into something that isn’t cliched or too predictable. So whereas Matt managed to fire out 8 over a weekend, it’s taken me nearly two weeks to come up with 2. I always have the problem of how to write scenarios – Phil has pointed out how easy it is to fall into the trap of technological determinism, or to make the whole story just exposition. I’ve ended up using a cheap trick – I’ve adopted exam papers as a structure for two of the scenarios, one based on Politics, one on Media Studies. I’ve found that the exam paper structure has helped keep the writing short and to the point, although its sometimes been hard to encapsulate a lot of potential change in a few sentences. Hopefully, they give you enough information to indicate what has changed and act as a starting point for further speculation, but I’m also worried they might just be too damn confusing. Any comments welcome…

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Matt Webb has been working on a social software application to replicate ‘glancing‘ – the kind of low-level social interaction we use to confirm the social status of a group, or as a precursor to more attentive communication. Having been exposed to critical theory when I was far too vunerable (ie, as an art student in the early ’90’s), I couldn’t help comparing Matt’s ‘glancing’ with the Lacanian ‘gaze‘.

Glancing is proposed as a way of technologically representing signifiers of assurance – the nod, wink or sly look that passes between members of a social group to let someone else know you’re with them. As Matt uses IM infrastructures as the base of the ‘glancing’ protocol, it is asynchronous, so the ‘glances’ have a prolonged life, starting intense and gradually falling after an hour or so. This way, people who are not at their desktops can see the recent history of glances and respond, perhaps encouraging other group members to glance until there is a quorum of attention for an IM chat.

Lacan’s concept of the ‘Gaze’ is similarly concerned with reassurance and identity. Its root is in the ‘mirror stage’ of child development, when the infant first recognises the image in the mirror as itself, and so enters a symbolic order in which the ‘real’ is lost in a ’screen’ of signifiers and representations. The confusion between this screen of our idealised projections, and the intangible ‘real’ is the heart of Lacanian Psychoanalytic theory, and was productively used in the feminist film theories of Laura Mulvey, amongst others.

But the Gaze has an uncanny element – look too closely and you realise that the screen of your projected desires looks back – it has a presence (the trace of the ‘real’) that destabilises your position as the centre of your projected universe. Lacan illustrates this with a pretty bizarre anecdote involving a sardine can bobbing about in a harbour – better to use his other example, Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’, an almost uncanny illustration of the concept. In this painting, the two ambassadors are pictured with objects that represent their wealth and status, a literal ’screen’ of their desires. At the bottom, the anamorphically distorted image of a skull represents morality, a sideways glance at the ‘real’ behind the ’screen’ of their life achivements.

Will Matt’s Glancing elide into this uncanny territory? Will the soft throb of the glance icon invoke the warm glow of friendship, or will it feel more like the goosebump sensation of someone staring at the back of your head? Matt suggests that the glance is a form of empty communication, like the blank SMSes sent between Japanese schoolchildren. Lacan tells us that there is no empty communication, that even the shiny surface of a sardine can ‘looks back’ at us by participating in the forest of signs that make up our symbolic order. For Mulvey, the gaps between film frames reveal the fetishised world of cinema as nothing but a ’screen’, and reminds us of the unbridgeable gap between our desires and the ‘real’.

Even empty communication carries a message, like a seat still warm from the last person who sat there. By introducing a half-life to the split-second glance, Matt is opening up an uncanny world of absence as well as a new protocol for presence.

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Matt Webb has been working on a social software application to replicate ‘glancing‘ – the kind of low-level social interaction we use to confirm the social status of a group, or as a precursor to more attentive communication. Having been exposed to critical theory when I was far too vunerable (ie, as an art student in the early ’90’s), I couldn’t help comparing Matt’s ‘glancing’ with the Lacanian ‘gaze‘.

Glancing is proposed as a way of technologically representing signifiers of assurance – the nod, wink or sly look that passes between members of a social group to let someone else know you’re with them. As Matt uses IM infrastructures as the base of the ‘glancing’ protocol, it is asynchronous, so the ‘glances’ have a prolonged life, starting intense and gradually falling after an hour or so. This way, people who are not at their desktops can see the recent history of glances and respond, perhaps encouraging other group members to glance until there is a quorum of attention for an IM chat.

Lacan’s concept of the ‘Gaze’ is similarly concerned with reassurance and identity. Its root is in the ‘mirror stage’ of child development, when the infant first recognises the image in the mirror as itself, and so enters a symbolic order in which the ‘real’ is lost in a ’screen’ of signifiers and representations. The confusion between this screen of our idealised projections, and the intangible ‘real’ is the heart of Lacanian Psychoanalytic theory, and was productively used in the feminist film theories of Laura Mulvey, amongst others.

But the Gaze has an uncanny element – look too closely and you realise that the screen of your projected desires looks back – it has a presence (the trace of the ‘real’) that destabilises your position as the centre of your projected universe. Lacan illustrates this with a pretty bizarre anecdote involving a sardine can bobbing about in a harbour – better to use his other example, Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’, an almost uncanny illustration of the concept. In this painting, the two ambassadors are pictured with objects that represent their wealth and status, a literal ’screen’ of their desires. At the bottom, the anamorphically distorted image of a skull represents morality, a sideways glance at the ‘real’ behind the ’screen’ of their life achivements.

Will Matt’s Glancing elide into this uncanny territory? Will the soft throb of the glance icon invoke the warm glow of friendship, or will it feel more like the goosebump sensation of someone staring at the back of your head? Matt suggests that the glance is a form of empty communication, like the blank SMSes sent between Japanese schoolchildren. Lacan tells us that there is no empty communication, that even the shiny surface of a sardine can ‘looks back’ at us by participating in the forest of signs that make up our symbolic order. For Mulvey, the gaps between film frames reveal the fetishised world of cinema as nothing but a ’screen’, and reminds us of the unbridgeable gap between our desires and the ‘real’.

Even empty communication carries a message, like a seat still warm from the last person who sat there. By introducing a half-life to the split-second glance, Matt is opening up an uncanny world of absence as well as a new protocol for presence.

Kayak

Sea

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Lumen are one of the most interesting new media organisations in the UK, and their annual conference and performance programme, EVOLUTION, stands head and shoulders above most of the flash-fests that call themselves ‘cutting-edge’. EVOLUTION is different for two reasons – it specialises in representing seminal historical work from artists that have been hugely influential, but neglected by the mainstream; and it is programmed by two people – Dennis Hopkins and Will Rose – who have an incredible knowledge and passion about this area, so manage to curate programmes with depth, texture and real insight.

This year’s programme has many higlights, including presentations and exhibitions by Kevin McCoy, a walk around Leeds by the Survellance Camera Players, and the ‘commodore 64 video graffiti’ of Cory Arcangel and BEIGE. Historically, there’s a presentation by Dan Graham, videos by Nam June Paik, and Woody & Steina Vasulka talking about 30 years at The Kitchen, the seminal NY media organisation and venue. Best of all is ‘Liquid Modernity’, a conversation between radical sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and entropy artist Gustav Metzger. Bauman’s writing on globalisation, post-modernity and sociology proposes real solutions rather than pat observations, and Metzger’s artistic career has continually challenged the commodity fetishes of the art world. In conversation, they will be a heady mix. Book those train tickets for Leeds now…

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Currently jet-lagged, and catching up after a lovely trip to San Francisco, spent eating in fine restaurants, digging for old vinyl and getting more used to taking pictures with my medium format camera. Whilst I was away, I didn’t go online once, and hardly read a newspaper, so I’ve got that weird dislocated experience of picking through nearly two weeks of news in small, non-linear fragments.

Two major stories broke that directly affect what I do – the (long-awaited) announcement of who would lead the Government review of the BBC’s Internet Services, and Greg Dyke trailing the Creative Archive in his Edinburgh speech. The two are symbiotically related, in that the Creative Archive is one illustration of what the BBC’s role on the internet should be in the future. I’d like to think I had a part to play in the Creative Archive – I organised an event with Larry Lessig in February, then took some BBC people over to see Larry and Brewster Kahle in SF whilst I was at ETCON, and have contributed to the project since. But the truth is, the idea of doing something with the archive online had been kicking around the organisation for ages – the team I run at the BBC have been developing concept ideas in this area for the last 3 years, and there have been many, many others trying to find ways to do something with the vast cultural heritage of the organisation. Danny has written an excellent article for the Guardian Online about the annoucement, and followed it up with a couple of good blog posts. The comments on Danny’s posts are really interesting, in particular about the scale of the project, and what it could feasibly achieve in its first iterations.

I’m really pleased the project was mentioned in Greg’s speech, although the debate doesn’t seem to have kicked off in the press over here. Regardless of that, it makes the BBC a *very* exciting place to work at the moment, and actually makes me want to get back to work. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever come back from a holiday and felt like that…

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Christiane Paul, one of the most experienced new media curators in the US, has written a book for Thames & Hudson’s canonical ‘World of Art’ series on Digital Art. There have been a number of books recently trying to pick themes out of the heady world of new media culture over the last 10 years, including Lev Manovich’s ‘Language of New Media’ (Lev! stop using frames!) and Noah Wardriup-Fruin’s ‘New Media Reader’.

Christiane’s book focuses on art, rather than the broader impacts of new media, and is a pretty good survey, starting with some context from Nam June Paik and Marcel Duchmap (of course…). Its a broad sweep of work, covering net.art, networked installation, online performances and ‘tactical media’. There’s also mention of mobile projects, including ‘Speakers Corner’, a project I was involved in.

I’m glad Christiane included that project, as its one of the things I’m most proud of, despite the protracted development and extended rebuild. It also means Jaap de Jonge gets a credit in the index – he deserves to reserve a place in the historicising of new media art, as he has created some of the most compelling, and accessible public art pieces of the last 10 years. And it also means that a corner of the canon of digital media will be forever Huddersfield…

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Forethought, a Labour thinktank on the future, have published a report on how they think Britain will change by 2020. I’m about halfway through the report, and most of the assumptions are not that radical – aging population, increased consumer expectations from public services, decline of manufacturing sector and rise in importance of ICT. But there is one statistic that has stopped me in my tracks:

“all of the phone calls made in 1984 are now made in less than a single day”

Annoyingly, they don’t give a reference for that statistic, or say whether they mean the UK or global communications market. But assuming its true, thats an amazing statistic – in 17 years, the amount of phone calls we make has increased 365 times. Its one of those stats that gives you an almost vertiginous perspective on the progress of technology. What did we do with all that extra time in 1984? What are we doing with all those extra calls? There is no analysis of whether they include internet access in the stats, but even so, that wouldn’t account for an increase of that scale.

It illustrates how communication technology changes society in subtle ways. We don’t end up with jetpacks, food pills or homes under the sea, but instead our lives change gradually, then exponentially, until we can’t remember what life was like before those technologies existed, even if this was less than 20 years ago.

In a previous job, I had to sort through the archive of a photography gallery, including carbon copies of all the gallery’s correspondence with artists in the 1970’s and 80’s. These conversations would take place over days, even weeks, as letters were sent and replies drafted. Nowadays, the same conversations would happen in a day, at most, using email. But we still ran the same number of exhibitions every year, with roughly the same number of artists, in 1997 as they did in 1977. What did the gallery staff in 1977 do with all their time? And what were we doing in 1997 with all our calls, emails and faxes?

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I was looking at this timeline of potential futures, and the bit on virtual reality and consumer robotics struck a nerve. People have been talking about VR taking off for over 20 years now. It made me think about certain ideas that asymptotically extend into the future, never seeming to actually get any nearer in real life. These ideas all seem to exist at the extreme edges of scenarios, either utopian or dystopian.

Technologies, like VR, that fall into this category often have technical or form factors that prevent them from catching a hook into the dynamics of real life. By existing mainly in labs, they don’t get the chance to get misused and abused by real users, and so never quite touch down on the street.

Other more conceptual ideas about the future are often just manifestations of rapture-like fantasies about cataclysmic change caused by some unstoppable force. These type of fantasies are closely linked to our insecurities about the limits of human agency, and take many forms depending on the belief systems of the author. Perversely, they are as much about reassurance as threat, as they imagine an event that shows all our beliefs about controlling our environment or destiny to be hollow illusions. If you’re struggling to make sense of your life, thats a reassuring thought.

But anyway, lets not go down that route. I started this post intending to write a list of ‘perpetual futures’ and their distance from real life:

Reality being replaced by VR – 15-20 years
Sentient Robots – 20-30 years
Curing all illnesses – 20-40 years
Living under the sea – 20-50 years
Colonising other planets – 50-100 years
Uploading consciousness/escaping the biological body – 50-100 years
Time travel – 100-500 years
World Peace through impact of technology – 100-200 years
World War through impact of technology – 100-200 years
World Peace through intervention from divine being – 1-1000 years
World War through intervention from divine being – 1-1000 years
World Peace through intervention from extra-terrestrials – 50-500 years
World War through intervention from extra-terrestrials – 50-500 years
Boston Red Sox winning the World Series – infinity

Any other suggestions?

[Thanks to thingsmagazine for the link]

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I love these two quotes from lasagnafarm’s interview with someone who’s just left friendster:

But really, walking up to strangers on the street and awkwardly introducing yourself is the new Friendster. Haven’t you heard?

Friendster is 75% hot 23-year-olds. Or there’s some serious trick photography going on. This is the perfect forum for them. It’s a demographic that likes to see themselves summarized in bullet points and photo-booth pictures

[via connectedselves]

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Tom Dolan writes about sony’s proposed PDP, and wonders when we’re going to get rid of the concept of the ‘phone’ as a device, and admit that it is merely one of a number of possible applications on a ‘mobile data-linked device’. But is the phone merely an application? It seems that the mobile phones, in particular, are almost ritual objects, imbued with emotional associations that we don’t assign to other devices.

I’ve been digging around for some historical perspectives on how the phone became such an emotional object, and found an excellent excerpt from the book ‘America Calling’. The final section quotes a report on the effect that the telephone had on women in isolated farm communities:

The most dramatic and consistent testimony in the first few decades of the twentieth century indicated that rural people, especially farm women, depended heavily on the telephone for sociability, at least until they owned automobiles. These women used the telephone to break their isolation, organize community activities, keep up on news, help their children maintain friendships, and so on. Observers repeatedly claimed that telephoning sustained the social relations – and even the sanity – of women on scattered homesteads.” Industry men were among such observers. For example, the North Electric Company stated in 1905, “The evil and oppression of solitude on woman is eliminated.” An officer of an Ohio telephone company wrote the same year:

“When we started… the farmers thought that they could get along without telephones…. Now you couldn’t take them out. The women wouldn’t let you even if the men would. Socially, they have been a god-send. The women of the county keep in touch with each other, and with their social duties, which are largely in the nature of church work.”

Tom suggests that the ‘you’ in your mobile device is your data, and so the device is just a dumb brick that stores data and applications. I disagree – the ‘you’ in your mobile device is the intimate connections that the device enables. Its this network that makes us imbue the phone with its emotional power – the hope or dread of its many possible connections. When a phone rings, or a text message bleeps, who doesn’t get a small jump in the stomach, a fleeting sense of wonder at who it could be?

The function that enables this emotional connectivity – telephony, IM, SMS, etc – might subtly alter, but whatever it is, we’ll continue to be in thrall to the emotional connections it enables, not the application itself. And while we have that emotional connection, the phone will always be a whole lot more than just an app.

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One of the things I commissioned in my old job was Speakers Corner, an interactive art project that links a 15m LED screen with the web, the street and text messaging. The artist who developed the idea was the fantastic Jaap De Jonge, who is not only one of the most interesting digital public artists around at the moment, but was also incredibly patient during the projects extended gestation period.

It was first commissioned at the end of 1998, and almost immediately I was asked to step into another role in the organisation, so had to put development of the project on the back burner. Jaap was very patient during this time, and also put up with a curator (me) that kept asking for more things to be added (like SMS functionality). In the end, though, it rocked. The opening night in June 2001, when groups of people stood on a Huddersfield street corner and battered the thing with SMSes, was fantastic.

Then genius artist/coder dorian mcfarland was roped in to totally re-write the back-end to make it more flexible, but I buggered off to a new job before he got a chance to do it. I only found out a few weeks ago that he’s been struggling with it for the last 2 years. I’m *really* sorry Dorian…

But now its back up, and looks 100 times better than it did when I left it. And the new Creative Director, Tom Holley, is commissioning more work for it, so hopefully they’ll be able to use the project for all sorts of experiments around digital networks, public space, and social writing. The one thing that I really wanted when commissioning the project (and that Jaap was the only artist to understand) was to create a digital public artwork that was a flexible, configurable *interface*, rather than a shiny badge that doesn’t change for 5 years and just looks increasingly out of date.

The fact that its now in version 2.0 is a good sign that its more like an on-going software project than a static, white-cube object. And like software, the initial release was the product of lots of delays, late-nighters and last minute fixes that we promised ourselves we’d fix in the next version, then went through all the same problems all over again.

Most artists wouldn’t be able to let go enough to be able to treat an artwork like a software project. They feel that too much of themselves is contained in the details of the work, and any suggestion that it might have to change or adapt over time threatens their ego. Jaap was confident enough about himself and his practise to want to work hard to make it flexible, and to realise that it was more powerful it could adapt and change. Almost every other artist on the shortlist we had wanted to take a ’signature’ piece and drop it on site (actually, SODA came up with a fantastic idea, but it wasn’t quite as good as Jaap’s).

All in all, I think the curatorial policy for this project would have echoed Wiliam Gibson’s quote – “the street finds its own use for things”. I wanted to find a way of creating something that had that kind of flexibility. The measure of success came one morning, about 3/4 months after the project launch, when I was walking down the street towards the sign. There, immortalised in 15m red LED, was a scrolling message, repeating over and over again:

BOOTHY IS A LADYBOY

I don’t know who boothy was, or who was questioning his gender preference, but it obvioulsy needed saying, and it marked the point at which a few thousand pounds worth of technology became just another surface of the city, and all the more interesting for that.

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This is the second in the series of three interviews I did for a recent essay. In this one, Lucy Kimbell talks about her project Audit:

“Audit is the result of conducting a personal poll in which Lucy Kimbell asks – “What am I worth?” Combining techniques from business analysis and other disciplines, this book uses material gathered from a specially constructed questionnaire to measure a broad range of values about the artist.”
[from the publisher Bookworks website]

Matt Locke: Are there any questions about yourself you refrained from including in Audit? If so, what were they, and why?

Lucy Kimbell: Yes, loads, things that I wanted to keep inside my public-private boundary mostly for reasons of fear – not wanting to expose myself.  The book is not actually about me but about the interface between me and a group of other people who know me in some way, and the process of finding out things.

ML: How did you choose who to send it to? Was this an empirical or an emotional
decision?

LK: Selecting respondents was partly about who I thought would respond, based on the nature of their relationship to me; partly circumstance and an instant ‘Hey, I’m doing this project…I wonder if you’d consider….’ It was sometimes emotional, sometimes pragmatic, sometimes me being a chancer. This did include people I think don’t like me or find me difficult. and vice versa.  Sometimes I gave it to people I had recently met professionally and they seemed to find it easiest to fill in my form.

ML: Did you have an interaction model in mind for the contributors? – did they all see the final book, or did their participation end with the questionnaire?

LK: No one saw the final book except for me, the publisher and designers until it was ready. My interaction model involved respondents filling in the form and sometimes my reminding them to fill it in and send it back, or hassling them a few times, or begging. It also involved slight shifts in the perception of each of us towards each other as a result of the interaction I had initiated. These shifts are alluded to and documented in my notes in the book.

Some of the contributors have seen the final book and mostly they like it, or don’t reveal their real thoughts or feelings. Without exception, on the occasions I gave the book to them in person, they all flicked through the pages looking for any recognisable reference to themselves.

ML: Did anyone expect the project to continue in some form after the publication of the book (eg be updated annually, or lead to more intimate (!) interactions?)

LK: No. But I’d like to set up a lovely graphical page on my site to display feedback to the book.

ML: Has the project changed any of the relationships that it measured?

LK: Yes, all of them in some way. In the same way that any feedback and observation changes everything.

ML: Has the project changed any aspect of your opinion of yourself, or self-esteem?

LK: Yes. I’d rather not say how.

ML: What kind of response have you had to this work ‘as an artwork’? Has it been reviewed/criticised at all?

LK: I’ve had very, very positive feedback from academics and writers including some well known names. In particular sociologists love it. But nothing from the art press that I have seen. Some of the audit form pages were reprinted in Tank magazine.

ML: What other responses have you had to the work? Are these more or less valid to you than its status as a piece of art?

LK: Who decides its status as a piece of art? Sure, it was commissioned as an artist’s book by an established art publisher and I refer to myself as an artist on the blurb on the back. But if ithe book has no or little currency among artists, curators and critics I do have to question its status as a piece of art. It may or not make a difference that I thought of it as a book all the way along. It has to work as a book, in relation to other books, as well as to what art does or can do. I welcome all interesting and considered responses, and particularly the ones that lead to a stimulating conversation.

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A few years ago, in a previous job, I commissioned a number of projects with artists using SMS as a medium. One of them was Tim Etchells, a writer and co-founder of Forced Entertainment, a performance group who have produced some of the most innovative and exciting theatre I’ve seen over the last 10 years. I was really eager to get Tim to consider SMS as a medium, as his writing is very epigrammatic, and his subject matter devoted to the random poetry of urban life. The project he came up with was ’surrender control’, a series of instructions sent as text messages to subscribers over a number of weeks that cleverly traced narratives of desire, trust and intimacy.

As part of an essay I’ve recently written on the project, I asked Tim some questions about ’surrender control’. I really wished I’d found some way of sparking a debate about this project at the time, as it touches on so many issues about narrative, privacy, intimacy and technology that have become even more important as ’social software’ like friendster have gained popularity. Surrender Control explored the darker shadows of communication technologies, illustrating the umheimlich twin of the shiny, happy world of ubiquitous connectivity that we are always being promised (look at those smiles on the Friendster homepage! Everyone’s having such a rad time!). So, rather belatedly, I’m putting this Q&A session with Tim up here, and hope that it sparks some comments. Also, read Jill Walker’s blog for an excellent description of what it felt like to participate in the project.

TIM ETCHELLS ON SURRENDER CONTROL:

“Surrender Control is somewhere between a game and a set of dares. The instructions that people will receive vary enormously – some are orders to think about particualr topics, others are invitations to look at the world in a particular way, other instructions are for actions, demands that people behave in particular ways or that they carry out particular tasks.

What interests me about SMS is the intimacy inherent in the form – messages go direct to the phone of an individual, direct to a ‘place’ which is normally occupied by that person’s friends, family or lovers. To create an art work for this context is an invitation, one could say, to whisper in the ears of strangers as they go about their daily business. Surrender Control tries to explore and push the boundaries of what is possible or even permissible in this context.”

Matt Locke:How did you find writing for SMS as a delivery medium?

Tim Etchells: I liked it in the sense that I really enjoy working to limits – the technical limits (text only, a certain number of characters) as well as the limits of the context – one’s expectations of the place and time that people would be receiving the messages. Once I know what the edges of a form are (be it SMS or theatre or video) then I’m happy to play with and disrupt those edges!

ML: What kind of responses were you expecting from participants in the project?
What role did they play in the narrative?

TE: I didn’t have a definite idea of what people would do.. I thought that some would obstinately do nothing! And that some would obediently do everything.. and a lot of middle ground.

There are certainly many instructions where the participants need to make their own decisions about how far they’re willing to go. To me that’s a part of the project. The instructions are proposals, invitations – but there’s undoubtedly an element of flirtatiousness and temptation in what I propose – people have to make their choices about what they’ll do and what they won’t do.

In fact it’s not even that important to me that people follow the instructions. Perhaps what’s just as interesting is to sit in a bar with friends, or ride the bus home or sit with familly in front of the TV and just consider for a moment what it might mean to follow a certain instruction. I think a powerful sense of what the world is, and what our boundaries for acting in it are could emerge from that…

ML: Surrender Control was designed as a one-way project – how did the lack of feedback effect your experience on the project?

TE: I can’t really imagine it working with feedback – it was so solidly built on the fact of none. Feedback would only be interesting to me if it was an interactive piece for ONE phone user at a time (now that would be something to pursue!) ­ ie: response from user is followed by a real response from me and so on. In that sense the piece was a broadcast work – a one to many piece, not a peer to peer piece. But any one receiver always gets their instructions/msg alone.. so it can still feel very personal. I think I constructed it so that the ‘voice’ of my text/instructions could appear personal and one-on-one but also so that it could switch to something more machinic/unsympathetic/relentless.

ML: What kind of narrative structure did you use for the texts? Was this influenced by the limitations of SMS as a medium?

TE: I think the structure was one that developed more musically, or in terms of
increasing demands and dares… It had a ‘pull to excess’ or a pull to the edges of the game that was established… ­ The texts become more and more insistent, stranger, more intrusive and at certain times more frequent or at anti-social times of the day. I tried to make it develop whilst at the same time avoiding any sense of it starting to cohere around a single narrative idea. It’s something I say or think about a lot of my work in a lot of media – I don’t want it to collapse into a narrative, I want it to stay in that state of suspension where narratives are possible, but not confirmed. In this way I’d say I am interested in juggling the elements of story, but not really in telling them! Of course this also connects very well to the context of SMS – as a writer I can’t control the context of receiving, so however much one wants to ‘control’ the meaning of what one writes/sends it is always changed/reinvented/reassembled at the other end. I embrace this.

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[this is a recently finished article commissioned by Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts, based in San Francisco. Thanks to Marisa Olson for the commission, and the artists for their assistance]

Part 1: Three stories about trust.

1: A story about Uncle Roy All Around You by Blast Theory

I’m standing in a red phone booth on the lower half of Regent St, London. Outside, a drunk-looking man in a tweed suit looks desperate to make a phone call, whilst I’m standing here, holding a PDA, waiting for the phone to ring. After what seems like an age, the call comes, and a man’s voice tells me that I have to trust him, and that he has something he has to ask me to do for him. After he finishes the call, I’ve got to head north, take the first left turn, and get into the white limousine that’s parked by the side of the road. I wait in the limousine for about 5 minutes, then a man in a brown suit gets in and sits next to me. Without saying a word, the limousine drives off, and the man starts asking me questions, looking straight ahead all the time. Have I ever had to trust a stranger? Would I be able to help someone I’ve never met if they were in need? Could I be at the end of the phone whenever they needed to call me? Could I commit to that for a year?

2: A story about Surrender Control by Tim Etchells

My mobile makes the two-tone bleep that tells me I’ve got a text message. Scrolling down, the message reads “Write the word SORRY on your hands. Leave it there until it fades”. What should I do with this instruction? Obey it? Delete it? What would happen if I did write SORRY on my hands? I think through the rest of my day – a meeting at work, a packed underground train, meeting my wife in a restaurant… What would people think I was sorry for? Is it a reminder to say sorry, or to be sorry? Would they ask me about it, or would they store the memory, forever affecting their impression of me, of who I am and what I might do? Am I the kind of person who writes messages on their hands about emotional issues? Am I the kind of person who says sorry?

3: A story about Audit by Lucy Kimbell

It’s a Wednesday. I’m at my desk, thinking of ways to not do things that I know I should be doing. I flick through the pile of envelopes in my in-tray, and come across an A4 manila envelope. Inside is a questionnaire from someone I’ve met a few times over the last few years – it’s an audit about her and about our relationship. The questions are strange; like a work appraisal, but veering off into more intimate territory – Would she make a good parent? Do I think she should have children? If she died tomorrow, or if we never communicated again, what are the three things I would miss about her? I start filling out the questionnaire, taking it seriously at first, as if it were a tax form, or a reference for a passport application. I feel like I know her, but we’re acquaintances rather than friends, and some of the questions push me to be more intimate, to imagine parts of her life that I don’t know about. What will she do with this? Why is she asking me? If I drew up a list of people to fill in a similar audit about me, would I include her?

Part 2: Trust, art, and technology

Those stories describe three interactions. Or performances. Or moments in the production, or consumption, of an artwork. Or perhaps they are descriptions of how the production and consumption of an artwork can be reduced to the same act, the same moment. They operate within, to use Nicholas Bourriaud’s term, a ‘relational aesthetic’ – these artworks don’t rely on an encounter with a traditional art object, nor do they substitute that with some transcendent concept of a dematerialised art object. In Bourriaud’s definition, these works exist within “the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”. They are moments to be experienced, not viewed, reaching out and enmeshing themselves in the messy network of conversations and relationships that make up your life.

But these are not ‘happenings’, ‘live art’ or, worst of all, ‘public art’ – these aren’t experiences created to celebrate the liberation of art from the constrictions of the White Cube, and the high capitalist symbolic value bestowed upon art by those hermetically sealed walls. Enough politics already! For some critics, art cannot exist amongst the quotidian without taking to the barricades. It’s damned if it keeps quiet within the safe walls of the museum, and damned if it tries to live outside that space without constantly reminding you of that fact. For isn’t most ‘public’ art exactly like the worst kind of evangelist – carrying a bundle a pamphlets behind its back whilst it tries to disarm you with a handshake? There’s no real risk there – no commitment to existing more than a toddler’s-step from the safe arms of the curators and critics, plaques and pronouncements that silently re-build white gallery walls around their ‘interventions’ into our city streets. Much harder to just put something out there, to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to risk misunderstandings and rejection.

If these works have one thing in common, it is this – they understand how communication technologies have created a series of fissures in everyday life, a series of moments when some small act – a phone call, text message or a letter – creates the possibility of stepping into someone else’s world. Bourriaud is right when he says this kind of work isn’t about the modernist fantasy of progress and opportunity – “Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world: today it is modelling possible universes” . But he then coins the term ‘hands-on utopias’, as if artists had slipped the shackles of the avant-garde project only to engage in the equivalent of community service. The fissures these works inhabit are sometimes more like wounds than open doors. They are intrinsically wound up in the dual morality of communication technology – the yet-to-be-answered phone call could just as easily be a bomb threat as a declaration of love.

Of course, we’ve been here before. Photography, the cultural virus that infected the last century, was heralded as a technology for emancipation and understanding. Given the grand project of uniting the world under an egalitarian flashlight, it instead illuminated our darkest shadows, creating unheimlich Memento Mori. Sophie Calle, in her book Suite Venitienne, embraces this duality, and uses the camera as a tool for an uneasy exploration of desire. Taking a chance encounter with a stranger as a sign, she follows him to Venice, keeping a diary of photos taken with a lens that took photos at 90 degrees from the camera driection. The diary documents, in breathless prose, her stalking of the mysterious ‘Henry B.’ through the streets of Venice. There is no clear justification for the act – it’s a folly, but the desire with which she throws herself into the project always threatens to become something else entirely – “I must not forget that I don’t have any amorous feelings towards Henri B.”

The intimacy of the mobile phone creates a similarly fragmented network of communication and desire. In Tim Etchells’ Surrender Control, a series of flyers were distributed in London with the enigmatic message ‘Do you want to Surrender Control?’ with the instruction to send a text message saying ‘SURRENDER’. A week or so afterwards, a series of instructions were sent back, each from an anonymous source, and increasing in risk over the following days from banal thought experiments (‘Look around. See who’s looking’) to actions that have tangible effects on real life (‘Dial a number one different from that of a friend. If someone answers, try to keep them talking’).

But who is really surrendering control here? Subscribers, experiencing the frisson of an instruction from an unknown Other, can still decide whether to actually obey the actions or not. But the artist risks much more. Nothing heralded this work as ‘art’ – in fact, in online discussions that commented on the project, it was frequently mistaken for a corporate viral marketing campaign . The work exists or not in the mind of the receiver (audience seems too passive a noun, whilst participant assumes an activity that might not actually have taken place). The text message, less than 160 characters long, was easily deleted, and there was no avenue for feedback – like Calle, Etchells wanted an unconsummated relationship. Describing the Other, or giving a motive behind the communication, would have greatly diminished its power – better to let people project from their own intimacies, and imagine their own masters:

“At first I felt as though something was lacking. Motivation, I think. Why would I want to follow these instructions? I wanted more of a story, reasons, causality, a role to fill, perhaps? Who was supposed to be sending these messages? I can easily imagine a messaging sequence like this with a clear narrative frame.
[…]
And yet there is some narrative here. It’s like a very loosely woven net that I slip through easily, but if I’m careful to stay inside it I can pull at threads and find the connections, feel someone else pulling threads pulling me towards them, imagine from the rhythm of the pulling and the messages who that other person might be.

Do everything in the wrong order, was my latest instruction. Shall I? Hmm…”

[fromjill/txt]

Lucy Kimbell’s Audit treads a similarly risky path. By sending out the questionnaire, she risked rejection, or, even worse, earnest responses that could be as disturbing as they were enlightening. In the book published to document the project, she uses a number of critical approaches to frame the responses, from economic theories to sociological. But the work keeps sliding out from under the microscope, with some respondents resisting the format, and Kimbell’s own sidebar comments that never quite give her the last word. So what is it as a document? It’s obviously flawed as a serious piece of research, due to the complicity of researcher and subject, It’s not a portrait of the artist – despite the whole book being ostensibly about her, you could read the whole thing and still pass her by in the street. Instead, it’s a fragile kind of map – a temporary document of a series of relationships, created not according to a strict topography, but by the warp and weft of real life. Those that didn’t respond don’t appear on the map, and the ones that did form a chorus of unreliable narrators. Audit, for the purposes of research, treats relatives and relative strangers with the same even hand, and demonstrates the fragile networks of trust that exist between them.

Part 3: Epilogue

At the end of our car ride around London, the brown-suited stranger asked me for a postcard I’d picked up from a disused office earlier on. Driven by a series of hints and instructions sent to me over the PDA, I’d discovered this office in an otherwise normal block on Regent Street. After rummaging around amongst desks, computers and guidebooks to London, I found a postcard printed with the text ‘When would you ever trust a stranger?’. I wrote, ‘When you have no other choice’, and slipped it into a shirt pocket. Back in the car, we’d parked by the side of the street, near a post box. The stranger asked me to write my phone number on the card, then added an address and stuck on a stamp. “This is the address of a stranger” he said. “There is a post box outside. If you post this card, the stranger will have your number. You will be committing to be there for them, at the end of a phone call, for 12 months. They can call you anytime, for any reason. Will you post the card?”

As the stranger drove off, I stood in the street, the postcard bending in my hand from the wind. I thought about posting the card, about how a simple act would transform a few square inches of ink and paper into a year-long commitment to trust, and being trusted. How many small acts of trust do I commit to every day without thinking about it? How many promises, phone calls, emails, letters? What kind of network is formed by these pushes and pulls – how many knots, how many loose ends?

And finally, how come its taken a stranger to make me think about this?

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Matt Webb has just posted a long, complex, discourse comparing the symbolic forms of archaic art with the connective tissues of the web. Its fascinating to see how he links a vast range of theories about the nature of cause and meaning, from linguistic concepts like parataxis to the social effects of walking down a street. At the end, he poses a very pertinent question:

It’s possible there’s some trend in our virtual worlds: from the creation of a new medium as a paratactic aggregate, how long does it take for it to become part of the real world again, complete with the implicit nothing-is-wasted qualities of the universe? Is this period decreasing? How long did art take, how long did other media take, and by extrapolating this line, can we tell how long before cyberspace becomes a fair place to live?

An interesting question, but phrased this way, it carries the assumption of a historical progression – that a virtual environment is an abstract ‘place’, access to which is restricted by technological, social or cultural factors that are normalised over time. Matt uses the example of archaic art as another virtual world with a different set of barriers to entry – this time due to the cultural signifiers embedded in the spatial arrangement of forms. The stylised figures in Egyptian pot decoration represented the worldview of that culture in a way that has to be investigated by contemporary audiences. We need to interpret the differences between this mode of representation and ours, divided by the fracture point that was the adoption of perspective during the Renaissance.

But to imagine that we have no reference points *at all* to this mode of representation is too simplistic. The belief that theories of representation progressed in a historical line from cave painting to analytical perspective is in itself a cultural formulation, starting with the formalist ‘Strukturanalyse’ of the Vienna School of Art History in the 1930s, and leading to the aesthetic theories of high modernism used by Clement Greenberg to position US Post-War abstract painting as the apothesis of a analytical representation.

Many of the theories Matt refers to are explicit attacks on this cultural construct of a logical historical development, so it seems odd that he relocates his question about the symbolic form of the web within a historically progressive context. The fact is, many different modes of cultural representation exist simultaneously, on both macro and micro-cultural levels, and this was as true in the time of archaic art as it is now. Erwin Panofsky’s ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’ is a good starting point to appreciate the interplay between theories of representation and their wider cultural influences. Since Panofsky, the logically progressive model that sees representation move from a ‘naive’ archaic language to an ‘analytical’ refinement of perspective has been under attack, and representational models that echo earlier historical forms (such as the links between baroque, rococco and art deco) have been re-evaluated.

So what does this mean for the web? Well, if we’re looking to understand the web as Symbolic Form, we need to appreciate that it has never *really* occupied a hermetic ‘virtual’ space, but that even in its earliest forms, it has contained echoes and reflections of pre-existing modes of representation. Even more importantly, these modes of representation are continually being mutated, built upon and erased by its users – sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Alongside this constant process of accrual and modulation, the web occupies a number of positions in relation to other contemporary modes of representation, and is both cause and effect in these relationships. For example, the web has sometimes tried to look like cinema or TV, but equally, these forms have adopted some of the representational modes of the web (eg the mix of visual and textual data on 24hr news channels).

We don’t need to identify a point in time in which the web becomes part of an imagined historical progression of increasingly sophisticated modes of representation. Unlike other technological media of the 20th century, the web has retained a huge amount of flexibility – indeed, mutation and adaption are intrinsic qualities. This means it has retained a myriad of representational forms, from the aping of mass media to the ‘folk art’ of homepages. If we want to understand how the symbolic form of the web illuminates its value as a cause and affect – how it accrues meaning – we need to ask a different question. Instead of asking when cyberspace will become a fair place to live, we need to ask how it is being lived – how it is being folded and adapted into the myriad other representational forms that we use to illustrate our lives.

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If you want to get a perspective on the hype surrounding new technology, its always worth looking back through history to see how the past viewed the future. You often find a few persistent visions that recur every time a new technology comes along. These dreams usually have some kind of transcedent aspect to them, and are continually re-invented from the technological capabilities of the time.

A good example of this is illustrated by this series of victorian postcards giving a vision of the year 2000. There are a few future memes that have come up again and again – like personal flying machines and weather control machines. Another consistent curiosity for futurologists is the sea – it seems we’re always just a few years from living under it or walking on it. I’ve got a fantastic album from 1973 by the Soul Searchers called ‘We the People’ that includes a track called ‘1993′ – “will we all be living/in new homes in the sea/by 1993?” goes the refrain. Funk Futurology – hmmmmmm, nice!

The best thing in this selection of cards is the things they get right – particularly ‘Televised Outside Broadcasting’ and ‘Police X-ray Surveillance Machines’. That last one is almost scarily prescient – but substitute the x-ray with its contemporary heirs DNA and CCTV…

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Eiffel Tower

View from roof of Pompidou Centre

Tuilleries Gardens

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Some more pictures taken whilst relearning how to use my Mamiya C330. These are of the Brighton West Pier, taken after its recent slump, but before it burnt to a skeleton metal framework.

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Fantastic post on cheesebikini (via tomdolan) about a series of random Mobs being organised via email that involve people getting together to chant a particular phrase or do something odd for 10 minutes, then disperse. Random, pointless, and rather beautiful…

Its a bit like a logical extension of the surrender control project I did with Tim Etchells a while ago, where we sent instructions to people over SMS for a week. I’m currently doing an email interview with Tim for an article, and will post the interview to this blog, along with interviews with Lucy Kimbell and Blast Theory.

I thought i’d post an extended excerpt from the email organising these DumbMobs. Its a bit long, but worth it to appreciate the detail and sheer style being put into these events. For my money, this is ART!

(3) Then or soon thereafter, a MOB representative will appear in the bar, wearing one of the “trucker hats” that is so stylish these days. He or she will pass around slips of paper, on which three important pieces of information will be printed: (a) the MOB site, (b) a particular item at the site, and (c) a secret phrase. Commit all three to memory and put the slip in your pocket. ONCE YOU ARE AT THE MOB SITE, NONE OF THESE SLIPS OF PAPER SHOULD BE VISIBLE.

(7) At 7:37 you should disperse. Thank the salespeople for their help, but explain that the item has been “voted down.” NO ONE SHOULD REMAIN AT THE MOB SITE AFTER 7:39.

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I’m currently writing a piece for Camerawork, a journal associated with the San Francisco Camerawork Gallery. The piece looks at three pieces of work – Lucy Kimbell’s Audit, Tim Etchell’s Surrender Control, and Blast Theory’s Uncle Roy, and discusses them in terms of Nicholas Bourriaud’s theory of Relational Aesthetics. Put simply, Bourriaud suggests the term to describe contemporary art that establishes an event or participatory relationship with audiences, challenging them to become ‘users’ as much as ‘viewers’, and to question the role or value of the ‘art object’. Bourriaud makes a distinction between 60’s & 70’s performance art happenings, where participatory events were used to break through the deadlock high modernism had created by fetishising the art object, and 90’s work, where participation is encouraged as a form of game, or a moment of intimate connection in a globally-mediated world. Bourriaud uses the lovely term ‘hands-on utopias’ to describe the social, but not necessarily political, environments these artists create.

I’m using this theory to see if its a productive way of discussing networked art beyond the primarily technological/political discourse that underpinned the first ‘heroic’ [sic] phase of net.art. In particular, I’ve chosen examples that use the interplay of social relationships mediated through technology as their locus, rather than an exploration of the technology per se.

In my research, I’ve come across this excellent article on social architectures by Sal Randolph, an artist and writer based in New York. Large parts of the essay could apply to current debates around ‘Social Software’ as well, including this part that has echoes of Clay’s comments on the use-values we inscribe into the architectures of software:

“Looking further into this idea of use, it becomes clear that for social architectures to exist at all, they must be functional — in other words people have to have a good reason to be part of them (they must have a use for them). Social architectures as artworks are always functional artworks. People need a purpose for becoming part of the social organization beyond the simple fact that they are participating in an artwork, otherwise the motive force of the structure is dead.”

As our understanding of social uses of the internet matures from ‘is anybody out there?’ to ’so what are we going to *do* here?’, so networked art is maturing from its initial investigation of the form-factors and politics of the network to an interest in how people are using networked media to connect, and participate in social exchange. Photography matured from technical experiment to social document as the spectacle of the medium wore off, and so networked art seems to be moving on from defining its borders, becoming concerned with the humans beyond the edges of the network as much as the network itself.

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Phil Gyford links to a very nice article about the way Chinese DJ’s are using the net to get the latest Western music. It seems ‘illegal downloads’ are playing a major part in establishing contemporary music culture, and that part of the social kudos of the downloads is their illegal status:

“Among some in the Chinese underground hiphop scene, only tracks which have been downloaded are considered truly “underground” and thus valuable, while any music which is available for purchase in physical form is seen as being tainted by commerciality to some degree”

This reminds me of the way in which northern soul DJs used to cover up their singles with white labels, so that other DJs or clubbers couldn’t identify the tracks. What’s interesting here is that the physical form itself is seen as ‘uncool’ – only MP3s or anonymous CDRs are seen as ‘authentic’.

Is this, like the fad for i-Pod Parties, a sign that music culture is mutating from fetishising material objects (vinyl records, gig tickets, autographs, etc) to fetishising participation and networks (playlists, cut-and-paste bootlegs, P2P, etc)?

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Phil Gyford links to a very nice article about the way Chinese DJ’s are using the net to get the latest Western music. It seems ‘illegal downloads’ are playing a major part in establishing contemporary music culture, and that part of the social kudos of the downloads is their illegal status:

“Among some in the Chinese underground hiphop scene, only tracks which have been downloaded are considered truly “underground” and thus valuable, while any music which is available for purchase in physical form is seen as being tainted by commerciality to some degree”

This reminds me of the way in which northern soul DJs used to cover up their singles with white labels, so that other DJs or clubbers couldn’t identify the tracks. What’s interesting here is that the physical form itself is seen as ‘uncool’ – only MP3s or anonymous CDRs are seen as ‘authentic’.

Is this, like the fad for i-Pod Parties, a sign that music culture is mutating from fetishising material objects (vinyl records, gig tickets, autographs, etc) to fetishising participation and networks (playlists, cut-and-paste bootlegs, P2P, etc)?

The winner of the bid to host the European City of Culture in 2008 was announced today – and its Liverpool. Overall, this seems a good choice – Liverpool can point to historical examples of its cultural significance in the Beatles and the legacy of Victorian industialists in the Walker Art Gallery, and it has signs of a resurgent investment in culture in the Tate Liverpool and the newly opened FACT centre. Its not as far down the regneration route as Newcastle/Gateshead, who seemed not to need it, and had a far more focused proposition than Birmingham, who produced a diverse and strongly multicultural bid on behalf of a large swathe of the West Midlands.

Liverpool has strong similarities to Glasgow, still the model for cultural regeneration in the UK. They both share a dockside industrial heritage, followed by lengthy decline and associated economic and social problems, and both had the roots of a nascent cultural regenration on the ground prior to the bid. Liverpool is probably the safest option, as a boost like this will help to coalesce the nascent regeneration, and provide weight for a different scale of ambition that should hopefully create firm roots for the industries that emerge or relocate to the region as a result of the publicity.

There’s still a lot of controversy about whether cultural regeneration is really a viable option for long-term economic regneration, or whether it is a current ‘fad’, as the Garden Festivals were in the 1980s (scroll down the page for info). One things for sure – there *is* an industry sector that has benefited massively from cultural investment in urban areas. Unfortunately, its the consultants, think tanks and quangoes who charge large fees to tell local and regional councils the things that their own cultural service departments have been shouting about for years…

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The winner of the bid to host the European City of Culture in 2008 was announced today – and its Liverpool. Overall, this seems a good choice – Liverpool can point to historical examples of its cultural significance in the Beatles and the legacy of Victorian industialists in the Walker Art Gallery, and it has signs of a resurgent investment in culture in the Tate Liverpool and the newly opened FACT centre. Its not as far down the regneration route as Newcastle/Gateshead, who seemed not to need it, and had a far more focused proposition than Birmingham, who produced a diverse and strongly multicultural bid on behalf of a large swathe of the West Midlands.

Liverpool has strong similarities to Glasgow, still the model for cultural regeneration in the UK. They both share a dockside industrial heritage, followed by lengthy decline and associated economic and social problems, and both had the roots of a nascent cultural regenration on the ground prior to the bid. Liverpool is probably the safest option, as a boost like this will help to coalesce the nascent regeneration, and provide weight for a different scale of ambition that should hopefully create firm roots for the industries that emerge or relocate to the region as a result of the publicity.

There’s still a lot of controversy about whether cultural regeneration is really a viable option for long-term economic regneration, or whether it is a current ‘fad’, as the Garden Festivals were in the 1980s (scroll down the page for info). One things for sure – there *is* an industry sector that has benefited massively from cultural investment in urban areas. Unfortunately, its the consultants, think tanks and quangoes who charge large fees to tell local and regional councils the things that their own cultural service departments have been shouting about for years…

Steve Dietz, the visionary founder and curator of the Walker Arts Center’s online space Gallery 9, was fired last week as the Walker put its plans for a custom-built Digital Art gallery on hold:

“Steve Dietz, the center’s new-media curator, and six other Walker staff members were laid off in a cost-cutting move that is expected to save more than $1 million annually, officials there said last week. Although the Walker is proceeding with a $90 million expansion scheduled to open in 2005, the center’s director, Kathy Halbreich, said plans to build a digital-art gallery would be deferred for at least five years”

[from the NY Times - log-in required]

Gallery 9 was undoubtedly a role model for other art museums’ engagement with digital and online work. Steve took in important historical projects, such as the archive of adaweb, the ground-breaking curatorial project set up by Ben Weill, and used innovative programming, such as the Art Entertainment Network, to create interfaces between online practise and the ‘real world’ of museums. Of all US museums, it seemed that the Walker really ‘got’ digital art, or at least had the savvy to support someone who really got it and gave them the chance to support innovative work. By firing Steve, they’re sending out the message that, in these post-dot.com-crash times, the internet isn’t a culturally relevant space anymore, and so institutions like the Walker can cut back on their online programmes and get back to the ‘real’ physical stuff that sits still and behaves itself.

But is this being too cynical? Mark Tribe, one of the founders of Rhizome, has suggested taking a wider perspective:

“We are certainly witnessing a retrenchment in institutional support, but these things develop in cycles. I predict that in ten years time every major museum (and many of the not-so-major ones) will have a signficant commitment to new media art in some form. Meanwhile, the boundaries between new media art and other forms of art are getting blurrier–a welcome transition, in my opinion. The walls of the new media ghetto are crumbling. Bring ‘em down!”

[From Rhizome's Digest email]

In 2000, at a Rhizome.org panel at the Kitchen a few years ago when the Whitney Biennale first included online artists, Mark introduced a phrase which elegantly described the bifurcation of net.art into two practises – one based on an exclusive relationship with networks, and one that tries to map networks onto physical museum spaces – ‘net.installation’. Mark now seems to be suggesting that this bifurcation was in fact a sequential, not parallel, development, and that the first phase of the maturation of online art is now over. The second phase will be the rise of ‘net.installation’ – work which mixes the real physical spaces of the museum with the radical dynamics of the net.

In this analysis, Gallery 9 will stand as the apothesis of art museums’ assimilation of the ‘first phase’ of net.art, but where are the role models for net.installation? The walls of the new media ghetto might have been brought down rather abrubtly, but the ingenuity of artists and curators like Steve Dietz will route around the rubble and find other homes. The trouble is, the resources to build something as substantial as Gallery 9 are rare, and normally built bit by bit (excuse the pun) over many years.

Of the three US curators who most successfully infiltrated the museum system in the late 90s, Steve seemed to be the most well established. Ben Weill moved from Adaweb in New York to a frustrating time at the ICA in London, before seeming to find his perfect home at SFMOMA, just in time for the seminal 010101 show. He’s now moved to Eyebeam Atelier, where I hope he finds the perfect environment for his curatorial skills. Christiane Paul is, as Rachel Greene points out in this week’s Rhizome Digest, the last remaining US institutional new media curator, by dint of her ‘adjunct’ position at the Whitney.

Is this the curatorial equivalent of the ‘glass ceiling’ I mentioned in my post about the FACT Centre? How can the excellent work of someone like Steve be brushed aside as if it were an expensive experiment? What kind of strategies can digital curators use to embed their work into the heart of institutions? And is it possible to do this without either compromising the intial political or aesthetic concerns of the artists, or creating a ‘ghetto’ that will condemn these artists to being a kind of prosthetic limb that can be discarded when the money gets tight?

I think Mark is right, in that there are cyclical cultural patterns that will see the re-emergence of digital art within an institutional context. But the problem is, without people like Steve Dietz at the heart of these institutions, it gets harder for artists to make work on their terms, and harder for audiences to see work that challenges and redefines the museum experience.

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Ted Joans, poet and artist, died in April. I remember seeing Ted read his poems at ‘Shakespeare and Co.’, the famous bookstore in Paris. My brother was staying in Paris for a month, and I was over to help the artist Cornelia Parker install an exhibition. I was 19, had just moved to Glasgow to go to Art School, and was enjoying my first tastes of fresh air after the stifling gas of suburbia.

We spent a few weeks in Paris drinking with people in bands that Chris had met under the pretences of starting a magazine that never got off the ground. Chris had wanted to show me the bookstore, so we went along one night to hear Ted Joans give a reading. He gave a fantastic performance, drawing out the lines and swooping his body to accentuate the rhythms in his poetry. He closed by urging us all to steal books from chain stores, then invited us to go and join him for drinks in a nearby bar, where he entertained a growing audience with more anecdotes, dirty jokes and poems.

I’m off to Paris in a couple of weeks, for the first time since that trip, so it feels strangely circular to come across news of Ted Joan’s death. Looking back, my trip reads like such a cliche – suburban kid goes to Paris to hear Beat poets, work with an artist and hang out with moody musicians who lived in crumbling 12th arrondissement apartments. But cliches are not cliches when you’re hearing them for the first time. I was lucky enough to work with Cornelia Parker on a couple more exhibitions, in Leipzig, East Berlin and London, and those trips were full of encounters like the one with Ted Joans at Shakespeare and Co. Full of those happenstance moments when you pinch yourself and think ‘I can’t believe I’m actually here, doing this’.

[more on ted here]

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Ted Joans, poet and artist, died in April. I remember seeing Ted read his poems at ‘Shakespeare and Co.’, the famous bookstore in Paris. My brother was staying in Paris for a month, and I was over to help the artist Cornelia Parker install an exhibition. I was 19, had just moved to Glasgow to go to Art School, and was enjoying my first tastes of fresh air after the stifling gas of suburbia.

We spent a few weeks in Paris drinking with people in bands that Chris had met under the pretences of starting a magazine that never got off the ground. Chris had wanted to show me the bookstore, so we went along one night to hear Ted Joans give a reading. He gave a fantastic performance, drawing out the lines and swooping his body to accentuate the rhythms in his poetry. He closed by urging us all to steal books from chain stores, then invited us to go and join him for drinks in a nearby bar, where he entertained a growing audience with more anecdotes, dirty jokes and poems.

I’m off to Paris in a couple of weeks, for the first time since that trip, so it feels strangely circular to come across news of Ted Joan’s death. Looking back, my trip reads like such a cliche – suburban kid goes to Paris to hear Beat poets, work with an artist and hang out with moody musicians who lived in crumbling 12th arrondissement apartments. But cliches are not cliches when you’re hearing them for the first time. I was lucky enough to work with Cornelia Parker on a couple more exhibitions, in Leipzig, East Berlin and London, and those trips were full of encounters like the one with Ted Joans at Shakespeare and Co. Full of those happenstance moments when you pinch yourself and think ‘I can’t believe I’m actually here, doing this’.

[more on ted here]

SimonF makes a good point about my previous post on Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive:

Digitising is hardly going to help.
While we’ve lost some great works due to fires such as those in the Great Library of Alexandria, the chances are that copies of most printed works still exist. We’ve got almost all the great Greeks, for instance.

What happens as digital media becomes obsolete though? Vide the Doomsday Book project on laser disc.

He’s right to mention the (doomed) doomsday project. I think what Brewster is doing is slightly different, however. He’s not so worried about keeping information stored as keeping it *alive* – his motivation is to put stuff out there so that people who want to use it, can use it, and create new things from it. It’s a Darwinian evolutionary model – the information that finds a purpose survives, like the great Greeks Simon mentions. The trouble is, a lot of information isn’t even in the gene pool at the moment, so hasn’t got a chance to mutate and adapt.

Brewster’s archive is more like a World Wildlife Fund for information – he’s interested in keeping things alive and preserving diversity. Earlier attitudes to archiving, like the Doomsday project, were similar to Victorian explorers – kill it and stuff it and stick it on a shelf. The Doomsday Project was the DoDo of information archives – I think Brewster is more enlightened than that.

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Paula Le Dieu

Ben Hammersley

Cait Hurley

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Matt Jones

Alice Taylor

Tom Coates

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Matt Webb

James Cronin

Clay and Leo Shirky

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At ETCON this year, I thought I’d buck the trend and use some ‘receding’ media to document the trip. I’m a 50/50 gadget/old tech fiend, and there’s two areas where I’m resolutely non-digital – photography and music. All my music is on vinyl, and I’ve got a lovely old linn sondek turntable and leak tuner. I’m even thinking of buying a valve amp, but that might be going *too* far.

So I took my medium format camera to ETCON – a Mamiya C330 – with the idea of taking quite formal pictures of the people there, trying to get people to pause for a minute for something a little different from the usual snapped digital pictures. I found a nice blank wall that looked like the kind of cheesy background school photographers use, and persuaded a few friends to pose. I’m quite pleased with the results, and will post them up here over the next few days. My only regret is that I stopped after the first few days, and so missed many people, including Danny & Phil, and also that a film I took of Larry Lessig and Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive seemed to get fogged going through x-rays. I guess that doesn’t happen to digital cameras…

Still, it was a lot of fun – maybe Tim O’Reilly will be looking for a ’school photographer’ for next year?

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Last Friday, I went over to the Internet Archive and met Brewster Kahle. I remember Danny interviewing him for the Irish Times and being blown away by all the projects Brewster’s involved in and his sheer energy and enthusiasm. Its all true. I don’t really have heroes, but Brewster is definitely not a mortal.

Where I work, there’s been a culture change project with the slogan ‘cut the crap’. Its great, but its aim is pretty modest – to try and cut down the stifling gas of bureaucracy inside the organisation. Is that as high as we can aim? Cutting down on meetings and cynicism is one thing, but trying to get a million books available at a dollar each to people all over the world – now *thats* something to wake up for in the morning.

Danny’s Oblomovka piece is a much better description of the projects than I could write, so go there to learn more about the man. In the light of Cory’s talk at ETCON, this quote jumped out at me:

“The history of libraries is this: they get burnt down. By governments. I’m not anti-government: I’m a librarian, not a libertarian. But that’s the truth.”

A new definition of Public Service: make sure the stuff we make can’t get burnt. Its not enough to just make stuff anymore – we can’t just fire it out into the ether and sit back feeling smug. All the radio and tv broadcasts since Marconi are still out there somewhere, beaming past the solar system decades after they were made. News coverage of 9/11? Just past Jupiter last time I checked. The Moon Landings? probably halfway to Alpha Centuri. But that’s a fat lot of good if you happen to be stuck on planet earth, and still want to see them.

We can’t send a thousand Tivos into space to catch all this stuff, but we can make sure the stuff is still available down here. The blocks to doing this are normally either rights issues or cost of digitisation and storage. Larry Lessig has answered one question, Brewster Kahle the other. Lets cut the crap and do it.

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Away from the ETCON flock, Tomski unearths this nugget:

“Our artists no longer try to put us in touch with God and the eternal, but with the infinity of our own archives.” -James Flint on Brian Eno

This reminded me of some things I’d been thinking about on the ’sublime’ in digital art. The sublime – the ’shock and awe’ of aesthetic experience – was, in 19th century culture, normally represented by nature, as in the paintings of Caspar David Freidrich. The sublime is a vertiginous moment – the moment when an excess of visual pleasure leads to a kind of terror, or awe – usually interpreted as a humbling realisation of God’s power.

In a Godless world, the sublime is invoked by the achievements of science of technology. Its understanadable that contemporary artists will reflect our vertiginious, ambiguous responses to technological progress – this is not so much the infinity of our archives, as the infinity of the spaces we can describe through the application of logic.

My favourite ever piece of digital art is an excellent example of this kind of sublime infinity. In Every Icon, John F. Simon Jr created a Java app that systematically explores every possible combination of black and white squares on a 32×32 grid. Starting at the top left in January 1997, the app has been cycling through combinations every since.

It took about 16 months to cycle through the entire first line of the grid, so how long do you think it would take to go through all the possible combinations of the 32×32 square? 100 years? 1,000 years? a *million* years?

Not even close. more like several hundred trillion years.

That’s what the digital sublime looks like.

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Clay did his usual tour de force at ETCON today. He’s a fantastic and compelling speaker, but the elegance of his metaphors can often hide some logical wrinkles. Only one stood out today – he said that we are getting close to ‘ubiquity’ – that in some circles (students, office workers, etc) access to digital networked technology is assumed, and that in these situations we can start to see mature usage of social software.

This struck a nerve, initially because the assumption feels wrong, but then because the assumption of how we *get* to ubiquity, and what that means for behaviour patterns, felt too simplistic.

In the early stages of the growth curve for a new form of social communication, the user base is so low that any behaviour is likely to be atypical in the long term – with a small sample, unusual behviour is almost as prevalent as the mature patterns that will develop as adoption scales. Its not until we reach about, say, 50% ‘ubiquity’ that these mature patterns start to become clearer, and the earlier models and theories are discarded.

The thing Clay is forgetting is that the first few stages of the adoption curve are often very different from the final push to mass adoption. Approaching ubiquity, there is often a subtle shift in the use of the technology – a tipping point that gets the last 50%, or 40%, or 30% to adopt. This is when something can truly be assumed to be ubiquitous – when the network isn’t characterised by its early adopters, or even the second wave that starts the ‘mature’ phase, but has become an almost neutral utilty.

This is why I don’t think we can say we’re approaching ubiquity – digital networks, and social software tools enabling people to inhabit them, are reaching the mature phase, but we’ve not begun to see signs of the subtle shift that will turn these tools into utilities.

We’ve moved on from the atypical behaviours of MOOs and MUDs, but I still don’t think we’ve seen the tipping point. If there are signs anywhere, its in SMS use. We get excited about how blogs and wikis are ’small pieces loosely joined’, but text messages are very, very small pieces, loosely joining real people in real places, and helping them navigate and use those spaces in ways that couldn’t have happened before this simple digital network was opened up as a social space.

If this is true, then the final push to ubiquity might be an extension of the mature patterns we’re starting to see emerge on Blogs, Wikis and community spaces like UpMyStreet conversations. But as with all networks, the ‘last mile’ of the adoption curve will be the most significant. We’ll see these emerging mature behaviours become more concrete, but it as likely to be in a completely different platform or context from the ones people are talking about here at ETCON.

[NB: Tom Coates has just finished the UpMyStreet presentation here, and Stef had the last quote - 'The future of the internet will be in the enmeshing of digital networks into the real world' - this is the most believable description of the 'last mile' problem I'm talking about - how will digital networks make the real world better?]

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Clay did his usual tour de force at ETCON today. He’s a fantastic and compelling speaker, but the elegance of his metaphors can often hide some logical wrinkles. Only one stood out today – he said that we are getting close to ‘ubiquity’ – that in some circles (students, office workers, etc) access to digital networked technology is assumed, and that in these situations we can start to see mature usage of social software.

This struck a nerve, initially because the assumption feels wrong, but then because the assumption of how we *get* to ubiquity, and what that means for behaviour patterns, felt too simplistic.

In the early stages of the growth curve for a new form of social communication, the user base is so low that any behaviour is likely to be atypical in the long term – with a small sample, unusual behviour is almost as prevalent as the mature patterns that will develop as adoption scales. Its not until we reach about, say, 50% ‘ubiquity’ that these mature patterns start to become clearer, and the earlier models and theories are discarded.

The thing Clay is forgetting is that the first few stages of the adoption curve are often very different from the final push to mass adoption. Approaching ubiquity, there is often a subtle shift in the use of the technology – a tipping point that gets the last 50%, or 40%, or 30% to adopt. This is when something can truly be assumed to be ubiquitous – when the network isn’t characterised by its early adopters, or even the second wave that starts the ‘mature’ phase, but has become an almost neutral utilty.

This is why I don’t think we can say we’re approaching ubiquity – digital networks, and social software tools enabling people to inhabit them, are reaching the mature phase, but we’ve not begun to see signs of the subtle shift that will turn these tools into utilities.

We’ve moved on from the atypical behaviours of MOOs and MUDs, but I still don’t think we’ve seen the tipping point. If there are signs anywhere, its in SMS use. We get excited about how blogs and wikis are ’small pieces loosely joined’, but text messages are very, very small pieces, loosely joining real people in real places, and helping them navigate and use those spaces in ways that couldn’t have happened before this simple digital network was opened up as a social space.

If this is true, then the final push to ubiquity might be an extension of the mature patterns we’re starting to see emerge on Blogs, Wikis and community spaces like UpMyStreet conversations. But as with all networks, the ‘last mile’ of the adoption curve will be the most significant. We’ll see these emerging mature behaviours become more concrete, but it as likely to be in a completely different platform or context from the ones people are talking about here at ETCON.

[NB: Tom Coates has just finished the UpMyStreet presentation here, and Stef had the last quote - 'The future of the internet will be in the enmeshing of digital networks into the real world' - this is the most believable description of the 'last mile' problem I'm talking about - how will digital networks make the real world better?]

Matt asked yesterday if I’d written up a version of a recurring rant about why Ebay is not a good model for reputation systems. I think I first started ranting about this at a work foundation conference on social software, and then have subjected various people at the beeb to versions of it. And then today, Clay mentioned the same idea in his talk about the conditions for succesful social environments.

It’s an important point, as Ebay is continually cited as a model for digital reputation, but its not a model that can be transferred outside of the context of Ebay itself. In a way, we have a version of the problem that Clay mentioned elsewhere in his talk – there are very few working reputation systems of a meaningful scale, so we build theoretical models based on this scarce evidence. This is as dangerous as earlier theories of identity based on activities in MUDs and MOOS – a small survey size will give misleading results.

The problem with using Ebay as an example is that its not intended to be a reputation system at all, but a part of a very efffective economic system. Sure, its about trust, but only in as much as trust will help faciliate an economic exchange. I use the reputation system to judge whether to buy a record, but I wouldn’t use Ebay to make new friends.

As Clay said today, reputation can’t be quantified and transferred (perhaps the term ’social capital’ needs to be revised?) but is an emotional, fuzzy construct. We can help people find ways to recognise and represent this fuzzy warm feeling about each other, but we can’t abstract it altogether. Reputation is not a ‘thing’, but a feeling.

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Ok – this is going to be very muddled. I’ve just been chatting with a bunch a people here about this morning’s sessions. There was a round table on DRM, and whilst there were some great speeches, particularly from Cory, a lot of us felt that the conversation didn’t really go anywhere.

The session was full of passionate calls to action to counter DRM proposals from Microsoft, et al, but this macro-rhetoric felt a bit wasted on this audience. We *do* need really good metaphors for the wider battles about DRM, and Cory provided an excellent one. Having described the accumulation of content through Napster as being the biggest repository since the Library of Alexandria, he said:

“DRM is the answer to a question that none of us should be asking: How can we burn down the library for good?”

Needless to say, this went down a storm, and is no doubt propogating the blogosphere as I type. But, outside of the micro-climate of ETCON, this rhetoric might not take root and grow. In my work environment, I need metaphors that are actually going to mean something in the culture of the organisation. The binary opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that is so important in motivating people to action actually reinforces stereotypes and creates barriers.

I’m looking for local metaphors – stories and role models that can help us create real solutions to the problems of DRM. Stories that are going to get people who still exist in a world of Broadcast and Baftas as excited as the people here at ETCON. The problem is, in order to find these role models, we’re going to have to find out what a wide range of people want to do in the open spaces we’re working so hard to preserve.

We can use ‘rip.mix.burn’ as a mantra, but what if most people want to just ‘pick.watch.chat’? Preserving the diversity and access of information spaces for these passive activities is just as important as preserving them for innovation. We need our passionate calls to arms to make enough noise for the rest of the world to listen. But unless we’ve thought hard about the subtler arguments, when ‘they’ finally decide to listen, we won’t have enough to say.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ok – this is going to be very muddled. I’ve just been chatting with a bunch a people here about this morning’s sessions. There was a round table on DRM, and whilst there were some great speeches, particularly from Cory, a lot of us felt that the conversation didn’t really go anywhere.

The session was full of passionate calls to action to counter DRM proposals from Microsoft, et al, but this macro-rhetoric felt a bit wasted on this audience. We *do* need really good metaphors for the wider battles about DRM, and Cory provided an excellent one. Having described the accumulation of content through Napster as being the biggest repository since the Library of Alexandria, he said:

“DRM is the answer to a question that none of us should be asking: How can we burn down the library for good?”

Needless to say, this went down a storm, and is no doubt propogating the blogosphere as I type. But, outside of the micro-climate of ETCON, this rhetoric might not take root and grow. In my work environment, I need metaphors that are actually going to mean something in the culture of the organisation. The binary opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that is so important in motivating people to action actually reinforces stereotypes and creates barriers.

I’m looking for local metaphors – stories and role models that can help us create real solutions to the problems of DRM. Stories that are going to get people who still exist in a world of Broadcast and Baftas as excited as the people here at ETCON. The problem is, in order to find these role models, we’re going to have to find out what a wide range of people want to do in the open spaces we’re working so hard to preserve.

We can use ‘rip.mix.burn’ as a mantra, but what if most people want to just ‘pick.watch.chat’? Preserving the diversity and access of information spaces for these passive activities is just as important as preserving them for innovation. We need our passionate calls to arms to make enough noise for the rest of the world to listen. But unless we’ve thought hard about the subtler arguments, when ‘they’ finally decide to listen, we won’t have enough to say.

Stanford Research Institute have a quasi-commercial consulting arm. William Ralston, the VP of Consulting there, led a workshop in Scenario Planning this morning, using a fictional Telco as a context, and future WiFi opportunities as a problem.

The workshop was a pretty straightforward run through the classic scenario-building process, but could have been a lot more ‘interactive’. It was mostly lecture, where I think the group would have got a lot more out of it if he had run through more exercises. A couple of the attendees, inclduing a guy from Vodafone US and another from Accenture, seemed to be having trouble grasping the whole concept of scenario building, and I think they would have understood betting by doing, not listening… Still, it was a good refresher, and made me determined to set in process a programme of sessions for a few groups at work.

We also discussed one scenario that reminded me of a presentation I once gave on modalities in mobile use. I think it was at a pitch to a UK 3G company a couple of years ago, when they had (misguided) ambitions to develop content. I got into a bit of a spat with their head of location-based services. I was saying that users’ modalities (what they were doing) where more interesting and relevant that an absolute location. He was adamant that location was paramount, and it wasn’t until later that I found out that he used to be in the army. That would explain his preference for abstract co-ordinates over the fuzzier, but more human, ‘modality’ concept…

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Pauline from Mute magazine has kindly asked me to tidy up my rather rambling post on the FACT centre for their next issue. I ended up reducing it to just being about FACT, and not really picking up the relationships between the stages of emergent artistic practises I described and blogs/networks. It reads much better as a piece of journalism that way. I never got around to writing the second part of the article, anyway…

[note to self - never call blog entries 'part 1' unless you've actually already written 'part 2'....]

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Matt Webb talks about our descriptions of social software as a pre-paradigm, and makes comaprisons with other scientific paradigms:

Social software is like the early days of thermodynamics, before stat mech. Or maybe pre-Newton. Or maybe early electricity: we had to make do with rules-of-thumb. Some day all of this will be filled in with limits so we’ll say: these approximations apply with this number of people; these others with this number.

I’ve always thought that descriptions of the net that focus on its topology in a way mirror euclidean geometry – its an accurate way to describe an abstract space, but it makes assumptions that start to unpick as we develop more sophisticated perspectives.

In the first stages of public understanding of the net, it was important to describe it as a space - to map its topology and the geometry in a way that elucidated its similarities and differences with ‘real’ space. As it has matured as a medium and become integrated into social behviour patterns, the dynamism of these social behaviours creates centres of ‘gravity’, and this creates warps in the abstract maps we have of the topology of the net. A non-euclidean geometrical paradigm is needed, and I think the interest in Power Laws and related network-theory has started to provide this. These geometrical paradigms factor in dynamics, so the static topology of the net is curved according to the patterns of behaviour that occur within it.

If we follow the historical development of geometry further, what would a relativity theory of the net look like? How would it help us describe the effect of social behaviour as a gravity-like force within the topology of net-space? And further still – what about a string theory of the net?

I’m out of my depth here, being a arts graduate whose knowledge of science and maths is gleaned from pop-science books read on the long commute from the south coast to london. Someone like Matt Webb is probably better equipped to know whether i’ve stretched an analogy to snapping point or not. But thats what arts grads are good at – clutching at a few narrative straws, and building a house out of them….

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[NB - this text was originally written for a conference in June 2002, when Matt Jones had just launched the idea of warchalking. In fact, Matt was at the conference, getting freaked out by the incredible velocity of the meme as it worked its way up daypop. The fact that this ephemeral meme might now be on its ebb tide is a poetic metaphor in itself...]

Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen’s Hard Shoulders Soft Verges (Edge Town)

Hard Shoulders Soft Verges is a project about the boundaries of urban space, and about devices that passively map and visualise activity within these boundaries. It invokes the situationist metaphor of the city as a palimpsest – an accretion of unconscious communication in the city, both structured and serendiptious.

Cities are already a forest of signs, but most of these signs are authorised
texts; part of the official story of a city. Public space was already a conflicting narrative of official and unofficial texts before the introduction of mobile communications. Billboards, road signs, street names, shop windows – these are the stories that have fascinated flaneurs since the 19th century.

But the city also has a tradition of writing itself in unauthorised ways, from graffiti tags to the wall paintings marking sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland. These are signs of a city marking its own boundaries, and also a dynamic public discourse about the structure of the city itself. In her book ‘Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England’, Juliet Fleming describes the practice of writing on walls in private and public places as a form of public discourse that has been lost to history, erased both physically and historically in favour of authorised printed texts:

“I imagine the whitewashed domestic wall as being the primary scene of writing in early modern England. That the bulk of early modern writing was written on walls, and was consequently both erasable and, in our own scheme of things, out of place is a proposition with consequences for current assumptions about the constitution of statistics of literacy and schooling in the early modern period.”

Fleming describes a discourse in 16th Century England that has been erased for us. Save for a few etchings in glass windows, on furniture, or on mantelpieces, we have very little evidence of this very vibrant social discourse. There is a similar form of social discourse happening today over SMS – a similarly ephemeral medium to the chalk writing of 16th Century England.

This ephemeral discourse is not part of a city’s official narrative, but can form underground communication network that are critical marginalised communities. A contemporary version of 16th Century wall writing is the ‘Hobo Codes’ that are used by transient communities in the USA. These codes, written on buildings in residential areas, tell stories for other hobos, and offer advice about finding food or shelter. For example, a squiggly line in a black box means “bad tempered owner”, a number of dime and nickel shaped circles means that there is a good chance to get some money, and, one of my favourites, a simple circle with two arrows, meaning get out fast.

Matt Jones recently proposed that we could reform some of these underground symbols to indicate the wireless networks that are starting to open up around our cities. Following on from ‘war dialling’, an old hacker term used to describe random attempts to access closed phone networks, Jones has called this system of ephemeral signs ‘Warchalking’.

Warchalking inscribes invisible communication networks into the physical space of the city, creating an iconic visual language that is deliberately ephemeral. Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen’s Edge Town is a technological version of these ephemeral icons – a vocabulary of small gestures that tell the city small stories about itself, about what happened, what accrued and what was washed away. Their series of sensors and small displays are a city listening to its own background noise. The patterns that emerge are part of a tradition of ‘edge town’ languages, from 16th Century Graffiti to Hobo languages and Warchalking. Edge Town turns the technological infrastructure of the city in on itself, creating a feedback loop of listening and representation. Will the ephemeral language created by this loop be stories about the technology itself? Or will it create a new vocabulary of icons for the inhabitants of the city? What stories will Edge Town tell us? How many of them will be remembered, and how many forgotten?

(originally commissioned by proboscis for the Private Reveries/Public Spaces project)

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Rachel Baker’s Platfrom

We have always located ourselves by mnemonics, by having shorthand visual maps of our environment. This is as true for virtual information spaces as it is for ‘real’ geographies. Memory experts use visual mnemonics as a way of remembering lists of information. These techniques propose visualising a room or a house with many shelves or cupboards, and then walking around depositing the bits of information you need to remember around the rooms of this virtual space. When you want to recall the information, you mentally walk around the space until you find the memory object you placed there.

In his classic book on urban planning “The Image of the City” Kevin Lynch describes how important this kind of technique is when we navigate real spaces;

“Way finding is the original function of the environmental image and the basis on which emotional associations may have been founded. But the image is not only valuable in its immediate sense in which acts as a map for the direction of movement. In a broader sense it can serve as a general frame of reference within which the individual can act or to which he can attach his knowledge. In this way it is like a body of belief or a set of social customs, it is an organiser of facts and possibilities.”

Lynch is making a very distinct link between a repository of knowledge -a body of belief as he calls it -and physical space. A contemporary example of this is NYCBloggers.com. NYC Bloggers maps Blogging activity in and around Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, encouraging bloggers to register their physical location by marking their nearest stop on the subway. Visitors to the site can navigate the map of New York, clicking on the subway lines presented as mnemonic linking blogging activity. Using this mnemonic structure, you can find out who is blogging on Canal Street, or who’s blogging at 5th Street , or in Queens or in Brooklyn.

In Platfrom SMS is used as a medium for a similar group of individual mnemonics. The train journey from London to the North is described not just a train journey but as a repository of stories and anecdotes. Train drivers tell stories about work, about how they have to be constantly thinking about the next station ahead, landmarks rushing by triggering them to think further down the line to the next station, the next curve, the next signal. For them the landscape is a series of mnemonics collapsing on themselves; each one a domino knocking a visual memory of what is further up the line.

But the drivers’ stories in Platfrom are tinged with melancholy for the rail industry. The lines that provide the visual mnemonic that enables them to do their job has been cut up and reformed through privatisation. With privatisation, a form of collective memory has been lost too. Kevin Lynch describes a similar disorientation in subjects who have suffered brain injuries:

“These men cannot find their own rooms again after leaving them and must wander helplessly until conducted home or until by chance they stumble upon some familiar detail. Purposeful movement is accomplished only by an elaborate memorisation of sequences of distinctive detail so closely spaced that the next detail is always in close range of the previous landmark. One man recognises a room by a small sign, another knows a street by the tram car numbers. If the symbols are tampered with, the man is lost.”

Platfrom makes an explicit connection between the privatisation of the railways and the corporate ownership of the cellular networks we have come to rely on so much. The cellular network, like the railway network, enables us to augment our environment with stories – mnemonics that root us in dynamic space. But who owns these memories? Are your private reveries really in a public space, or are they reliant on a private infrastructure that can be broken up and resold? If we had invested in memories in such an infrastructure, how would we find our way around then?

(originally commissioned by proboscis for the Private Reveries/Public Spaces project)

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Natalie Jerminjenko’s Sniffer Dogs is a playful exploration of intelligence, agency and avatars. At the heart of the project is an inversion – the domestic face of artificial intelligence, exemplified by the recent craze for robotic dog toys, is repurposed for a more sinister task – sniffing out radiation levels in the landscape. Jerminjenko reprograms the toys with a custom chipset and radiation sensor implanted in the dog’s nose. The dog then ‘sniffs’ the air for radiation, following the scent and mapping radioactivity levels as it walks.

The contrast of these cute robot toys with their grim nuclear task gives a frisson of perverse glee. Jerminjenko uses the inbuilt system of behaviours programmed by the toy manufacturer, so the dog wags its tail and perfroms a little dance whenever it senses radioactive material. But perhaps there is an even darker concept lurking underneath. Jerimenjenko suggests in her supporting material that these domestic robot dogs have had ulterior motives all along, killing their time barking and playing with bones and smiling at their owners while secretly awaiting further instructions.

This suggests a new spin on the issue of technological agency – instead of the domesticated avatar, we have the double agent. Most technological futurology see agents as benign, as obedient slaves who only have our best interests at heart. Jerminjenko playfully suggests that a dark heart always exists, even behind the most domesticated technologies. If cute robotic dogs harbour secret alter egos, who knows what ulterior motives lie behind your PC screen, or your mobile phone?

In Bruce Sterling’s short story ‘Maneki Neko’, a similarly domestic icon – the Maneki Neko, a Japanese good luck item in the shape of a cat – is the icon for an intelligent social network co-ordinated by ‘Pokkecons’ – PDA style ‘pocket controllers’. These devices organise their owners lives around a gift economy of seemingly random gestures. Your Pokkecon might order you to buy an extra coffee and hand it to a stranger in the street, then when you return home you find a parcel has been delivered containing your favourite type of sweet. These daily activities are seen as benign to people who have woven the pokkecon into their everyday lives, but a visiting American executive who doesn’t engage with the system find herself under attack, like a foreign agent rejected by its host:

“’I know very well what this is. I’m under attack. I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I broke that network. Stuff just happens to me now. Bad stuff. Swarms of it. It’s never anything you can touch, though. Nothing you can prove in a court of law. I sit in chairs, and somebody’s left a piece of gum there. I get free pizzas, but they’re not the kind of pizzas I like. Little kids spit on my sidewalk. Old women in walkers get in front of me whenever I need to hurry.
‘My toilets don’t flush. My letters get lost in the mail. When I walk by cars, their theft alarms go off. And strangers stare at me. It’s always little things. Lots of little tiny things, but they never, ever stop. I’m up against something that is very very big, and very very patient. And it knows all about me. And it’s got a million arms and legs. And all those arms and legs are people’.”

The Pokkecon initially seems like a benign agent for goodwill, but by the end of the story, it’s more like a shadowy double agent for an immoral underworld, as if the Yakusa or Mafia had invented an IM client. Unlike the perfect intelligent agent who understands your every need so well that you don’t need to think or do anything anymore, the double agent is a threat – a shadow lurking around every corner. A double agent isn’t looking out for you, but instead gives you the eerie feeling that you are being watched, making you look over your shoulder. In their benign forms, intelligent agents exist solely to smooth your path towards a technologically seamless future. Its sinister twin, the double agent, is evidence of a complex past returning to haunt you – an uncanny doppelganger from a future that is really a half-remembered, re-engineered past.

The double agent also has an existential literary cousin in the private eye – an agent who has no life except as lived through others. Constantly trying to make sense out of an incomplete picture, the private eye is an imperfect avatar, always a few clues short of the whole story. In the classic gum shoe novels of Raymond Chandler, this anti hero is always getting in the way rather than getting to the truth, getting implemented in the crime and led down dark alleys. How much more interesting are these double agents compared to the dumb shiny world of the intelligent agents? The double agent recognises that intelligence can never be perfect, and those who hold intelligence cast a malign, powerful shadow. After all, even the best, most discrete butler always keeps a few too many of his master’s secrets.

The intelligence we are building into our technological landscapes will be cast with these same dark shadows, so lets build infrastructures that recognises that instead of hiding it beneath an illusory surface of perfection. We need to have more cute robotic dogs turned into Geiger counters. Interactive Barney needs a double life uncovering conspiracy theories instead of reading saccharine-coated bedtime stories. Lets build intelligent avatars that remind us, not of upcoming commitments, but of our past mistakes. We always think we can make the future better, cleaner, and brighter, but we never quite get there. By setting our targets lower, we might achieve something more complex, unpredictable, and truer to our own dystopian lives.

(originally commissioned by proboscis for the Private Reveries/Public Spaces project)

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I gave a presentation a while ago at this event organised by Giles Lane. I promised Giles I’d write up my notes, and (only about 6 months late!) I’ve finally done it. I think Giles is publishing them in some form, but I thought I’d put part of it online as well. I was asked to comment on three research projects by artists/designers: Platfrom by Rachel Baker, Sniffer Dogs by Natalie Jereminjenko, and Hard Shoulders, Soft Verges by Shona Kitchen and Ben Hooker. The texts are ok – I’ve rewritten them quite a bit from the original presentation – so i thought I’d stick them up here, starting with my favourite, on Natalie Jereminjenko’s Sniffer Dogs. This brief essay talks about agency in intelligent systems, and pokes a tongue out at the idea that swarms or smartmobs are always benign. I structured the presentation around three themes – Agency, Accretion and Memory - so those are the titles of the essays.

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Googling on information for the slow networks post below, I came across this excellent paper from Princeton about communication networks in 18th Century Paris. The article gives an analysis of ‘Laffaire des Quatorze’ – an investigation by Parisian police into the author of some seditious poetry that had been circulating amongst students, clerks and priests. The interesting thing was that when they started tracing the route of the poetry, there was not the straight line back to an author that they expected, but a complex network of alterations, repurposing and adaptions that criss-crossed between 14 main protagonists (hence ‘The Affair of the Fourteen’). Its almost like a political combination of slow networks and a ‘rip.mix.burn’ philosophy, where the adaptation is part of the condition of a slow network. Very interesting…

I thought it worth quoting this summary paragraph in full, but please go and read the full essay:

“But as the investigation broadened, the picture became more complicated. The poem crossed paths with five other poems, each of them seditious (at least in the eyes of the police) and each with its own diffusion pattern. They were copied on scraps of paper, traded for similar scraps, dictated to more copyists, memorized, declaimed, printed in underground tracts, adapted in some cases to popular tunes, and sung. In addition to the first group of suspects sent to the Bastille, seven others were also imprisoned; and they implicated five more, who escaped. In the end, the police filled the Bastille with fourteen purveyors of poetry – hence the name of the operation in the dossiers, “L’Affaire des Quatorze.” But they never found the author of the original verse. In fact, it may not have had an author, because people added and subtracted stanzas and modified phrasing as they pleased. It was a case of collective creation; and the first poem overlapped and intersected with so many others that, taken together, they created a field of poetic impulses, bouncing from one transmission point to another and filling the air with what the police called “mauvais propos” or “mauvais discours”, a cacaphony of sedition set to rhyme.”

I love the phrase ‘collective creation’, particularly in this political context…

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Googling on information for the slow networks post below, I came across this excellent paper from Princeton about communication networks in 18th Century Paris. The article gives an analysis of ‘Laffaire des Quatorze’ – an investigation by Parisian police into the author of some seditious poetry that had been circulating amongst students, clerks and priests. The interesting thing was that when they started tracing the route of the poetry, there was not the straight line back to an author that they expected, but a complex network of alterations, repurposing and adaptions that criss-crossed between 14 main protagonists (hence ‘The Affair of the Fourteen’). Its almost like a political combination of slow networks and a ‘rip.mix.burn’ philosophy, where the adaptation is part of the condition of a slow network. Very interesting…

I thought it worth quoting this summary paragraph in full, but please go and read the full essay:

“But as the investigation broadened, the picture became more complicated. The poem crossed paths with five other poems, each of them seditious (at least in the eyes of the police) and each with its own diffusion pattern. They were copied on scraps of paper, traded for similar scraps, dictated to more copyists, memorized, declaimed, printed in underground tracts, adapted in some cases to popular tunes, and sung. In addition to the first group of suspects sent to the Bastille, seven others were also imprisoned; and they implicated five more, who escaped. In the end, the police filled the Bastille with fourteen purveyors of poetry – hence the name of the operation in the dossiers, “L’Affaire des Quatorze.” But they never found the author of the original verse. In fact, it may not have had an author, because people added and subtracted stanzas and modified phrasing as they pleased. It was a case of collective creation; and the first poem overlapped and intersected with so many others that, taken together, they created a field of poetic impulses, bouncing from one transmission point to another and filling the air with what the police called “mauvais propos” or “mauvais discours”, a cacaphony of sedition set to rhyme.”

I love the phrase ‘collective creation’, particularly in this political context…

Matt has written an interesting post about slowness in networks. He refers to an article talking about minority views and the time it takes for these views to be heard in a system, and relates that to a project he’s working on about online participation.

This reminded me of an ad-hoc workshop I led at a conference at Banff NMI last year. The conference was about networks, mobility and public space, and I brought up an idea that had been at the back of my mind for a while – Public Caches. I’d been fascinated by the distributed patterns of physical media along transport systems – for example the ‘Metro’ newspaper that is given away free at UK train stations. It seemed like such a good way to distribute information – piggy-backing on the dynamics of people’s commuting, and the letting the carriers leave the information, meme-style, lying around on trains for others to pick up. I commute for over 1.5 hours a day, and picking up someone else’s copy of the Metro or Evening Standard can be a godsend on a delayed train.

I started thinking about this in relation to PDAs, and thought of the idea of installing ‘Public Caches’ – stand alone devices embedded into street furniture or trains that people could use to upload or download content. You could send an e-book or avantgo article that you had finished with, or browse the cache to see what people have left behind.

Streetbeam have been doing this for a while with their infra-red beaming stations in street furniture, but they seem to see it as a broadcast distribution network, rather than the decentralised, P2P network that fascinated me.

Anyway, in the workshop, the group got really interested in the idea, but kept insisting that the individual public caches would also be connected to the internet, so that you could upload content remotely. I wasn’t at all interested in this, but in re-introducing a physical aspect to a digital network, something like a Human Computer Transfer Protocol, where individuals with their PDAs are the packet carriers between a number of disconnected storage nodes. Most of the group thought this was pretty pointless, as it runs against the whole point of digital networks – speed and connectivity. But there was something there that intrigued me, something about the contrary and serendipitous network of people-connected nodes that seemed valuable. These values might be:

Slowness, and the reinforcement of community
In such a network, information would have to travel physically between people’s devices in order to jump from cache to cache. The cache on your train or street corner would be full of stuff that only people who physically travelled through or visited your neghbourhood could access. This would mean it would take a long time for ‘memes’ to migrate through a network, but it would also increase local specificity, and so enhance a sense of place and community.

No economy of scale
In highly-connected networks, there is a huge economy of scale – it is as easy to send information to 1000 people as it is to send it to one. In the HCTP public cache network, there is no economy of scale, as you would have to physically travel to each Cache location to upload material across the whole network. The effort increases proportionally for each additional node if you try to broadcast information in a ‘one-to-many’ manner. On the down side, this resists the rapid development of ‘memes’ and other power-law related behaviour. On the upside, it makes it a spam-free network, as would-be spammers face a gargantuan physical task in flooding a network.

Super-connectors
Certain individuals who regularly use the caches would become super-connectors, responsible for a significant proportion of traffic between particular caches. There might be a DJ who regularly travels to Europe, downloading MP3s from European Caches and uploading them in the Caches near his home. Or there might be high degrees of connectivity between suburban Caches and ones in the city as people commute to and from work. Some interesting dynamics of exchange would develop out of this.

But why bother?

This is the question the group ultimately hit on, and I can’t say I have the answer. I was really just being perverse, and thinking about where slowness in a system might be an asset, as so much of our network culture eulogises speed. Interestingly, we came up with no examples where slowness itself was an asset, but a few of the effects of slowness were interesting. One was privacy/security – the Public Cache network most closely resembled the physical networks of drop-boxes and other intelligence/spy techniques. The process of uploading/downloading should be anonymous, like the messages left under park benches or empty trees in many a cold-war spy story. More recently, attempts to close down the financial support for terrorists stumbled on the decentralised, trust-based Hawala system that can allow the transfer of millions of dollars without a paper trail, using a trusted network of individuals.

So there seems to be some value in deliberately slow networks, but these seem to be antithetical to our current economic, political and cultural interest in digital networks. Matt’s post about slowness just scratches the surface. I think we need to reintroduce physical timescales into our thinking on networks, and stop being slaves to the artificial acceleration of our technologies. Pure information might be able to travel at the near the speed of light, but things like trust and community build a lot more slowly.

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CityPoems is a fantastic new project by Blinkmedia, the new ‘creative projects’ agency who are also behind the long established Centrifugal Forces and Short Circuits:

“Fifty million text messages are sent every day in Britain. We use them to organise our lives, gossip and even flirt. And we take our mobile phones everywhere. They have become like books with an unlimited number of blank pages waiting to be filled. CityPoems uses text messages to write the biography of a city.”

I admit to a bias here – I worked with Andy Wilson to set up the first Guardian SMS Poetry competition in 2001, and Lisa Roberts, the other half of Blink, used to work with me at The Media Centre a few years ago. Bias aside, its a fantastic project, and Blink, along with Lumen, look like the most dynamic and innovative media arts organisations in Yorkshire. Here’s a sample CityPoem:

Sparklers
We write our names:
in traces on the dark;
on flat, wet sand;
in breath on windowpanes.

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Mark Waugh makes some valuable comments about my post below. He reminds me that my brain is pretty rusty in this area, and that its easy to confuse the general points I wanted to explore with the specific example of the FACT centre. To clarify- I’m interested in what roles infrastructures play in supporting emerging networks, not just in FACT and digital art. I used that as an example as it was oblique to most of the discussions I’m aware of about emergent networks, power laws, etc, and I wanted to think through these arguments in another context. I think it was useful, and I’ll try and link it to these other points in the second part of the essay. In the meantime, I want to pick up on one of Mark’s points:

“I am not without anxiety about the direction of FACT but believe that it illustrates a wider process in the arts, one that comprehends the processes of production are what need communicating to audiences if they are to penetrate the spectacle of consumption.”

Its the last bit that I think creates the ‘glass ceiling’ effect – organisations that were established in the early stages of emerging networks concentrate on supporting process, whereas mainstream cultural organisations focus on spectacle. There are exceptions to this – the performance art historical re-enactments at the Whitechapel were interesting for trying to merge the two, and Artangel have admirably supported work that perfectly mixes process and spectacle, such as Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave.

But I think Mark is suggesting that the shift to communicating process is a growing trend, and one that is particularly key to digital art. I’m not so sure. I think it sometimes seems to be so, but I think the dominant spectacle of our mainstream cultural infrastructure will always mitigate against process. White cubes struggle to show process-based emergent art, and after a period of settling in when both sides of the relationship try to get to know each other’s quirks, the white cube normally wins. Video Art is a good example of this – the trend has been to spectacle, not process, as illustrated by the recent works of Bill Viola, which overtly adopt the framing and scale of painting.

Ulimately, fantastic buildings are a spectacle in themselves, so need spectacular work to justify themselves. Organisations that resist the need to create spectacular infrastrcutures are generally better at remaining tactical, flexible and process-orientated. The question is, does this fatally limit their scope and ultimately their contribution to the development, maturation and historicisation of the practises they support?

I’ll get back to this eventually in the second part of this, but not till I’ve drunk lots of free booze in Liverpool. In the meantime, there’s an excellent article on FACT in today’s Guardian, but unfortunately they’ve not bothered to put it on their website. Pity.

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I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff in my head at the moment about power laws, emergent systems, network architectures, etc – partly from the google/blogger merge, partly from Clay’s writing, and partly because of where I work.

But the thing I need to write about is something else that has been gnawing away at me for a couple of years. Its to do with the sector that I used to work in – digital art – but the parallels seem more and more relevant to all these current issues. And my usual tactic in this instance is to take an oblique look at the problem, and see if I can creep up on it from there. Also, the last thing we need is another random blog posting about power laws or Bloogle. So here goes.

I’m going to Liverpool on thursday for the launch of the new FACT centre. Its a very ambitious Lottery-funded building project that is trying to create a new type of space for a mixed economy of media arts, from cinema to installation and web art. So why is that particularly ineresting? There’s been a glut of Lottery funded building projects in the last decade, some successful, some not. This one’s been in the pipeline for a while now, so why is it different? Well, the answer is to do with the organisation behind it, their philosophies, and whether they can successfully navigate the substantial shift in scale that the building represents.

FACT, the Foundation for Creative Arts and Technology, have been one of the leading lights in commissioning digital arts for over 10 years now. They’ve previously operated out of a small warren of offices in Bluecoat Chambers, Liverpool, with a broad portfolio of activities that have grown quite organically out of their core interests in supporting media art. These include the regular Video Positive festival, the ISEA 98 conference, The MITES service for galleries wanting to show media art, and a fantastic collaboration programme within the local community. The important thing is, their overheads have been (I assume) pretty managable. Their offices were pretty basic and staff broadly aligned to specific projects, so they could expand or contract depending on the size of their commitments. They’ve had some hits and misses, like any arts organisation, but have been around for over 10 years now, so must be doing something right.

All this is going to change with the FACT Centre. In one fell swoop, they’ve got to understand how to manage a complex and expensive building, and will have related staff costs, utilities, etc, before they can begin spending on artistic programmes. I’ve spoken to Clive Gillman, who has been heavily involved in this project since the beginning, many times in the last few years, and its been interesting to see the organisation prepare for the realities of running a building, and some of the hard compromises they’ve had to make.

What we have here is a challenge of scale, and one that has come out of a historical practise in an emergent sector. If we look at the way in which emergent media practises have been adopted into the cultural mainstream, scale, both architectural and in terms of audience, has been a crucial factor. There is a repeating pattern of infrastructures that support emerging practises, and similar ideaological crisis points between the practitioners and the infrastructures themselves. To be very crude, we could put it like this:

1st stage: Establishing a community of practitioners
This is when a new practise emerges, and early practitioners look to seek each other out and establish shared vocabularies. Primary needs are access to production facilities, which are often expensive and hard to obtain, and a peer network to share ideas about political, cultural and technical issues. Audiences for the products of this community is usually limited to the community itself, with a focus on innovation rather than high-quality presentation. Good examples of historical infrastructures at this level include the many photography resources that developed in the 1970’s and 80’s, such as Impressions in York or the now-defunct Camerawork in London. For net art, Rhizome has played an essential infrastructural role, as did Backspace in London.

2nd stage: Establishing modes of display and developing audiences
After a production community has reached a critical mass, quality of presentation becomes a critical factor in establishing the value of cultural products. This is for a couple of reasons, including the need to address the criteria for public funding and the maturing vocabulary of the emergent practise itself. 1st stage infrastructures often mutate to play a supporting role in this stage, developing more sophisticated physical or virtual spaces to showcase cultural products, and extending the network to peers on a national or global scale. Successful infrastructural organisations have an increasing effect on the emergent practise itself, by creating larger-scale opportunities that amplify certain elements of the practise whilst marginalising others. This is usually accompanied by the first crisis of identity amongst practitioners, with splits emerging between those who see this as ’selling out’ and those who benefit from the opportunities. Most of the network of UK photography organisations went through this mutation in the 70’s and 80’s. Some managed to retain their links with practitioners, whilst others more overtly took the role of medium-sized galleries. Most significantly, the audience for these spaces grows outside of the practitioner networks, attracting clued-up members of the wider artistic community.

3rd Stage: Development of a ‘canon’ and historicisation of practises
The emergent practise is now attracting a lot of interest from mainstream cultural infrastructures, including the media and museums. This accelerates the profile of the practitioners who successfully adapted with the mutating infrastructural organisations, and as a result appear as part of an early ‘canon’. This can be a problem, as the scale of opportunities increases rapidly, putting a strain on practitioners who don’t want to say no to the exposure, but can easily overcommit themselves and see the work suffer as a result. The primary needs in this stage come from the ‘early adopter’ agents from the mainstream, who demand a level of quality and uniformity of practise that has not typically been there in the early stages. There is also a need to adapt the practise to the needs of their infrastructures, for example, a museum or a newspaper. Again, practitioners whose work can adapt to these needs prosper, whereas those who cannot, or choose not to because of their allegiance to the more political and egalitarian aims of the early stages of the emergent practise, find themselves increasingly marginalised. Audiences are now very significant, and the mainstream exposure of the practise is no longer seen as such a novelty. A good example of this stage is the survey show, exemplified in digital art by the confluence of major shows at SFMOMA and the Whitney in 2001. Both these shows are typical in that they try to locate an emergent practise within a broader cultural milieu, attempting to trace historical precedents and parallels with commercial practises.

4th Stage: Assimilation
By now, successful practitioners have been able to create international careers, and are regularly featured in mainstream shows along with more traditional practitioners, or are offered one-person shows in private galleries. This introduces a commercial audience for the work, and ways to edition or otherwise commoditize the practise are developed. The practise is now almost unrecognisable from its early, socialized forms, with any ambiguity about authorship, presentation orthodoxies and historical relationships resolved as part of its assimilation into the mainstream. Interestingly, there are virtually no examples of ‘emergent’ infrastructural organisations who can adapt to play a role at this level. Its a kind of glass ceiling – the shift in scale to meet the needs of audiences rather than communities is so huge that organisations face a crisis of identity, and many don’t survive. Those that do normally shift their focus to a related emerging practise that is at stage 1, 2 or 3, where they can more easily identify a role. This happened to most of the photography organisations in the UK, as emerging practises and funding streams for digital multimedia shifted support from ‘traditional’ chemical photography to these new forms.

The challenge for FACT
In creating their new centre, FACT are trying to break this cycle. Rather than seeing emerging practises mutate to fulfill the needs of mainstream spaces, they are creating a bespoke centre that is at least partly based on the needs of emerging practises. Its intended to be a flexible, dynamic, space; in a way a materialisation of the philosophy of the organisation over the past decade. But will they succeed?

I don’t know. That there are precious few precedents is a worry, although there are a few similar projects that are in development. They’ll need peers, both for the network externalities this brings (sharing investment in programming, franchising exhibitions, etc) and for the kind of competition that will develop audience interest in this sector. The trouble is, the cost of entry to market at this scale is so huge that there are unlikely to be many other organisations able to make the same step up, especially in a Lottery funding climate that is much harsher than when FACT got their funding. If they see their immediate peers as organisations out of their sector (the Tate, Whitechapel, etc), then the bespoke conditions of their space will not be exploited, as they’ll have to make concessions in their frachised programming to the facilities available in standard ‘white cube’ spaces. MITES is a partly successful attempt to deal with this, but is still geared towards adapting ‘white cubes’, not replicating the far more dynamic spaces that the FACT centre has.

But the biggest problem could be the building itself. All cultural centres of this scale subsidise their programming activity with the support services that mass audiences expect – cafes, bookshops, etc. FACT have addressed this head-on, with 2 cinema spaces that will show art-house programmes that are related to the other emergent work exhibited. But this could easily become the tail that wags the dog, as audiences might identify the FACT centre as a great cinema with some funky exhibition spaces attached.

Of course, this could be their overt intention. There is nothing wrong with this at all, but it would represent a significant shift away from the programming philosophies that have underpinned their work for over 10 years, and would prove my theory that no organisation involved in emergent networks of practitioners can manage the shift in scale from supporting communities to supporting audiences. This is where the relationship to power laws and the Google/Blogger relationship comes in, and I’ll get around to exploring this in part 2. In the meantime, I’m off to Liverpool on Thursday, and will let you know what I think when I get back.

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ZONE

The space of a mobile phone conversation is a real space as well as a node on a technological network. These communication spaces used to be architecturally defined, such as Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s classic ‘K2‘ red phone box. With mobile technologies this architectural referent disappears, and the ‘zone’ created by switching your attention from a social public space to a private call or message is defined by product design and gesture, neither of which have effectively replaced architecture as a commonly understood social protocol.

The ‘zone’ also describes the cell-like structure of mobile phone networks themselves, explored very effectively in the work of Dunne & Raby at the RCA. This technological boundary is more fluid than physical architecture, moving dynamically with you as you walk between zones, but can still be used as a way to locate the user within physical space.

However, boundaries of communication spaces are not only defined by architecture and technology. Erving Goffman also describes the way in which we use social conventions of inclusion and exclusion to demarcate these boundaries – what Goffman calls ‘situational closure’. This describes the way in which we communicate, or pretend to communicate, our participation in a conversation. Depending on our familiarity with the participants or the context, we can take a number of positions in relation to a conversation, from active to passive, from bystander to focal point. Goffman investigates these positions, and most importantly into the transitions between them, in great detail:

“One example of this is small enclosed spaces like elevators, where individuals may be so closely brought together that no pretence of not hearing can possibly be maintained. A similar kind of issue seems to arise in near-empty bars, or with cabdrivers. So too with the individual who is momentarily left to his own resources while a person to whom he has been talking answers a telephone call; physically close to the engaged other and patently occupied, he must yet somehow show civil inattention.”

Erving Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places

In these examples Goffman is describing how intimate conversations affect the status of the observers in the immediate vicinity. Instead of a singular connection between the people participating in a conversation, there is a ‘fall-out’ amongst everyone in hearing distance, with the consequence that they must somehow signify their inclusion or exclusion from a discourse that they are not in control of. A similar set of relationships occurs when one person takes a mobile phone call in a public space, even if the surrounding audience aren’t necessarily known to the person taking the call (for example on a train).

The ‘zone’ in this case does not describe a kind of ‘cocoon’ that temporarily separates the individual from social space, but a kind of wave that affects everyone within the vicinity of the communication. Yet again, the moment of intimate communication is not merely an exchange between two people and the technologies that connect them, but a complex social environment with a large number of participants, each of whom has to play a role, whether voluntarily or not.

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INTIMATE

“The young ladies of Frankford … have recently discovered that by holding a piece of tin against the iron foot-rests driven into the wooden poles of the Southern Electric Light Company they receive a weak electric shock, and almost every evening a group gathers around the poles that are not situated on the main thoroughfares and enjoys the fun for hours… One pretty miss was heard to remark, after her first experience, “Oh, I thought I was squeezing a handful of pins” “yes,” said another, “it’s something like being kissed by a young man with a bristly moustache.”

Carolyn Marvin – When Old Technologies Were New

What do we mean by a technological intimacy? Is it about communication with intimate others? Or being intimate with technology itself? The original use of the word ‘intimate’ in TIZ referred to the irruption of a private, on-to-one communication in a public space. This has traditionally been signified by a form of architecture – a phone booth or other construction that makes it clear to passers-by that the user has stepped out of the public realm and into an intimate communication space. With mobile technology, these physical signifiers have almost disappeared, replaced by ever-shrinking mobile phones and ‘hands-free’ interfaces. The phrase TIZ was formulated to describe this new phenomena – temporary, intimate communication zones that are not architecturally signified, but instead performative – signified, if at all, by gestures as much as by products.

But the word ‘intimacy’ invokes a closed, binary relationship, where we know that mobile communication is partly public, even this is unintended. Privacy might be a better term, but privacy has become one of the most political terms in technological discourse, and the weight of these arguments overloads it for this context. But perhaps this discourse focuses too much on the huge discrepancy in scale between individuals and an abstract technological network, and not enough in the real space of human encounters enabled by these networks. Intimacy and privacy are not concepts that exist as binary oppositions (intimate/distant, private/public), but as a continuum that is negotiated socially and affected by specific contexts.

In Erving Goffman’s , “Behaviour in Public Places”, he describes the social and cultural factors that delineate ‘proper’ or ‘improper’ behaviour, and how these create protocols that should, ideally, communicate these boundaries to all participants. These protocols are incredibly complex, with nuances reflecting subtle changes in the make up of social groups, cultural norms or location. For Goffman, these protocols define different levels of ‘tightness’ or ‘looseness’ in social situations that describe how individual behaviour is either tolerated or proscribed:

“It would seem that there may be one overall continuum or axis along which the social life in situations varies, depending on how disciplined the individual is obliged to be … the terms ‘tight’ and ‘loose’ might be more descriptive and give more equal weight to each of the several ways in which devotion to a social occasion may be exhibited”

Perhaps these definitions of ‘tightness’ and looseness’ could valuably be transferred to debates about ‘intimacy’ or privacy in networked communication. Rather than isolating the individual as a node on one end of a network that is vast in comparison, we should understand that intimate and public behaviour exist along a continuum, where the local context is as important in negotiating concepts of intimacy or privacy as the global perspective. Just as a temporary, ephemeral message can attain status and longevity through their context – for example an accrual of attention or scale – so levels of intimacy or privacy are products of a complex, almost fractal, social discourse, negotiated between participants using body language, clothing and a host of other signifiers.

Technological intimacy is merely another level of signification along this continuum. Particularly in the real spaces of mobile communication, the technological network is just one part of a context that includes the architecture, people and events around us. Definitions of privacy or intimacy that only take account of the relationship between the node and the network look thin and naive compared to the rich sociological context of Goffman.

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TEMPORARY

The mobile experience is temporary in that, as the subject is in a more dynamic situation than is usual for communication technologies, the moment of connection is ephemeral and far shorter than the usual experience of, say TV or the web. But it is also temporary in that the forms of discourse itself tends towards the ephemeral – gossip, comment or diaries rather than longer writing forms. This kind of public discourse is nothing new – Juliet Fleming, in her book ‘Graffiti And The Writing Arts of Early Modern England’ , traces a similar kind of public discourse played out over walls, windows and other architectural elements in the 16th Century:

“I imagine the whitewashed wall as being the primary scene of writing in early modern England … The writing that survives from the Elizabethan period was produced by people who had the technological and financial resources for the laborious procedures of securing paper, pen and ink. The poor, the hurried and those (it may have been practically everybody) unconcerned with the extensive circulation and long survival of their bons mots wrote with charcoal, chalk, stone and pencil”

Fleming here describes a wealth of literary activity that, transplanted to a different kind of accessible technology, mirrors the huge amount of writing that takes place over mobile networks via SMS. The success of SMS, viewed as part of a continuum of ephemeral public writing stretching back at least as far as the graffiti of Elizabethan England, is less surprising than currently appears. It seems that the lure of a white wall, or a blank screen that serves as such, is irresistible to a public that wants to communicate, however ephemeral or banal that communication may be.

Although it is ephemeral, this kind of writing occasionally seeks to reach a more public level of discourse, and with it some kind of longevity. In graffiti this is marked by a transition in scale, from the tiny etching on windows of Elizabethan ‘writing rings’ or names scratched on a school desk to huge slogans painted onto the side of a building. This kind of transition tends to be signified architecturally – in Rome, four ‘speaking statues’ are historical focuses for such samizdat ‘publishing’ – a location that has accrued a status as a ‘speakers corner’, where individual comments become public pronouncements. There are examples of these spaces enabled by current technology, such as hellomrpresident, but another example may be blogs, where the boundary between unheard comment and public discourse is defined not by scale or architecture but by a complex network of attention and reference (linking).

By definition, this kind of ephemeral public discourse, even when scaled in size by physical or virtual architectures, is lost to history. Is this a good thing? What gets lost when these complex networks of intimate public discourse are erased, either by whitewash on a wall or deletion from a server?

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Ok – i’ve found the essay that I wrote for Horizon Zero, and as I’m planning to use this as a space to put those things I don’t use in my day job, I’m going to put it up in three parts. But first a bit of background.

In my previous job, I developed a series of experiments using mobile technology. I also got interested in thinking about the new social behaviours that mobile use was creating, and the historical parallels with the introduction of other new technologies. I strongly believe that there are a few common fantasies that recur with the launch of every new technology, and these tend to be both utopian and dystopian. Inevitably both types are hyperbole, and picking your way between the two is a better way to think about the future. Most of the stuff I find myself idly thinking about, or idly writing, is like this.

In this presentation, I went back to a term that I used half-seriously to describe the experience of mobile telephony – the Temporary Intimate Zone or TIZ – and picked through each part of the phrase to see if it made any sense. Its a rambling essay about public space, discourse, and technology, and doesn’t really go anywhere, but includes most of the ideas that I’d like to think more about, so seems a good place to start this blog from. Well, ignoring the first rant about bad web design, that is…

oh, and yeah, TIZ is meant to be a slightly tongue-in-cheek adaption of Hakim Bey’s TAZ. But I wouldn’t take it too seriously if I was you…

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I wrote up a presentation I gave at a Banff NMI conference last year for their off-shoot zine Horizon Zero. My essay is typically rambling about public space, TIZ and stuff, but the design of the site is *terrible*. Its the kind of designer’s free-for-all I thought people had stopped doing in 1997 – completely done in flash, no intuitive UI, or even guides to help you find what you want to find.. in short, a navigational nightmare. If they’d been sensible enough to provide an HTML version for those of us that have accessibility needs, or just can’t stand pointless flash interfaces, then I’d have been able to link to my essay. Instead, I can only tell you to click on english or french, wait for the flash to finish downloading, somehow find the link for the archive, choose issus 4, look for ’speakers corner’, and then see the text come up as an image (!) so that you can’t cut and paste, and have to click to get every new page. This site seems determined to counter every possible advantage that putting a text online brings. sheesh.

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now nothing what so ever to do with this

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now nothing what so ever to do with this