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.

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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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