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
Rooftop Cafe at Shell’s Amsterdam HQ
Amsterdam Skyline from Rooftop Cafe
Amsterdam jet-trails
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!
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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…
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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