jeff watson

Bruce Sterling’s keynote from the Transmediale Festival (6 Feb 2010) delivers some brilliant and provocative ideas about the role of the creative artist in the context of an increasingly atemporal culture. In this wide-ranging speech, Sterling passionately articulates how changes in knowledge production practices and shifts in the way authority is conferred in the context of network culture have permanently altered the “organized narrative representations of history in a way that history cannot recover from.”

To set up his discussion, Sterling begins with a brief hypothetical confrontation between the “Old” Richard Feynman and his present-day counterpart, the “Atemporal” Richard Feynman. Drawing on a memorable speech by the real Mr. Feynman, Sterling outlines how “Old” Feynman viewed the process of generating knowledge as having three simple stages:

• Write down the problem
• Think really hard
• Write down the solution

“Of course it’s a joke,” Sterling observes. “But it’s not merely a joke — [Feynman is] trying to just make it as simple as possible.” This simplicity is confounded by the Atemporal Feynman, for whom knowledge production is at best a much more circuitous and unstable process, and at worst, a kind of upside-down hyperbolic oxymoron:

• Write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already.
• Write problem in my blog. study the commentary cross-linked to other guys.
• Write problem in Twitter in 140 characters. see if i can get it that small. see if it gets retweeted.
• Open source the problem. supply some instructables that can get you as far as i was able to get. see if the community takes it any farther.
• Start a Ning social network about my problem. name the network after my problem. see if anybody accumulates around my problem.
• Make a video of my problem. YouTube my video. see if it spreads virally. see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem.
• Create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. create some gadget that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.
• Exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media.
• Find some pretty illustrations from the Flickr looking into the past photo pool.

Sterling: “Old Feynman would naturally object, you know: ‘you have not solved the problem. You have not advanced scientific knowledge, there is no progress in this, you didn’t get to step three, solving the problem. Whereas the atemporal Feynman would respond, you know, it’s worse than that. I haven’t even done step 1 of defining the problem and writing it down. But I have done a lot of work about its meaning and its value and its social framing, combined with some database mining and some collaborative filtering, which is far beyond you and your pencil.”

More info: Futurity Now!

Chicago’s Version 2010 (April 22 to May 2, 2010) is “now seeking proposals and presentations about tactics and strategies that help sustain our communities, find better uses of our resources, and maintain and expand our networks.”

For eleven days and nights, we will explore the best practices and boldest failures in interventionist, participatory, and collective social, political, and cultural practices. This year’s theme is presented in order to bring together groups and individuals seeking additional methods for connecting our networks and creating solid foundations for the practice of art, education and social activism well into the next decade. We want to use this opening during the current economic and political crisis to expand and amplify our shared ideals, values and strategies for survival and expansion. (Version 10 CFP)

Submissions are programmed under themed “platforms.”

• Free University
• Live Musical Performances
• The Chicago Art Parade
• Performance/ Interventions/ Mobile Projects
• A Catalog of Strategies
• the NFO XPO
• Version Group Exhibition
• Curatorial Projects
• Underground Multiplex (Film/Video)
• Printervention
• Web Selections
• The Other

Submission form here. See also the related call for papers from Proximity Magazine: “A Catalog of Strategies.”

Via @glowlab

There are real risks in reading the present moment into historical accounts, but I couldn’t help doing just that as I read “The Amateur Operators” by Susan Douglas (one of this week’s recommended readings for Henry Jenkins’ class, Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0).

For those who haven’t read the piece, the gist of it is that the period of 1906-1912 saw an explosion in amateur wireless telegraphy, with boys and young men across an increasingly urbanized America “[reclaiming] a sense of mastery, indeed masculinity itself, through the control of technology.” (191) Wireless kits and how-to guides (some published by the “founder of science fiction” himself, Hugo Gernsback) sold like hotcakes, and in just a few years there were several hundred thousand amateur wireless operators spread out across the country.

This hobbyist culture, at once intensely social — as it inherently involved communication — and potentially isolating — as it required technical skills that could only be acquired outside of the flow of ordinary life — bears a striking resemblence to the tinkering subcultures that have attended the rise of home computing, network culture, and social media. Like the initial “boy wonder” practitioners of homebrew wireless telegraphy, early adopters of computational and network technology have been characterized in the popular discourse as heroes of the arcane, the possessors of secret knowledge, and even potential messiahs. But, as was the case with amateur radio operators, the culture has a tendency to swing in the opposite direction as the technologies and practices in question become more widely embraced and therefore subject to greater scrutiny (and acts of mischief). In many cases this scrutiny has led to calls — rightly or wrongly — for regulation founded on anxieties about safety, morality, and legality (compare, for example, the heirarchically-minded US Navy’s half-pragmatic, half self-righteous outrage at the “leveling effect” of amateurs sharing the airwaves with professionals to academia’s worries over the loss of control over canon or the RIAA’s efforts to distinguish “professional” content from amateur production via vehicles such as tonight’s awkward and remarkably irrelevant Grammy awards ceremony).

Inspired by Douglas, I looked up the 1907 New York Times article that she references in her text, and found in it many parallels to early descriptions of Internet enthusiasts (among many other possible analogies — for example, such fascinated exaltations of the “boy-inventor” now can be found in press coverage of Augmented Reality designers, physical computing tinkerers, Y Combinator whiz kids or certain social networking platform CEOs). Have a look for yourself — the article is here. Then have a look at this gem from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, circa 1993:

Young Peter Mansbridge’s awkward yet strangely fascinating decision to not use the word “the” in front of “Internet” notwithstanding, a final parallel with wireless telegraphy occurs to me as I write these notes. According to Douglas’ account, the wireless boom peaked quickly and came to an end as the airwaves became so crowded as to be unusable. The US Navy, among others, fought and won a battle with the amateurs, despite the latter’s claims that “the ether was neither the rightful province of the military nor a resource a private firm could appropriate and monopolize,” and that “their enthusiasm and technical spadework entitled them to a sizable portion of the territory.” (214) In the end, none of these objections mattered: the airwaves were either militarized or sold off to corporate interests, and amateur radio was relegated to shortwave only (a limitation that caused an estimated 88% drop in the number of hobbyists in the United States). In light of this, could we consider the emergence of “boy inventor” and techno-messiah characters in popular culture as harbingers of public resource conflicts to come?

MIT’s CROMA group brings together researchers from media arts, architecture, and chemical engineering. The group “aims at developing technologies and use case scenarios for building responsive, programmable, and energy-smart architectural components.” Their “smart organic window” project proposes the use of electrochromic organic polymers to enable touch- and motion-sensitive brise-soleil techniques.

A basic premise of this work is that a programmable and responsive façade element can not only be aesthetically provocative and improve energy-efficiency of architecture, but also has the potential to alter the ways we relate to buildings and surfaces, opening exciting avenues for new kinds of interaction and experience, and requiring new skills and competencies in the fields of design, architecture, and engineering. (CROMA)

I’m curious to see what kinds of game design and storytelling projects will emerge out of CROMA’s research. A variable-opacity responsive window is pretty amazing, but the radical step is using such a window to articulate a ruleset or open up new vectors for communication…

I met Eric Gradman at a meeting of the recently-formed Transmedia LA group; his enthusiasm and sense of humor are as infectious in person as they are in his work. Gradman’s “uncomfortably augmented reality” project, CLOUD MIRROR, is currently on show at the Sundance festival.

The CLOUD MIRROR is an interactive augmented reality art installation… Live video captured by a camera and is re-projected on the wall behind the camera, functioning like a “magic mirror.” But the CLOUD MIRROR software alters the images on the way to the screen. It runs an algorithm that tracks faces from frame to frame and also examines each frame for 2D barcodes printed on attendee badges. By pairing each face with a badge, and each badge id with a database row, the CLOUD MIRROR can identify by name whoever is standing in front of the installation.

The CLOUD MIRROR then augments each frame, adding a thought bubble to each face in the image. The contents of that thought bubble are selected from a set of “tags” associated with that person. Tags come from various sources, including Facebook, Twitter, and SMS data.

When registering for the event, attendees were asked to optionally provide their Twitter name, Facebook profile ID, and to answer the question “Where is your favorite place in LA?” In the weeks leading up to the event, the CLOUD MIRROR software sent a friend request to any attendee that provided that information. The poor trusting souls who accepted this request had their personal profile gently data-mined. Specifically, the information captured was “Facebook updates,” “Twitter updates,” and “Facebook relationship status.”

CLOUD MIRROR also capitalized on peoples’ innate desire to embarrass their friends by allowing anyone to anonymously “graffiti” in a thought bubble by sending an SMS message to a special number containing the target’s unique badge ID. (monkeys and robots)

Update: Eric’s documentation from Sundance and his reflections on some of the privacy implications of the project.

From NASw-512, “Engineering Man for Space”; May 15th, 1963 (abstract).

More: Cyborg bibliography.

via @caseorganic

This paper visualizes a sample of my own fan practices by placing them on a simple x/y grid. Based on this visualization, I draw a variety of provisional conclusions regarding a) the role of fandom in my life in general; and, b) its relationship to my artistic practice in particular. Finally, I conclude with a brief commentary on the future of fandom in the context of network culture.

The Grid

This is a blank version of the grid I created for this exercise (larger view). The horizonal axis represents the degree to which a particular practice is participatory, with the rightmost end of the axis representing a maximally-participatory level of engagement. Individual practices are positioned on this axis based on how I answer questions such as:

• Did my fandom lead me into actively engaging with an intellectual property’s (IP’s) broader fan community?
• Did my enthusiasm for a media franchise or category result in me attending conferences, connecting with others online, and participating in other events, or did I let such opportunities pass me by?
• Did I engage with the world of the IP to the point where I began to produce my own extensions to that world?
• And finally, did my fandom lead me closer to an “active” community of practice, or did I remain within the confines of a more “passive” community of spectatorship?

The vertical axis of the grid maps the degree to which a particular fan practice is “comprehensive,” and addresses the following kinds of questions:

• Did my commitment to the IP or category make me want to accumulate everything that I could get my hands on related to that franchise or practice?
• Did I become an obsessive collector of related information and media, or was I content to merely sample smaller portions of the world of the IP?
• Did I gravitate toward an “expert” level of knowledge? Or was I happy to remain on the surface in terms of my apprehension of the totality of the world of the IP?

Continue Reading

“I didn’t give up writing poetry, I like to say; poetry gave up on me. Through 20-odd years of reading and writing poems, I felt reputations rise and fall around me, certain styles of poems fall in and out of fashion. Unlike with painting or music, the poetry world’s changes occur entirely outside anything that resembles the forces of reception or reading. In New York, it is a self-licking ice cream cone that depends on untalented poets to keep the system going. The more paranoid poets regarded their skills as a threat to those toward the bottom of the Ponzi scheme, whose worship of higher-ups were not adequate enough to rise a level on the Poetry Chain of Being.”

– Goodbye to All Them by Daniel Nester – The Morning News (via @jaybushman)

Jejune Institute Induction (Part 1) (via BrettLowers)

LA Monsoon

Victoria Kaʻiulani Kalaninuiahilapalapa Kawekiu i Lunalilo Cleghorn, Crown Princess of Hawaii (16 October 1875 – 6 March 1899) was heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and held the title of crown princess. Kaʻiulani became known throughout the world for her intelligence, beauty and determination. After the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, she spearheaded a campaign to restore the Kingdom. In New York, she made many speeches and public appearances denouncing the overthrow of her government. In Washington, D.C she spoke before the United States Congress and pleaded with U.S. Presidents Benjamin Harrison and later Grover Cleveland, but her negotiations could not prevent eventual annexation. (via upload.wikimedia.org)

“…what does it mean for a cybertext to be experienced via a mobile device? Traditional forms specify the syntagm because the possibilities of the real world are unquantifiable. Text-messaging, however, blurs the boundaries between a hermetic narrative space and the unpredictable logics of the real world. A cybertext on a mobile device is neither specifying a syntagm nor a complete paradigm. Instead, it elicits the specific creativity of the human consciousness interacting with its environment, temporarily organizing how reality, whatever its subjective nature, whatever preexisting simulacra exist, might be experienced.”

– Knifeandfork – Subversive (Mobile) Storytelling

Marmocorn.

is this ARG? is a social media aggregator I’ve built to gather feeds from the ARG community/affinity. The site is kind of like an amped-up Twitter list, displaying feeds from blogs, Delicious accounts, and other open/publicly-available social media sources — including the Unfiction forums and even Wikipedia.

The idea is to amplify the potential vectors for collaboration and research among and across the ARG community (and provide a handy real-time research tool). Everything that gets posted across the web by the sources listed on the site’s sidebar is gathered and put into a single stream on the root page. I’ve also made it possible to view the individual output of people/sources on the list by clicking on their names. There’s an FAQ on the site, and I’m also working on some more features that will roll out soon, including a way of archiving everything, curating venn-diagram-like clusters of streams, and generating keyword clouds to help with browsing through past posts.

The inspiration for this came in part from something Brooke Thompson wrote in reference to the ARGdb project, something to the effect of wanting to find a way to bring together all the energies members of the community are putting into different web fora. This is an effort in that direction, and also a bit of a curatorial endeavor: for me, making this project is kind of like editing a magazine or journal of sorts, populated not by articles or essays but rather by voices.

The following is an excerpt from my paper, “Alternate Reality Games and Pre-Splash Knowledge Studies: Hypothetical Worlds; A Better future.” This tongue-in-cheek science-fictional paper didn’t work out exactly the way I wished it would, but it’s funny in parts, so I’m posting it here for posterity…

Introduction

For some, the very notion of “pre-Splash Knowledge Studies” (PSKS) is an oxymoron. The academic institutions of the time were notorious for being wasteful where they should have been stingy, and stingy where there was need. Worse, restrictive copyright laws and archaic credentialing rituals sealed off important participation vectors and created an atmosphere of distrust and resentment.

Significantly, one doesn’t require the remove of time and circumstance to make this bleak assessment of the period. Thought leaders clearly understood that crucial components of the academic ideal, such as the free and universal access to knowledge, were “compromised by the current intellectual property regime,” and that the so-called ‘new media’ initiatives put forth by most institutions were “about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it” (link) And yet while this frustration was shared by many within the Humanities, few seemed to know what to do.

Part of the reason for this desperate state of affairs was a lack of examples of alternative knowledge production systems that could point the way. As one scholar noted:

[Reimagining the Academy will] involve developing projects which span disciplines, which link several classes together and [require] students to build on each other’s work, and which may straddle multiple universities dispersed in space. All of this is easier said than done, of course, but we should be experimenting with how to achieve this goal since at this point it is even hard to point to many real world examples of what this would look like. (Confessions of an Aca/Fan, October 2008)

Indeed, despite the incredible advances in network technology and ubiquitous computing that had taken place during the early 2000s, the inherently conservative nature of degree-granting academic institutions meant that official scholarship continued to treat “digitally (re)produced research…as if it were more or less a prosthetic extension and enhancement of print.” Worse, in many cases, knowledge produced in online spaces – particularly collaboratively-produced knowledge – was often rejected altogether. So high was the anxiety about the future that many turned to denial, attempting to wish the unfolding changes out of existence by clinging to the past; in so doing, these actors did their part to set the stage for the cataclysms that accompanied the Splash. Such was the tenor of the time.

On the other hand, it has become something of a Crosbyism to simply equate all pre-Splash knowledge production practices with corporatism, neofeudalism, and rampant careerism. As broadly accurate as these clichés might be, the reality is, of course, much more nuanced. Our research has revealed numerous progressive models for the production of knowledge that were actively explored in various sectors during the decade leading up to the Splash. One such practice, namely that of “Alternate Reality Gaming”, a cross-platform recreational knowledge production activity whose popularity exploded in underground “alpha geek” culture in the years immediately preceding the Splash, has captured the imagination and enthusiasm of our node to such an extent that we have decided to dedicate our centennial activity almost exclusively to its study. By exposing this little-known genre of story and play to a wider audience, we hope to spark fresh discussion about popular conceptions of life and learning in the first decade of the 21^st century. Further, by revealing how the ARG community (among others) enacted many of the very practices that would have enabled the Humanities Academy of the time to break free of its self-imposed chains, we intend to make a larger point about the all-too-human tendency to miss the solutions to one’s problems even when they’re sitting right in front of one’s nose.

Full paper: watson-hypothetical-worlds.pdf

Jan Libby and Steve Peters talk ARGs at DIY Days LA.