Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: thoughts about the first two weeks and moving on
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hey! Some years ago, around 2007, there was a lot of institutions dealing with media arts in the country, particularly in São Paulo. Looking back now, it feels like another intoxicating side-effect of the wave of optimism provoked by what seemed another “Brazilian miracle”. That is when the Museum of Image and Sound (MIS-SP) reopened under a new direction, with a strong international residency programme attached to a media lab. However, the lack of popularity of this programme, combined with some political disagreements between the museum management and SP government, took things some steps back. Right now, most exhibitions are ready-made travelling shows imported from abroad, repeating the same old topics. Kids love them, though. Artemov is another interesting case: a festival for locative media convened by artists and academics who engaged critically with this area (among whom were Lucas Bambozzi and Marcus Bastos, participants of the list). Supported by the sponsorship of a local mobile phone carrier, it managed to have a quite substantial programme, including very good seminars with international guests. These events resulted in what I believe to be one of the most updated essay collections on media arts and locative technology published in Portuguese - a priceless resource for classes. Sadly, the festival is hibernating. From what I heard, the said phone carrier cut all of its support for cultural programmes. Smaller and sporadic events are still running, making do with whatever they can get. Right now, there is a local edition of Pixelache going on in Ubatuba, in the coast. It was quite an adventure for the organization to get means of travelling for everyone interested, but it worked out in the end (the solution was refunding participants’ long-distance bus tickets). What prevented me from attending was mostly the clash with the classes calendar. Best! Menotti 2013/10/23 Timothy Conway Murray t...@cornell.edu: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Gabriel, It's interesting that your experience at Socine parallels my thoughts about the Bosun Festival. You put it well that Bosun, apparently as with Socine, could have been more successful in integrating experimental medial approaches into its programming and discourse. So that if convergence figured, as it did so prominently as the theme of the Festival Conference, it did so primarily as folded into the screen of more traditional cinema discourse. It's very disconcerting that those organizations most committed to articulating and promoting artistic convergences have fallen on the budgetary chopping block. Would you be willing to say more about the context and histories of Arte.mov, Prêmio Sérgio Motta, MIS-SP? I suspect that Dale is experiencing an alternative and more robust approach to funding the arts. Dale, could say something about this and what difference it's making for thinking convergence and alternative approaches to the screen arts? Thanks so much, Tim Director, Society for the Humanities Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art Professor of Comparative Literature and English A. D. White House Cornell University Ithaca, New York. 14853 From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Gabriel Menotti [gabriel.meno...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, October 21, 2013 9:41 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: thoughts about the first two weeks and moving on --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello, Tim! So would you mind elaborating a little more specifically about the particular institutional contexts about which your thinking in Brazil. Oh, sorry if I was unclear. I was referring mostly to academia and academic forums. Particularly, I was thinking about Socine, the biggest cinema/screen/film studies congress in the country, which is fresh in my mind because I was participating of it two weeks ago. I was hoping to see a more heterogeneous event, but it ended up very traditional. The only working group *slightly* opened to convergence (or issues of technology and culture) was the arts cinema one. I was presenting a paper about piracy and ended up in a panel with someone doing statistical research on the participation of women in the production of Brazilian features in the last 20 years. While there could have been an interesting dialogue between our two projects, if the panel was better planned and chaired, it ended up feeling simply as the place where they throw the misfits. The point being: there is not enough people working in certain areas to constitute productive fields of academic dialogue and criticism. On the other hand, it is interesting to notice how sometimes it is non-academic events and institutions (like FILE) that work
Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: thoughts about the first two weeks and moving on
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello, Tim! So would you mind elaborating a little more specifically about the particular institutional contexts about which your thinking in Brazil. Oh, sorry if I was unclear. I was referring mostly to academia and academic forums. Particularly, I was thinking about Socine, the biggest cinema/screen/film studies congress in the country, which is fresh in my mind because I was participating of it two weeks ago. I was hoping to see a more heterogeneous event, but it ended up very traditional. The only working group *slightly* opened to convergence (or issues of technology and culture) was the arts cinema one. I was presenting a paper about piracy and ended up in a panel with someone doing statistical research on the participation of women in the production of Brazilian features in the last 20 years. While there could have been an interesting dialogue between our two projects, if the panel was better planned and chaired, it ended up feeling simply as the place where they throw the misfits. The point being: there is not enough people working in certain areas to constitute productive fields of academic dialogue and criticism. On the other hand, it is interesting to notice how sometimes it is non-academic events and institutions (like FILE) that work as catalysts of thought, creating conditions for the displacement of current research culture. Didi-Huberman, for instance, was brought to Brazil for a lecture by the newly opened Rio Museum of Arts (MAR), and this certainly played an important role in his recent surge of popularity. Such events have the conceptual freedom and necessary fundings to propose new questions/ bring new people. It is a shame that lots of them that were involved with arts media were recently discontinued due to cuts in cultural budgets (Arte.mov, Prêmio Sérgio Motta, MIS-SP). FILE is one of the few in the area that survived - perhaps because of its popularity with a wider public. Time will tell how negative will be the effects of these cuts to the variety of research. Best! Menotti 2013/10/19 Timothy Conway Murray t...@cornell.edu: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi, Menotti, It's so nice to hear your voice back on -empyre- and to receive it from your home territory of Brazil. It strikes me as extremely important that you situate the possibilities for or restrictions of convergence in relation to resources or institutions. In some cultural contexts, it seems like minimal resources might have enhanced the possibility for and necessity for convergence (such as the Arte Povera movement, etc.). So would you mind elaborating a little more specifically about the particular institutional contexts about which your thinking in Brazil. Many of our readers, for instance, might associate Brazil with the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, which historically has been known for celebrating the convergence of artistic medial practice. Is FILE the exception or do you see FILE being held back economically, etc.? Best, Tim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: thoughts about the first two weeks and moving on
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hey, empyre! Thanks for the intro, Renate. It is quite pleasing to participate of the list in the much more comfortable position of a guest. =) Following Dale’s comments about venues and events in Delhi/Mumbai that foster convergence of practices, I could talk a bit about my recent experience, having returned to Brazil after a four-year season as a PhD candidate in London. Still suffering from academic jet lag, some challenges within local universities, research councils and seminars become very clear. Somewhat, the precariousness of local institutions plays against convergence. In the context of arts humanities, the general lack of resources (books, equipment, funding - and time to work!) seems to result in much more homogenous projects, repeating similar formulas, topics and bibliography. Besides the demands of productivity and accountability, I believe one of the reasons for this streamlining of the field is the very honest desire to find intellectual interlocution - common, reliable bases for dialogue. It can feel quite alienating to be the only one in a whole field dealing with a particular bibliography or theme, having no one to talk to. We invest time and attention in authors and schema that allow us to communicate with our peers. Thus, theory moves slowly, in well-established fads, trailing after what happens in North America and Europe (mostly France). The most recent ones are Rancière and Didi-Huberman, who are being mentioned in virtually every national debate about moving image. There seems to be both insecurity and cautiousness in this development, a kind of fear of walking with one’s own steps and suddenly finding divergences from norms set abroad, risking putting into question the rigid hierarchies scientific authority relies upon. (It’s funny how this creates certain distortions of perception. For a long time, Vilém Flusser – who lived, worked and taught in Brazil for a long time – felt too foreign. When I moved to London, I made the mistake of changing all my main references to match the British edition of “Towards a Philosophy of Photography”, ignorant of the fact that Portuguese was more of a working language for the author, and the Brazilian version of the book is actually more up to date.) Best! Menotti 2013/10/17 Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Tim and I have returned to the US after an intense and productive time at the Busan Film Festival. It was wonderful to see Youngmin and Alex in real time in both Busan and Seoul. The Asian perspective on convergence is one that I feel we have only begun to flush out. Thank you Alex for teasing out some of the cultural complications involving this fact. This was evident for me not only at Busan's film festival but in meeting many of my former students who despite a critical fine arts education at Cornell have transitioned over to their home in Korea where most of them work in very large commercial design firms. It appears to me that this spirit in celebration of capitalism as opposed to a suspicion (that particularly western academics and artists) stems from a desire and necessity for South Korea to assert itself from its neighbor to the North, communist North Korea. I am thinking though about how other parts of Asia may weigh in on this. Week three brings to us three guest moderators: Dale Hudson, Gabriel Menotti and Ken Feingold. Dale now teaching in the United Arab Emerites has been a guest on -empyre previously so many of you may know him. Dale used to teach at our neighboring institution Ithaca College and we do miss seeing him around town. Gabriel Menotti long-time empyreans will recognize. Menotti was a part of a moderating team a few years ago. We welcome him back as a guest and look forward to his contribution. We also welcome Ken Feingold this month a new contributor to -empyre. Biographies are below. Dale Hudson (UAE/USA) is a media theorist, critic, and curator. He teaches film and new media studies at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), curates online exhibitions for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), and serves on the preselection committee for the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF). His work appears in journals including Afterimage, American Quarterly, Cinema Journal, French Cultural Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Screen, and Studies in Documentary Film, as well as in anthologies. His book-in-progress, “Blood, Bodies, and Borders,” analyzes transnational and postcolonial vectors of U.S. history through the political economies of film. He has also reviewed films, exhibitions, and books for journals including Afterimage, African Studies Review, Jadaliyya, and Scope. Gabriel Menotti (Brazil, 1983) Gabriel Menotti is an independent curator and lecturer in Multimedia at the Federal University of Espírito
[-empyre-] bio - gabriel menotti
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hey! What a nice opportunity to get to know more about the participants of the list, especially the lurkers (category to which I normally, proudly belong). =) My name is Gabriel and I have moderated a couple debates on empyre before, on topics like the denied distances of the cinematographic circuit, gaming subcultures and in/compatible research (with Magnus Lawrie). I was planning to do another on super-human agency, but teaching overwhelmed me completely! I have a PhD in Media and Communications (Goldsmiths, University of London) and another in Communication and Semiotics (Catholic University of São Paulo). Interests/ fields of activity include cinema and grassroots media. I often mingle research and practice, and thus ended up organising pirate screenings, remix film festivals, videogame championships, porn screenplay workshops, installations with film projectors, generative art exhibitions, academic seminars, and collective 3d-printed model-making sessions, among other things. Some of these works and research results have been presented in events such as ISEA, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Makeart, Interactivos?!, the São Paulo Biennial and Transmediale. Last year I published a regular academic book, Através da Sala Escura (br portuguese only, easy to find in PDF), which investigates the history of movie theatres under the light of contemporary art practices and VJing. Currently, I’m back in my home town, lecturing at the local Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES). At this very moment, I'm in London helping organizing the Media Archaeology / Technological Debris conference+workshop that happens in Goldsmiths next week [http://technologicaldebris.info]. If you are around, be invited to come! =) Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] in/compatible research practices - signing off o/~
Dear all, As the week comes to an end, the in/compatible research practices debate reaches its closure. I’d like to thank once again to all the discussants and the empyre crowd for the very diverse discussion throughout these days. It gave us some food for thought that will hopefully expand in further dialogues about academic practices and alternatives, in such time when they seem so necessary. For me, it was a particularly happy opportunity to discover more about the work of the people involved in the reSource workshop and seminars. I feel extremely grateful for everyone’s generous contributions and especially for Magnus’ co-moderation. (And thanks also to Ana Valdés for this spare time in March! =)) As a final note (not entirely unrelated to the last threads on encapsulation, privacy and data mining), I call the list’s attention to the metaphor search engine that started to be promoted last week. It seems that the drive for incompatibilities in thought processes is becoming increasingly popular: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328536.500-metaphorical-search-engine-finds-creative-new-meanings.html Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Contextual Glitch
Hey! Sorry, but I’m a bit slow to catch up with this week’s discussion. Starting with some points raised by Andrew about glitch/failure: if failure is the goal, then presumably it’s not failure to begin with… [ANDREW PRIOR] Agreed - but in that case, what is a failure? Does aiming for failing (again; better) makes one completely immune to it? What about not aiming for anything? Would that be the ultimate technique for dealing with disappointment? It is telling that the reframing of failure in another timescale, making projections after-the-fact, often turns it into a historical steppingstone (something evoked by expressions such as “blessing in disguise” and “God works in mysterious ways”). In that sense, how is the success/ failure dichotomy bound to certain teleologies? Kim Cascone gave a talk in the Piemonte Share festival last year that reworked his ‘Aesthetics of Failure’ title into a statement about the ‘Failure of Aesthetics’ […] largely based on the recuperation of glitch aesthetics, the ability of the market to co-opt and repackage oppositional aesthetics into something that is popular, and commercial. [AP] Again, to bring back one question from the previous week: wouldn’t these art (‘critical’?) practices profit from moving away from the discipline of aesthetics altogether? What comes to my mind is Hito Steyerl’s take on the “poor image” (or Francesco Casetti’s idea of “relocations”), in which the “aesthetic” loss in embraced in favour of economic gains (e.g. cost, speed - mostly access). Given these parameters (which are not merely contextual, but operational), a tension with the market seems nonetheless to persist. The market can always co-opt the lookfell of, say, CAM movie recordings – but can it co-opt piracy? What about the art establishment? Are there ways in which the background, the context, the story, the meaning can be foregrounded within noise works? [AP] It seems to me that such works still carry some of their “meaning as failure”, making a degree of (counter-?)contextualization necessary for their circulation in less informed channels. For instance, at some point in G/L.ITC//H Birmingham, Iman Moradi was telling me that the infamous Kanye West video didn’t last long on MTv because the unaware spectators thought its special effects were a real glitch. Could this be an explanation for the integrity of the community of glitch artists, as an environment that promotes a proper understanding of its own production? On the other hand, how much effort does the market needs to do in order to appropriate oppositional aesthetics? And how does this appropriation relate to (or build) public expectations? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Search, privacy, data
Now, onto privacy, search and data: However, now we are witnessing a throwback of our own data; Google begins to make the search more personal, Facebook has the frictionless sharing to name a few examples. [TERO KARPPI] In the more specific case of research practices, which problems might arise from this growing personalisation of platforms, the proliferation of algorithms tailoring search results to “our interests,” and the constant filtering of information by like-minded peers? More directly: would this combination of narcissistic mechanisms be creating a vicious circle that makes it even more difficult to take anomalies into account? What tactics could be used to escape the circle? For instance, is “variantology” programmable? I somehow cannot imagine this boring information to be valuable enough to justify a complete makeover of the whole idea of privacy. Or: Who is _literally_ buying all the twitter babble? And why? [LASSE SCHERFFIG] This question makes me think about these scientific expeditions to the wild, focused on “discovering” and then patenting never-before-seen natural “resources” (birds’ DNA sequences!), without applying this information to anything specific. Could all this privatization of superfluous user data be similarly related to getting control of still unseen possibilities – “colonizing the future”? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Search, privacy, data - the abuse of encapsulation
And finally, trying to stretch “encapsulation” in different directions: Whilst others disagree, I am of the opinion that computing is an independent real process: it is not the logic of encapsulation which is the issue, but its proprietary use and abuse which should worry the masses. [ROBERT JACKSON] I wonder if here we could trace connections between the logic of encapsulation and the broader one of abstraction, which is inevitable for dealing with computational complexity (and complexity in general). Taking this into account, could the issue be not only technical or political, but also epistemological? Is there any way of circumventing the forced removal of complexity of a system if this removal is what makes it understandable (operational, engageable) as the system in the first place? Is it practical for the users to take control of abstractions themselves (e.g. choosing what and how to encapsulate)? Or does it suffice to build up awareness about them? The problem with iPhones is that they aren't shitty enough. Again, this is linked to the logic of encapsulation, and the ability to save us time, as per the Western infrastructure of career enforcement and obsession with social attention 'sharing'. [RJ] Considering the culture of gadgets, could we also relate encapsulation to degrees of technical concretization? What role does the removal of complexity of the system at hand plays in its alienation from circuits of productions-distribution-consumption – all the while inscribing it in its own history of programmed obsolescence (an older iPhone being always shittier than a newer one)? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the extents of learning experiences/practice as a means towards academic self-criticism
what is needed so that the moment of the performance itself can be a learning experience, I think, is openness or, what I sometimes like to call, being in the moment: being aware of and in constant reaction to what is actually happening then and there, on stage. […] So what I think can first and foremost be learned in the moment of the performance is another way of knowing that breaks away from teleology. [IOANA JUCAN] This is an interesting way of considering knowledge in relation to different awareness of time/history. But how do they negotiate with one another? In other words, is the learning experience of the performance limited to the (timeless!) stage, or can it survive (does it have any value) once we are cast in the flow of (secular, teleological) time? How to translate the awareness of “being in the moment”, or whatever is learned from it, back to the everyday (or precarious) life? And are these products [of artistic research] to be discussed under the rubric of aesthetics, still? Is talk in terms of aesthetic value relevant as far as they are concerned? […] To push this question one step further: What is the relation between artistic research and the category of aesthetics? [IJ] Or, to attempt another reversal of paradigms, is the category of aesthetics still relevant as a means of assessment? Couldn’t artistic research move us from the epistemic fascination with the aesthetics of results/products to a more general attention to the poetics of processes? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Horsemouth
Hey! Thanks for jumping in, Anthony. Your participation is very welcome. =) Just to add another serendipitous resource to the noise thread, I’d like to call the attention of the list to the recently uploaded recordings of “noise=noise.theory” - “a live public lecture/presentation/performance event that took place on thursday 19th january 2012 in london uk” – which also includes a very topical presentation by Mattin and Anthony. http://www.archive.org/details/Noisenoise.theory19012012 Best! Menotti Em 25 de fevereiro de 2012 13:52, anth...@metamute.net escreveu: Hello there, Apologies for the delay pedal on this response. Earlier this/last week Johannes posed some questions about the Noise Capitalism and book. At Pauline's prompting I subscribed to Empyre to try to answer some of these questions and respond to the interest in this book/ongoing project. Mattin, a musician originally from Bilbao working with noise, improvised music and performance initiated the process of a book consisting of 12 contributions together with Audiolab - a group dedicated to audio research based at Arteleku in San Sebastian. The book was intended to bring some, then much needed, critical reflection on the politics of experimental music practices and it's relation to capitalism as a social relation. Mattin and I have been friends since he lived in London around 2000. I helped him edit the book which finally saw publication in 2009. Arteleku/Audiolab kindly supported the design, printing and distribution of the book. The book was intended to be translated into Basque and Castillian Spanish. This has yet to happen, but my hope is that one day it will at the very least in Epub or PDF. As a way of launching the book and opening up it's content to readers, practitioners and theoreticians of noise and improvised music, Mattin, Emma Hedditch, Howard Slater and myself traveled to San Sebastian where we lead a workshop around readings and discussions of the book and performative practices we developed together in response to it and the situation in the room. An aspect of the ethos developed around the book's disseminations involves not separating or hierarchising discussion, theory, utterance, gesture, movement, play, 'music', silence and so on. Since then this group of contributors to the book has worked together with others in a different formations to create performative situations in the context of festivals, concerts, workshops, book launches, exhibitions and lectures. Notably at the Ertz festival in Brera (at the same time as the first workshop) and Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee 2010, CAC Bretigny, Exhibition as Concert 2010 and most recently a performative lecture entitled:'Noise Capitalism: Funeral and Zombification' at DAI, Arnheim. Another interesting aspect of the book's dissemination was that Arteleku are bound by local cultural policy not to sell any product. Therefore, in discussion we made it possible for the book to be available through trading/swapping. Individuals could obtain a copy of the book by writing to Arteleku and sending something in exchange - often an audio project or art object. By our request these were to somehow respond to the question which informed the book - what is noise? what is capitalism? These works are documented on the Arteleku noise and capitalism blog. There were many interesting responses and there is a kind of potlatch sensibility to this archive. However, in other respects this was a disabling aspect of distributing the books - when people hear about a new book people expect to find them in the shop or on Amazon - and this is also where people find and hear about new books. So, even if a few record shops exchanged in bulk with Arteleku and then resold the books, I guess this also showed how non-property-based relations are marginalised under capitalism and giving stuff away for free does not necessarily challenge the buying and selling of everything else and the fact that our access to certain vital necessities are only obtained through money - access to money for those with out any is through work for someone with money and so on... An integral aspect of this will be some sort of live event in the near future and an opening up of the first book to criticism (self-criticism), discussion and new practices in this area. I hope that answers some questions and that engagement with the book still gives some food for thought. All the best Anthony ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] benefits of practice to conventional research / could gamification save academia?
Interestingly though, until very recently these developments have only been Cybernetic by structure, not by name (mainly because it carried the smell of a hype from the past). [LASSE SCHERFFIG] How efficient is this sort of symbolic camouflage to disentangle a discipline (structures of thought, conceptual frameworks, methods) from the hype (of the past)? From another perspective: should the changing of names/labels (from KYB to INF?) be taken as a “superficially” administrative or as a “deeply” philosophical operation? Or is it one of these cases in which such separation makes no sense whatsoever? Is there any advantage in sticking to the old, overused/abused concepts, and forcing them to perform new operations? I generally feel uneasy with talking about benefits of artistic research, […] But of course both inform each other to some extend. [LS] I’m curious whether this information remains as a form of silent inspiration to the thesis, or if it is actually written down in some way. Do you refer to the artworks even in passing? If so, do you conceptually reframe them as experiments? How personal is (would be?) your account of them in any academic form (such as an essay)? the objects on a game's screen do not exist in the loops we created, although they exist (a) in code and (b) for us, i.e. as sign and signal. The game, however, functions without them. [LS] The game “functions”, but can it be /played/? And if it can’t, is it still a game? Considering the amount of material resources spent on these “objects” (memory, processing cycles, etc - which is critical in older console systems), how redundant they should be considered to the overall feedback structure entailed by the gaming system? (And: is this relation between “functionality” and “playability” in any form analog to the one between “conceptual structure” and “names” above?) News of the World is a nice example of circular causality because it bends the very rules that produced it (the demand for peer reviewed publishing). [LS] Reaching out to the other thread: should we take this rule-bending as a form of institutional critique? Can it have long-term effects, or is it restricted to opening space for a singular intervention? But exams and degrees are already gamification of education. And badge-based accreditation of achievement outside the academy is a way of reproducing this. [ROB MYERS] Ha, indeed. All the comments about “gamification” made me realise how it might be a most appropriate way to describe the particular economy of academic research we are already in. It brought to my mind a text on The Last Psychiatrist about a particular research project that went completely wrong, but nevertheless had a “quite positive publication output”. From its (self-congratulatory?) conclusion: “In general, the results could not be combined in an overarching model, and were thus disappointing with regard to scientific progress. In contrast, the end result in terms of publication output was quite positive: the majority of papers were presented at international conferences and published in highly cited journals and several students earned PhD degrees based on their work on the subject.” (The whole text: tinyurl.com/7fhsv9h) Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
institutional critique is no longer associated with artistic practices only and is developing towards what has been termed as a 'transversal practice' [MAGDA TYZLIK-CARVER] And do you see institutional critique playing a central role not only in your curatorial practice, but also in your academic research? In practice, what tactics do you employ to manage the paradoxical relation between this political agenda and the “inevitable” outcome of an (institutional) validation? Another seemingly paradoxical relation I’d like to hear more about is that between commoning and curating. In your work, do you actively make an “emancipatory” effort to move away from “directed commoning” and towards “collective curating”? Or you try to pay close attention to how both vectors interact in the course of instituting? How much self-awareness is involved in this process? I don't want to be romantic about it, but what I would want to preserve for my own practice is the recognition that there is knowledge that is hard to categorise and then that it might become something else (another knowledge) after the process of translation into what we can understand through language. [MT] Just to clarify: would that be self-recognition (as the outcome of a learning process) or some sort of institutional recognition (e.g. the inclusion of such knowledge in the common academic tradition, a PhD title, etc)? I would be curious to see how do you relate these hardships of categorisation to the skype logs of the common practice project, which seem to be an interesting way of writing/ preserving that fully embraces the metamorphosis that result from translation (or a transport in time). Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] myths of conservation / the extents of learning experiences
myth […]: the opening of a space that allows one to create rituals of understanding around the social space, around pervasive epistemological-ontological constructs; [IOANA JUCAN] I was not familiar with Dominguez’s ideas, and now I’m wondering if he also considers the more normative dimension of rituals, as well as those myths not about transformation, but about conservation (nature as an ever-returning cycle both in pagan legends and in the abrahamic Ecclesiastes, etc). This trope seems particularly central to some stories about eternal punishment (such as Sisyphus’ and Prometheus’), in which there is a sort of endless feedback cycle leading nowhere (or forever-denied transformations/ deterioration). How can I make of my performance-making practice a learning experience (that materializes in some kind of knowledge acquisition or understanding) rather than an application of the theoretical outcomes of my research? [IJ] Do you also extend this question to the moment of performance itself? Can being on stage be a learning experience, instead of the application of the outcomes of another process (e.g. scriptwriting, rehearsal, etc )? (How) am I to justify my art practice in relation to my theoretical research and demonstrate its relevance to the latter? [IJ] I believe this concern also connects to Magda’s questions about the validation of practice within academia. In that sense, at this point, do you feel inclined towards any of the three different approaches outlined by her? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] benefits of practice to conventional research / could gamification save academia?
Of course, this science in the meantime had its own hype in media art and theory (in which it never was as forgotten as it is(?) in the sciences). [LASSE SCHERFFIG] I wonder if there is any lesson about the relation between media art/theory and “the sciences” that we could take from this delay. Is one domain fated to lag behind the other’s insights, adopting them as late models? Or is the “longer time” media art/theory is “spending” with cybernetics able to bring out new things from it? (Does the influence also go in the opposite direction? Are scientists still anachronically bewildered by something the artworld no longer takes seriously?) With Paidia Laboratory: feedback (that has been part of transmediale) and my friends of Paidia Institute, we recently have taken this research into art practice; [LS] I’ve seen the exhibition and enjoyed it quite a lot. Didn’t know it was a recent undertaking. What benefits do you think this practical work is bringing to your research process? Is there any connection that might be established between this criticism of pedagogy and the learning process that is entailed by a PhD investigation? (Or rather: could gamification be a solution for academia?) Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
regardless if the question of artistic practice and research method and their in/compatibilities take place within an institutional or more personal and subjective context, it is, nevertheless, an administrative issue which involves bureaucratic processes and forms of communication/communicating those processes [MAGDA TYZLIK-CARVER] I tend to agree with this administrative perspective, or at least I feel that it is perfectly able to overarch / make the case for the other two (of “ontological separation” and “methodological confluence”?). I wonder if this implies that what is specific to academic work is just a particular way of accounting for anything – coming down, precisely (purely?), to an issue of language and form. Could it be? And going back to a question from previous weeks: how do we preserve what could not be written down in the first place, and will inevitably get lost in the bureaucratic translation? Is part of the work of the researcher to make more graspable the less visible structures s/he tackles and employs? Should one provide to his/her examiners the means for his/her own assessment? What about the posterity? More generally, how much of a reflexive endeavour within academia (or a meta-research) must a practice-based PhD be? the managerial, administrative and communicative aspects are some of the defining elements of what is considered to be a domain of so called ‘curatorial’ (along many others, of course) [MT] Considering the role these aspects play in a research project (from proposal to the publicization of results), is there any particular way you relate academia and the curatorial? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] incompatible research practices - week 03 - feedback control // language curating
Dear all, Thanks everyone for the manifold discussions last week, and especially Marie for bringing up such rich material from her experience and projects This round will entail an interesting departure from the subjects of noise and revolutions with the contributions of Lasse Scherffig and Magda Tyzlik-Carver, which will move us to a wide range of topics that include videogames, feedback, control, curating and language. Quite a variantological week! =) *Lasse Scherffig* Lasse Scherffig studied cognitive science and digital media in Germany, Switzerland and the USA. He has worked both in art and science contexts, publishing on Cybernetics, interaction, location and satellites and showing collaborative art projects at numerous festivals and venues. He currently works at Lab3, Laboratory for Experimental Computer Science at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). *Magda Tyzlik-Carver* Magda Tyżlik-Carver is a PhD researcher at KURATOR/Art and Social Technology Research Group at University of Plymouth. Magda works as a research assistant in Digital Economy research centre at University College Falmouth. She is also an independent curator currently associated with KURATOR. Projects include series of collaborative curatorial events common practice/language and common practice/code (2010) in Arnolfini/Bristol, playing practice (2009) and turning language into objects (2009). She regularly contributes to conferences and symposia and has published several texts on curatorial practice which relate to her current PhD research. http://magda.thecommonpractice.org/ Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] incompatible research practices - week 03 - feedback control // language curating
Hello again! I'm happy to say that Ioana Jucan, who could not participate last week, is also contributing to this one. Welcome, Ioana! Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] fragile identities / taboo of destroying property
Hey! I spent a while doing the 'full with noise' strategy – playing all sounds, all at once, loudly. But where do you go once you've done that, when you've reached (what you hear as) the limit? [Marie Thompson] This question leads me to think about how much a presentation to others involves the repetition of the skills one is already fully accustomed to and over control. At the same time, how much attention should we be paying to what /the audience/ hear as the limit? Could their expectations be used as a way of furthering the understanding (and turning around) of one’s own techniques? Are there analogies to be traced here with a viva voce examination? but i am not so sure (Cage's 4':33 and his ideas on silence go back to the 50s) what surprised audiences, what made anything un-bearable, or why an open structure (an indeterminate structure?) would be considered radical? [Johannes Birringer] Tentatively, I’d say that they could have been surprised if they were not familiar with Cage (or with that tradition). Or just because silence/ inaction is always a bit disturbing, even when one is consciously prepared for it (elevator silence, for example). On the one hand, I think this could be thought in terms of how we understand/ manage the relation between universal and particular references/ history. A certain scholarship/discipline might have digested and overcome certain ideas, but these ideas can still be relevant and create turning points in a personal investigation. (Also, every new generation has to rediscover all traditions anew, don’t them? How is this process goes through? How is a tradition implemented and reimplemented?) Could there be a parallel here with Luxemburg’s distinction between the “unknownness of revolutionary life” and the “unknownness and intimacy of personal life”? On the other hand, what are we assuming about the audiences? While we are wondering what expectations they might have, what expectations do we have about them? I think you really have to be delusional at this point to think that destroying globalized industry-produced state-owned PA speakers in a publicly funded cultural institution during a PhD symposium is somehow a significant or effective challenge to patriarchy... or any offending notion of order [Baruch Gottlieb] Uh, I don’t believe this was implied at any point. I was precisely asking why we are so quick to dismiss the potential risk to the equipment as an “uninteresting question” – or as “insignificant” and “ineffective”. Such objection raises yet another reason: our own political expectations, or the parameter we set ourselves in order to assess the (“critical”) meaning and value of something (in that case, the assumed “challenge to patriarchy”). Behind the risk to the equipment there are many risks. It is quite undisputable that a breakdown challenge *some orders* (such as that of the very situation of performance). Why is the challenge to these orders irrelevant? Are these orders (“critically”) irrelevant themselves? (I feel that this could come down to a question of universal/ particular as well; critical inquiry still much more focused on grand narratives about the obsolescence of technical standards than on the demise of single (“irrelevant”) things.) Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] the will to escape identities (and the taboo of destroying property)
Hey!
It might seem strange that i'm interested in escaping
identity when this current work is so heavily routed
in identity politics. There are two primary responses
to this. First, I feel that you have to work through
identity in order to escape it. [Marie Thompson]
Actually, there is a peculiar resonance between this (let’s say)
political strategy and your poetic interests, if we consider another
divide besides the noise-silence one: the separation between noise and
language (or signal).
Some people involved with particularly creative practices (writer
Clarice Lispector and Picasso are two that come to mind, but I’m sure
there are other examples) have posited that in order to overcome
(abandon) grammar/rules, they must be first mastered.
In that sense, the way to get to the undefined seems to be through a
highly-defined territory. Regardless of superficial impressions, noise
(the awkward prose, the convoluted drawing) would not be something
prior to the structure of language, but something that is beyond (or
in spite of) it. (Maybe as a result of linguistic saturation, which
makes language become the unwanted/rejected?)
(This might take us back to the issue of assessment, and parents
pointing to modern art and saying that their kids could do better.
Would this be a good or a bad thing to Picasso, who once declared that
it took him a lifetime paint like a child?)
In any case, Marie, I was wondering if you feel that this active
reaction to rules/canons plays any role in your musical work or
research.
So I guess there is also the question of do I have a
responsible to create certain sounds that don't risk
equipment? (I appreciate this isn't the most interesting
question, and I feel that its been asked a lot of times...) [MT]
Or maybe it is *the* most interesting question, as it points towards
boundaries that *seem* unshakeable. But why? Bruno Latour once
mentioned how highly political is the definition of materiality, and I
believe this could be extended to such claims about the
infrastructural limits available to action, thus throwing open
dynamics of ownership and authorisation.
Besides the *equipment*, what else is under threat? The room’s
electric installations? The artist’s voice and reputation? The
audience’s amusement and inner eardrums? Someone’s job? Social and
economic contracts?
Among all the possible risks, why is the destruction of property still
the strongest taboo?
Of particular interest to me has been the noise of
neighbours. A number of participants have commented
on missing the sounds of their neighbours, when they
have been (forcibly) relocated to ‘better’ housing with
thicker walls. [MT]
Fascinating study! Besides this relation between noise and presence,
it suggests how noise seems to be in-between public and private
communication, softening their boundaries.
Would it be possible to understand gossip through a similar logic,
especially when it acts as a form of social engineering that modulates
institutional and personal regimes (often, in the most perverse ways)?
I felt myself lucky to participate in a performance
'going fragile', involving Mattin and other contributors
to Noise and Capitalism. […] It seemed as if people
('audience') couldn't bear the silence and the absolutely
(radically) open structure of this collaboration. [Magnus Lawrie]
Annoyed audiences always get me curious, Magnus. =) Could you please
bring more details about the performance?
Best!
Menotti
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[-empyre-] postponement - Ioana Jucan
Hello, all! Just to let you know that Ioana Jucan apologizes, but she had some trouble that forced her to postpone the participation in the debate until next week. Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] incompatible research practices - week 02 - performing revolutions // noise and gossip
Hey! I have also been interested in the treatment of women’s sounds as noise. Gossip, for example, is seen as frivolous, extraneous, and meaningless. [Marie Thompson] This reminds me that Kittler attributes some important characteristics to the voice of women that are far from meaningless or threatening, but not entirely incompatible with this perspective on gossip. He foregrounds the reassuring role that mothers (used to?) play in the education of kids, training them to be vocally (physically) able to perform discourse. Along those lines, he kind of traces a gendered account of the development of media systems. He also refers to how, later on, women would get “within writing” by taking the role of secretaries and typists. Thus, there seems to be a cultural history of women as specialized functionaries (as computers as well, as evoked by Hayles) that intermediate/ mediate discourse; allowed to /be/ a voice but not to /have/ one. But then, it is interesting to note that the intervention of the soundman in Marie’s performance shows how being just a functionary can still be very “meaningful”: When I arrived, the soundman was not expecting me to play (I think something had got lost in the communication channels) […] what actually happened was the noise kicked in, and the soundman turned me right down. [MT] In that sense, we could develop Magnus’ question further: more than managing or maintaining a network of performance, is the presence of functionaries able to offer another perspective over these networks, one that allows us to turn dualisms around? (Particularly the separation between “technical procedures” and “meaningful discourse” – and maybe that between backstage and stage)? Though it's a matter of perspective - I know that some people who saw it didn't recognize the lack of noise/ volume (myself included). [Magnus Lawrie] Which also throws us back to the issue of how shared/ universal have to be the criteria for assessing these less traditional practices – especially when they propose a radical departure from previous measures/standards. Also, is there any special care that should be taken in order to communicate them to a “general” audience? Or are misunderstandings also a positive result? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the pitfalls of trendy theory and popular art projects
I wonder why you doubt the commensurabilities? probably you are interested in how the research you ask about was written, or written down (is it up?) as they say, and this is course perhaps a different question. [Johannes Birringer] I’m not sure if I *doubt* them. I’m just very curious about people’s strategies to deal with the in/commensurable, as this seems to be one of the obstacles for the connection between artistic practice academic research (or even between different disciplines): things that are easily amenable in one domain completely escape the parameters of the other, rendering them either irrelevant or impossible to assess (at least by PhD examiners, peer-reviewers, etc). So, in a way, it is a question about “how do you write your practice?” But at the same time, is this writing – or, more generally, the logos – able to convey what at first escaped it, and you found somewhere else? Your comment on Baader-Meinhoff, however – I could not figure it out, sorry, Could you unpack it for me? [JB] Uh, sorry about that. The Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon is when you start stumbling again and again, apparently by chance, upon something that you just discovered. The urban dictionary specifies “obcure information:” http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Baader-Meinhof Is it a fate? A conspiracy? Or just a sort of involuntary cognitive bias? In any case, I was wondering if the sudden hype felt around some theories could not be just a *personal* (or collective, but not universal) impression. A case in point might be how, after some days of Transmediale, I felt that the notion of “incompatible” had become meaningless. Maybe it hadn’t, maybe it is just me that got saturated of it. to my mind we are not yet finished with the old metaphysics. I have not yet read or heard a 'new' metaphysics which was not just metaphysics couched in new terms or frames. e.g Harman's talk at tm. [Baruch Gottlieb] Yes, I agree. What I meant is that the ship detour inspired a new metaphysics *for Kircher*, making him come up with another way to structure the universe. Maybe “cosmology” would have been a better word. In any way, the “new” thing I was referring to is already medieval. =) (by local scholars, you mean latin american ones? I suppose you are right... but Zielinski probably knows enough about scholars by now not to expect too much. Academics are European. Academic institutions are European. [BG] Indeed, the latin american ones. To some extent I think that you are spot on, and Academia is European throughout, no matter where you may find it. From my experience with Humanities/ Social Sciences in Brazil, what I get is that the influence of the local context in the traditions of this institution is less in terms of references/ bibliography than in terms of method (understood as a sort of “flexibility” of form and procedures). I wonder if César (or any other lurking Brazilian/ Latin American!) have a similar impression and could bring in some better thoughts on that. who's favour are you expecting to curry here? [BG] One’s own. =) Is “hype” one of these popular toxics that could fuel people into understanding and/or productivity? (The analogy here being coffee.) When I started my master's degree I was already a professor having to advise doctoral students with only a bachelor's degree albeit with years of artistic practice, [BG] Interesting situation! Hope this doesn’t sound offensive, because I am genuinely curious: did you felt any professional tensions (or maybe freedoms) while working in academia with a “pure” artistic background? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] incompatible research practices - week 02 - performing revolutions // noise and gossip
Hello! Thanks very much to Baruch and César and all the other participants for the generous input last week! I don’t mean to interrupt the ongoing threads, but it is time to introduce some new guests into the discussion: Marie Thompson and Ioana Jucan. Both their researches engage with a range of practices not entirely unproblematic to academia, such as experimental performance and noise improvisation. Biographies below. *Ioana Jucan* Ioana Jucan is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher primarily focused on performance-making, philosophy, and new media. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. degree in Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University. In her research, she is interested in exploring the role of performance in the production of epistemological shifts in periods marked by major technological breakthroughs, towards rethinking the notions of the experimental and the revolutionary. In her artistic work, Ioana combines traditional and experimental artistic methods in her exploration of performance as a site for the creation and transmission of knowledge and as a story-telling device. She is an alumna of the Watermill Summer Program 2011 under the artistic direction of Robert Wilson. She is also the co-founder and artistic director of the Listening LabOratory performance group associated with Brown University. *Marie Thompson* Marie Thompson is a AHRC funded PhD candidate at Newcastle University, based in Culture Lab and the International Centre for Musical Studies. She has previously studied at the University of Liverpool, where she undertook her Baccalaureate in Music/Popular Music and Masters in Musicology. Marie is also a musician, interested in noise-based musics, circuit-bending and free improvisation. She regularly performs solo as Tragic Cabaret, in the duo Ghostly Porters, and as part of Newcastle’s audiovisual collective, Kira Kira. Also, welcome to Magnus Lawrie, an old member of empyre who also participated of the in/compatible research workshop and will be co-moderating the debate from now on. Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] ambiguous artistic strategies critical engineering
Much contemporary computer based art work has a cargo-cult like quality due to such illiteracy. This can be interesting but usually in spite of itself. [Simon Biggs] I normally tend to appreciate the poetics of cargo-cult (or the work of script kids), but I feel that Simon’s remark is extremely pertinent considering the rigour expected from scientific production. Maybe this would be the place to draw a line in terms of how artistic practice should be employed within (humanities/ social sciences?) academic research? At the same time, a degree of radical invention (semiotic or otherwise) seems to be always expected from art (even more than from engineering). Considering this, how to assess for literacy when speaking in a language that doesn’t yet exist? Or to put it in another way: isn’t one always fully literate in the languages that one makes up? http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpagev=IMxWLuOFyZM#t=202s To bring the problem back into PhD research: could this be solved by the means of translation or framing – of drawing from the appropriate references in a strategic literature review? Alternatively, (how) could art (or “arts”, or crafts) be excused as a method? For instance, I wonder how César managed to include his insights about video and digital technologies into his thesis. Have you actively deployed your argument in contrast to Manovich’s? In order to do so, did you need to look for further references besides your own personal understanding of the technology? How much of your background had to be made explicit in the text? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] ambiguous artistic strategies critical engineering
Hey! my first area of study was the electronics, and I think that today this has much influence on what I have written and on my experimental projects. [César Baio] Being fascinated by the way some programmers write about software, I’d be very curious to see what kind of insights this technical background provides to your research. Are these overt influences or more subtle ones? Could you please give some examples – either theoretical or empirical? Also, do you see some coherence in the way you move from one field to another? I'm interested in if and how artistic practice can reformulate the concept of technology making their production and use more accessible, how are different (and ambiguous) the strategies that the artist uses [CB] Julian Oliver’s appeal for a “critical engineering” comes to mind here (there was a debate about it on empyre on July ’11, moderated by Simon and Magnus). Do you think there is anything particular in artistic practice that allow it to employ ambiguous strategies, or would these strategies be within the reach of anyone – such as academic researchers or technicians? Otherwise, shouldn’t they? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] the pitfalls of trendy theory and popular art projects
Oi! Media Archaeology is thus really a fashion, something inordinately hyped to sell more books, music, clothes, etc... […] Meanwhile, Zielinski is always (if he still uses the label) explicitly not a media archaeologist but a Media (an)archaeologist, a practice which has been increasingly one of biographing the anarchic margins of western thought and knowledge. [Baruch Gottlieb] To be diluted/ crystallized seems to be the gloomy fate of every theoretical framework that becomes originally successful and is then propagated and made trendy. Was Zielinski quick to jump off the boat of “anarcheology” before it felt prey to the same cycle? Should we spend our lives running from the conceptual edifices we spend so much time to build, right before they are gentrified? Or should we do something to barricade them and prevent the occupation of the masses? On the other hand, is there really anything wrong with the hype? When something becomes fashionable (e.g. Deleuze, incompatibility, practice-based PhDs), what is lost (if anything)? Baruch, I can’t help but think that this dilemma of popularity is similar to the one you faced with the iMine application. During the Transmediale seminar you raised the question of whether the viral dissemination of the project would be beneficial (or even necessary) to it. Could you bring to the list some of your considerations on that? And at the same time, what would you do if iMine indeed became a popular media phenomenon? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] incompatible [?] research practices
Hey! Sorry if I didn't made myself clear. What I meant to say is that this is the fourth forum in which the same people are gathered to discuss the same topic - incompatible research practices. The first was one workshop organized in November 2011; the second, a one-day seminar during Transmediale; the third, a peer-reviewed newspaper launched during the event. Some info about the initial workshop and the PDF of the newspaper can be found at http://darc.imv.au.dk/incompatible/. Probably they will publish the videos of Transmediale at some point. All of these activities were organized in the context of the reSource project, to which this debate is not connected. Previous participation is not really necessary to follow or contribute to the upcoming threads, which should address diverse challenges in new (or marginal/ anomalous/ problematic/ etc) forms of academic research. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the formats of discussion so far were so tight (and the background of the participants so diverse) that it was not yet possible to come up with common questions and well-developed conclusions (one good attempt at this was made by the people from Aarhus University in the end of the seminar, trying to think through issues of methodological/ thematic compatibility as a matter of academic hospitality). Explanations about the guest's individual concerns and projects can be read in their articles in the newspaper. Personally, I'd be happy to move the topic of research practices away from Transmediale's theme of incompatibility (or in/compatibility). It is a very seductive and malleable term, easy to be approached and included in a lot of different discourses. This apparent advantage seems to carry a huge downside. In the few days of the festival, the term was so throughout abused that it became meaningless pretty quickly. Taking a step in getting rid of the concept, one could ask how relevant (or: operationally useful) it is to frame any issue (or: technical challenge) as a dilemma of compatibility. Of either belonging or not? Being part or being apart? Isn't this a sort of teenage anxiety? (Here some joke relating peer-reviewing to peer-pressure could fit :P). Best! Menotti PS: On another level, this month's debate could have to do with reprises and subtle changes in meaning due to drastic changes in context. Em 7 de fevereiro de 2012 14:21, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk escreveu: dear gabriel and all you mentioned in your introduction that you wish to spin off or go deeper into a discussion ... in/compatible research (remake) inspired by something at the Transmediale called “reSource for Transmedial Culture” - and since perhaps many of your readers or subscribers here will not have been at this event or the postgraduate workshop you also mention, I'd like to ask whether you could give us a bit more background and context information. You seem to speak of obstacle protocols for first activities (what are these? research of a compatible or incompatible nature? obstacles to the research? framework definitions? institutional support? can you give an example of who practices incompatible research and what for, and who underwrites incompatibilities?), and hope to open up the workshop (can you tell us what the workshop did) to a month long forum; second activities, yes? greetings Johannes Birringer dap-lab http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] incompatible research practices - week 01 - from functionaries to programmers (and then some tricks for handling the incommensurable)
Hello, all! It is a pleasure to bring to the Internet the discussion about research practices started in the previous days during the Transmediale festival. The first participants for the month share a filmmaking background, as well as a long-term interest in the writings of Vilém Flusser and a personal engagement with art production. It will be interesting to see how these common points of departure might result in two very different approaches to academic investigation. In the paragraphs below, a bit more info about our guests. *César Baio* Artist and researcher, Cesar Baio has a background in electronics, art and audiovisual. He has developed his master's and PhD’s research at the Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC/SP) with a research internship at the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Berlin University of the Arts (UDK). He address issues related to the technical image and dispositifs of mediation in art. These issues have been elaborated also poetically in interactive installations, urban interventions and video. *Baruch Gottlieb* Baruch Gottlieb is a Canadian artist and researcher living in Berlin. Trained as a filmmaker, his work theoretically, speculatively and practically explores ground principles of the materiality of digital media, the materiality with which all digital media may be made, taking many diverse and convergent forms, such as: permanent and ephemeral public installations, stage and public performance, writing and video. Welcome! =) Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
Dear all, In the final moments of the year, the debate was rekindled in such a way that foregrounded the heterogeneity of perspectives over the game/ art distinction. This heterogeneity was expected, given the different backgrounds of the participants, and it should be welcome, in as much as it shifts the focus of the whole debate - or rather, return it to the matter of subcultural engagements. By now, we should not be worried whether the game/art distinction holds true, but on what basis we are dealing with this issue or dismissing it altogether. The criteria of gamers, artists and academics to judge the separations between playing and other cultural dynamics (art included) seem to be inevitably distinct. Is there a problem with that? Does anyone have to hold control over the definitions? Who gets to ask questions and give examples? The interdisciplinary confrontation should make us aware that our own theoretical frameworks are, themselves, mere operational platforms and not transcendental underpinnings, applicable to every field of society. In that sense, I'd echo Julian's interest in the mere /possibilities/ of things - and consequently, not in coming up with new paradigms, but in continuously provoking anomalies. So as to give some directions to this, I could end with one practical question: how is it possible to break disciplinary boundaries while maintaining critical effectivity? Would the performance (or interplay) of disciplinarity be a good strategy for that? Again, thanks very much for everyone's participation and a happy 2011! =) Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] week 5: summing up + thanks (and happy holidays!)
Dear all, There are no new topics or guests planned for this final week of the year, and I assume that most of you are away from the interwebs. However, even though life goes into this kind of recess, there is still time to explore and expand on the previous Gaming Subculture threads, if anyone feels like. I will be here, alive and kicking until the 31st. Then, Renate Ferro is taking over the list with a new debate. Anyway, I’d like to thank very much for everyone’s engagement – especially the invited guests, who were extremely generous in their contributions throughout the whole month, despite end-of-academic-terms, snowstorms, Christmas’ shopping and other holiday tasks. =) I was personally motivated by all the directions the debate took, and I am sure it will inspire some future projects and ideas. I hope it was fruitful for you as well. Best regards and, if I don’t see you around before the 1st, a happy new year! =) Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
Hey! “Games have repeatedly shied away from tying their dominant value to external systems.” [Daniel Cook] Value is a dubious measure for us to use. On the one hand, it is way too relative and personal; on the other, it seems to me that the art system is more and more aiming towards pure value as its essential specificity (perhaps the only way to subsist as an enterprise). So, why not compare artworks and games according to another parameter? Indeed, artworks may be created by reputation alone. Conversely, in terms of functionality alone, they seem much less dependent of external systems than videogames. To a large extent, a Picasso picture has an intrinsic existence: it is there, it can be hung on a wall. Wherever the viewer is aware of History of Art or not, she can still grasp a Picasso’s general characteristics, since the painting resorts to innate psychophysical mechanisms perception and the shared cultural legacy of western societies. So, it works in a very bare level. It is not the same with a videogame. In order to work on this bare level, it must comply with a lot of things – from genre conventions to technical specifications – the “representation information,” as summed up by Jerome McDonough. Even thought it doesn’t need any validation from a critic or curator, it needs a platform to run – which entail other forms of authorization. (One might say that my comparison here is dishonest; that, to be more rigorous, I should be putting a Picasso side-by-side with a non-electronic game such as Scrabble. I concede. However, I rest my case: a Scrabble board and pieces aren’t self-explanatory – they don’t work *as Scrabble* if you don’t know the rules of the game, an algorithm that circulates printed in the game manual or through the player community - i.e. subject to other authorities.) Is mere consumption truly the driving force of the market? Let’s say there is this amazing game, beautifully crafted, incredibly fun. People would certainly love it to addiction. However, if it is meant for the iPhone and it doesn’t conform to Apple’s specifications, it simply cannot be – and it doesn’t seem to matter how much pressure the consumers put on the company (I cannot remember an example of a game in this situation, but that has recently occurred to Grooveshark, a music streaming platform). Of course, the consumers can always hack their devices and look for alternative platforms. As Rafael Trindade has put it, retrogame emulation has been going around before videogame companies created official virtual console services. For iPhone, there is a very well structure platform for the distribution of applications in Cydia.[1] At the same time, the videogame developers can always learn a different programming language and look for a different platform and userbase. In what is that different from what the artworld has been doing, at least since the modernist avant-gardes? “I don't like the expression framed as art. I know it's difficult to say what art is, but I'm sure it doesn't depend on a frame. I don't think that the batman piece will become art if we frame it as art.” [Domenico Quaranta] When I said that No Fun exists framed “as art,” I do so in opposition to its framing “as reality,” in the original situation within chatroulette. Did the chatroulette people know they were in front of a performance? Did the piece communicate it? Would it operate differently if it did? (Answer: depends. On what? On the context – i.e. a frame. I think the Mattes kind of address this point directly in the “Freedom” piece).[2] I will again compare it to a machinima, which only exists “as movie” because before it existed “as game.” The presumed “mode of production” of a piece such as Red vs Blue [3], mentioned by Adam, contributes substantially to the meaning and value we attribute to it (its all-togetherness). The repetitive, bland animation of the series is below the conventional standards of 3D movies nowadays. If there were a universal parameter of criticism for animation technique as the one Daniel is asking for, the series would be doomed. However, RvB particular animation is not only excused because of its “tools of production” – it is also praised because of the way it engages with the videogame system and appropriates it for something it wasn’t originally meant to. In that sense, what would be a crappy animation becomes formally relevant, revealing the blandness of the game Halo itself. It seems to me that No Fun uses a strategy not dissimilar. In that case, it is no more an online performance than the making of Red vs Blue is a proper Halo Match. It is all staged, recorded and edited – even the supposed authentic, outraged reactions. Of course, one might argue that the piece is a network of different relations that include all these assumptions as well. In that case, I believe that it is even more important that we take into account the different framings (both technological and cultural) the it might go
[-empyre-] the self and the (machinic) other / a post-systemic condition or a post-art condition?
Hey! “Thus, the rage against the machine displayed in My Generation is, more properly, a rage against ourselves, and against our way to live into the game.” [Domenico Quaranta] I don’t see these outbursts (whenever they actually happen) as a form of rage against the self. On the contrary, they are normally provoked by the frustration over “unresponsive controls.” I remember feeling the same as I was learning to ride a bike when I was 13, or playing VV earlier this year. Two perceptions confront each other: even though you feel that you are doing everything right, you don’t see the machine responding accordingly. So, you try and make the machine respond by force. In other words, it is also a form of cheating – of confronting the game outside its own parameters. In that sense, the outbursts are a strong affirmation of the egoistical self against the machinic otherness. Of course, they hide the fact that the part in this relation that is flawed is the user himself – but anyway, the user is only flawed according to the parameters of the machine, etc. This can be seen as a form of self-aggression if we believe that there never is any real antagonism between man and videogame, only a ritual one (which I do believe). The end game screen is (generally) pre-programmed, and therefore the game intends (and, since we’re into guattarisms, let’s say it *wants*) to be mastered – even by a deaf, dumb and blind kid; even at the cost of a hundred coins. “At another level, we may wonder if the advent of video-games and the increasing familiarity of artists with them may have had other consequences on recent art practices.” [DC] Maybe the naturalization of technique that society is through going creates a sort of “post-systemic condition,” and videogames are the object that best express this – not only in our (“ludic” or self-aware) ways of understanding them, but also in the ways that this understanding fosters different forms of machinic engagement, both affective and operational. Overall, I fell that, nowadays, there are different disbelieves to be suspended. I wonder if this can lead to the perception that the frameworks that separate Cartier-Bresson from Thomas Demand are no more fundamental than the ones that separate playing from cheating. But how can we push this critical perception into critical agency, allowing movement across frameworks without needing to crystallize another one (as the post-structuralisms did, in a way)? “Internet cultures and subcultures represent increasingly layered and subtle politics beyond what popular journalism, and often academic study, can keep up with.” [Adam Trowbridge] I wonder if the art system isn’t losing the pace either – not only in terms of structures of distribution and authorization, but also regarding its choice of topics and strategies of production. Even though there has been no point in talking about avant-gardes for a while, early digital art had this “antenna of the race” quality. Nowadays, the interesting reverberations seem to come from somewhere else. About this, another work by the Mattes comes to mind: the “performance” No Fun. [1] Does it have ethical or aesthetical implications any stronger than other performances done within chatroulette subculture (e.g. the batman guy [2], piano improv [3], tits or chicken die [3])? Or its particular meaning and value arises from the fact that it is framed as art – and therefore deserves a critical consideration that these other performances don’t (it is reviewed in certain websites, etc)? It is telling that, for the performance to be framed (i.e. circulate) as art, it has to become a video piece. In what is this different from a speedrun or machinima, who become actual works only after they are recorded? How does the Mattes’ piece incorporate this mediatic translation into its strategies? Is the performance any different from a candid camera prank because it depicts death? Is it any different from a “faces of death” episode because it includes the reactions to it? And what can we say about the reactions to the performance's recording? Best! Menotti [1] http://vimeo.com/11467722 [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eoa-KqIwW8s [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTwJetox_tU [4] http://www.geekologie.com/2010/03/pederast_feeds_baby_chick_to_s.php (the chicken video is a fake – but what difference does it make?) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] pre-designed decay / gamifing the archive
“It's sort of unfortunate from a preservationist point of view, as it would be desirable to try to minimize the number of strategies employed to preserve games, but at this point I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all strategy for keeping games alive.” [Jerome McDonough] Wouldn’t it be the case maybe of creating a self-adaptable / malleable strategy of maintenance? Or incorporating it to the games themselves, so that they have their own pre-designed form of decay (I mean, historical persistence)? In that sense, and considering that archives are themselves socio-technical systems, could they be “gamified”? Would that facilitate preservation? Or create another problem in the preservation of the archive? (I'm sorry, but I can't think of any examples of either case right now. I invite you to speculate with me. =)) Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] the systemic qualities of media / the artistic qualities of consumption
“[…] most media is that it has a preferred path of being consumed. You watch a movie from end to end. You read a book from the beginning. You look at a picture with your eyes.” [Daniel Cook] Interesting that you put it in terms of consumption. I personally believe that the dynamics of consumption restrict medium specificity (and “language”) much more than the structures of production (the particular case study of my master’s was projection and film: in practice, the former defines cinema much more than the later, even though we have the opposite impression). However, I don’t really agree with the idea that these “normal” mediatic objects are just signals whose experience can be “diminished or tweaked.” To believe so is to reduce them to a mere logic of representation (according to which they can always be re-represented with more or less success, always in reference to – to what?). To watch a movie in a way or situation different from the “ideal” should be taken as a qualitative different cinematographic experience. In fact, sometimes, watching a movie from end to end actually means having a date – in the same way that playing a game actually means showing off or making friends. How do you transport these particular qualities? What I mean is that, certainly, videogames show the limits of media theory (and production) based on a logic of representation. However, the epistemological model they ask for should not be restricted to them – it should be expanded to other consider the situated and relational character of all forms of mediatic experience. “When this preservation topic was discussed at Project Horsehoe (a game design think tank) several years ago, the emphasis was on giving game design legitimacy.” [DC] A pertinent point. It reminds us that preservation plays a very important role on the historicization of things – a process that always revolve around authority: it both depends on it and builds it up. Of course, this is a huge matter of debate om the artworld itself (more to come next week). Now, I want to ask: could videogames suggest some alternative historiographical model that detaches preservation from authority? Just like they promote different modes of consumption, don’t videogames ask for different criteria of historical primacy, since their ongoing uses are at least as important as their processes of engineering? Shouldn’t videogame preservation itself be more concerned with the continuity of modes of playing than of game rules? In that sense, can we think of strategies of preservation that give legitimacy to playing over design? Or playing should always pertain to the realm of disauthorization? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] the performance of history / rom-hacking the museum
Dear all, As Jerome McDonough puts it, practices of preservation can be a challenge to the social nature of videogames and gaming. As digital artifacts, videogames are naturally systemic, depending not only of their inner components, but also of a surrounding environment in which these components can be executed – what Jerome called “representational information”. Certainly, this surrounding environment entails socio-cultural dimensions that are not so easy to maintain. From Daniel Cook’s contribution, we are reminded that games are naturally hard to preserve because they are performative. No matter if you sustain the conditions of play, the actual gameplay can be lost once the game becomes crystallized / objectified. (Here, a comparison of game rules to actual law might be interesting. How often outdated law does not become a series of meaningless traditions, completely disconnected from the ongoing social protocols? In that sense, should they be preserved? What about their conditions of existence?) In the context of our debate, it makes me wonder how much of what seems just representational information is a constitutive part of playing itself – sometimes a very important one. From the examples so far: what would be of the speedrunners without their video-recording-tools and forums? Or of the fighting game communities without their fractal ecosystem of arcade parlours and championships? So, in terms of historical preservation, how should these “environments” be treated? Meanwhile, Rafael Trindade has shown that emulation, a practice sometimes necessary for the maintenance of gaming systems (if not of games themselves), has many different reasons behind it. The kinds of enjoyment people get through emulation are not related to a transparent mode of playing; they are always self-conscious of other levels of engagement with gaming systems and their historical character. In that sense, I’d ask if emulation really is a static thing. If we understand preservation as the maintenance of access to videogame systems and their actual ongoing performance (more than the preservation of the stable conditions for that performance), a simple practice such as translation becomes extremely crucial. From a certain perspective, translation seems able to turn canons inside-out, bringing newer (but paradoxically older) references to a certain gaming tradition – for instance, many important JRPGs (such as Mother 3) that were brought to the west years after their original release. Therefore, should romhacking be considered the ultimate way of performing videogame history and keeping it alive? Wouldn’t it be the strongest form of preservation? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] week 3: platforms-within-platforms: videogame development preservation
Dear all, The last days have been a bit quiet due to a temporary crash on the empyre list server and a misunderstanding about the debate schedule. I apologize for that. Luckily, Ian Cofino has provided a lot of food for thought with a deep scrutiny of the fighting game community, a group of specialized players that organize modes and structures of playing in supplement to the standard ones. To this particular subculture, the development of the core videogame industry can be troublesome, as it challenges their “underground” identity. In that sense, the fighting game community seems to have an ambiguous relation with the mainstream industry, not entirely dissimilar from the one that “normal” hardcore players have with social/casual games development. There is still a lot to be discussed on that matter, and I hope that the threads about game championships and chiptunes are kept alive and kicking for the rest of the month. But the new week also brings new topics, which I will introduce by referring to Alex Gibson’s sidetracking (which wasn’t, really). Gibson evoked the idea of “gamification” of media technology: the incorporation of game mechanics into a given system’s interface in order to shape particular behaviors of its end-users, without limiting of forcing them into it. Daniel Cook unpacked the different implications of this idea and shown that the debate around it is not a new one. In sum, game design tap into dimensions of ergonomics and usability that are not normally taken into account by everyday interface design. This brings into question the essential character of videogames as sociotechnical systems that exist in relation to others within a larger media circuit. This week, we intend to explore this dimension by referring to communities involved in the creation of new strategies for videogame development and platforms for their historical preservation. One particular example of both cases can be found on the practice of system emulation. Our guests will be: * Daniel Cook Daniel Cook is a veteran game designer who runs the popular game design website Lostgarden.com. He writes extensively on the techniques, theory and business of game design. He is the Chief Creative Officer at Spry Fox, was a professional illustrator in his youth and managed to collect both a degree in physics and an MBA. His most recent projects include Triple Town, Panda Poet, Steambirds and Ribbon Hero, which turns Microsoft Office into a game. * Jerome McDonough Jerome McDonough is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the faculty at GSLIS, Professor McDonough headed the Digital Library Development Team at New York University. His dissertation, Under Construction: The Application of a Feminist Sociology to Information Systems Design, explored the interplay between software engineers and end-users in the construction of identity in graphical, computer-mediated communication systems. His research focuses on metadata and digital preservation, and he is currently serving as the principal investigator for Preserving Virtual Worlds II, an IMLS-funded project investigating the significant properties of computer games and interactive fiction for preservation purposes. * Rafael Trindade Rafael Trindade is a Brazilian ROM hacking aficionado. With the Cine Falcatrua collective, he has organized a series of workshops on Creative Emulation during 2006-2008, as well as KinoArcade, an event that explored gaming as a cinematographic experience. Nowadays he is a Literature student, planning to take over the translation of SNES’ Final Fantasy 6 into Latin. Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] week 2: user-based innovation VS the crystallization of a bro-world?
Thanks, Ian, for this closer view on the history and environment of competitive gaming! From your report, it is clear how the community engaged in this sort of activity share the same values and behaviors across different levels of organization. Your description of fighting games competitions suggests that the development of the community structure coincides with the increasing self-preservation of certain modes of playing – so that, as you said, participation “becomes cyclical in nature.” This is particularly interesting if we consider that this community is born from a deviation in the regular mode of playing console games (e.g. playing in public, for an audience, what was meant to be played in private). So, what I'd like to do is to compare this idea of cyclical practices with the notions of identity that you evoked in your text – both individual and collective. At the beginning, you highlighted the nature of competition as a process of self-discovery (that is, of one’s own self). I suppose this could be compared to the kind of character formation fostered by martial arts – which, to a large extent, is carried through the disciplinarization of the subject – the apprenticeship not only of certain skills, but also the internalization of an ancillary code of ethics. Hence, my first question would be: is mastery really a process of self-discovery, or would it be a process of self-definition – one that, paradoxically, depends on the accordance to a pre-defined system? Likewise, you finish your post wondering if the growth of a subculture would cause it to lose its original identity. According to the same perspective as above, I would ask: isn’t this process of “growth,” which structures a community and consolidates certain practices, precisely the process of formation of a communitarian identity? In other words, is there any original identity to be preserved? Isn’t the resistance to new players and modes of playing the affirmation of an identity that didn’t exist before them? Finally, I think it would be really interesting to hear more about the “transitionary state” the fighting game community is passing through. Maybe it can shed some light on the way these socio-technical systems are constituted. Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] week 2: user-based innovation VS the crystallization of a bro-world?
Dear all, In the last week, we have seen how the automatized rules of videogames crystallize sort of sociotechnical fields around them – not only for playing, but also for the creation of new gaming systems (titles, genres, platforms). Julian Kücklich called attention to the early history of gaming being one of almost transgressive innovation and experimentation with the machine’s possibilities. Daniel Cook has shown how the establishment of the “bro-world” industry trimmed down this experimentation, crystallizing certain modes of play to attend the mainstream audience, creating a sort of closed loop between development and consumption. Thus, experimentation is pushed to “minor” genres such as casual and social games. In the next two weeks, we will be talking about these possibilities of experimentation in terms of the different subcultures that revolve around gaming. In this first one, we will deal with forms of innovation that are not generated by game developers, but by the players themselves, as they subvert or build new “rulesets” over the machine’s and foster supplementary modes of “playing” – e.g. machinima production, chiptune music and fighting games championships. These practices seem to challenge the idea of playing as a form of pure participation or immersion in a given system, evoked by Rafael Trindade, Cynthia Rubin and others (which I'd relate to cinematographic/literary suspension of disbelief). They present playing as a form of appropriating the system and pushing it further. In that sense, are these practices a sort of “human executable multi-player rules” that Daniel was wondering about – protocols of engagement that are negotiated not directly with the machine, but between their users? What kind of feedback do they produce to the core of videogame development? To introduce these questions in our debate, this week’s guests are: * Kevin Driscoll Kevin Driscoll's recent research addresses the historicization of internet protocols, Wikipedia's changing editorial community, the ethnographic value of writing code, and the technical innovations of young people of color in hip-hop. He is currently a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and formerly taught mathematics and computer science at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Cambridge, MA. http://kevindriscoll.info/ * Ian Cofino Ian Cofino is a motion designer and filmmaker from New York. He graduated in 2009 from SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design with a BFA specializing in Graphic Design. He is currently finishing postproduction on his independent film “I Got Next” which is a documentary that follows 4 fighting game players across a year of tournaments as they balance real life with their passion for fighting games. He works and freelances in the New York area. Best! Menotti PS: Joshua Diaz apologizes that he couldn’t participate due to the change of dates, but he said he would be popping up eventually. =) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] culture, counter-culture and hardcore Farmville players
[Julian Kuecklich] I think it's useful to keep in mind that computer gaming itself was seen as a subculture until recently, and that some hardcore gamers are still holding on to this notion This is a very good point. Gaming culture has indeed been sub- for a very long time – subversive, even. Then, it seems that it had its limits directly defined by playing itself. The participation in such communities demanded high technical know-how. For instance, the occupation of an arcade parlour still is first and foremost defined by skills. Not only the names of the best players are forever carved on the machine’s scoreboards: the players themselves stay longer on the machines, since they are not beaten. [1] Hence, is gaming culture going mainstream in the same way that punk rock did? Does all this casual gaming represent the commodification of its dynamics and values? But wasn’t punk rock defined exactly by its technical crudeness? And aren’t arcade parlours commercial venues in the first place? There are people that go to arcades to just hang around and button-mash their way through Tekken. Is it also possible to be a virtuoso, hardcore Farmville player as well? How to approach free-to-play titles such as Mafia Wars, whose proper gameplay entails almost brainless social widespreading, somewhat indistinguishable from marketing? Is it possible to play Mafia Wars without doing free publicization of the game? Are we comparing two different ways of appropriating socio-technical systems, or two inherently different system logics? Best! Menotti [1] http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] playing vs productivity (and what does it has to do with videogames?)
[Simon Biggs] All interesting. No mention though of Huizinga's work, or that of numerous related theorists, on the role of play in the formation, practice and value of cultural activities. Thanks, Simon! Huizinga is a very good reference, which had completely escaped me – probably because I was not really taking into account how the dynamics of play drive general cultural activities and structures. Moving away from the ludologistic perspective, I wondered instead how these other activities are in fact enmeshed within what we call “playing.” Although generally suspicious of cultural analytics, I admit it does a good job demonstrating that the interaction with some modern videogames is mostly constituted by watching CGs and making otherwise dull system management and navigation. [1] On the other hand, it is true that the all-pervasiveness of play is one door through which videogames are being re-functionalized and incorporated into larger productive systems – in that sense, one might recall “games” such as EpicWin [2] and the somewhat controversial Google Image Labeler [3]. I’m sure Daniel Cook can give much better examples. However, doesn’t that defeats the idea that “play” should be a gratuitous and aimless activity, an end-in-itself? Given the complexities at hand and the way playing can be easily appropriated as labour, where should we trace the line that defines this concept? Do videogames have essentially anything to do with “playing” anymore? And with “videos”? And with “games”? Best! Menotti [1] http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/06/videogameplayviz-analyzing-temporal.html [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmKwF_Si734 [3] http://images.google.com/imagelabeler ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] December Discussion - Gaming Subcultures
Dear all, Welcome to an early December and another debate! This month, empyre is dedicated to the general universe of Gaming Subcultures - the different forms of playing outside the console, titles that explore such dynamics and, especially, the social practices built around them. In spite of the many stories they might tell, videogames are first and foremost narratives of mastery over the system. Their particular drama is not situated on whatever turning points are shown on the screen, but between the player and the controls. This is easier to perceive in highly technical genres such as platformers and rhythm games. To play a game is to learn how to perform within it – how to take things into effect. In an article about game design, [1] Daniel Cook shows that the gameplay is meant to conform the user to its rules gradually, in a sort of smooth pedagogy of procedures. The extent to which this increasing reflexivity between man and machine can be tutorial is obvious from titles such as Mario Teaches Typing. [2] However, this tendency may not be collateral, at least according to German philosopher Claus Pias: in a thesis that is available online (but that I could never read), Pias finds the historical origins of videogames in military training. [3] Could videogames be then reduced to a mere dressage medium? I believe not. To do so is to attribute an impossible self-sufficiency to them. On the one hand, the designers themselves are never completely free to set the conditions for training. They are also constrained by rules: those of the available frameworks, libraries and engines, whose total parameters often escape them. This is why bugs occur and, sometimes, the users get to find something that the designer did not put there. The same Daniel Cook, upon sharing a hint page of his Steambirds on Google Reader, confesses: “Now I finally know how to play my own game.” [4] In that sense, one cannot ignore that every platform is contained within others, and therefore can be exploited, hacked and cheated (just like school). This means that the feedbacks between player and system can occur far beyond the individual and pre-planned hand-eye coordination, they can happen on a larger socio-cultural scale. Even if internal mastery cannot be achieved, the game can be beaten from the outside – or, better yet, circumvented into other uses. I personally consider these activities a constitutive and inseparable part of ordinary gameplay. I take that from my personal memories of titles such as Stunts [5] and Street Fighter II, which I played during my early teens with the neighbourhood gang. Our main mode of interaction with the former was making and exchanging racetracks in which we never actually care to race on. With the later, it was watching friends fight each other in living room championships, while we waited for our turn to use the joystick (for barely three minutes). Even so, there was a lot of engagement even when no playing seemed to be involved. It comes as no surprise that the off-game creation and trade of in-game content (from Chinese Gold Farming to Knytt Stories [6]), as well as the physical situation of the gaming platform (from the Pokéwalker [7] to Auntie Pixelante’s Chicanery [8]), are fast approaching the centre of the stage. Maybe this is a mark of the increasing complexity of the medium. Maybe it’s a sign of the colonization of these social fields by the system’s logic. Finally, the debate means to focus on how videogames can be publicly appropriated through the invention and transmission of supplementary parameters, leading to activities that James Newman dubs as “superplay.” [9] These include but are not limited to their use as platforms of audiovisual creation and their employment in sport-like tournaments. Our first guests are Joshua Diaz and Julian Kücklich. They will be addressing how the gaming practice often spills into the immediate surroundings and then back again, as playing becomes a subject of everyday conversation and players resort to each other to understand rules, optimize their skills, pass through a certain stage, etc. All this communication requires and generates its own channels, such as gamesforums and faqs. More often than not, these external channels are the only way to get into the system's most internal rules - the ones that are never written on manuals and made explicit, such as hints (e.g. the order to fight megaman's bosses) and exploits (e.g. konami code). Bios below (and links bellower). *Joshua Diaz* Joshua Diaz is a game designer and researcher. Currently working in social games in the SF Bay area, he's a graduate of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and an alum of the GAMBIT Game Lab. His research focused on multiplayer game design and the impact of player communities, collaborative storytelling and procedural narratives, and game literacy research in education and development. He's findable under the nick dizzyjosh most places, like
[-empyre-] the prototyping perspective - wrapping up
Dear empyreans: After these 'bonus' days of the Easter holiday, it's time to wrap up the discussion about prototypes and give way to April's topic. I hope that the debate has been fruitful in suggesting an alternative parameter to think through the present concurrence of modes of production, taking in account their material demands and the different ways they are informed by digital technologies and computation. For me, it was interesting to see how the prototype theme feedback into the free software issue (or rather the contrary: how the free software issue got into the discussion of prototyping). Even though the fact is not really surprising, given the crossovers between both domains, it seems that we have always to mind Marloes very sensate disclaimer about misleading metaphors and, let's say, truly working epistemologies. But, once again, maybe this contamination is the hint of a favorable iteration, exposing what has to be depurated to open up a deeper analysis of different models of technical development, their imbrications, and the (technical or political) discourses that organize and drive them. A possible future theme for empyre? A great thanks to everyone that engaged into the discussion, and especially to our guests for their generous contributions and insights. Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] creating environmental conditions / creating teleological perspectives
Dear empyreans: Sorry for the disappearance! (Things have been hectic around here with an upgrade coming on). I hope there is still time for a couple questions in this end of Holy Week. =) what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy [..] That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. (RepRap website) I am normally suspicious of ecologic metaphors, but the analogy about the symbiosis between insects and plants used by Bowyer in the video, suggesting that human agents ‘pollinate’ across reprap machines that reproduce themselves, suits well the change in the topology of manufacture under ‘desktop factoring’ conditions. The metaphor insinuates on the persistence of environmental (physical) restrictions for the widespread of the 3d-printing flora – the local availability of parts and prime matter, for example. So, sometimes it is also necessary to prepare the soil, and we might wonder who will take up this role. Thinking about the aims of the project, I get very curious about what kind of mutations the basic RepRap would have to go (if any) to be adapted for the developing world. Adrian, do you know of any RepRap build in one of those areas? If so, did it suffer any adaptation to local conditions? Do these adaptations generated feedback that informed or will inform future developments of the system? Peer to peer, decentralised ways of working together, where it is not the rule to always feed your output back into a central repository, where you can fork. (Marloes de Valk) Forking seems to be a most sensate horizon to limit a more fluid topology of manufacture, as it means the complete detachment from a series of iterations, equating a whole chain of development to a kind of prototype of a new series – though not a failed prototype, just an inappropriate one. It is as if we were able to set not only the pace of production, but also of history. Maybe it is precisely this possibility of abandoning old rhythms and inaugurating new ones that enables people to be free from the localized roles (such as ‘prosumer’). However, this makes me wonder if forking assures the emergence of new methods, or if it only represents a reorganization of political roles and the ownership/ responsibilities over a shared structure – or, in any case, what is preponderant in the definition of new design cycles and their long-term perspectives. Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] from communities to festivals / printing printers
Dear empyreans: Thanks again Alexandra for the extreme generosity of sharing your research material with us! Now that we are now approaching the end of discussion, our attentions will move back to more literal cases of prototyping. One of our guest for the week is the previously announced Marloes de Valk, part of GOTO10 collective, and responsible for the production of both software systems and art events. She will be joined by Adrian Bowyer, founder of the RepRap project, a fast prototyping machine that aims for self-replication. Are there similarities between the methods of development of these different products? Or maybe crossovers? Here is Adrian's bio: Adrian Bowyer (UK) In the early 1970s Adrian Bowyer read for a first degree in mechanical engineering at Imperial College, and then researched a PhD in tribology there. In 1977 he moved to Bath University's Maths Department to do research in stochastic computational geometry. He then founded the Bath University Microprocessor Unit in 1981 and ran that for four years. After that he took up a lectureship in manufacturing in Bath's Engineering Department, where he is now a senior lecturer. His current areas of research are geometric modelling and geometric computing in general (he is one of the authors of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to manufacturing, and biomimetics. His main work in biomimetics is on self-copying machines. Welcome both of you! =) Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] methods for storytelling and feedback - from charismatic authority to narrator?
Children stories is just a product but the general question is how
metaphor and narrative can be used as a way of prototyping (Alexandra
Antonopoulou)
Could you describe further your methodology, specially the role of
metaphor in it? I can see that the act of narration can open up the
story, creating a feedback cycle able to reorganize it during its
'use'. If we could say that textual analysis, as a sort of reverse
engineering, get us inside the manufacturing process of these scripted
entities (the story of the story - the underlying creative process),
than narrative would be something able to enact another making (the
performance of the story?).
I just wonder how (and if) the information generated during narration
gets back into the stories-as-products. Do the children tell one
another what they have come up with, in a controlled workshop
environment (just like in a marketing meeting brainstorm)? Or is this
information expected to be incorporated into the stories during their
wider circulation, in an emulation of oral tradition?
How sad that even children's stories must be dragged into prototyping, and
design. have we all been taken over by robots? (Christopher Sullivan)
Hmn, I tend to look at it in the opposite way - specially considering
that the children are actively engaged in the process. From my own
experience, telling stories to children tends to be an iterative
process, full of interruptions and ('real-time') revisions. The father
stars with Once upon a time, there was a king... and is immediatly
corrected by the kid: No! It was a queen/ president/ mangoose/ etc.
The following negotiation runs far from any sort of robotic automation
(and I wonder if Adrian would consider this gap between the children's
fantasy and the story's script of fulfillment as anti-ergonomic).
However, this dynamic has little to do with the form of (and the
process of reform/inform) the story as a product; it is already
present in the fairy tale /genre/ and its specific modes of
circulation (including the bedtime situation and the particular
relationship between reader/listener). Does this context deteriorates
the charismatic authority of the parent into a reminiscence of
Benjamin's narrator?
(Or is your comment referring to the scope of the discussion - i.e.
we should not talk about children stories in terms of products/
prototypes'?)
Best!
Menotti
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[-empyre-] Fwd: prototyping fairy tales (on behalf of Alexandra)
Alexandra made a mistake and send the message to my address! =) Here it goes. best! Menotti -- Forwarded message -- From: Alexandra Antonopoulou alexian...@yahoo.gr Date: 2010/3/22 Subject: Re: [-empyre-] prototyping fairy tales To: Gabriel Menotti gabriel.meno...@gmail.com Hello to everybody, I am Alexandra Antonopoulou and I am PhD candidate at Goldsmiths - University of London as well as children books illustrator and writer. My research theme is 'Story-making as a methodology for learning and designing. Creating the future children stories through a partnership between children and designers.' I am focusing on the impact of the story-making process on children’s learning. When I am referring to the term story-making I will not mean only the conception of a story or the thinking up of stories but also the very act of designing and making using the ideas that fantasy can offer. In my case, the children rewrite and reillustrate fairytales creating contemporary versions based on their own experiences. This enables them learn about design and be given voice as moralizers. They have also to design a new medium that would host their stories. Therefore, the children use the story-making tool for design (a tool that I have created) to use fiction as a starting point for prototyping an appropriate object to host for their stories. The making and prototyping acts as a way to bring their fictional scenarios in life and translate them in terms of design objects. So modelling acts as the materialization of fantasy and play scenarios. Looking forward to your confusions questions and comments. All the best, Alexandra Antonopoulou ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] prototyping fairy tales
Dear empyreans:
I have been away and I will need some time to catch up will all the
threads, but it is great to see the discussion taking so many
directions! Thanks again to Sonia for the diy bio contribution and to
everyone that engaged in debate.
I believe that thinking through prototyping was a way of getting away
the regular open source ('vs free software') discussion, focusing less
on structure and ideologies than towards material practices (and their
localization to one another). It’s interesting to see this
(repressed?) ‘rise of open source discontentment’. Maybe this calls
for a new, more detailed debate on the subject?
Let’s see what turns the discussion takes with our next guest,
Alexandra Antonopoulou, who will discuss the making of the future
fairy tales!
(On a sidenote, how relevant it is that the free nature and organic
modes of circulation of fairy tales are not able to prevent movie
companies from adapting them in multi-million dollar productions?)
Best!
Menotti
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Re: [-empyre-] the man as a prototype - the limits of open source
society' but also the implications for our ways of thinking about the 'prototype' as that which ties the old debate between 'synthetic' and 'natural' (Sonia Matos) In that sense, one could also say that prototyping also ties creationism and evolutionism as complimentary ideas of /genesis/ – the feedback cycles of correction leading to a qualitative leap (‘creation’) and emergence of the final object? It is in this process of constant re-design that knowledge shifts, encounters new subaltern meanings. (SM) Precisely. But shouldn’t we go as far as to say that that’s the only place where subaltern meanings can become manifest – after all, if they prevail over prototyping and become standards, how can they still be considered subaltern? I think I echo Davin’s concern: As a thought experiment, I think there is much value to thinking about our everyday practices as prototyping. On the other hand, I think we do lose something if we embrace this metaphor with too much enthusiasm. (Davin Heckman) I think the idea of prototype is particularly fruitful because of the special place prototyping occupy in the technical topology of the industrial age, and how it is ressignified by the present paradigm shift in modes of production and material culture. But I also wonder if it will remain meaningful as we get into different cycles (of marketing, of manufacturing). Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] the man as a prototype - the limits of open source
After this warm-up and to finalize my brief intervention, for this week’s Empyre I propose the following discussion: how might synthetic biological concocts shed new light on the concept of the ‘prototype’ as a means for democratizing knowledge productions? (Sonia Matos) I think diy bio is iconic as a practice because it not only seems to increase the dynamics between different levels of (knowledge) production – specialized and layman research –, but also between subject and object. The way you put it, Sonia, I can't help remembering Zaratustra famous remark that 'man is a bridge to the Overman'. After all, diy bio does breach the concreteness of a being that is not exactly (or entirely) technical - at least from an ethical standpoint. In spite of this, is Simondon's approach enough to reason about biological (if not living) organisms? Would diy bio allow such reflexiveness that we start seeing ourselves as prototypes (i mean seriously, not in an scatological transhumanist way)? Or we still have to wait until the availability of a bioengineering home lab? one danger of do it yourself culture, is also the breakdown of actual cumbersome but humanly necessary moments of interaction. (Christopher Sullivan) i share some of your anxieties towards open source. in some sense, they risk being just a reorganization of priorities and levels of authorizations - the role of the designer becoming a form of mere use encompassed by a even more controled layer of design (let's say protocolar?). nevertheless, i believe that diy models create possibilities for meaningful interaction through the act of making - and even what you call 'actual' interaction, with digital models coupling with physical hardware, electronics and the possibilities of fast-prototyping (which might mean involve materials as cheap as paper). best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] march discussion - the prototype perspective
Doesn’t that intensify the functionality of everything, casting out random innovation? And what is the destiny of the objects that does not ‘ressonate’ with the architecture? They go to jail. Therefore as 'users' we need now to argue not function, but infrastructure, protocol, spectrum and grid, It is interesting how this change (of balance from object design to architecture?) could result in great political tensions. Wouldn't it transform every adaptative use in a kind of negotiation with public parameters? And what happens if the ‘user’ doesn’t have the authority to affect such parameters? What are the risks of implementing a sort of DNS/IP control in-real-life? And who would be capable of such standardization? Could you give some examples of possible user arguments with (or against) infrastructure, protocol, spectrum and grid? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] youtube VS warner bros VS the users; circuits as technical objects
Dear all: I apologize for the void that has taken over the list! It seems that this week’s guests had some troubles in the last moment, and I wasn’t quick enough to find substitutes. =/ On the bright side, that means we can stick longer to the last week’s threads! =) I will take Johannes Birringer cue to try and introduce a little more about the circuits topic: I am not I see any connection between the video trailers on YouTube and the claim “In that sense, transporting cinematographic practices to open spaces disturbs both its particular architecture and the urban logic, allowing the dismantling of the apparatus and its renegotiation in more fluid forms.” It would seem to be always the opposite, under capitalist / global domination-diffusion systems, namely that the apparatus goes on, healthy and strong, and panoptic and postpanoptic [Johannes Birringer] Maybe the thing is that you are reading /renegotiation in more fluid forms/ as having straightforward political (liberal or democratic) connotations, when it is not the case at all. The statement was from a purely formal point of view. Considering the whole cinematographic circuit as a complex technical object, I’d argue that the deterioration of the limits between public and private spheres has the same effect of the wearing of the mechanism inner pieces: the machine operation becomes loose and faulty; for it to run “properly”, we must make fixes, put wedges, etc. We must work in function of automatization. To use Gilbert Simondon’s terms, this disturbance would make the cinematographic circuit less concrete, less individuated - we’d presume: less specific, less cinematographic (at least for a while, before these fixes become institutionalized solutions, and the object become concrete once again). I.e. before Google enforced copyright measures protections in YouTube and production companies used the service to advertisement (in favor of their systems of distribution), some users were employing the website for piracy (that is: to bypass the companies system of distribution). That said, I also meant that I don't believe the concept of (an all-powerful and essentially a-historical) apparatus can be politically or aesthetically useful to analyze media systems anymore. Consider the relation between the engineering sectors of society and the cultural production ones, for example – a very stressful relation ever since tape recording was killing the music biz. Nowadays we see Sony tech department against Sony Music; Apple outdated strategies of controlling content-software-hardware at once. In the meanwhile, the French government is outlawing photoshop. Is it really possible to see in the negotiations between Google and movie companies the synergy of one “capitalist / global domination-diffusion system”? (btw, I don’t think that the logic going on here is that of the supplement, and I don’t believe it is dialectical either. Piracy still keeps going on the ‘tubes – trying to adapt itself to the “apparatus” just as the movie companies are. Is there any distinction between one's tactics and the other's strategies?) All the best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] youtube VS warner bros VS the users; circuits as technical objects
To be clear however The French government isn't outlawing photoshop so much as ensuring that any digitally modified photograph needs to be distributed with a notice that it has been modified. Photoshop, Gimp or other editing application is still perfectly legal in this country. Yup, sorry for not being clear about it, and thanks for explaining. =) Unofficially allowing the upload of pirated material has been a primary strategy in pre-Google YouTube's peer publicity model, no different from peer-to-peer services that later switch to a pay model once a community feels dependent on them. That sounds more like drug-dealing than napster downfall. =) Blogger in Brazil was a huge failure because of this - there were free options out there, once the company that managed the national version of the service decided to charge for it. Nevertheless, some services become cultural standards either way, I just think the proccess can't be seen as a simple result of marketing strategies The end result is a system of mutual benefit that sacrifices the occasional user regularly enough to give outward appearance of legal obedience. but isn't the user also benefited, in a way? after all, the service *is* 'free' An 'ecology' would be a better metaphor here than 'circuit', I feel. A 'society' even better.. 'society' would suggest a too large scope for media analysis (and is not a very spatial metaphor! =)). i like 'circuit' because it highlights technical/ material aspects of the ensemble, while 'ecology' can be dangerous for sounding 'natural' best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] the depth of projection - uses of space, networked spaces, control
Dear Duncan and Spot, thanks for the brilliant expositions. Here goes my round of commentaries: Malcolm looks a lot like Vitruvius, Roman architect celebrated by Leonardo as the pre-modern humaniser of the built environment. [Duncan White] Indeed, a very pertinent comparison. Conversely, let’s not forget the ‘horror’ part of the performance: the de-humanization of the image, when Malcolm gets closer to the projector. As his body exits the scene, the shadows grow and become more and more different from each other (and from the body they are a projection of). In dislocating the body from one point to the other, I think Malcom’s performance demonstrate something Movie Show doesn’t: the image as a result of the circulation of bodies; visuals that can be radically different depending on where the artist (and the public) is positioned. Somewhat, the situation reminds me of the famous Wizard of Oz scene in which Dorothy uncover the wizard behind the curtain (by the way, another kind of frame). From this perspective, the image seems inevitably connected both to the body and the projector - what produces an illusion of autonomy (both of the image and its circulation) is the architectural context in which the film is presented: a spatial organization that hides the source of projection, but which is not necessary to projection at all. So, is the architecture in these cases a strategy of control? If so, how such control is related to the dehumanization of the space (and, in a way, of the image)? Expanded Cinema doesn’t circulate in the same way because of how it uses space. [Duncan White] Good point. Bruno had commented before how it is difficult to find places to exhibit his Hangover interactive film, due to the structure it needs. On the other hand, these works find their own venues – a “scene” where the particular uses of space they foster are promoted. As they circulate more easily, do these works lose anything? This is a software project and meta-artwork which exists on tens of thousands of screens all over the world. […] Because it takes so long (about an hour) to render each frame of animation, it's only practical to realize these works with an internet-wide supercomputer. [Scott Draves] I really like how the way of presenting of the images (as a screen saver) is connected to the rendering structure (crowdsourcing, networked computing) of the piece. What of theses aspects do you think were enhanced/ diminished when you did the symphonic presentation? How is it like to gather all the originally dispersed audience of the sheep in the same semi-public place? I will skip the discussion about the [..l] relationship between man and machine as this seems peripheral to the screen discussion (but just ask). [Scott Draves] The man-machine relation seems a pivotal point so far! Could you please expand a bit more on that? Especially about your degree of control over the generated images. In what points of the image production do you actively actuate? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] mediation videogames / the screen as a place of activity in the battlefield
The thick description of screens shold really look at the raw materials, manufacture, energy use and recycling. (…) Most screens are build and assembled in offshore plants: human and environmental costs rarely factored into the clean image of screen cultures. [Sean Cubitt] Yes, that is maybe the most complex socio-economic aspect to consider. But what it means in ethical and formal terms? A case in point is the sculpture Tantalum Memorial (Harwood/ Wright/ Yokokoji),[1] who won the last Transmediale award. The name of the piece refers to a particular metal used in the production mobile phones and other electronic devices, which is subject of bloody disputes in Congo. In a way, the whole situation reminds me (again) of Flusser, pointing out that the logic of an image apparatus is the product of a prior, heavier logic – that of the industrial apparatus. In that perspective, can the most cunning and well-intended movie director be anything more than a functionary of the mastodonic technological complex? Again, what about the artists’ autonomy, especially when they are engaged with new media and the latest technology? (not referring to tantalum memorial here, but in general) The proposition that the 'process of mediation is an abstraction of the world' is surely not sustainable as an interrogation even of the present [sdv] I wasn’t implying that media is an abstraction of the whole world, but that the process of mediation always depend on different levels of /the real/ - the image is a product of what is in front of the camera as well as of the mechanism of the camera itself – and both things seems equally finite, in different, material ways. (Also, the world is doing fine, it is the humanity that is coming to its terms, etc etc ^^) Moreso, conventional screens on computers are entirely concerned with output; they are always late. No input event /requires/ the screen display an image to the user. As such nothing passes into screens, yet that is what is felt. [Julian Oliver] Another provoking consideration. Our computer culture is build up around graphical interfaces, when initially they were just peripherals. The first computers had no screens at all. On the other hand, early devices of computation were very visual - the process of computation itself was very visual – or at least at the reach of human perception. If there is any suppression by way of abstraction here, it is of the subject realities of puncturing, poisoning and burning people, disabling or killing them in process, [JO] Après Hayles, we can think of abstraction as ‘selective ignorance’, as well as the techniques employed in order to achieve it (normally, allowing for a certain performativity that wouldn’t be otherwise possible). Anyway, I tend to agree that these more dramatic situations are very *sincere* (even though the whole propaganda around them aren't): what is clearly suppressed here is human (bodies) and human action (killing etc). Best! Menotti [1] http://mediashed.org/TantalumMemorial ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] materiality as a dynamic process / the autonomy of the artist / augmented reality
Dear all: Thanks for all the contributions! I think we had some very nice developments of the initial idea, and will try to sum them up, trying not to stray to far from the screens. =) A medium device, in layman's terms, means a device which produces, stores, transmits, or provides access to content of some kind; and this content is informational, or immaterial. [José Carlos] store/transmit/provide access: these are precisely the terms in which devices seems to behave more like spaces than objects - or better, more like architectures than mechanisms. what does that implies to their materiality? if the informational content has a different nature than that of the medium device - one as a presence, the other as a kind of openness (for lack of a better term) -, what hinders us from appealing to dichotomies such as channel/message, background/figure, etc? through other perspective: thinking of materiality as a dynamic process, in what is it different from information itself? Assuming the premise that one of the things that artists possess is a special autonomy to probe new media for their underexplored possibilities, and potentially catalyzing their quasi-independent agency as media (again, Deleuze), then aren't we severely delimiting the range of this autonomy by situating it in a discourse that takes place at the momment of audience reception? [Brett Stalbaum] but don't you think that there really is some preponderance of reception over production in defining the limits of mediation? and it seems to me that preponderance is not only dependent of errors, but also of the particular uses the public makes of media. that is harder to exemplify when talking about screens, but just think about people that go to the movies to sleep or make out. they are approaching this complex viewing apparatus in a lower level of its materiality: just as a dark, quiet room. why can't that be considered a radical exploration of hidden possibilities? besides, do artist really have any special autonomy over other users in exploring media? or is it that anyone who assumes such autonomy becomes an artist? aren't the process of production themselves restricted to dynamics of mediation as constrained and elusive as reception? The Artvertiser positions any advertisement in a video feed as a public 'screen', treated and considered as such, for the purposes of exhibiting video or still images. [Julian Oliver] very nice work. =) reminds me of a short video from Graffiti Research Lab, in which they project some images over an animated billboard - I've been looking for similar stuff ever since! I was planning to talk more about this division of public/private (as well as production/consumption) from the third week on, but since you come up with it, why not? =) it is interesting how the artvertiser highlights screens as places of activity, which can be occupied and affected (just like chat windows?). having quoted Plato, I wonder if you consider the activity allowed by the work's dispositif similar to the one involved in the gaze (the plane visual cognition) - i.e. are AR goggles a kind of instrumentalization of the eye, a movable part of a complex visual device, or both? another thing that I think is pertinent to our discussion is how the image in that situation is formed by the articulation of two different screens, and the distance between them is also relevant - if they are too near or too far from each other, the AR system may not work properly. it always strikes me how the user is tolerant to errors in this process - what can shed some light in the matter of new media and glitches: sometimes, the user assumes that he is the one doing it wrong (it also makes me think of people doing the mobile phone dance while looking for signal) Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] new media galleries VS new media labs
SARAH At Eyebeam I am learning what it means to curate within the context of a new media lab... […] on the CRUMB side I am tasked with transfering knowledge as to what it means to be curating new media art in or from a lab rather than in the more traditional gallery context. That's interesting because, if we consider that the technologies are collapsing (the same frameworks/ architetures/ facilities are being use for production and consumption), the fact that some new forms of audience can't be taken apart from techniques of creation (remixing, for example) and that we are more and more interested in the aesthetic dimension of (creative) processes, there should be not much difference between the structure of a media art gallery and a media lab – since both are spaces for postproduction (in the sense bourriaud employs this term). (I usually believe that the ideal model for a new media gallery is the penny arcade, or the science fair, which are also places for experimentation.) At Cine Falcatrua, for example, the only thing that takes the moment of screening apart from the moments of setting things up is the social protocol governing each specific situation. The same technologies, people and space suddenly start acting differently, as if movie theater, subtitling room and distribution central (and videogame =)) were just different circunstances (modes) of the same architetural apparatus, which could be shifted in seconds. (which media lab would be complete without some random human interactors the artists could test their experiments with? ^^) * * * Since Sarah already talked about Star and Shadow cinema, maybe she could also tell us something about the International Seminars held at Baltic center (Newcastle), which resulted in some nice publications on curating new media, residence for artists and such. Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
