Re: [-empyre-] Videogames of the oppressed / oppressive games
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- An oldie but perhaps worth throwing into the thread. Escape From Woomera was a game developed by a group of us around 10 years ago as a direct response to the detention and subsequent mistreatment of refugees arriving by boat to Australia. It was federally funded, which particularly pissed off the Immigration Minister, when the game went live. http://julianoliver.com/escapefromwoomera/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2987745.stm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_From_Woomera http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRJmQvXWSs http://www.acmi.net.au/39695E5C2A19442BA67A9D296612A1B6.htm http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/29/1051381948773.html Cheers, -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] social media as revolutionary technology?
: http://www.washington.edu/lst/help/computing_fundamentals/networking/osi A final example, giving a glimpse at the innate geo-political, material and deeply corporatised substrate upon which the Internet is implemented.. Below are all the computers that my HTTP request traverses to resource any data at http://www.subtle.net/empyre, the parent site of this mailing list, from here in Berlin. Each machine belongs to a company, resides in a different place (sometimes even different country), with varying laws on data retention, deep packet inspection, encryption, content filtering, etc. We see machines in Germany, Spain, UK, USA and Australia. Each necessarily makes a copy to local physical memory in the process of reading and writing that underpins computer networking along a route.. julian@splinter:~$ traceroute www.subtle.net traceroute to www.subtle.net (203.170.81.33), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 3.940 ms 4.768 ms 5.620 ms 2 lo1.br12.ber.de.hansenet.net (213.191.64.23) 39.556 ms 40.498 ms 41.640ms 3 ae1-102.cr01.ber.de.hansenet.net (62.109.108.125) 42.912 ms 44.009 ms 44.737 ms 4 so-0-1-0-0.cr01.weham.de.hansenet.net (213.191.87.217) 51.522 ms 52.733 ms 54.299 ms 5 ae0-0.xd01.weham.de.hansenet.net (62.109.67.242) 55.090 ms 56.292 ms 57.697 ms 6 ae1-0.pr02.weham.de.hansenet.net (213.191.66.181) 58.508 ms 39.655 ms 42.777 ms 7 ae0-0-grtdusix1.red.telefonica-wholesale.net.7.16.84.in-addr.arpa (84.16.7.233) 51.085 ms 54.452 ms 53.534 ms 8 Xe-5-0-8-0-grtlontl3.red.telefonica-wholesale.net.120.142.94.in-addr.arpa (94.142.120.242) 63.284 ms 66.146 ms 67.384 ms 9 xe-0-4-0-3.r02.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.9.129) 68.685 ms 69.937 ms 71.939 ms 10 ae-4.r23.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.40) 73.192 ms 71.132 ms 74.684 ms 11 ae-3.r22.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.198) 82.095 ms 77.867 ms 76.830 ms 12 as-0.r25.tokyjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.79) 344.571 ms 332.329 ms 376.900 ms 13 ae-7.r23.tokyjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.164) 354.715 ms 337.709 ms 340.529 ms 14 p16-2-0-0.r05.sydnau01.au.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.29) 414.284 ms 425.399 ms 419.056 ms 15 xe-1-1-0.a00.sydnau02.au.ra.gin.ntt.net (202.68.64.163) 412.916 ms 416.319 ms 417.047 ms 16 202.68.67.142 (202.68.67.142) 417.795 ms 415.052 ms 407.951 ms 17 180.148.64.106.static.amnet.net.au (180.148.64.106) 411.969 ms 409.738 ms 410.703 ms 18 180.148.64.113.static.amnet.net.au (180.148.64.113) 400.470 ms 412.528 ms 407.805 ms 19 te3-3.br02.wa.amcom.net.au (203.161.65.85) 620.757 ms 481.446 ms 467.667 ms 20 te7-2.cr01.wa.amcom.net.au (203.161.65.66) 464.867 ms 472.877 ms 468.424 ms 21 116.212.203.62 (116.212.203.62) 461.889 ms 465.786 ms 473.687 ms 22 acc-jcore-vl101-ge-0-0-0.per.syra.net.au (203.170.86.6) 482.157 ms 476.909 ms 477.957 ms Cheers! Julian -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Death of the Curator
The Death of the Curator comes with the Death of the Cursor. In a time of opaque infrastructure and corporate (re)mediation of social life a productive paranoia is seeded. We grope for a Command Line such that we may operate below that which points, frames and mediates. The Curator is that which comes between points, Network Address Translators, Booking Faces, in what is otherwise tending toward a point-to-point, p2p, socio-political economy. With that said I know, and greatly value, fucking good curators. Greetings from Madrid, -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ..on Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 02:13:00PM +0100, Johannes Birringer wrote: dear all regarding writers, Ana schreibt But writers need to make the transition to next level of work, to the collective creation of spaces where cooperation and support substitute individual infatuation and rediscover the power of the words as revulsive. We wordmakers are the heirs of Socrates, poisoned by the State for his words and his teachings and his ability to subvert the minds, we are the heirs of Ovidius, in exile far from Rome because his words were far to critical for the ruling class, we are the heirs of Hildegarde von Bingen, accused for being a heretical, we are the heirs of Emile Zola, who wrote one of the most emotionally powerful alegate of our times, we are the heirs of Primo Levi and Simone Weil and Victor Frankl and Miguel Hernandez and Federico García Lorca and Haroldo Conti and Rodolfo Walsh and so many others showing than words are indeed powerful tools to perform changes... But there is a challenge, again, how to jump to the next level and redefine all these roles, the role of the artist, of the curator, of the writer... And currently visiting the quiet German countryside, i read the papers there, and the daily outpouring of commentary on the bad poem that Günter Grass published/released worldwide last week. What a curious event, a storm in a waterglass caused by a badly written ideological poem by a well known writer, touching on some wounds, nevertheless, predictably. The media and the papers now act as collectors, curating the national and international response and reactions to this poem. Indeed interesting to ask what happened to languages in the larger context of new media arts and the discussion here on curating; and issue of other kinds of writing (in the digital age) have certainly come up, I am sure, also on this list (empyre June 2010 on publishing?) - it's a short step, then, to include the question of curating electronic writing or multimedia writing. At the university in London where i work, they recently hired a writer to be a professor of contemporary thought, and he began working in the english department with an interesting proposal, a gesture towards collaborative production on a literary essay on Kafka (Kafka's Wound) he got invited to produce to be hosted later on the BBC online platform, and writer and BBC had the idea to make the essay multimedia-ready for the digital age, thus my colleague is now suggesting others can participate in the cross-media generation of audio-visual or other sensorial mediatable hypertextual dimensions of a literary text. Not an interactive collective writing experiment, but something similar yet different, where the paratextual or paramedial dimensions can emerge without a curator or director but in solidarity with the idea for the project. I am quite intrigued by this. And by Kafka's Wound. with regards 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
Re: [-empyre-] postponement - Ioana Jucan
I would also like to apologise for not responding to the insights of Ben Bogart and Marc Garrett regarding the tocic at hand. I've been between 2 robotic hands, a microcontoller and an interesting place. Julian ..on Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 09:33:35PM +, Gabriel Menotti wrote: 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 -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] ambiguous artistic strategies critical engineering
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] glitch device/divide
..on Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 08:49:37PM +0100, Rosa Menkman wrote: Dear Julian, Although I like some of the examples you gave and you made some engaging arguments, I feel like the way you end your email kind of shuts down a door for real engagement. Are you really just taking issue with the term 'glitch art' this movement has appropriated? Visual glitch art has been using the term glitch art for 10 years - Beflix was the first to coin it and since then a wide array of practices, works and shattered, side ways and full frontal movements have come and celebrated it. What is the point in going back 10 years and trying to rename history? Also: what about psychedelic art, or net art, or … conversations around the names of these movements could be had as well, but is that really what is interesting about them - I think it would be interesting to have content based conversation than these semiotics/name call-based ones. I prefer 'limiting' (or at least retaining) a glitch to be an unexpected outcomes from any System we have designed. This is the beautiful thing about glitch! Those systems may indeed be social, economic or political, borrowed from the original German term later adopted by electrical engineers. However, expanding glitch to unanticipated events or symptoms in biological, neurological, neurochemical, meterological processes, for instance, assumes that such contexts can be neatly described as discrete systems at all; a very recent idea made prevalent with the popularisation of Cybernetics and the consequent invention of the Ecosystem. In reality we don't know enough about the brain, or much of the world's biological entities for them to produce much other than the unexpected. That something as magical as the unexpected can occur in a discrete electrical circuit however, a network of traffic lights, a navigation system, a thermal sensor network in a data center or in a video codec/player version incompatibility... these are themselves too wonderous to lump in with all the unexpected that existed before such abstraction. Life is already the frame of the unanticipated. We are ourselves unanticipated. That which we know enough to engineer, to make, is not. Glitch art, in itself, may have some or nothing to do with any of this, rather seemingly quite often fetishisation of very particular visual or auditory outcomes of such events, when perceptible at all. That's fine in itself but it would seem that much, not all, of what is called Glitch Art has gone a bit the way of Punk, a culture with aesthetic links to a politic, rather than political links to an aesthetic. I'm all for bringing it around, as it seems John Cates is doing. Cheers! -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] human glitches
..on Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 12:03:56PM -0500, Renate Ferro wrote: Funny you should write about limiting our glitchy discussion to hardware and software because I was thinking about my early days as an art undergraduate student when I did quite a bit of weaving, tapestry and fibers installation. To authenticate the fact that the piece was actually hand made and not machine made my classmates and I would leave one thread of a woven design mis-threaded on purpose or a couple of stitches in a tapestry left awry. That one unobtrusive glitch was to authenticate the trace and touch of the human hand. Our mentor encouraged us to follow this tradition of many early weavers. If my memory is serving me well this glitch was referred to it as a lazy thread.though I may be wrong! Thanks all for interesting discussion on the glitchI have been enjoying it. Renate Ferro Incidentally I'm not limiting it to hardware and software at all, this is a misreading. Rather I'm 'limiting' it to systems, in other words anything Engineered. They need not be software or hardware. This is a far more fruitful reading of glitch and one that doesn't require migrating it from the culture from which it originally came. It seems my post of yesterday morning has yet to be moderated through - it unpacks this a bit further! Cheers, Julian On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 10:39 AM, Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.com wrote: Hi Curt, ..on Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 05:34:05AM -0500, Curt Cloninger wrote: It seems like you are wanting to limit the discussion of glitches to occurrences that happen at the hardware and software level, within machines. But humans can (and frequently do) glitch as well, particularly in response to media which their bodies receive as glitched. In one sense, phenomenological sculpture, op art, and structural film are all about trying to get a human body to have a glitched experience. I don't have to read binary to have a glitched experience. I don't have to be a programmer (although I myself occasionally program) to receive an affective, bodily or linguistic glitch effect from media sent to me via a machine. I don't have to understand compression schemes at the binary level in order to affectively eperience the phenomenological differences between various compression schemes as my body is exposed to them. I'm not limiting the breadth of the term, I'm leaving it just as it is; 'glitch' is a term derived from the culture of electronics, circuitry in particular. Only recently has it come to be applied to software at all, possibly by way of errors writing and reading from bad physical or temporary memory. Glitches specifically relate to systems and machines, things we have designed. They express something we don't yet know about something we've made, a potential born of failure. Positioning glitch outside of Engineering seems unproductive and/or opportunistic; animal kind like us don't experience bodily, cognitive or behavioural 'glitches', rather lapses of judgement, unintended behaviour due to nervous stimuli (confusion or stress) and illness due to mutation or failure of organic parts. A glitch is a brief, sometimes recoverable fault in a circuit, system or machine. We are only any of these things if you yield entirely to Cybernetic metaphor. Most importantly however, we are not systems of our own design. It's a bit like talking about a Rothko painting in terms of whether he used horsehair or synthetic brushes. Such discussions are always possible, but they are only obliquely related to the things which are most interesting about art, and they usually dead-end fairly quickly. He either did or he didn't use horsehair brushes. It either is or isn't a true glitch. Mez Breeze's new book is called Human Readable Messages. So perhaps a distinction needs to be made between human-readable glitches and machine-readable glitches. Human-readable glitches are media glitches -- they occur when humans are communicating to humans through machines which mediate this communication. Human-readable glitches don't freak machines out. But neither do machine-readable glitches. Machine-readable glitches may crash machines, but that doesn't freak machines out, because machines have no sentient expectation of normal. Machines lack the ability to have an uncanny experience. So to limit the discussion of glitches to events that only happen within machinic systems, glitches which never run on or involve human bodies, is to talk about something quite limited. Because a machine can't know or experience a glitch. Only a human can. A phenomenological refactoring of glitch as being only existent within experience, therefore dependent upon -and expressed through the human- seems pretty hairy and/or confusing to me. What would be gained by glitching out
Re: [-empyre-] glitch device/divide
..on Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:15:24PM +0100, IR3ABF wrote: A glitch or a rupture should or can reveal the contents through the package, whether the package is an art/philosophical societal/political or an otherwise rigid authoritarian systemic world constructing machinic device Hehe super. Can you explain how your own glitch art, or glitch art you like, achieves this? Or does it just point to this, as a sort of a signification of intended rupture (if ever given the chance)? Curious, Julian On 9 dec. 2011, at 21:52, Curt Cloninger c...@lab404.com wrote: Hi Eduardo (Andreas, and all), The apparant paradox of The void is all there is merely reveals the prejudice toward presence which is built into predicative language systems. It doesn't really prove anything other than language is unable to access The Artist Formerly Known As The Void (which seems to be Andreas' point). Just because a concensus of post-post-structuralist people have agreed to use language to reduce the entire world to language, that doesn't mean all contemporary people have to drink that same flavor of cool aid. There are other plateaus of immanence besides language (that exists in realms other than ascii-centric listservs). Yes, a romantic quest ideed (but hopefully rigorous); within and without language. Way Off and/or On Topic, Curt At 10:11 PM -0500 12/8/11, Eduardo Navas wrote: Dear Andreas, I think others have moved past my comment on to more complex ground, but I should follow up to a couple of points you make. On discourse: the very fact that we are communicating about the specificity of glitch as an art form is proof enough that we are dealing within a specialized field. This is all my statement means. Regarding your statement on the pre-discursive, it is safe to say that in our times, it is common knowledge, at least based on what is left to us after poststructuralism, that it is impossible to function outside the symbolic. There is no such thing as pre-discursive. A search for such an element may closely appear to be romantic. To this effect, your statement: The void is *all* there *is* exposes that through negation existence is confirmed. Best, Eduardo Navas On 12/8/11 6:19 AM, Andreas Maria Jacobs aj...@xs4all.nl wrote: hmm I wonder why discourse should have relevance at all, I think what matters is to uncover a field which is *inherently* pre-discursive and *existent but not known* and consequently *before* any possibility of interpretation. Artists task is to observe - from their own subjectivities - a *probable* - because not yet commonly perceived - future understanding of the phenomenal appearances of perceived/sensual *reality* Also I do think that just that makes it possible to (re)gain *truthful* insight in *reality*, wether technological, political, societal or personal and where aesthetics plays no role. (i.e. whether it is boring or not, does not matter, because that again is discursive and supposedly based on previous knowledgeability of the mental gestalts of being bored, surprised, touched etc etc ) The conservative - literary - *art worlds* collect, maintain and indeed conserve quasi-religious fetishized material forms, which are but indicators of what lies beyond them Andreas Maria Jacobs The void is *all* there *is* ___ 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 -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] glitch device/divide
boring to behold. To most, they'd probably go unnoticed. Cheers, Julian ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ 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
Re: [-empyre-] glitch device/divide
of these historically transformative glitches specifically. There are many examples out on the internet, here are a few that are quite famous. On February 25, 1991 the system clock on a patriot missile glitched, putting it out of step by 1/3rd of a second. It crashed into a compound in Dhahran, killing 28 Americans. The 'smart ship' USS Yorktown simply stopped out in the ocean in 1997 due to a divide by zero error. This glitch itself wasn't seen, no one knew what had happened, but analysis of the issue triggered deep inspection of seaborne auto-piloting systems world wide. 5 people died due to excessive X-Ray exposure in the 80s due to a bug in the Therac-25 radiation machine. In 1996 the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 Flight 501 self destructed due to a glitch in the guidance software. Again, a glitch itself doesn't have to be seen for it to have been highly significant. No one saw the glitch at work in Flight 501, buried deep in the guidance software subsystem. They saw the craft explode as a consequence of the glitch. Perhaps no one even saw the explosion, but a statistical representation of it a second after all their comms went down. Also, I'm curious to hear your response to Jon Cates' previous post regarding John Cage's prepared systems. Can prepared aleatoric systems, oulipian (constraint-based) systems, and other human-orchestrated systems still lead to uncanny outcomes? It seems to me they can, for humans. Perhaps the outcomes are not uncanny to the systems themselves; but again, a system can't experience itself as normal or uncanny. I'm not sure really. I most certainly don't think one can design glitches, merely encourage them or work with them. Parametric control of a glitch would be an oxymoron in that one cannot choreograph an accident, only create conditions such that one is likely to occur. For me a great glitch is unanticipated, devastating, wild. Cheers, Julian Julian: Indeed it is what is relevant, as it is with any cultural trope. It's here however that software developers like myself find ourselves cynical about Glitch Art precisely because we know that what we're often looking at/listening to is not a glitch, rather an event designed to have the appearance of one. A glitch-concert using Max MSP is not glitch, rather the application of digital synthesis to mimic sounds that sound like what we understand to be glitch, namely electrical sparks, servos breaking under load, etc. Similarly, someone playing with GTK or Quartz Composer to manipulate a desktop interface such that it performs unexpectedly isn't glitch, it's UX/UI design. This leads us to the question Can you design a glitch?. Perhaps you can only design /with/ glitches, not glitches themselves.. If glitches are political at all it's in because they represent a possible entry-point within an otherwise closed system, a 'de-punctualisation' (from Latour) of the Black Box. What many call glitches are in fact just the beginning of what later becomes an exploit (whether that be jailbreaking a device or injecting malicious code into a process running on a server). In this way glitches signal the possibility of further action; an opening, they express freedom of movement. Purely aesthetic fetishising of glitch depreciates this potential, I think. After all, some of the most potent and transformative glitches in technological history are quite boring to behold. To most, they'd probably go unnoticed. Cheers, Julian ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] glitch device/divide
..on Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 09:34:18AM -0500, Eduardo Navas wrote: About what you write below, Your observation is a summary of what informs contemporary art practice, no matter the medium. The need for context that you point out is what makes all art discourse, no matter the form of delivery. This is also what allows artists to worry about what they want to say rather than sticking to a specific form. This brought about the concept of ³interdisciplinarity.² Duchamp figured this out a while back. However, it is because glitches are the result of a material occurrence that can be reproduced within a certain range of error once a person understands the process why they need to be discussed with a specific understanding of the context in which they take place, in direct relation to the material elements that make glitches ³glitches.² This enables glitch artists to develop a field of aesthetics of their own. I think that if we really thinkg about the term ³intrinsic² it only functions once we accept a specific context in which to discuss a thing to which an extra value based on discourse is added. Glitches have values that are material (before that are recognized as glitches) and these values once recognized within the field of glitch art allow people to add on their own interpretations and develop a discourse. This is what is relevant. Indeed it is what is relevant, as it is with any cultural trope. It's here however that software developers like myself find ourselves cynical about Glitch Art precisely because we know that what we're often looking at/listening to is not a glitch, rather an event designed to have the appearance of one. A glitch-concert using Max MSP is not glitch, rather the application of digital synthesis to mimic sounds that sound like what we understand to be glitch, namely electrical sparks, servos breaking under load, etc. Similarly, someone playing with GTK or Quartz Composer to manipulate a desktop interface such that it performs unexpectedly isn't glitch, it's UX/UI design. This leads us to the question Can you design a glitch?. Perhaps you can only design /with/ glitches, not glitches themselves.. If glitches are political at all it's in because they represent a possible entry-point within an otherwise closed system, a 'de-punctualisation' (from Latour) of the Black Box. What many call glitches are in fact just the beginning of what later becomes an exploit (whether that be jailbreaking a device or injecting malicious code into a process running on a server). In this way glitches signal the possibility of further action; an opening, they express freedom of movement. Purely aesthetic fetishising of glitch depreciates this potential, I think. After all, some of the most potent and transformative glitches in technological history are quite boring to behold. To most, they'd probably go unnoticed. Cheers, Julian On 12/6/11 10:33 PM, Evan Meaney emean...@gmail.com wrote: so, my point. if glitches depend on specified contexts to function in the moment and if they are functions of re-presentation and curatorial (or curator-as-artist) intent, then any critical work about a glitch is really critiquing the context and the curator, and not the glitch itself. tl:dr - we appropriate glitches to our own purposes. let's stop pretending that they have intrinsic value when we classify them. xo. evan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] glitch device
..on Sun, Dec 04, 2011 at 11:29:52PM +, James Morris wrote: i used to waver between art and programming but recently have been programming much more than making art. so as a programmer, a glitch is a bad thing, something to remove, we seek defined behaviour within expected parameters etc. the likenesses of the glitch in art aren't really glitches but defined behaviour within expected parameters. artistic devices for the telling of the story; the finger print database searching software in CSI where rather than being presented with a progress meter we see each finger print the software is attempting to match against flash before our eyes... Very well put! I find it incredible that the emulation/fetishism of glitch is still rampant in electronic music and electronic art; glitch-making plugins in music sequencers, glitchy flash movies, glitch-alike PD and Max MSP performances. It really is a great example of Baudrillard's 'Becoming Null' in the software arts. A glitch is not an aesthetic artifact (let alone distinctly visual or audible phenomena) but an unanticipated rupture within a logical structure; they are valuable because they express volatility within the inner workings of the system in use. Perhaps we should talk about 'glitch' (in the original sense) and 'gl1tch', in its prepared, self-conscious sense. -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] glitch device
..on Mon, Dec 05, 2011 at 04:25:25PM +0100, Rosa Menkman wrote: Personally I find the discussion 'real' or 'fake' glitch not a very fruitful discussion. A glitch refers to the moment of not knowing what causes a technological slip; a glitch is thus often the user not knowing technologically what is going wrong; he is indeed relying on his own parameters of knowledge. By your definition, to bear witness to a glitch requires knowing that a technological slip is occuring. If you cannot know that such a slip is happening (for instance, at an audio-visual glitch concert) but are merely told it is, is the glitch any less important? Is it still a glitch? Does it matter if such a 'slip' occurred at all? What's left of the glitch? No, this isn't a forest-through-the-trees argument, rather I believe that there is a politics to the glitch too valuable to defer to presentation alone, one that has helped spawn interest in the phenomenon as a whole. Producing the unexpected is easy. Producing glitches is not. Hence plug-and-play glitch culture, the culture of gl1tch. Cheers, Julian ▌ ▌ ▌ On Dec 5, 2011, at 12:57 PM, Julian Oliver wrote: Very well put! I find it incredible that the emulation/fetishism of glitch is still rampant in electronic music and electronic art; glitch-making plugins in music sequencers, glitchy flash movies, glitch-alike PD and Max MSP performances. It really is a great example of Baudrillard's 'Becoming Null' in the software arts. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Art, Funding and Politics
..on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 09:31:52PM +0200, NeMe wrote: One positive feature of an online discussion is its immense potential to reach a large number of people and not just network friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, we feel that this thread has not succeeded, to the extent we had hoped for, in engaging a satisfying representation of these voices despite the very significant contributions. We also feel that, as moderators, we failed in engaging voices belonging to academics and cultural workers from non western institutions who do not have English as their first language. We did invite several academics from non-western universities who enthusiastically agreed to post but then retracted due to their unfamiliarity with overtly academic precis style posts. We were aware of this criterion when writing our posts however it does appear, sadly, that there is still a lot of work to be done towards the breaking of the dominant boundaries and notions of intellectual authority established by western cultural and academic hegemony, especially online. One can even say the academic precis style can appear actively counter-conversational. So endemic, it seems some academics don't even recognise it as a rhetorical form, rather the sole approach to critically engaging problems of a cultural, aesthetic, social or political nature. Academic discourse, even on would-be casual mailing list, assumes habits that many may find very bizarre - even antisocial - such as the pressing need for discrete references to traditions and texts relative to the argument at hand. The reader may even be familiar with these references but find the need for placing them in the text to be contrived or self-conscious/insecure. At this point the initially proposed question can feel like a mere container, a prop for the performance of a sort of a rarefying and selfish prose. Analogy, for instance, is a widely accepted vehicle for carrying forward a proposition and/or critically re-positioning it. Among academics however this is something often seen to be naiive, even lazy, evidencing both lack of experience and critical rigour. This is the sort of thing that'll keep many lurking on a list like Empyre, regardless of whether they're at the periphery of a western cultural and academic hegemony. Even the fact I felt the need to put that in quotes derives from an academic habit built around the strategic performance of Evidence. When you're already swimming within the language it looks quite different of course, feeling quite natural, fluid, opening. I enjoy reading and occassionally writing my way through problems in this way myself but also find it slow to get back into during intensive periods of computer programming, teaching or travel. When the case I've just carried Empyre topics offline, inspiring several great and productive debates! Cheers, -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Art Funding and Politics
in the open for the model to work at all. Some artists fear this risks the possibility of other artists 'stealing' their ideas. Regardless, this system could be just as readily applied to a media-arts institution looking to develop a large project as an artist working alone on a small project. Production facility. This is a model already used by several experimental and media-arts organizations throughout the world. By designating a certain portion of their skill-base, equipment and other resources to the paid production of third-party projects, funding is brought in that can be used to support the core agendas of the institution as a whole. HANGAR in Barcelona is a good example of this model in practice. Naturally in the case of the independent artist, this would manifest as the application of their given skills for commercial work, something not always desirable for many artists, hence them rather seeking light-footed philanthropists or relationships with art dealers where their work is directly positioned as a capital commodity. Public education platforms. Rather than depending on the state to support free public education programs within given or approved topics, the arts organization might host quality workshops on a regular basis, selling tickets as required. Free seminars targeting a diverse public should argue as to why supporting experimental arts and research practices is a good idea in the first place. If voters cannot see tangible value in supporting diverse experimentation, complaints directed at elected politicians that under-represent the respective field make little sense, in the long term. Conclusion It's my hope that out of the gloom of austerity -one cutting deep into the European arts sector at the time of writing- will come a positive shift: a commitment to the exploration and implementation of strategies that loosen dependence upon the State and thus reducing infrastructural vulnerability in the long term. More so, I suspect such new directions might spur a more courageous and rigorous critical disposition within experimental arts practices more generally, one not shy to offend, lest of all the hands that feed. Julian Oliver July 2011 1 See Eleanor Heartney's Art and Money http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/heartney/art-and-money-and-politics-3-28-11.asp 2 An economically positivist account of the Bilbao Effect http://www.forbes.com/2002/02/20/0220conn.html Whilst it has created thousands of new jobs (largely in the tourist industry) it is important to note it has also doubled property values, displaced immigrant populations and raised the cost of living in the area overall (See Esteban's El Efecto Guggenheim, Editorial Anagrama 2007). 3 Rather humorously 'Khudozhnik', the word for artist in Russian, also means 'skinny' or 'unwell'. 4 The media-arts is a good case example of a burgeoning field of practice not considered central to contemporary art history and so is arguably more vulnerable during times of austerity. i http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_intervention#Lord_Napier_in_red_tape.2C_2004 ii http://www.kernotart.com/artist/eleonora.html //-- -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] can we avoid the corporate pyramid scheme model: independents
With high entrance fees and neither flight or accommodation covered, 'independents' such as myself will always be discouraged from attending. I know many people that would've liked to contribute and/or visit ISEA this year but without a university or media-lab covering costs they simply cannot justify the personal expense. Independent makers and thinkers are not merely those /without/ institutional affiliation; rather they're often practitioners that consciously operate outside an institutional frame. Such people are great in number, authoring some of the most rigorous electronic art and theory today, celebrated in books, festivals and museums worldwide. They may have day-jobs or merely live on a very small budget, relying entirely on artist fees, talks and the occassional commission. If ISEA's economic model cannot assist and/or make it easier for independent contributors (let alone lower costs for attendees themselves), it is in no place to claim canonical representation of the state of electronic art today. Leave that to other festivals. Rather, ISEA would better be cast as an instititional meet-and-greet or forum for pursuing professional agendas. A little imagination wouldn't go astray here: with such stunning weather wouldn't it have been great to have the festival under large canopies or tents down on the water side? Perhaps it could've been smaller and more tightly curated such that it could fit in a smaller venue. Parallel talks and panels are always frustrating, especially given the complex social relations and critical interests endemic to conferences and festivals. It is sad for a conference schedule to propagate as stress within what is otherwise a warm and stimulating gathering of minds. A festival that makes it easy for people to meet, demonstrate and discuss is, in general, a cherished festival. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Reclaiming creativity as agent of change
..on Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 04:28:53PM +0100, Simon Biggs wrote: The Critical Engineer seems to be doing reverse engineering, a form of technical deconstruction. It's what most interesting artists who work with technology tend to do in their work, opening the black box to analysis. In that sense the term critical engineer seems to be a synonym for media artist ;) Media Artists need not reverse engineer at all to be artists working with 'media'. I know many that use Flash on a Mac and have been successful as media artists doing so. They couldn't tell you what a threaded process is, let alone a kernel. Many other Media Artists simply pay engineers to work on projects, not being able to solder or write a line of code themselves. This is the traditional 'Visionary and the Hired Hand' class-like separation endemic to Fine Art. I've been called a Media Artist for years and frankly am pretty happy to get away from the term. I've always thought the term Media Artist was so vague that Culture Jammer would be a better fit! Mario Biagioli writes on black boxing rendering ideas and paradigms opaque and unto the apparatus of industrialised culture. The challenge is to reverse engineer such constructs so they become (again) problematic. Once deconstructed they are open to re-use. Indeed. I really like this way of framing it, especially in that it expresses two forms of use, the un-boxed form being in knowledge through understanding the object of study as a field of interesting problems. Cheers, Julian On 19/07/2011 15:18, Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.com wrote: The Critical Engineer takes black-box technology and infrastructure as something that must be pared back, cracked open and or re-purposed before both the object and its engineering effects upon the user can be fully understood. Simon Biggs | si...@littlepig.org.uk | www.littlepig.org.uk s.bi...@eca.ac.uk | Edinburgh College of Art www.eca.ac.uk/circle | www.elmcip.net | www.movingtargets.co.uk Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Reclaiming creativity as agent of change
..on Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 01:23:34PM +0100, Saul Albert wrote: Your description of the workshop in Lima, Julian, sounds like you're taking a critical artistic approach to your materials in context. An Art and Language workshop might have performed a similar auto-exegesis. There wasn't a lot of art-thinking involved at all really, rather getting down to the technics and engineering guts of what makes a network work. From the physical layer of metal and cable, through the link-layer of hardware addressing, raw ethernet frames etc, and up to the networking layer (IPv4, routes, subnets etc). Only once understood could the network be read as itself, on its own terms, and the relationship between network topology and corporate control structure was clear. You don't need art or its critical devices to get you there. Some of the 18 members of the workshop had no background (or seeming interest) in art let alone crit theory at all. All were creative and critically concerned folk however.. Infrastructure and our dependence on it is a leveler like that, common dependence. Art can only interpret and fork where engineering is (in this case) already the active, creative language. Having started a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 'Critical Engineering' sounds like an exciting oxymoron to me. Hehe perfect. We also like it for its provocative oscillations in that regard. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] real vs. unreal
..on Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 11:46:15AM +0200, Tamiko Thiel wrote: Is a painting real but a projection not real? Isn't visual phenomena real - and therefore any AR object also real? Are perhaps these not the correct terms to be using when talking about AR and VR, even though both terms use the word reality and therefore bring us into discussions about what is real and what is not? That which comprises 'real' is simply what is experienced. It's very difficult to say otherwise, of course. 'Reality' however is more a consensus of experience. AR, as an actor of the real, has not yet reached consensus, as your conversation with Mathias here conveys. Much of AR is concered with targeting the visual cortex as the site of exhibition directly. It doesn't matter what form the light-projecting object itself takes. No one ever experiences 'Digital Art' anyway, rather the analog symptoms of mechanical events, like photons shot from a screen, some of which pass through a cornea, converted by the retina into electric events then ordered and interpreted by nets of neurons which later become 'experiences'. No one has ever experienced a digit. Plato put it well: The image stands at the junction of a light which comes from the object and another which comes from the gaze That object has merely widened in scope with screen based innovations, like AR. FYI Here's a short article I wrote on this topic: 'Option Illusion Art as Radical Interface' http://julianoliver.com/share/text/Oliver_Optical-Illusion-Art-as-Radical-Interface.pdf Cheers! -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com follow: http://twitter.com/julian0liver ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Augmented reality as public art, mobile location based monuments and virtual memorials
..on Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 09:25:46AM -0400, Alan Sondheim wrote: Hi - I'm not sure how to reply to this; I've been thinking about it. One thing about locative art is its oddly inert quality - it's _there_ and remains there, is fixed there. It's _there_ in the sense of geographic location, and _there_ in the sense of specific technology needed to reveal it, almost as if it's embedded in the technology, welded to it. The ephemerality lies in the fact that it takes a specific, soon-to-be- outdated technology to run, as well as energy; unlike a physical public monument, the energy is meted out within a specific regime of capital and control. So the 'We' in electracy you talk about is inextricably mixed with capital, with enclaving, and with the specifics of location; only the last is accessible to everyone. In this sense, what you call 'this virtual public sphere' is a 'real private sphere' whose manifestation or represen- tation is is virtual. Indeed. I've mentioned this problem in a couple of talks, albeit to Dutchies who are of course very proud of the company at large (sorry Mediamatic, V2_)! We're seeing a real platform dependency set in the artistic AR scene, akin to all those countless artists depending on Macromedia Director, back in the day of CDROM art, much of which is completely unplayable now on modern systems. Forward compatibility will a nightmare as will archiving any of this stuff - destined to become space-junk unless the LayAR team actively take an interest in the problem. Naturally this is only an ethical issue if artwork deployed using LayAR is publically funded. In any case, AR on handhelds is still in a fairly impoverished, unconvincing place: LayARs UX is not so good really, at least for the time being. This is one of the issues of trying to do pose estimation using a digital compass rather than true NFT style tracking which is concerned with things like ground plane detection, even occlusion. These features are the difference between AR as 3D art wobbling around on a plane of video and augmentation that truly transforms a sense of place, of being somewhere. In any case, we're still not there yet on handhelds. Georg (Oxford) got pretty close however with PTAM before working for Microsoft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBI5HwitBX4 From: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9HMn6bd-v8 Sadly while the source code is open (the right to read it) it's entirely proprietary (restricted use rights, no modification). It would certainly be good to gather together and dedicate some time writing a free and open source alternative to LayAR but with working ground plane detection and a better renderer (a la PTAM). Perhaps this is something that could be kickstarted. By the end of the year I will be able to contribute quite some code to such a project as a result of a collaboration with V2_ and Lighthouse, Brighton. Regarding other proprietary AR suites, Damian Stewart and I have an alternative to Junaio's proprietary image tracking solution. It is robust and (it seems) more performant than their own. It allows augmenting any complex image with images, video and 3D models: http://selectparks.net/~julian/theartvertiser/install.html A version for Android is on it's way thanks to the help of colleague Arturo Castro. It may in fact use a more robust algorithm, allowing detection of images that are very difficult to track due to having fewer feature points, like logos. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com follow: http://twitter.com/julian0liver ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome Patrick Lichty
..on Fri, Apr 08, 2011 at 03:28:47PM +0200, xDxD.vs.xDxD wrote: hello there! On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.comwrote: AR is really a modern implementation of a very old idea, one seen with Phantasmagoria like Pepper's Ghost, some Op Art like Perspectival Anamorphosis, of Trome-l'Oeil and work by the (rather astonishing) Varini. and let me add surrealists, dada etc :) as if you look at it from a broad perspective, AR is not about look through your iPhone and see a dinosaur where there is none in the physical world, but more about the idea that you can reinvent reality by creating layers of it. When we happily met Patrick in Rome, we went for a shopdropping run in which we placed a series of boxes of an Augmented Reality Drug beside ordinary products in the shop. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXaoPPkpqUo Ahh this is great. Bookmarked for my next lecture on the topic! We have been using AR a lot in both its technical/technological form and through the imaginaries that we can build on top of it. The AR Drug is a part of it: the drug is actually an open source software which people can plug into their wordpress blog to turn it into a full-scale AR (and cross media) production platform (the software is called MACME https://github.com/xdxdVSxdxd/MACME ) And all this is done by a fake institution called REFF who is currently promoting a youth program for the methodological reinvention of reality http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CfET1YyyKs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdD1g0fd94Q which is oriented to helping students, activists, artists and, actually, anyone to learn the technological and methodological tools that they can use to systematically reinvent reality. As you can see from this link: http://www.artisopensource.net/?s=REFF Nice work.. Somewhat relatedly my colleague Danja Vasiliev and I have also taken a new direction in tactical augmentation that doesn't deploy the traditional camera+comuter+overlay model. The project is called 'Newstweek' and is a device to remotely manipulate news read by other people on wireless hotspots (cafes, libraries, airports, universities). By altering images and headlines in other people's browsers, we can literally augment and alter world views, as read on smartphones, laptops and tablet computers. Here's a project video: http://vimeo.com/21707290 Some articles/interviews: http://vagueterrain.net/content/2011/01/newstweek-network-permeability-and-headline-hacking http://www.imperica.com/features/newstweek http://blogs.computerworld.com/17820/hackers_use_hidden_device_to_manipulate_news_at_wi_fi_hotspots Project page: http://newstweek.com Worth mentioning that the project will appear on Arte.tv in France and Germany in early June. we touched dozens of schools, universities, arts academies, festivals, political squats, and it is really wonderful. Because what emerges immediately by touching these issues, is that it is not about technology, but about multiplication and stratification. When we learn that there are tools and methodologies which we can use to efficiently craft reality (be it through an iphone or through stickers, or posters, or things hanging from a baloon or whatever), we feel very comfortable with it, as a materialization of a tension we've been feeling from a while, maybe, in this postmodern world in which just about everything multiplies, becomes fluid and polyphonic. Just a couple of links to some more actions we did that could prove to be interesting in the discussion: http://www.artisopensource.net/?s=squatting+supermarkets Again, nice work! I wasn't at all aware of this. Squatting Supermarkets: AR used with products' logos as markers to turn logos into AR wikis onto which people could publish their information (presented at the Share Festival in Turin it used a custom AR software then published as open source that could be used to transform logos into AR markers. Hundreds of students used the software for performative actions in various parts of the world. Some of them even got some university credits for performing a stickers-based version of this as a workshop during the Share Festival. http://www.artisopensource.net/2011/04/06/leaf-leaves-nature-and-augmented-reality/ Leaf++ The next project about AR that we will present together with AOS and FakePress, at ISEA2011 in Istanbul: a platform that uses leaves as AR markers, allowing you to create information and art directly on top of leaves. The software will be ready (and released as free software) on about the end of May and we will both present a scientific analysis of the technology and an art performance using leaves all these software tools also to add another thing: The fact that the art can be pose-reestimated independent of viewer position is the innovation wrought by software
Re: [-empyre-] the art of forgetting
..on Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 02:10:27PM +1300, simon wrote: Simon Biggs wrote: It's part of the role of artists to ensure we don't forget. Hmm, I don't think this is true really. Donning a role of social responsibility, whether that be for a moral project or cultural heritage, hasn't been widely practiced by artists since the Englightenment. Unless you're from an underprivileged background or oppressive political circumstance, it seems assuming such a role in one's art is increasingly frowned upon, lacking rigour, within the broader machine of self-disillusionment that is contemporary art. Rather: It's part of the role of artists to ensure we don't forget about them. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com follow: http://twitter.com/julian0liver ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the art of forgetting
..on Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 04:58:41PM +, Simon Biggs wrote: Certainly, in an art world where marketing is so much part of practice then your suggestion that artists should seek to ensure we don't forget them is the mantra. I'd rather not work that way... Great. It's a rare attitude. I am not from an underprivileged background nor live in an especially oppressive environment (although that is debateable) but nevertheless I do think people (including artusts) are obliged to try and make a difference. This is a risky imposition I think. Artists are, almost by contemporary definition, assigned with a social /irresponsibility/; by escaping obligations, social utility, behavioural and cultural norms, even laws, they supposedly widen our cultural and intellectual scope, demanding new definitions whilst undoing others, affording greater movement for the group as a whole. That's the idea, a romance still prevalent today. How many actually do - and how transformative their efforts are - is another thing. The reality is that most art is now made in the interests of excelling within the group rather than excelling the group as a whole. An obligation to make a difference is perhaps more clearly delineated and easily asserted where public arts funding is concerned - a common polemic between tax payers and state commissioned public artworks, for instance.. I don't see how else making a difference as a priori for the arts can otherwise be imposed (or whether it should). The change here should better happen with audiences, of which and why work is valued. I'm personally increasingly drawn to making less 'solipsistic' work, work that reaches into the world with change in mind. At the same time I fear that art audiences comprise a poor context for effecting change; the art world is naturally more interested in the transformation of its own narrative than the world around it. And so, like numerous others, I'm interested in strategies like direct distribution and public intervention. I do think we use the word 'art' far too often, especially to describe projects that are not explicitly works of entertainment, politics or science and have no overt utility, hence committing them to a frame (and culture) of reflexive discussion and abstract value generation, limiting their reach. The art world will tell us we're making art anyway. We don't always need to do it ourselves! But that can come in many shapes and sizes. I agree a simplistic approach is not desirable. One reason I'm not with Badiou. Deleuze is far more interesting. Somebody mentioned Nietzsche, which is interesting territory in this respect. So is Marcuse, who seems out of fashion at the moment but offers a model of action that allows for a dystopian view. Marcuse (esp Study on Authority) is great to read with this topic in mind indeed, but far from dystopian in my opinion! Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com follow: http://twitter.com/julian0liver On 13/03/2011 14:01, Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.com wrote: ..on Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 02:10:27PM +1300, simon wrote: Simon Biggs wrote: It's part of the role of artists to ensure we don't forget. Hmm, I don't think this is true really. Donning a role of social responsibility, whether that be for a moral project or cultural heritage, hasn't been widely practiced by artists since the Englightenment. Unless you're from an underprivileged background or oppressive political circumstance, it seems assuming such a role in one's art is increasingly frowned upon, lacking rigour, within the broader machine of self-disillusionment that is contemporary art. Rather: It's part of the role of artists to ensure we don't forget about them. Cheers, Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ s.bi...@eca.ac.uk http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ 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
Re: [-empyre-] networking art + postmedia
On Sat, January 29, 2011 1:14 am, Heidi May wrote: I wanted to bring up one more topic for discussion as we wind down this last week. Joseph had mentioned that he made several pages of notes before preparing his ideas and questions for this week, and, well, I too found the previous week's discussions to be full of ideas to expand on. The one area I really want to revisit, if others are also interested, is the vibrant discussion that began from Cynthia's response to Simon B's question of materialist deconstruction of post- convergent media. I'm fascinated with the recent ideas Patrick has raised and do intend to respond to those as well, however, the artist- educator in me wants to inquire into the artistic methods we are choosing to work with when expressing these extremely important ideas related to network culture and when attempting to engage with a networked public. A strategy friends and I have taken recently is to actively interrogate the implicit trust people place in the metal and minds and vested interests that comprise the internet by learning to manipulate the reality it supposedly provides. This produces productively contrary or incompatible realities, often within the same subject. Our most recent application of this strategy was to develop a device which allows people to manipulate the news other people consume on wireless hotspots. Our targets are CNN, The Guardian, BBC, The Independent, Newstweek and Fox News. Innocuous and small, it acts as a console allowing a remote user to alter the browser-delivered realities adopted every day by users of smartphones and laptops, whether they be in airports, schools, libraries or cafes. You can read an review of the project here: http://vagueterrain.net/content/2011/01/newstweek-network-permeability-and-headline-hacking An interview with us on the project here: http://www.imperica.com/features/newstweek Here is the project website: http://newstweek.com Video of our device functioning (intended more for networking geeks and naysayers) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL5ljrNInpM Greetings from Tokyo, --- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Tokyo, Japan about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
..on Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 01:14:11PM -0500, davin heckman wrote: In some ways, I think the question of games as art can be enriched by looking back to poiesis and techne. I must admit to finding this entire thread largely redundant. Surely the very attempt at discerning whether or not videogame and art can find peace is indication that they already do. When friends and I established the game-art collective Select Parks back in 1998, in the interests of documenting and 'archiving' game-based artistic experiments, we certainly did not need the canonical annointment of the fine arts to steer our judgement. Rather, we were interested in work that was merely interested in the /possibility/ that they might be considered as such. This is an important distinction, one that falls wide of the need for authenticity as such. My own early mods have themselves been exhibited in museums since 1999/2000 and at no point was the question as to whether they were or not artistically valid itself /intrincally/ important. Once they're there -once the question has opened- it's already too late for qualifying discourse. Many of my peers share the same disinterest in this debate; 'Art' is merely the name we give to discourse after cultural transformation, a muffled echo at best. All the best for the new year, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com follow: http://twitter.com/julian0liver On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 5:05 AM, Rafael Trindade trirraf...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, folks, Not a few times I've prepared myself to post something and got to stop just because your messages did my job better :) I just regret missing this latest topic, for I was afraid that kind of contention would happen. I find it a pity, and I'll try to show you why: The Picasso instance is not - OK, is not to me - as silly as might seem to some of you. I didn't reply it before for the reason cited above, and - I believe the main motive amongst us all - vacations! Back to Picasso-gate, what Daniel meant to me is the most pretty obvious thing: the same thing Duchamp and the conceptual artists and lots of people didactically showed us - that there is no such thing as an essentially, trouble-free, object of art. This is not only a contemporary feat; more rigid systems of yore demanded - as today - lots of training, education, sensibility and adequation to norms, institutions, artes poeticae, and dialogue with past canons and coetaneous artistic circles. What is to say, even believing so, there was not a pure, isolated, intrinsic aesthetic value in any object in any era. The example can make you cringe, but carries lots of elementary truth. The de-corporification of art, the stress on its relational, institutional, ecological nature does not imply art is valueless or an ethereal fiction. This is a sense a whole century have striven to build; not only about art, but about [social] reality itself. So Gabriel Menotti's response is not in conflict with Danc's sayings. We can find in videogames dependence on circuits, on a whole material ecology, on some modes of reception (recognition of genres), and a will of tradition (like I said weeks ago). Most human experiences are bound to some sort of will-to-canonise (gaming, being part of a gang, any nostalgia), not only the highbrow stuff. So you can relate games and art. BUT they are realities crested on very different social and technological complexes. One cannot fail to notice the enormously difference of weight canons have in arts. As someone - I forgot, sorry! - have told us here, art is, generally, about to associate, to enrich, to open more and more possibilities (according to old prescriptions, as synthetically as possible). This depends on the intrinsic properties of the object, triggered by a set of apparatuses linking it to synchronic circuits and diachronical traditions. There's nothing alike in videogames, even the most complex and beatiful; even the most distant from the childishly-irrational, fascinatingly-creative, absolutely freak and impatient mobs that makes, among other reasons, artists interested in 4chan-ness and gaming cultures. Everybody who happen to be into so-called literary fiction is familiar to the formula (which I believe only in some degree): books have to do with books, not with real stuff to which their tales could point at. Heretofore, people had learnt that Romeo and Juliet are not about some Italian couple more than they are about, say, Pyramus and Thisbe; that you cannot (would say some rigid and enthusiastic Victorian teacher) understand Molière without reading Bocaccio (and Scachetti, and Terence, and Menander...). The same has gone to arts. One can say that contemporary painting is not the same activity the pre-Raphaelites have practised, and one is right. But the pre-Raphaelites did
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 68, Issue 10 / is there a will to create / the social beyond the mechanisim?
Hi,
..on Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 09:33:12AM +0100, Simon Biggs wrote:
I am using agency in a sense that some might find contentious as I am
considering it as an ontological phenomena in a context where individuals,
whether human or animal, alive or inert, physical or virtual, are not where
agency is located. Rather, I am entertaining the idea that agency is of (or
is) the relationships between things (whatever those things might be). In
this respect I am proposing a folding of agency and creativity into one
thing which might be considered somewhat like a dark matter which binds
everything together.
Isn't this also the trajectory that Bergson takes ('Matter and Memory',
'Creative evolution', quasi-objects) and even the rather enigmatic Serres?
Cybernetics touches on this also, at its more abstract extents.
The units that are bound within this prima materia (for
want of a better term) might then be considered rather like quantum
phenomena - the closer you look the more you realise there is nothing there
and that it is the phenomena around the unit that give it its apparent
properties. The subsequent question, of course, is what is the unit (here I
include people)? Clearly there is something there - but what?
Intention. A 'will of things' one could say.
In the case of quantum physics it is evidence of perception as a productive
subjectivity, an old idea in philosophy and folklore. Bergson's take is that
matter is so deeply bound to the perception of it - alongside actions around and
with it - that Matter, Time and Mind must be considered part of the same
creative, generating system.
This may appear to depend on consciousness too much to satisfy your question.
His answer might be that in order to consider matter independent from agency,
from consciousness, we become immediately dependent on such abstractions as The
Universe, the very idea of matter, linear time or Numbers, none of which exist
in themselves, of course.
Cheers,
--
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Berlin, Germany
currently: Berlin, Germany
about: http://julianoliver.com
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Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
..on Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 09:00:59AM -0700, { brad brace } wrote:
My FB account with 5000 appreciative 'friends' was
immediately disabled once I began to sell collections of
(enhanced/enlarged) profile portraits. The hierarchical
social network hasn't changed a bit.
I've moved the project here:
PROXY Gallery
http://cart.iabrace.com
This is a great/interesting project. A clever diversion of Social Capital.
Congrats,
--
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Berlin, Germany
currently: Berlin, Germany
about: http://julianoliver.com
On Mon, 12 Jul 2010, Julian Oliver wrote:
I wonder if exclusiveness (not necessarily understood as a negative
feature)
is the only necessary ingredient for intimacy... ?
The very basis of a community depends on a logic of exclusion; any community
represents a grouping around a common interest, whether that be needs,
fetisches
or topics. To defend those interests - even if that requires excluding
others -
is to invest in the health of the community.
A society itself can be understood as an expression of exclusion; membership
is only granted to those that prove compatibility with the existing
interest(s).
For this reason, a discussion around 'Intimate networks' could be more aptly
(but less fashionably) named 'Exclusive Networks'.
The Local Area Network of your apartment or school expresses this exclusion
with
(the somewhat depolitised) WEP or WPA encryption. An IRC channel excludes
those
that do not demonstrate respect for the channel topic. A town in the South
of
the U.S.A might do so by making the newcomers feel generally horrible about
being there until they expressly prove a compatible interest.
Exlusion has an awful name, largely due to xenophobic, classist projects
throughout history, but we're all already practicing exclusion in the
interests
of our cherished communities every day. In consideration of this topic, one
could say any social network is the industrialisation of social exclusion
(network anxiety) - Am I your friend or not?
global islands project:
http://bbrace.net/id.html
We fill the craters left by the bombs
And once again we sing
And once again we sow
Because life never surrenders.
-- anonymous Vietnamese poem
Nothing can be said about the sea.
-- Mr Selvam, Akkrapattai, India 2004
{ brad brace }bbr...@eskimo.com ~finger for pgp
---bbs: brad brace sound ---
---http://69.64.229.114:8000 ---
.
The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Projectposted since 1994
+ + + serial ftp://ftp.eskimo.com/u/b/bbrace
+ + + eccentric ftp:// (your-site-here!)
+ + + continuous hotline://artlyin.ftr.va.com.au
+ + +hypermodern ftp://ftp.rdrop.com/pub/users/bbrace
+ + +imageryhttp://kunst.noemata.net/12hr/
News: alt.binaries.pictures.12hr alt.binaries.pictures.misc
alt.binaries.pictures.fine-art.miscalt.12hr
. 12hr email
subscriptions = http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/buy-into.html
. Other | Mirror: http://www.eskimo.com/~bbrace/bbrace.html
Projects | Reverse Solidus: http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/
| http://bbrace.net
. Blog | http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/wordpress/
. IM | bbr...@unstable.nl
. IRC | #bbrace
. ICQ| 109352289
. SIP| bbr...@ekiga.net
| registered linux user #323978
~
I am not a victim Coercion is natural
I am a messenger Freedom is artifical
/:b
___
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empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
..on Fri, Jul 09, 2010 at 09:32:52AM -0700, Eugenio Tisselli wrote: Julian, Can we think of an example of an intimate network? Sure, you mean a computer network right? Examples might be an invite only code repository and forum, a videogame LAN, the LAN in your house, an Intranet, darknets, IRC channels (#botany, #math, #radioastronomy, #security on servers like freenode, ircnet) etc. I wonder if exclusiveness (not necessarily understood as a negative feature) is the only necessary ingredient for intimacy... ? The very basis of a community depends on a logic of exclusion; any community represents a grouping around a common interest, whether that be needs, fetisches or topics. To defend those interests - even if that requires excluding others - is to invest in the health of the community. A society itself can be understood as an expression of exclusion; membership is only granted to those that prove compatibility with the existing interest(s). For this reason, a discussion around 'Intimate networks' could be more aptly (but less fashionably) named 'Exclusive Networks'. The Local Area Network of your apartment or school expresses this exclusion with (the somewhat depolitised) WEP or WPA encryption. An IRC channel excludes those that do not demonstrate respect for the channel topic. A town in the South of the U.S.A might do so by making the newcomers feel generally horrible about being there until they expressly prove a compatible interest. Exlusion has an awful name, largely due to xenophobic, classist projects throughout history, but we're all already practicing exclusion in the interests of our cherished communities every day. In consideration of this topic, one could say any social network is the industrialisation of social exclusion (network anxiety) - Am I your friend or not? Cheers! -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
:20 -!- - 19:20 -!- - freenode is a service of Peer-Directed Projects Center Ltd, 19:20 -!- - a not for profit organisation registered in England and Wales. 19:20 -!- - 19:20 -!- - If you support the work we do and wish to donate to the PDPC, 19:20 -!- - you may do so over at http://freenode.net/pdpc_donations.shtml 19:20 -!- - 19:20 -!- - Thank you for using freenode! 19:20 -!- - 19:20 -!- End of /MOTD command. 19:20 -!- Mode change [+i] for user julianoliver 19:20 frigg [~fr...@freenode/utility-bot/frigg] requested CTCP VERSION from julianoliver: 19:33 -ChanServ(chans...@services.)- [#debian] Welcome to #Debian. This is a discussion channel; if you have a question about Debian GNU/Linux, ask and we will try our best to answer it. Newcomers should read the channel's guidelines by typing /msg dpkg guidelines. Please do not paste in the channel; use #flood instead. Thank you. /msg dpkg: 19:36 -!- Irssi: Starting query in freenode with dpkg 19:36 julianoliver guidelines 19:36 dpkg 1) Read the /topic, the FAQ, and google before asking us. 2) Don't ask to ask. Just ask. 3) Don't repeat; show that you have tried to help yourself by refining the question. 4) Reading docs (man/info pages, READMEs) is a worthwhile skill. Practice it. 5) Use /msg to talk to the bots (not the people). See msg. 6) Be polite and patient. 7) Paste on #flood or paster, not here. 8) No trolls or spam. //--- Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Delft, Nederlands about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology, ...stanza to simon biggs ----off list email
..on Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 06:21:44PM +0100, Simon Biggs wrote: Happy to. Foucault's panopticon interprets Bentham's centralised eye of control as distributed throughout society. Everybody is implicated in the gaze of control. Foucault connects Lacan's concept of the gaze and Freud's of the super-ego (the social-self as controller of the Id) fixing surveillance as distributed agency. Indeed. Social networks leverage a pre-existing social anxiety, the fear of social irrelevance and subsequent obsolescence. A symptom of this is suspicion of those that choose not to participate, as participation edges toward social compulsion and then the compulsory. Guilty until proven subscribed. Again, we need to remind ourselves that the most popular social networks are not owned by their Public. Rather, they are owned by the most legally inverse form, Private enterprises. One can reasonably consider subscribers of Facebook as employees, without contract, whose renumeration is access to the data they create. Subscribers encourage, patrol and regulate participation (pokes, invites). Cheers, Julian From: stanza sta...@sublime.net Reply-To: sta...@sublime.net Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:38:35 +0100 To: Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology,...stanza to simon biggs off list email Hi Simon I just read this post of yours on...on empyre I don't suppose you have time to elaborate on this (below) for me..if you do thanks. Foucault's panopticon is an expression of social creativity and collective (un-)consciousness too. stanza www.stanza.co.uk Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
..on Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 12:02:50AM +0100, Johannes Birringer wrote: dear all: thanks for the clarifications, Helen, and for other comments that followed today, such as Davin's post. I think you are right to note that creativity and desire and community do not always move without conflict. This is an interesting portrayal of the mechanics of desire. I agree that desire is a motor for creativity, both individual and collective. But how do we actually move together into these commonly held futures you mention? A quick view on history may show that such moves have seldom been made without ruptures and conflicts. We could try to focus on the expression and actualization of collective desires from the viewpoint of complex systems, in which local interactions generate large scale changes. Politics, then, would emerge from a creative construction of the social actors, with all their common / opposed desires. I think these are the ontological stakes of consciousness. What we think has implications for what do. What we do has implications for what we think. And, if we live in a true community, our ideas and actions are bound to modify, be modified, contradict, and/or complement the negotiation of being. My questions were addressed precisely at these issues of conflict or contradiction, in a poltical and organizational sense, but also at the easy assumption (a kind of idealism) that networks (communicating via mobiles phone or internet or cybergames) equal communication equal creativity equal art. One answer is probably just not necessarily. Art is intended, not incidental. Even found art expresses the intent to find unintentional art objects. While all communication is obviously a form of creative expression it's not neccessarily art. Art doesn't happen when you increase the possibility for communication between individuals. Communities do. Even if we take an active position, of those making art using computer networks, we find that few people actually use the internets to make art together. Most use the internets to distribute artwork, connect with audiences, plan and research how to make artwork, curate, discuss and organise artwork - not make it. Like offline collaboration, there are very few artists actually making art together in large groups online. This says more about the desire for recognition and exposure than anything else, something endemic to contemporary art in general. We hear of the supposed revolution that collaboration on the internet brings, of a hyper-dividualism, a dissolution of authorship etc but I don't see many creators flocking to be one-of-many without the promise of earning positive and directed social rewards. By bringing money into the picture however, creating artworks resourcing the talents of large numbers of creators becomes very feasible. Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey's A bicycle built for 2000 comes to mind as one example, leveraging the micropayment system provided by Yahoo's Mechanical Turk to attract the sincerity of intent to create a singular work from those 2000 (unnamed) people. http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/ Anything that happens in Second Life (for instance) expresses no more about computer networks and creativity other than that geographically separated people /can/ collaborate on building a 'house', a sculpture, a performance. Previously one had to be very creative with postage stamps, ink, time and the social networks of friends in the vicinity of your collaborator (Fluxus did a lot with this). As you suggest it really is an idealism we're talking about here and one we'll be a little embarrassed about in years to come. The supposed wisdom of the crowds, with the Internets as a platform, will continue to fail to actually contribute more than small groups, or even individuals, have acheived for aeons. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Delft, Nederlands about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
..on Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 06:01:37PM +0200, Julian Oliver wrote: leveraging the micropayment system provided by Yahoo's Mechanical Turk to Oops! Should have read Amazon's Mechanical Turk. https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Delft, Nederlands about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
..on Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 12:04:26AM +0100, Simon Biggs wrote: I am hoping it is possible to find another way through this maze. It would seem many in this discussion agree that creativity and identity are intrinsically linked. Some seem to accept that this is not something that happens in isolation but socially, a sharing. Is the most important thing we can create art? Part of the attraction of making art is that it is one of the very few things you can do that is automatically deemed by a society to be somehow 'important'. The very carrying through of a desire to make a personal and symbollicaly meaningful expression is protected within society - at least in the West - even before the work itself is assigned cultural value. Art, in some way, is always given social 'room'. However after Duchamp it seems the making and presentation of art is also an expression of the maker's preparedness and courage to abstract away from one's culture, a show of independence, to abandon the known in favour of the other, to step out and above it. That expression /becomes/ the art. If that stepping-out is widely recognised, culture as a whole is seen to have symptomatically progressed somehow. It is this cultural incorporation of the 'independent' expression that leads us to believe a social negotiation has taken place somewhere, whether it simply did well at Christies or the Venice Biennal, or neither, we don't care as long as it's in the books. All the while artists are seen to be social benefactors. Despite this, it seems to me that most art is made (or 'done') in the interests of excelling within the group rather than excelling the group as a whole. Rarely are American artists 'competing' with European or Asian artists, let alone are whole disciplines of art competing, between themselves. The desire to excell within the cultural group has little to do with social competition directly I think, at least after art-school. Rather, I think it's very hard to talk about art and the making of it now without considering the impact of late capitalism on human culture, as a dis-ease that orders the social through the internalisation of competitive interest. Every non-established artist I know is looking for ways to gain exposure such that they can attract interest, get shows, get sales/funding and keep making work. It's just such a fundamental reality for artists these days. So, the Market-ordered society is the group to which the culturally transformative artist currently speaks and in which they desire to excell. Cheers (and good thread), -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Week Four - Design
Hi Femke, ..on Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 03:34:37PM +0200, Femke Snelting wrote: Thank you all for three interesting weeks of discussion. It seems almost too much to add 'design' to the mix now, but here we go: As you can read from Michael Dieters introduction, both Pierre Huyghebaert and me are members of OSP (Open Source Publishing)[1], a graphic design collective using Free, Libre and Open Source Software only. We are affiliated with Constant, a Brussels based Foundation for Art and Media, and active since 2006. To us, the part that software plays in creative work is just too interesting to leave with a single proprietary company. It might be the same for architecture, animation or writing, but in graphic design, there is not much to choose from if you want to play professional. Our choice for Free Software is therefore as much about an alliance with Free Culture, as a way to break with the shiny but dull surfaces of those habitual tools-of-the-trade. Indeed this is of central importance. The question we, as creators dependent on software, need to ask again and again is Am I designing through these tools or are these tools designing through me? There is a conspiracy of action in place when working with any tool - they contain encouragements, tendencies and visual codes that ineluctably influence how we use them. For this reason we ought to be suspicious of tools that are designed by corporations with a mass market in mind; they represent a generalisation of creative possibility and aesthetic interest, right down to their branding. As Florian Cramer and I asked recently at Linux Week Linz, would the greats of painting or photography have accepted the persistent presence of an OSX or Windows logo in corner of their studio, let alone a Photoshop toolbar on their canvas or print while they work? While much Free Software exceeds the 'quality' of proprietary solutions, it does offer a valuable opportunity to engage with Weird, Mutable and Porous softwares in a market where human computer interaction is dominated by ever normalised expectations of Intuitive, Solid and Slick interfaces. Think Similar (TM). Moreso, at the heart of most Free Software is a UNIX philosophy, tending toward many connectable components rather than discrete monolithic 'suites' with unique and closed-standard file formats. Good to read you, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Zone book about A2K
..on Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 09:21:02AM +0200, geert lovink wrote: http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/KRIK_ACC.html Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property edited by Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski Current Affairs | Information Science $24.95 | £18.95 orig. paperback 978-1-890951-96-2 646 pp. | 61 illus. | 6 x 9 Available November 2010 Yet the important knowledge in this book is itself not freely accessible? Just kidding ;) I look forward to reading it, looks great. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Week Four - Design
contributions, attracting further opportunities like talks, lecture series', collaborations, offers of development funding, the results of which may benefit another organisation's existing projects. It's such 'indirect renumeration' that has sustained me for the last 10 years - with no day job, rich parents or institutional affiliation and there are many like me. Sometimes people simply use the code I've written in their projects (despite it being released under a pro-copy Copyright license) but it's surprising how little this happens in general. Instead, if I was less public about my code I'd be in greater risk of my initial contribution being too far 'under the radar' to protect me from blatant violations of the license under which I release my work. Artists are often very concerned with their reputation as originators and so will rarely steal something that is publically freely available. Moreso, working directly with the author of a given code-base is often far cheaper than hiring a bunch of people to work out how it works and where it can be taken. In short, the Media Arts is not supported by a cultural economy transacting around objects, but ideas and their implementations. The money that sustains this scene tends toward a service-based economy rather than the product-driven economy typical to traditional arts. In any case, it's still very much a Culture Industry, in the sense Adorno intended, and as such comes with inherent vulnerabilities and maldistributions. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Narrativity and Reading Regimes
..on Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 02:42:56PM +1000, Michael Dieter wrote: As a literary critic, I highly value immersive reading and desire it to continue. I suspect, however, that the enemy here is not the internet, but rather the neo-liberal economic rationalism that results in ever-increasing work hours, and diminishes the free time required for people to engage in sustained reading practices. Great post! I wonder whether there might be something more to add from a media specific perspective also: the devices associated and deliberately engineered for informational 'hypertext' scanning are increasingly imbricated throughout our everyday lives as constant companions. Neoliberal economic rationalism cannot itself be sustained without rallying a material infrastructure in support of the logic of increasing work hours, competition and value-added knowledge work. The blurring of work and leisure that underpins attempts to increase productivity is actually facilitated by mobile networked devices, such as the iPad. I fear is that the problem is additionally encoded into these technical objects themselves, things that are privileged as central to these economic systems and regimes of labour. Also a great post! And it's here that the 'gift' of social networking is an ideal capital model; managing ourselves and our data across so many devices and networks becomes a kind of labour regime in itself, requiring increasing hours of attention to maintain social exposure. The hidden fruits of our self-and-social interests are then sold on to data miners and marketeers, or simply repurposed as a canvas for ad revenue directly. Here's a timely remedy: http://suicidemachine.org/ Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of open source
..on Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 05:35:03PM -0500, christopher sullivan wrote: and Julian your definition was perfect, towering over all other possible attempts, you must understand the small mind I have to work with.. Chris. Chris I liked your definitions, certainly far more fun/complex than what I came up with. Nonetheless, you asked me for a definition and so I gave it. To clarify: personally I think 'prototyping' doesn't need a whole lot of definition, it's simply (already) any process of defining something; most commonly an idea, up until the point the prototype acheives the intended utility and/or is ready to be copied. Sometimes that might involve developing concrete intermediary forms (a polystyrene mock-up of an industrial design, code sketch) other times ephemeral (a critical debate (prototyping answers) or a night club (prototyping selves)). In our case, on this list, we're prototyping definitions of prototyping. Cheers, Julian Quoting Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.com: ..on Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 06:07:24PM -0500, christopher sullivan wrote: definitions, I think we are not all talking about the same thing. so here are my worst case and best case definitions of prototyping. [..] what is your definition? (earlier) Prototyping is any test of expectation or: Prototyping is practicing real. or: Prototyping is an attempt to reverse engineer the imagined. We could go on forever while forgetting that prototyping itself escapes definition. This is because it itself is the very process of definition, of 'defining'. To recurse, your email was (expressly) a Prototype Definition. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com Quoting Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.com: ..on Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 03:10:01PM -, Johannes Birringer wrote: Davin wrote: At one point in time, discrete objects were things that were considered prototypes that could be thrown into an existing system and tested. Increasingly, it seems like the prototypes are geared to test individual and collective consciousness. In other words, maybe we are the prototypes? Being tested so that we can be effectively processed, shrink-wrapped, labeled, bought and sold Hmm, This statement from Davin confused me also. I thought it was fairly clear that any act of learning - or any 'attempt', which all action is at it's root - simultaneously produces the self as a prototype, even if only for the duration of that act. The very notion of a prototype assumes a platonic and eventuating objecthood, a finished thing. When are people ever so singularly resolved? Second order prototyping is the work of other people, especially aquaintances, marketeers and those that resource people. Beast, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Christopher Sullivan Dept. of Film/Video/New Media School of the Art Institute of Chicago 112 so michigan Chicago Ill 60603 csu...@saic.edu 312-345-3802 Christopher Sullivan Dept. of Film/Video/New Media School of the Art Institute of Chicago 112 so michigan Chicago Ill 60603 csu...@saic.edu 312-345-3802 -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of open source
..on Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 06:07:24PM -0500, christopher sullivan wrote: definitions, I think we are not all talking about the same thing. so here are my worst case and best case definitions of prototyping. [..] what is your definition? (earlier) Prototyping is any test of expectation or: Prototyping is practicing real. or: Prototyping is an attempt to reverse engineer the imagined. We could go on forever while forgetting that prototyping itself escapes definition. This is because it itself is the very process of definition, of 'defining'. To recurse, your email was (expressly) a Prototype Definition. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com Quoting Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.com: ..on Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 03:10:01PM -, Johannes Birringer wrote: Davin wrote: At one point in time, discrete objects were things that were considered prototypes that could be thrown into an existing system and tested. Increasingly, it seems like the prototypes are geared to test individual and collective consciousness. In other words, maybe we are the prototypes? Being tested so that we can be effectively processed, shrink-wrapped, labeled, bought and sold Hmm, This statement from Davin confused me also. I thought it was fairly clear that any act of learning - or any 'attempt', which all action is at it's root - simultaneously produces the self as a prototype, even if only for the duration of that act. The very notion of a prototype assumes a platonic and eventuating objecthood, a finished thing. When are people ever so singularly resolved? Second order prototyping is the work of other people, especially aquaintances, marketeers and those that resource people. Beast, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Christopher Sullivan Dept. of Film/Video/New Media School of the Art Institute of Chicago 112 so michigan Chicago Ill 60603 csu...@saic.edu 312-345-3802 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of open source
..on Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 11:34:49PM -0700, adr...@cnmat.berkeley.edu wrote: The software might be free and the prototype might be free, but you, the creator are not. You are bound in a panopticon where anonymous others can observe and scrutinize your creative output. How can you not mediate your behavior aware of this scrutiny? Is the prototype a tentative confirmation of conformity that announces a productivity that funds the panoptican? hehe ;) Well writing Free Software tends to offer a rewarding 'panopticon' for those that excercise their freedom to give away what they make, the courage to allow their work be so widely peer-reviewed, the open-mindedness to allow it to be re-purposed and the humility to allow it to be improved. It is a model of productivity yes, a socially productive selfishness. If their's any behavioural alteration in having countless thousands read your source-code, it's to get better at writing source-code. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] // The Emperors new source code //
The reality is that very few academics and artists actually know what Open Source is, where and why the term was introduced, the difference between Free Software and Freeware yet are more than happy to talk about it all ad infinitum; Open Source has been a academic cash-cow and a great cultural love-in for the media-art scene. 'Open Source' sounds a little bit technical - a bit 'digital' - contemporary and a lot more fashionable than the word 'participatory' which is, in fact, the word they're looking for.. The result is a vast number of talks given on Open Source Architecture (what?) the postulation of Open Source Governments (que?) and countless blogs on Open Source Cooking (umm..) and Open Source Crochet (wass?). Papers given on Open Source hailing its messianic power as a design model are given in publically-funded university conferences on closed-source operating systems (OSX/Windows), the PDFs of which are locked up in pay-per-use services like JSTOR under non-pro-copy-Copyright licenses. In the absense of /actual/ source code, the term Open Source has been so widely abused it makes little real sense anymore. It has become absurd. The term 'participatory' however has lost little of its shine. Who's brave enough to use it? -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of open source
..on Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 06:07:24PM -0500, christopher sullivan wrote: definitions, I think we are not all talking about the same thing. so here are my worst case and best case definitions of prototyping. Chris dictionary, Prototype A prototype is an original type, form, or instance of something serving as a typical example, basis, or standard for other things of the same category. The word derives from the Greek(prototypon), primitive form, neutral of (prototypos), original, primitive, from (protos), first and (typos), impression.[1] my definitions. best case scenario: . a prototype in is an object, or behavior, that is an experimental attempt to work towards a best case scenario of application, validity, or volatility of an idea, or thing. there must be a concrete need, for the prototype to be valuable. Worst case scenario: a replacement or guinea-pig for a genuine article, so to make the person experiencing or using this thing, or thought system. feel that they are negotiating a known object or experience: a dopple ganger or facsimile of the real. a placebo: a stunt man. what is your definition? I don't know, perhaps: A prototype is any test of expectation. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com Quoting Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.com: ..on Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 03:10:01PM -, Johannes Birringer wrote: Davin wrote: At one point in time, discrete objects were things that were considered prototypes that could be thrown into an existing system and tested. Increasingly, it seems like the prototypes are geared to test individual and collective consciousness. In other words, maybe we are the prototypes? Being tested so that we can be effectively processed, shrink-wrapped, labeled, bought and sold Hmm, This statement from Davin confused me also. I thought it was fairly clear that any act of learning - or any 'attempt', which all action is at it's root - simultaneously produces the self as a prototype, even if only for the duration of that act. The very notion of a prototype assumes a platonic and eventuating objecthood, a finished thing. When are people ever so singularly resolved? Second order prototyping is the work of other people, especially aquaintances, marketeers and those that resource people. Beast, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Christopher Sullivan Dept. of Film/Video/New Media School of the Art Institute of Chicago 112 so michigan Chicago Ill 60603 csu...@saic.edu 312-345-3802 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of open source
..on Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 03:10:01PM -, Johannes Birringer wrote: Davin wrote: At one point in time, discrete objects were things that were considered prototypes that could be thrown into an existing system and tested. Increasingly, it seems like the prototypes are geared to test individual and collective consciousness. In other words, maybe we are the prototypes? Being tested so that we can be effectively processed, shrink-wrapped, labeled, bought and sold Hmm, This statement from Davin confused me also. I thought it was fairly clear that any act of learning - or any 'attempt', which all action is at it's root - simultaneously produces the self as a prototype, even if only for the duration of that act. The very notion of a prototype assumes a platonic and eventuating objecthood, a finished thing. When are people ever so singularly resolved? Second order prototyping is the work of other people, especially aquaintances, marketeers and those that resource people. Beast, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] animation and gender
Hi, ..on Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 10:25:20AM -0500, Renate Ferro wrote: Chris thanks for the list of animators below. There is something that I have been very curious about since we began this whole discussion now about a month ago. I was on a site (and I'm not sure which one it was) that was discussing the lack of female animators in the field. The distinction was that many female animators who are working tend to do more documentary, self help animations. Their observation was that most women artists instead tended to be drawn towards manipulated, experimental cinema and video and not straight animation. (Perhaps we need to extend the whole notion of animation via the fuzziness that Suzanne alluded to early on!) Additionally, Mary Flanagan was here at Cornell a few weeks ago and in a public lecture commented on the overwhelming lack of female gamers in the field as well. Mary has forever said this. I wonder if her statistics aren't a little old? According to the ESA, 38% of American videogame players and 48% of gaming parents are women. In other countries such as Korea, statistics show as much as 69.5% of women are playing video games. Even so, women's interests continue to be grossly under-represented, leaving women as single largest untapped market segment in the gaming industry. Link: http://www.womengamers.com/aboutus/ In the case of animation I know many computer-based female animators, albeit at a loose count less than men. It'd be bold to say it's a male oriented field - I've worked closely with animation departments and studios over the years and have seen no evidence of discrimination as such. Correlation is not causation. It would seem however that women are less often encouraged, at an early age, by men and other women to engage in the kind of technical cultures and communities that might lead to a choice to study digital animation. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com Hi Richard, there are plenty of non-linear narrative animations, not too many feature ones, but then there are not all that many feature length animations. here are a few animators, off the top of my head, and the Quay's as well; janie Gieser. Lewis Klahr, Nancu Andrews, me Chris Sullivan, Jim Trainor, Simon Pummel, Amy Kravitze, Karen Yasinsky, Lilli Carre, Patrick Smith, Don Hertzfeld, Rose Bond, Joshua Mosely, Jim Duesing, Pritt Parn, Brent Green, Piotr Dumala, and check out the nice work funded by the organization, Animate Projects, great british wonders. have a good night. Chris. Quoting Richard Wright futurenatu...@blueyonder.co.uk: I always liked the quality in the Quay films where time seems to lose all its reference points. Those shots of dust settling or shadows dancing where you are no longer sure whether you are watching in realtime or over the course of hundreds of years. This also made me wonder why certain kinds of narrative and time are almost never used in animation. For instance, why are there no non- linear narrative animations? They are not that uncommon in live action films - I am thinking of Memento that goes backwards in story time (with one b/w stream going forwards), Amores Perros that jumps repeatedly backwards and forwards, The Hours with its parallel storylines running in different historical times periods. The only example of an animated film that has anything like these kinds of narrative structure is Waltz with Bashir with its persistent flashbacks. And that was made by a live action director. I wonder if this has something to do with the way that animators work, concentrating as they do on building up a sequence of actions bit by bit, are they generally less directed towards the larger narrative structures of time? By focusing on the duration of the immediate event, is it as though they assume a sort of short term memory? Richard On 25 Feb 2010, at 03:34, T Goodeve wrote: Hello everyone: Sorry Ive been so lax as a discussant-generator but here I am with some thoughts and reflections. If its okay just an aside first: off the top of my fingertipsmany of you make stuff you love and live for, also write about with great passion, and the animated worldscape is still and ever will be one of magic and wonder I hope (you have the romantic here), i.e., endless visual and aural reimagings via its ability, or definition, whether anlogue or digital, to do anything and everything within and beyond the spacetime continuum. But sometimes I miss the basic humor, wonder, and sheer wow of the simplicity of animation. I mentioned in a post. The blank page and the dot. We lose track, myself included, analyzing the life out of things sometimes and to do this with animation seems particularly perverse. I realize I set myself up for a bit of ridicule here but alas
Re: [-empyre-] animation and gender
Hi, ..on Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 10:25:20AM -0500, Renate Ferro wrote: Chris thanks for the list of animators below. There is something that I have been very curious about since we began this whole discussion now about a month ago. I was on a site (and I'm not sure which one it was) that was discussing the lack of female animators in the field. The distinction was that many female animators who are working tend to do more documentary, self help animations. Their observation was that most women artists instead tended to be drawn towards manipulated, experimental cinema and video and not straight animation. (Perhaps we need to extend the whole notion of animation via the fuzziness that Suzanne alluded to early on!) Additionally, Mary Flanagan was here at Cornell a few weeks ago and in a public lecture commented on the overwhelming lack of female gamers in the field as well. Mary has forever said this. I wonder if her statistics aren't a little old? According to the ESA, 38% of American videogame players and 48% of gaming parents are women. In other countries such as Korea, statistics show as much as 69.5% of women are playing video games. Even so, women's interests continue to be grossly under-represented, leaving women as single largest untapped market segment in the gaming industry. Link: http://www.womengamers.com/aboutus/ In the case of animation I know many computer-based female animators, albeit at a loose count less than men. It'd be bold to say it's a male oriented field - I've worked closely with animation departments and studios over the years and have seen no evidence of discrimination as such. Correlation is not causation. It would seem however that women are less often encouraged, at an early age, by men and other women to engage in the kind of technical cultures and communities that might lead to a choice to study digital animation. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com Hi Richard, there are plenty of non-linear narrative animations, not too many feature ones, but then there are not all that many feature length animations. here are a few animators, off the top of my head, and the Quay's as well; janie Gieser. Lewis Klahr, Nancu Andrews, me Chris Sullivan, Jim Trainor, Simon Pummel, Amy Kravitze, Karen Yasinsky, Lilli Carre, Patrick Smith, Don Hertzfeld, Rose Bond, Joshua Mosely, Jim Duesing, Pritt Parn, Brent Green, Piotr Dumala, and check out the nice work funded by the organization, Animate Projects, great british wonders. have a good night. Chris. Quoting Richard Wright futurenatu...@blueyonder.co.uk: I always liked the quality in the Quay films where time seems to lose all its reference points. Those shots of dust settling or shadows dancing where you are no longer sure whether you are watching in realtime or over the course of hundreds of years. This also made me wonder why certain kinds of narrative and time are almost never used in animation. For instance, why are there no non- linear narrative animations? They are not that uncommon in live action films - I am thinking of Memento that goes backwards in story time (with one b/w stream going forwards), Amores Perros that jumps repeatedly backwards and forwards, The Hours with its parallel storylines running in different historical times periods. The only example of an animated film that has anything like these kinds of narrative structure is Waltz with Bashir with its persistent flashbacks. And that was made by a live action director. I wonder if this has something to do with the way that animators work, concentrating as they do on building up a sequence of actions bit by bit, are they generally less directed towards the larger narrative structures of time? By focusing on the duration of the immediate event, is it as though they assume a sort of short term memory? Richard On 25 Feb 2010, at 03:34, T Goodeve wrote: Hello everyone: Sorry Ive been so lax as a discussant-generator but here I am with some thoughts and reflections. If its okay just an aside first: off the top of my fingertipsmany of you make stuff you love and live for, also write about with great passion, and the animated worldscape is still and ever will be one of magic and wonder I hope (you have the romantic here), i.e., endless visual and aural reimagings via its ability, or definition, whether anlogue or digital, to do anything and everything within and beyond the spacetime continuum. But sometimes I miss the basic humor, wonder, and sheer wow of the simplicity of animation. I mentioned in a post. The blank page and the dot. We lose track, myself included, analyzing the life out of things sometimes and to do this with animation seems particularly perverse. I realize I set myself up for a bit of ridicule here but alas
[-empyre-] [jul...@selectparks.net: nettime-ann Network[IN]Security workshop: 10-11 December @ moddr.net]
Hi all, FYI here is a workshop a friend Danja and I are giving at moddr_lab, Rotterdam, that somewhat relates to the topic. If any readers are local to the Rotterdam area, we'd be very glad to see you at our Network (IN)Security workshop. Kind regards, Julian - Forwarded message from Julian Oliver jul...@selectparks.net - From: Julian Oliver jul...@selectparks.net To: nettime-...@nettime.org Driving: Debian GNU/Linux X-Mailman-Approved-At: Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:57:24 +0100 Subject: nettime-ann Network[IN]Security workshop: 10-11 December @ moddr.net . *Network[IN]Security workshop* with Danja Vasiliev and Julian Oliver: Two day workshop on 10 and 11th of December, 15.00 till 21.00 (GMT+1) participation fee: 30 euros (includes entry fee for the FOO_bar event on 11th!) http://agenda.wormweb.nl/agenda.php?id=2895 Location: moddr_lab, Willem Buytewechstraat 188a, Rotterdam The increasing dependence on wireless communication appears at odds with notions of public space: while the air we breathe is considered public, the signals passing through it are often not. Borrowing tools and techniques from the field of network (in)security, Danja and Julian will expose the otherwise invisible layer of WiFi activity as a rich space for activism, performance, paranoia and audiovisual practice. Over the course of the workshop participants will prototype ideas using a software toolkit given to participants. In parallel we welcome a lively discussion around the ethical and political implications of this area of study more generally. This course is open to anyone with a healthy dose of curiosity, creativity and paranoia. *Topics covered include:* - Network packet capture, analysis, creation and manipulation. - HTML page reconstruction from network packets: what websites are people around me viewing? - Spoofing remote browser sessions: how can I change the text and images in other peoples browsers? - Intercepting chat sessions: how can I change what people say to each other? - Image and streaming media reconstruction from network packets: what video and audio are people around me downloading? - Traffic shaping/routing: changing the shape of the network in your favour. - A creative introduction to the GNU/Linux command line. - Network security crash course. The Network (In)security course is open to anyone with a healthy dose of curiosity, creativity and paranoia. No prior technical experience is required. - register for this workshop by sending a short motivation to works...@moddr.net - /more info at/ http://moddr.net/networkinsecurity-workshop /more info at/ http://agenda.wormweb.nl/agenda.php?id=3102 /more info at/ http://agenda.wormweb.nl/agenda.php?id=2895 -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com ___ nettime-ann mailing list nettime-...@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-ann - End forwarded message - ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] question about online writing
, 2009-10-28 at 12:49 +1100, Anna Munster wrote: I don't want to sound like a fascist here...but as moderator I am supposed to keep people on topic on the empyre list as it is a list devoted to particular topics by the month. The question has been raised about whether networks involve a sustainable form of future energy. This is tangentially related to the topic at hand insofar as reading/writing/making online does involve consuming energy. However, I'd rather not have an explosion of comments about networks and energy use etc in a topic where we are looking primarily at networked writing/reading UNLESS there are salient points to be made about the relation of each to the other. Just a general note about the fact that I will moderate an onslaught of off-topic posts IF they come! cheers Anna A/Prof. Anna Munster Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting) Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics School of Art History and Art Education College of Fine Arts UNSW P.O. Box 259 Paddington NSW 2021 612 9385 0741 (tel) 612 9385 0615(fax) a.muns...@unsw.edu.au From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Julian Oliver [jul...@julianoliver.com] Sent: Wednesday, 28 October 2009 10:37 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] a Question ..on Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 10:20:19PM +, s...@krokodile.co.uk wrote: I may have missed this during the past month but has anyone here actually talked about the cost of networks and whether the network forms are sustainable ? If there's something I don't grokk here it's the strangely time-less, willy-nilly projection of the term 'sustainable'. From when to when and what to what is sustainable? 'Sustainability' is a concept that refers to a temporary control over energetic decay that favours one or more (inter)dependent organisms. We live on a sphere in a void and we're breeding like rabbits. Let's talk about minimising inevitable harm (a 'sensible harm'?) rather than invoking the myth of 'sustainability' no? My 2 watts, Julian P.S For all the hair-dryers, needles, routers, castles, deep-sea probes, Zaha Hadids, Ikea bookshelves and false teeth made, it's my suspicion that the Earth has not grown any heavier and nor has it grown any lighter. -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com Anna Munster wrote: I'd now like to bring Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel into the discussion, perhaps as 'other voices' and I've intro'd them below. They aren't authorial contributors to Networked but hopefully they might become contributors anyway! I'm wondering if either of you might comment upon the question of reading new media/networked writing. We've had a lot of discussion the difficulty of reading dense theoretical writing in online environments and hence of people participating in the Networked project. Do either of you have any comments about the screen (broadly speaking) as a reading interface and/or the role and place of the reader in collaborative and participatory writing? best Anna BIOGRAHIES Anna Gibbs is Associate Professor in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. A specialist in affect theory, she works across the fields of cultural, textual and media studies and her most recent publications are in Cultural Studies Review, Interrogating the War on Terror (ed Deborah Staines) and forthcoming in The Affect Reader (eds Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg). A writer of experimental fiction, she also collaborates with visual artists and has recently curated an exhibition on Art, Writing and the Book. She is currently working on a project about Writing in the Media Culture with Maria Angel, and together they have published essays in Literature and Sensation (ed Anthony Uhlman and Helen Groth) and forthcoming in Beyond the Screen (eds Joergen Schafer and Peter Gendolla). Maria Angel is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Current research interests include the transformation of literary genres in new media contexts, theories of writing, memory, and corporeality. She has published essays in the areas of literary aesthetics and visual rhetoric. More recently she has worked on the convergence of theories of affect with writing and new media. Her current collaboration with Anna Gibbs theorises the emergent field of literary writing in digital media and they are currently completing a manuscript At the Interface: Writing, Memory, and Motion
Re: [-empyre-] a Question
..on Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 10:20:19PM +, s...@krokodile.co.uk wrote: I may have missed this during the past month but has anyone here actually talked about the cost of networks and whether the network forms are sustainable ? given that the network is currently estimated at using 5% of the daily energy resources. Energy which is required just to enable a 'reader' to view the rather cramped screens.. I'm sure that I'm missing the point of this but on the other hand since the most interesting technological arguments I have come across in the past few years have been for 'slow tech', technology built to last - I'm simply unsure how attractive the new media and networking technologies appear. Or, a polar generalism: A general reduction in dependence on the Internets would negatively impact upon distribution of numbers, ideas, memes and resources aiding reduction of carbon footprints more generally. As such, the carbon footprint of /not/ using the Internets may be higher than using it. Chicken, meet egg, Julian -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com Anna Munster wrote: I'd now like to bring Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel into the discussion, perhaps as 'other voices' and I've intro'd them below. They aren't authorial contributors to Networked but hopefully they might become contributors anyway! I'm wondering if either of you might comment upon the question of reading new media/networked writing. We've had a lot of discussion the difficulty of reading dense theoretical writing in online environments and hence of people participating in the Networked project. Do either of you have any comments about the screen (broadly speaking) as a reading interface and/or the role and place of the reader in collaborative and participatory writing? best Anna BIOGRAHIES Anna Gibbs is Associate Professor in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. A specialist in affect theory, she works across the fields of cultural, textual and media studies and her most recent publications are in Cultural Studies Review, Interrogating the War on Terror (ed Deborah Staines) and forthcoming in The Affect Reader (eds Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg). A writer of experimental fiction, she also collaborates with visual artists and has recently curated an exhibition on Art, Writing and the Book. She is currently working on a project about Writing in the Media Culture with Maria Angel, and together they have published essays in Literature and Sensation (ed Anthony Uhlman and Helen Groth) and forthcoming in Beyond the Screen (eds Joergen Schafer and Peter Gendolla). Maria Angel is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Current research interests include the transformation of literary genres in new media contexts, theories of writing, memory, and corporeality. She has published essays in the areas of literary aesthetics and visual rhetoric. More recently she has worked on the convergence of theories of affect with writing and new media. Her current collaboration with Anna Gibbs theorises the emergent field of literary writing in digital media and they are currently completing a manuscript At the Interface: Writing, Memory, and Motion. A/Prof. Anna Munster Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting) Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics School of Art History and Art Education College of Fine Arts UNSW P.O. Box 259 Paddington NSW 2021 612 9385 0741 (tel) 612 9385 0615(fax) a.muns...@unsw.edu.au ___ 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 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
..on Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 07:59:06AM +0100, Gabriel Menotti wrote: 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. Yes Apple is certainly one of the most destructive, monopolistic players in this space. 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. 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?) 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. Google is however legally absolved of being an enabler or collaborator in the 'making available' of copyrighted content by pushing responsibility onto the user wherever possible. Thus when they publically remove copyrighted content from YouTube they are heralded as defenders of content producers/artists. The end result is a system of mutual benefit that sacrifices the occasional user regularly enough to give outward appearance of legal obedience. An 'ecology' would be a better metaphor here than 'circuit', I feel. A 'society' even better.. Chairs, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Madrid, Spain about: http://julianoliver.com ___ 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
..on Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 10:36:04AM +0100, Gabriel Menotti wrote: 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 I think it is strategy and process, in turn: provide a free service in the hope it becomes popular by leveraging content you, as provider, do not produce. The more popular the content the more your service is used. User-generated content can't always compete with an episode of Mitchell and Webb or an HBO hit and so it is in the interest of the service provider to 'turn a blind eye'. As the service becomes more popular it attracts the interest of third-party investors and the virtual capital of your company increases. At the same time the risk of legal conflict increases. A race of sorts, the goal is to have enough liquid capital to survive these inevitable battles meanwhile securing your service as a dominant distribution mechanism, a 'standard' as you say. Traditionally, corporations have necessarily worked just outside of the scope of legal definition, defining new laws in their favour through survivng and/or winning ambiguous or complex cases against them. In a Web 2.0 context the risk within this legal metabolism is more readily distributed to the users. 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' Yep, that's why I used the word 'mutual'.. Anyway, such services only appear to be free. In fact, they help sell bandwidth, serve as a low-cost advertising platform for producers and generate a dependence that is intended to be capitalised on later. Facebook is a good example here. Facebook users are contributing to a bright future for advertisers, governments and retailers by generously contributing to data-mines and trend-analysis that will be used to sell products and predict population behaviour later. In this broader sense, none of these services are at all Free, let alone standing as acts of generosity: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook 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' Hehe. Well there's nothing intrinsically unnatural about YouTube, the TCP/IP protocols or vast redundant arrays of hard disks. They've proven to be well within our nature. 'Natural' is just an old-fashioned, artificial construct to conveniently delimit the man-made as an object of thought - another topic altogether of course! All said, I see your point. -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Madrid, Spain about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the Screen
But the thickness of the screen implies in a metaphor as well: it
likewise means the space that is produced by or contained within the
image –
This is an interesting line for me in relation to an Augmented Reality project I
have been working on for some time. 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.
Advertisements encountered in the urban environment (or even in a feature film)
are detected and substituted for art ('Artverts') in realtime on a handheld
device, like a smartphone. This I've called Product Replacement.
I'd be interested to hear how the repurposing and positioning of planar
advertisements as 'screens' (already within a handheld screen) holds up in the
context of this theme.
Project page:
http://theartvertiser.com
Video documentation:
http://vimeo.com/3464018
Consider also Plato's 'screen' as one we all bear, the plane of visual
cognition:
The image stands at the junction of a light which comes from the object
and another which comes from the gaze.
In this sense all screens are very thin..
Cheers,
--
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Madrid, Spain
currently: Vigo, Galicia, Spain
about: http://julianoliver.com
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the Screen
..on Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 09:56:52AM +, Pall Thayer wrote: Actually, I agree also that media are not necessarily material. I was attempting to avoid addressing this altogether for now because I wanted to clear up other things regarding physical media specifically. As Jose Carlos mentions, in the case of cinema, the theater itself is a medium. But it's not just the physical properties of the theater. It's the aura of the theater as well. The same thing can be said of the gallery. There is a distinct immaterial character that has a huge impact on our mediated experience and we can really sense this when we see art in non-gallery settings. It's a very different experience. Yes, taking a Phenomenological angle on this, from Plato's synthesising plane of cognition onward, there is no medium only mediation. All that can be discussed falls purely within the realm of experience, of impressing effects. To follow this trope is to place all Screens somewhere along the vector between corporeal mechanism and the sense-making apparatus of a person. SciFi references to screens in a holographic context, or in the case of Augmented Reality, could be seen as the literal manifestation of this idea: the screen is any inset plane of representation to which content can be dynamically written. Why is a mirror not considered a screen? A mirror is the world writing to itself. That we discuss the screen's depths, a projecting plane comprised of material parts, is evidence that for us the screen is already fictitious: here we are /giving/ it materiality, not taking it away! Cheers, Julian From: Pall Thayer pa...@pallit.lhi.is Reply-To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 01:18:43 + To: soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the Screen Literature is not a medium. The medium of literature is print. Film is a medium but only if you're talking about the film that you wind up on spools. The wider class of film or cinema is a collection of various media. Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 -- Pall Thayer artist/teacher http://www.this.is/pallit http://130.208.220.190 http://130.208.220.190/nuharm http://130.208.220.190/panse ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Madrid, Spain about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] liminal screenality - a critical opera in three shots and a walking poem
..on Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 04:25:21PM +0100, Simon Biggs wrote: The mind¹s eye made material. Or is the AR contact lens just a hemispheric screen situated very near the eye? Incidentally (screen-less) manipulation/stimulation of the visual cortex is the end game for augmented reality. Chairs! Julian From: Ricardo Dominguez rrdoming...@ucsd.edu Peek at: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-l ens/0 I got some yesterday and I must say the world looks quiet wonderful when I set it for neo-tech-noir filters (even this e-mail seems poised for danger in the shadows). Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Madrid, Spain about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Towards a theory of digital poetics
..on Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 12:07:18PM -0400, Juan B. Gutierrez wrote: Thanks to Simon and all others for such a wonderfully catalytic discussion. Simon says: «What I am seeking to do here is to separate poetics from human intent and authorship and regard it instead as a phenomena of things.» hmm, i'd also be suspicious of this direction.. reaching over Heidegger i'll quote Heinz von Foerster Objectivity is a subject's delusion that observing can be done without him. while not being a big reader of verse myself, one thing i've always appreciated about poetry is that it appears to ask for the confession that all there is - all provable phenomena - is bound by experience. the poetic is always something experienced: it simply doesn't exist without people and therefore its 'thingness' doesn't either. intent and authorship are not absolved from verse through automatic writing processes, serialising or transducing verse in collaboration or competition with a machine.. rather, that poetic intent is just given new form within experience. in the case of technologically mediated poetic processes, that form takes on a reflexive value that exposes the primary intention, to /read/ with poetic intent. secondly, language is already a technology, no less essentially 'natural' or in-human than a computer program. and «Indeed, the bulk of this research is being carried out by teams of computer scientists and linguists and involves artificial systems interpreting and responding to body language, facial expression, vocal tone, gesture and speech without building precise models of what is occurring but functioning as sets of dynamic contingencies and probabilities that may or may not require resolution prior to action. I consider what they are seeking to do as digital poetics – which is possibly why we find it easy to work together on artistic projects.» Digital has become a wildcard that loosely means through he use of a computing device in colloquial language. When we ask about digital poetics, there are two dimensions of these questions: (i) the aesthetics of a piece of art (probably of linguistic nature) that cannot be without a computing device, and (ii) the aesthetics of a piece of art (probably of linguistic nature) generated by a computing device. yes, even 'linguistics', by way of its own methodologies of interpretation, is still within the realm of experience, formalised or not! I agree with both definitions of poetics suggested by Simon: (i) creative practice of association and (ii) The motile engagement with the interplay of dynamic elements. My position is that it is impossible to separate poetics from a fundamental attribute of human beings (intentionality -- precise definition below), and that poetics generated by machines is impossible to occur unless machines have this same attribute; therefore, poetics is not an intrinsic attribute of things, but an elaboration, a derivative, of intentionality. oops, there you go. you said it ;) cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Madrid, Spain about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Poetry and/or poetic
..on Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 10:40:17PM +, Pall Thayer wrote: I've been loosely following the discussion here for the past couple of weeks, finding particular interest in the theme due to a relatively new project of mine. The project is called Microcodes (http://pallit.lhi.is/microcodes) and is described like this: on this topic, here's a good (and rarely brief) introduction to a history of artists positioning code as material and/or as a literature, in itself and for itself. http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/programm.htm both the X Reader and the READ_ME texts also give good coverage on code-as-art/text: http://x.1010.co.uk/ http://www.unipress.dk/en-gb/Item.aspx?sku=1143 hmm, your post reminds me that i have a fair few works of this ilk i ought to dig up and publish! your idea of allowing for modifications/patches also inspires. some of the pieces on your site were fun to play with today (CNN Dada especially!) chars, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Madrid, Spain about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Gross materiality
..on Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 09:55:18AM +, Simon Biggs wrote: In the same manner that visual art is effected but, paradoxically, unconstrained by the materiality of paint and canvas, digital art cannot be constrained by the materiality of computer hardware, even whilst it is profoundly effected by it. perhaps i'm misunderstanding you but from my perspective i see 'digital art' to be very much constrained by computer hardware: there's a lot of art of this kind i can't yet make due to constraints relating to hardware, from the pipeline architecture of CPUs, the vector processing of GPUs, bus bandwidth and so on. moreso there's work i've made that i can't run on modern systems - far beyond a problem of mere emulation. in many ways software based art degrades with the hardware (and software) on which it depends. conversely, new hardware brings new possibilities for artistic exploration. at it's most literal the constraining power of hardware over 'digital art' is expressed by the fact that i cannot make art of this kind /without/ computer hardware. to flogg a tired metaphor, the computer provides for the paint tints, the brushes and the canvas. this is why 'digital art' is, to me, something of a fallacy and 'computer art' is simply more critically constructive, honest. Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, ATI will all be figures in any serious history of computer art. they certainly are in the history of video games just as film technologies are in the history of cinema. software developers and operating systems (Linux, Windows, OS X (Irix, Dos Lisa OS) on which so much computer art is based will also be significant. consider what PD and Max MSP have contributed to computer music.. put simply, the Digital Artwork doesn't exist beyond being a cultural convenience, an object of thought. that's all very well, much of terminology is, in fact, born of convenience. in the case of the field of art made using computers i see 'Digital Art' as critically lazy and unneccessarily illusory. again, it's certainly no great concern to me if the term retains value (albeit i don't believe it will). i, and a few other artists i've shown with, have expressed discontent at the fallacies projected by 'digital art' and so we no longer use it. these digital resolutions were to be personal, afterall! cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Madrid, Spain about: http://julianoliver.com On 17/1/09 01:00, Julian Oliver wrote: 'Digital Artwork' is very much non-digital. the metal and plastic computer, in all it's gross materiality, is more than the frame, even the support (canvas). it is, for the most part, a physical context that cannot be separated from the digital content, critically, functionally and historically. Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ 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
Re: [-empyre-] Julian Oliver: Resolution for Digital Futures
..on Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 10:26:50AM -0800, B. Bogart wrote: Computers, computation and the digital are simply extensions of (a subset of) our cognitive abilities. (Cognitive in relation to mind-body, not some aspect non-physical cognitive space.) very much so. (to these ends some friends and i are planning a workshop on object-oriented programming for artists without a single computer in the room..) I'm generally a proponent of the title Electronic Media Art, this is in relation to the other dominate labels (new media, information art, digital art). The main reason of doing so by locating my work in the tradition of electronics and engineering in art, which was inspired (at least in part) by the mechanical media arts of kinetic sculpture. yes exactly! this is precisely where it all began. with engineering. over time the parts have got smaller - the mechanisms less transparent - and so the ability to 'read' the processes at work in an example of Electronic Media Art became more difficult. at a certain point it was all just generalised into the digital whereas in fact a huge amount of engineered physical activity is at work just to plot and colour a single pixel. What I realized why reading Julian's deconstruction of the physicality of digital art is that all these terms are stuck in the realm of representation. Something being digital or information does not mean that it is dynamic and changeable. For me, it seems this is the aspect that is most important, the conversion, the change, the shifting of the representations, not the representations themselves. good words. cheers, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Madrid, Spain currently: Madrid, Spain about: http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Julian Oliver: Resolution for Digital Futures
..on Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 12:02:16AM -0500, Eduardo Navas wrote: On 1/15/09 12:48 PM, Renate Ferro , Timothy Murray r...@cornell.edutcm1@cornell.edu wrote: hola a todos, my Digital Resolution is to stop using the literal term Digital Art, a term that suggests art can exist in an entirely digital frame. while the category may have been useful some years ago, i feel it's now destructive and misleading - in the contexts of historisation, criticism and education especially. This statement is the ideological template often used to argue for total assimilation of a minority to a majority--often promoted by the monority. In other words, moving to cultural politics of difference, you could make the same argument as above for people of ethnic backgrounds other than white and part of the Bourgeois, or ruling class, who have been marginalized in the past, and who may want the whole issue of race, gender and ethnicity to go away. i was not drawing from an ideological template used to dissolve difference within historically political diametrics. i don't want to close any gaps. rather, the statement represents a personal recognition that the term is no longer useful to describe my work and much of the work i see labelled as Digital Art for reasons relating to the term's descriptive integrity. Digital is in every sense of the word a contemporary manifestation of difference, yet it is also becoming assimilated by the institution that is unable to completely be successful to say that digital is the same as any other field of art practice. Consider this: we don't hear painting as a practice worrying about the fact that it is painting anymore... We don't hear sculpture denying its thingness... We don't hear conceptual art denying/celebrating itself as an idea... Yet they are all different and are part of history according to the very names that make them identifiable as discourses within art practice and its history. the 'thingness' of painting - in the sense of an unnegotiable, opaque corporeality - cannot be held in the same question as the 'thingness' of Digital Art: having learnt about operating system design, how kernels abstract over hardware, the role of CPU assigned registers in writing data to physical memory, i realise that what comprises the delivery (and often outward appearance/presence) of a 'Digital Artwork' is very much non-digital. the metal and plastic computer, in all it's gross materiality, is more than the frame, even the support (canvas). it is, for the most part, a physical context that cannot be separated from the digital content, critically, functionally and historically. an ingredient of Digital Art, it could be said, is fossil fuel, the liquid bodies of things long dead. furthermore so-called Digital Art is dependent on hardware, operating systems and often tools provided by corporations. a huge stack of upward dependence, from state-infrastructure to private capital entities, just to run my 1000 lines of C code in a museum. i'd love to get my hands on a Compaq Presario with a 19 CRT monitor running Windows 98 Service Pack 1 so i can see the last artwork i made for Windows, as i intended it to look and perform, before switching to Linux and free-software entirely. i don't want to see it emulated, i don't want full-screen-antialiasing on a modern NVIDIA card, i don't want it on a matte LCD screen or completely out-of-context on an style-pointed iMac. i want it as it was outwardly intended to appear, to me, the artist. (consider a Nam June Paik video work in HDTV on a 100 plasma screen or 'archived' on YouTube) a Painting refers to the paint and its support yet a Digital Artwork assumes only digits comprise the work - it defies its inherent material dependence under a pretense of transcorporeality. again, i refer to the (Euclidean) myth of the digital as unbounded, ageless space. again, this is a personal distinction and one that informs why i and some other so-called 'digital artists' no longer refer to themselves as such. To worry about digital as a label is a way of defeating the strength of difference as a vital part of day to day production, not only in the arts, but even when we walk down the street. To try to dismiss the digital, or to stop considering how a work of art is informed by the digital is a way of feeding the well established monolith of the art institution as it has been established prior to the rise of new media culture. The term digital should be constantly questioned for its strength and flaws. The term should not go away, and because it is beyond the power of anyone of us on this list or in global media culture, it will not go away, but will be considered according to its flux as discourse. i believe the term will probably just become increasingly irrelevant. a symptom of ubiquity is dis-appearance. the more digital in art, the less 'digital art'. cheers (and good to read you!), -- Julian Oliver
