The Medium is The Message

Digital Aesthetics

Based on Bruce Sterling’s work on what he calls the “New Aesthetic”, David M. Berry writes on the emergence of an aesthetic that “revels in the grain of computation”, incorporating the digital within physical patterns, textures and ways of seeing. We see it in fashion and even in the most trivial of instances, where I for one have taken on the use of digital html code in physical writing, simply to mark the duration of school breaks and events in my diary. In this instance, coding is not only a language but also a sensory and aesthetic demonstration of the digital. In the digital, the code has a function and effect, where as in the physical, it is simply picture taken from the digital world.  Just as the pixel patterns on a dress are nothing but a picture of computational make up.  

We find ways for our sensory experience in life to imitate the digital; and if life so often imitates art, as it is said to, how responsible is the movement of New Media art in forwarding these experiences? As Michael Whitelaw asks, “Do the technologies define aesthetics? They certainly shape the aesthetics powerfully - but at least now the field of technology is more open and malleable for artists than ever before.”

As explored in previous weeks, the transversal nature of New Media, moving across fields and blending them into one another can be seen in how it is used within art. For example, Keith Armstrong’s Intimate Transactions uses virtual technology on a dual site to show the interconnectedness of human beings, blending an experience of network in his artwork.  New Media art engages in performance and audience participation, blending the concept and experience of “art” and pushing the boundaries on what classifies as art.

As art is being reshaped, so are aesthetics that infiltrate in life. And so we find the digital blending with the non-digital – life, imitating art. 

References

Armstrong, Keith (2005) ‘Intimate Transactions: The Evolution of an Ecosophical Networked Practice’, the Fibreculture Journal 7, <http://seven.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-047-intimate-transactions-the-evolution-of-an-ecosophical-networked-practice/>

Whitelaw, Mitchell (2012) ‘An Interview with Paul Prudence (Neural 40)’ The Teeming Void, <http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com/2012/01/interview-with-paul-prudence-for-neural.html>

<http://www.embodiedmedia.com/#/page/intimate-transactions>

David M. Berry (2012), http://www.imperica.com/viewsreviews/david-m-berry-computationality-and-the-new-aesthetic

A World of Imaginings

As Easterling would suggest, in our Wi-Fi, 3G world, we have an “internet of things” that connects objects to objects, transferring digital signals and communicating with their own sense of agency. In my own household alone, our Wi-Fi connects our main desktop computer to our TV, our printer to the computer and our iPhones and iPads are connected to all these things and to one another. These connections are held together in the physical space of a one-storey apartment. What now happens in an average Australian household were the visions and imaginings of architects and artists in the last century.

As unpredictable and contingent as it is, the future is imaginable and imagination can be achieved in reality. In an article following the release of Google Glass, Annalee Newitz compares the implications of the technology to the imaginings in TV series, An Entire History of You and lo-fi film, Black Mirror.   

In another way of imagining the future into existence, alternate reality game designer Jane McGonigal creates games, such as EVOKE, a ten-week crash-course on changing the world, as a way to empower people to come up with creative solutions for the world’s greatest problems. McGonigal’s philosophy on gaming as a way to equip people to solve real life problems began with her own battle with a debilitating concussion, solved by making a game of her recovery. Inspiring positivity and reclaiming her livelihood, McGonigal believes that a better future can be imagined into existence in the way that games can “transform the way we lead our real lives, and how they can be used to increase our resilience and well-being”.

Knowing that the future can be what we imagined it to be and not just an unknown certainly has a power.  But where are The Jetsons today? The hovering cars and all the previous expectations of the 21^st century imagined in the last one? Where are the limits to imagination – if any?

References

Annalee Newitz (2012), ‘Could This Photograph Change The Future?’, i09, <http://io9.com/5909151/could-this-photograph-change-the-future>

Keller Easterling (2011) ‘An Internet of Things’, e-flux journal, <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/an-internet-of-things/>

<http://janemcgonigal.com/>

Open Science, Faster Future

Scientists have prided themselves as careful and economical arbiters of knowledge, publishing their discoveries only at points of certainty and groundbreaking impact for society. Their papers became a matter of “being right in the smallest number of words possible” (Wilbanks, 2012). Yet as paper, as the means for knowledge distribution, becomes more and more obsolete compared with the flooding capabilities of the World Wide Web, the process of scientific discovery has come under criticism. There is a call for open science, necessitating that science be more accessible and available to the public.

Discoveries, which hold the potential for change and progress just aren’t arriving to the public fast enough. Perpetuated by instant and prolific updates through new media is this spinning, rapid cycle where industries are speeding up production and people are speeding up consumption. And what was it that brought us here? Ironically, the grey-haired lab coats stuck in the world of print. Ultimately, it was scientific discovery that initiated and carried the process of modernisation. Science promotes that by understanding natural phenomena, we can have some control over it according to what benefits us.

The problem is, what is viewed as beneficial for society is not always so cut and dry. Sure, there is wide consensus on looking for causes and cures to disease – no one dies needlessly. However, go beyond life and death and what area are we dealing with? The grey, where scientific discovery is riddled in social, political and religious frictions on what constitutes as the “positive growth of our civilisation” (Seed, 2011).

Since IVF produced the first “test tube baby” in 1978, notions of “the natural” and entitlements on family, sexual orientation and marriage have taken new shape. Today we have “progressed” to the point of campaign for the validity of same-sex marriage on the basis that homosexual couples are entitled to the same as heterosexuals and can choose to have a family. How much further, if indeed on “the right side of history”, could scientific discoveries take us if it kept up with the rapid, prolific movements of society?

References

Wilbanks, John (2011) ‘On Science Publishing’, Seed, <http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_science_publishing>

Seed (2011) ‘On Science Transfer’, Seed <http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/on_science_transfer>

Saving Industries

In 2008, at the very beginning of my long journey through the field of media and communications at university, technology and all its capacities and the way we have come to think of technology and all its capacities has changed. In my first year, I remember being greeted by very a cynical tone in my Media Studies class, implying the death of the industry we thought we had signed up to be a part of, where we were more or less greeted with an “out of order” sign and told to hold our aspirations in suspension for a while. We looked at media “under trouble” – music, journalism etc, and were told in whispers new and emerging ways of doing media, although they had not yet been demonstrated much or well. We were told to be the pioneering generation and yet in our young, fresh out of school minds, could not fathom too far “outside the blinkers”, to borrow from Genosko (Murphie, 2006). 

In mention of this illustration, Murphie uplifts New Media as an unstable yet mature and advanced field that is driven to function and engage within other fields “transversally”. Like the nomadic guest that shows up at the doorstep of medicine, anthropology, dance, law, urban planning and wherever it is welcomed, New Media can be hosted everywhere. And yet interestingly enough, the traditional Media industry itself has played a reluctant yet inevitable host, holding onto its dying formats and shaking its fist at the migration of customers, readers and fans to new modes of media.

In a Nieman Journalism Lab article, Google’s Richard Gingras speaks of 8 ways that the model of journalism everywhere should come under revision in light of the changes “in the architecture of the news ecosystem”. Can we gather streams and archives of articles into one “persistent URL” that makes a reporter’s work less disposable? Can we not have a more story-centred way of viewing news rather than navigating from a news homepage? This process has already begun in some of the major news sites, such as The New York Times and CNN that arrange news information topically and have been the most diligent and present in multiplatform journalism. While digitisation still means less revenue and less jobs in traditional news roles, the industry is certainly alive and playing an important, ever-present role in society.

In contrast, music record companies today are struggling to remain relevant and profitable. Unlike news that was able to realise all it needs is some reconfiguration and streamlining, the music industry has arguably been the most reluctant host to New Media and I would argue, rightly so. Their role diminished as soon as music became free. So they were right to spend the first years of the new century in a piracy battle, rather than exploring their place within the irrepressible reality of digitisation. They had long framed file sharing negatively, promoting their one view of how music should be provided and purchased. It was not music itself that was affected, but the keepers of it.

In truth, digitisation did not directly harm the artists, but the pockets of the record companies who’d gone from making killings in music sales in the late 20^th century, to seeing no return in what they would produce and market. The digital revolution provided opportunities to promote and distribute an artist’s work, but left little for the producers. Even as the industry has had to think more transversally, supporting services such as Last FM and Spotify, can their role in society ever be rebuilt?  

Perhaps there are some things that simply do go out of order in the new order.

References

Murphie, Andrew (2006) ‘Editorial’, [on transversality], the Fibreculture Journal, 9 <http://nine.fibreculturejournal.org/>

Richard Gingras (2012), ‘Google’s Richard Gingras: 8 questions that will help define the future of journalism’, Nieman Journalism Lab, April 12, http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/04/googles-richard-gingras-8-themes-that-will-help-define-the-future-of-journalism/

Data, Models and Solutions

Highlighted in the introduction to Paul Edwards’ book, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, is the truth that knowledge on climate science, much like the fish of the sea, cannot be obtained without a certain type of net, hook, spear or fish-catching tool. In which case, he refers to fish as data and its net as a model – “without models, there can be no data” (Edwards, 2010, p. xiii). For the human, in order for data to become knowledge (or fish to become food) a tool is involved, an intermediary, a translator. Data is everywhere, yet our understanding remains always at a distance to the life and raw essence of it. Models are created to filter and shape data into useful intelligence, grabbing hold of chaos and ordering it according to purpose and meaning. Edwards argues for the “models vs data” debate on climate change as merely an illusion, asserting that we are unable to separate one from the other, so long as we are dealing with knowledge.

We humans search for data and spin knowledge from it in almost every aspect of our functioning. Gary Wolf writes that where we once separated data seeking in our personal lives and engaged in it only for science, business and governmental purposes, we are now “checking in” at every locale, publicly archiving and sharing our experiences simply for amusement purposes. And perhaps this is because the models for the data themselves are so amusing. We perpetually geo-tag, because we are perpetually amused by the interface for the data. Do we really find a use for recording and checking one another’s whereabouts or is it only really about who sees?

It seems that while for personal function this data might simply be for muse, tied up in all sorts of personal and emotional significances, its interconnectedness to the corporate function gives the data potential to go much further. As quoted in The Telegraph, geo-tagging “can help us understand how the social lives of cities relate to their spatial structure. By analysing geo-social datasets we can hope to understand the basis for a more sociable, more usable city”.

In the endless stream of data and the models they come under, we find new answers and solutions – where suddenly my personal habits unknowingly contribute to urban planning and societal development.

References

Edwards, Paul N. (2010) ‘Introduction’ in A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: xiii-xvii, <http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12080>  

Quilty-Harper, Conrad (2010) ’10 ways data is changing how we live’, The Telegraph, August 25, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7963311/10-ways-data-is-changing-how-we-live.html>

The middleman that just gets in the way

As I was browsing through the examples of videos on Augmented Reality (http://www.gigantico.net/augmented2/aug_video_index_00.html), one was particularly familiar to me. Zugara’s Webcam Social Shopper immediately struck me, as the idea seemed to take inspiration from Cher Horwitz, played by Alicia Silverstone in the 1995, legendary, teen movie Clueless. 

Seventeen years later (already?), a software developer implemented what was then, a ridiculous notion and joke inserted in the film to represent the ridiculousness and excess of Cher and her life as a Beverly Hills princess. Only now, almost anyone with a computer and internet access can easily and inexpensively access a webcam and employ the same virtual dress-up routine as Cher as they shop online with Zugara. 

As Chris Grayson of Gigantico explains, the wow factor of augmented reality used in advertising is a double-edged sword that can attract users as well as lose them in an immediate, non-lasting fad. It is important that augmented reality is used in contexts that actually require them for functional, lasting benefits.

To me, Zugara’s webcam social shopper is an example of applying augmented reality in a context that does not require it and has no functional, lasting benefit. Unlike Cher’s closet, filled with garments she has, assumably, already tried and used, a shopper cannot accurately test the fit of a garment using a shrinkable and moveable digital image to “try it on”. The novelty of such a function, for me, would wear out after a few if not the first try. 

It is an example of how media, in many cases, simply gets in the way of the tactile, lived experience and sensory quality of reality. An example that in itself, demonstrates how we know what is real from what is simply virtual, where tactility and real-world sense wins. 

What other forms of media, which virtually enact or replicate lived experience could we say the same of, to a greater or lesser degree? 

Redundancy of the present and remembering through machines

So this is what we do at university; we examine, destabilise and build new conclusions out of our deep-seated, inherent notions, such as the function of memory and our experience of the now. 

Two months ago, I found a particular image that resounded with me and all that I was experiencing in my context and posted it up as truth. 

This naive statement, thanks to its very vivid, prettified and glorified graphic composition, came to mind as soon as I begun to read up and deconstruct this notion of the present. The present, empirically, does not exist. It exists only as the clash of the very recent past together with the anticipated near future.

According to Benjamin Libet (Course Outline, p. 24), it’s empirical existence is found in only 0.5 of a second. For all the iPhone users out there, try starting and stopping to see and feel through an iPhone perception of time that “the present” is only this:

By this itself, I have demonstrated and put myself up as the very subject of Stiegler’s ideas of the exteriorisation of memory and knowledge by confiding these in technological equipment. I have forgotten, or rather cannot really perceive what is embodied in 0.5 of a second unless I have a stopwatch, a clock or some kind of technical device in which to animate and record 0.5 of a second. I as a human, have almost no agency in my knowledge and memory of time when I am without these tools. And yet, it is we humans who invented it. We invented the notion of milliseconds and we invented stopwatches, and yet we make our memory-embodied selves “obsolete” and “interiorly empty” when we use them (Stiegler, http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis). 

I was curious to know when it was exactly that Stiegler wrote that, in this, “the only thing left for us is to consume blindly, a kind of impotence, without these saveurs (savours) that only savoir – from sapere – which is knowledge, can provide.” (ibid). If it were written any time before the last decade, the foresight in this insight could not be more uncanny when looking at consumer culture today. We have come to a point in history where our capacity to think and live is so exteriorised, that our only way to fulfil ourselves is to buy into these exteriorisations.  

Kony 2012: a lesson on today’s media ecology

In 2007, what is now about 5 years ago, I first watched the documentary Invisible Children, the first film made by the charity organization telling the story of how children were being trafficked and enslaved as child soldiers in Uganda. Needless to say, this film impacted me insofar as certain images and moments were added to the stockpiles of my memory and association with all the injustice in this world.

Just two days ago, those images resurfaced and were recharged in the instantaneous and global eruption that was the Kony 2012 film, at this very moment sitting on 43,354,020 hits on YouTube. 29 minutes of slick, heart-wrenching editing and an objective that global citizens alike, especially the kids with only first world problems, could participate in. 

Only a couple hours after viewing it, did I begin to read posts from the skeptics and newshounds, shared from various sites and agencies on my Facebook presenting the questions, problems and loopholes of the movement. Two days on, Kony 2012 has been an issue of gathering, filtering and constructing information and in it all was a vivid manifestation of media ecology today; one that wasn’t nearly as apparent five years ago but is more explosive than ever today.

In part, what we are seeing, or at least what I am tuning into, is Neil Postman’s media ecology theory of “environmentalism” put into practice. The pros and cons and the complications put forward by media in response to a seemingly simplistic campaign to arrest a criminal is in itself an attempt to reach a state of equilibrium, “a harmonic balance to be achieved with some ingenious and beneficent mix of media” (Fuller, p.4). There was one ecology of information consisting only of the Kony 2012 video and site (http://www.kony2012.com/), but almost immediately there came so many other voices and perspectives with their own ecologies of information to be received not alone but always, as a set.

My limited set so far:

• The film itself: 
   
• http://kony2012.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
• http://www.invisiblechildren.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/critiques.html
• http://mumbrella.com.au/the-questions-we-should-be-asking-about-the-invisible-children-viral-78114#comment-120525
• http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18890947431/we-got-trouble

Reference:

Fuller, M., 2005, ‘Introduction: Media Ecologies’, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Cambridge, MA; MIT, Press: pp. 1-12