Wayfarer V1 was a sell-out live event in 2007 at Sydney’s Performance Space – its a live computer game with actors as avatars. ‘Wayfarer v1’ utilised a custom-designed hardware-software system. The players streamed video, audio, bluetooth and RFID from body-mounted Vaio micro computers, to the Wayfarer software which displayed the players’ clock-times, site location, loot and camera point of view.

Urban Agents is the 2nd Wayfarer project – a fortnight long social media event taking place on the streets of Melbourne in late 2009, open to anyone who registers to play. Citizens, agents, advocates and moderators play together to create a smorgasbord of video interventions. Urban Agents tempts you to make sense of your city, to question, report back and to re-invigorate and re-interpret the urban spaces you call home. Wayfarer engages citizens experientially in an event that animates both the real world and online communities.

A good primer on Hyperdub’s rise and the project more generally can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/22/hyperdub-steve-goodman

To cite that article directly on Hyperdub’s post Burial era;

‘The new Hyperdub sound is all about synthesisers…”It’s like hearing circuitry crying,” Goodman has said of this recent output, and for new signings Darkstar this idea of computer love is a real fascination.’

There is an obvious ‘mutation’ here form a music born of hedonistic abandon in a sea techno-cultural detritus to a more positively generative techno-synthesis.

Users own all the data they collect and they can access this data through smart phones (e.g. iPhone) for future use. Users might want to share their data with friends and social networks to improve bike routes or meet up on the fly. They can also share their data anonymously with their city to create a finely grained database of environmental conditions that can be used to help improve traffic flow, air quality and the like.

Prototypes developed by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab for the Kobenhavns Kommune were launched at the COP15 United Nations Climate Conference. Technical partners were Ducati Energia and Progical Solutions LLC. The project was funded by the Danish Ministry for the Environment.

The pair represented Australia at the 2008 Beijing Architecture Biennale.

“intends to create a sonic space that can support innovation in new electronic music and digital art. This is a world of constant evolution and incessant refinement – the “MU” in MUTEK refers consciously to the notion of “mutation”.

The not-for-profit organization achieves this through a variety of initiatives including the festival itself but also a record label, tours, international events and showcases in Montreal.

Syneme’s aim is to explore artistic practices that are enabled and enriched by networked digital technologies (particularily those that allow real-time engagment between participants) and to ask ” how can we use the network itself as an artistic instrument – not merely a distribution channel.”

To explore such questions Syneme has focused on the development of Artsmesh, a platform that makes expressive telepresence on high-speed research networks possible.

Kenneth Fields is the group’s director.

The creators state that the objectives of ec(h)o are:

to develop a “next generation” interface that augments an existing physical environment with a virtual audio environment, and enables people to interact with the system without directly using a computer device; to develop an interaction model based on a semantic web approach to networked digital object repositories in order to create adaptive responses; and to demonstrate that enabling end-users access to digital object repositories engenders a participatory model for interaction and communication.

Soundscapes are generated based on the users position in the gallery and audio objects can also be triggered based upon his or her past visits and expressed interests. Customisation is possible as each user generates a “knowledge tree” or “a map of relationships” based on their interaction with the artifacts. Taken together these many maps create a “collective intelligence”. Their design is influenced by the philosophy of Pierre Lévy.

Build Your Own Being utilised the company’s expertise to create an interactive performanceat the Studio at the Sydney Opera House, the Melbourne Arts House and the Canberra Street Theatre in 2007. Data about the audience’s creation and participation is available on the website for use by researchers and media.

Pesce’s most recent research focuses on sharing

CipherCities was developed by researchers at the Queensland University of Technology and launched in late 2008. The project uses the web in tandem with mobile phone technologies such as SMS and phone cameras to to build interactive mobile adventures intent on connecting people with their environments and each other. The website is a repository for games, artifacts collected by users (eg. photos) and social connection. Creators say that “at its most basic, a game consists of a sequence of messages sent and received between you and CipherCities.”

Packet Garden is a private virtual world generated by capturing information about how you use the internet. The open source software was created by the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist Julian Oliver. The software was commissioned by the Bristol-based contemporary arts centre, Arnolfini.

The software creates a landscape and grows virtual plants based on the servers you visit and the amount and kind of data you send and recieve. The information you harvest is entirely private and it is suggested that “you can think of packet gardens as pages from a network diary.”

Between 2005 and 2008 they developed and coordinated The Migrant Project, a collaboration between 40 Sydney-based artists that included performances and the creation of serveral multimedia projects.

CuriousWorks’ second project, All Around You, is, according to their website, “a system for using digital media in a simple, positive, lasting manner in marginalised communities. Currently the system is being developed through 3 year partnerships in two regions: Western Sydney (urban) and the Pilbara, Western Australia (remote).” A resource kit and training program is being developed and will be available to other interested groups and communities in 2010.

The project developed interface techniques and applications to support research into outdoor augmented reality.

Augmented reality (AR) is the registration of projected computer-generated images over a user’s view of the physical world. With this extra information presented to the user, the physical world can be enhanced or augmented beyond the user’s normal experience. The addition of information that is spatially located relative to the user can help to improve their understanding of it. The images and videos on this web site are demonstrations of what a person experiences when they use our equipment.

The project was developed as Piekarski’s PhD thesis, under the supervision of Dr Bruce Thomas, at the Wearable Computer Lab.

OpenAustralia.org utilises Hansard, the name given to the public record of parliamentary proceedings, and networks these documents in such a way that they are made more accessible, easier to find and simpler to use in a networked environment. Registered users are able to comment upon debates and documents, thereby making it easier for Australian citizens to insert their views via annotation of the public record. Cross referencing also makes it easier to find out about your MPs participation and effectiveness in parliamentary debate.

The site was inspired by the UK project http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

The experimental research/practice focuses on generative design processes that address contemporary social and cultural agendas. Included in their collaborative work was an entry in Abundant, the 11th architectural biennale in Venice.

All principles are distinguished graduates of RMIT’s Bachelor of Architecture and are currently PhD candidates at the university’s Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory.

Kokkugia’s wiki collects open source scripts and collaborative tools for teaching and research.

Podborsek and Snooks both hold Bachelor of Architecture degrees from RMIT.

Interactive Media Facades (Rob Saunders, Martin Tomitsch, Design Lab)

The Design Lab is a centre for research and creative practice in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. It aims to “foster design as a means of knowledge production in its own right.” The centre’s research staff and postgraduate students come from a range of disciplines including interaction design, electronic arts, computer science and social science.

His research blog  infosthetics.com collects data visualizations and similar projects related to his interest in Information Aesthetics. It takes it’s name from Lev Manovich’s definition of information aesthetics.

See http://web.arch.usyd.edu.au/~petra/ for links to recent projects and publications including her collaborative work Impossible Geographies.

His research interests include the “biopolitics of network culture, neomaterialist cultural theory, transdisciplinary discourses and practices of knowledge, media anomalies, research/creative practice collaboration.” (ARC Digital)

Research projects include Spam Cultures, a project that “aims to develop tools and concepts for a critical understanding of the accidents of digital culture, and address the media anomalies of current digital culture” and to address the “biopolitics of networked culture”. (ARC Digital, Research @ the Centre) He addressed similar themes in his book Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (Peter Lang, 2007) and in a volume he co-edited The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (Hampton Press, Alternative Communications Series, 2009).

In collaboration with Milla Tiainen, Parikka is creating a conceptual laboratory devoted to Neomaterialist Cultural Analysis. This research will investigate transformations in cultural studies through a series of publications, events and seminars that will engage with trends in media and cultural theory. Forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press in 2010 as part of their Posthumanities-series is Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals, Technology and Cultural Theory.

Originally from the USA, fields received a Ph.D. in Media Arts from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000 before moving to Beijing to assist with the establishment and development of media arts programs and curriculum in some of the country’s top institutions including China’s Central Conservatory of Music and Peking University.

An advocate for research-creation, Field’s own domain of practice lies within the area of telematic arts, specifically digital music, while focusing theoretically on issues related to ontology and the technology of inquiry. As well as write and perform his own electroacoustic compositions, Fields has been involved in several sound installations and networked performances internationally, has developed collaborative online work environments for students, and has published widely. He is also co-organiser of the Musicacoustica Festival, Beijing.

Perceiving the Internet to be more than a conduit of communication, but also a medium for artistic creation, performance, exploration and experimentation, at the University of Calgary Fields focuses on building high-speed networks that facilitate live, real-time interaction between participants operating within various media (be they musical, visual, physical, etc), thus establishing dynamic collaborative environments that are not tied to one location, but exist in multiple places at once.

ThoughtMesh was conceived as an effort to overstep the limitations associated with academia’s currency of the peer-reviewed print journal, which can be viewed as an isolating and outdated medium for distribution of intellectual discourse in our increasingly networked environment. Operating via a tag-based navigation system, ThoughtMesh allows users to instantly locate excerpts within essays that deal specifically with the subject matter they are wishing to research. For example, within an essay dealing with a wider topic within new media, a researcher may select the tag ‘interactivity’ to be presented with direct excerpts from the essay that deal with this subject matter. Beyond this, users may also view from a list of sections of other essays throughout the mesh that also share this tag.

ThoughtMesh presents itself as an avenue for scholars to tap into and participate in flows of information Twittering and Flickring across the world. It is also an ideal way for academics specializing in digital culture to situate their discourse within the culture itself. ThoughtMesh’s system of fluid distribution bears benefits when compared to single repository databases in that it interconnects essays and authors beyond their affiliations with single institutions or isolated networks and websites. Users are given the option of submitting their work directly into ThoughtMesh’s database, or simply tagging essays as they are published on a remote website.

This essay by John Ippolito outlines the intended aims and outcomes of the ThoughtMesh project.

The Interactive Insitute outside Stockholm, Sweden is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. Originally set up by Sweden’s Foundation for Strategic Research in 1998, it is now owned and co-funded by the Swedish Insitute of Computer Science group which also includes the Viktoria Institute and Santa Anna, and is in turn owned by the government body Swedish ICT Research.

The Interactive Institute has a number of research groups within it such as Digital Cultural Heritage Centre which looks at issues such as cultural knowledge transfer in new media and technologies, The Design Research Centre which seems concerned with developing big-picture research strategies, Sound Studio and SoundSpace groups working in interactive sound design, NVISION working with visualisation techniques and Mobility Studio which looks at, well, developments in the use of mobile technologies.

The Mobile Life Centre at Stockholm University has a research focus that spans from social and entertainment and work aspects of mobile technologies, affective engagement and ubiquitous computing. Set up as a 10 year funding project by VINNOVA – (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems), which is a State authority that aims to ‘promote growth and prosperity throughout Sweden’ through funding ‘innovations linked to research and development’. The Centre names the Interactive Insitute and the Swedish Insitute of Computer Science as collaborative partners, and also list a number of industry partners including Sony Ericsson, Microsoft Research and Stockholm Innovation and Growth. The centre lists around 20 PhD students and Professorial staff on its list of researchers and lsome of the more interesting research projects include:

Mobile Eco-System

The future mobile eco-system – who pays for what? And what does it feel like? A future mobile service eco-system where we explore alternative universes for infrastructure, business models and the industry’s new role.

Embodied Affective Interaction

Interact emotionally with your whole body. New mobile and ubiquitous services in areas such as pervasive games, social, emotional and bodily communication and new mobile media.

There is also an interesting list of seminars on topics such as the following:
Beyond representations: Towards an action-centric perspective on tangible interaction

Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing

Affective Loops : research agenda for bodily persuasion through a design approach we name affective loops is outlined. Affective loop experiences draw upon physical, emotional interactions between user and system.

Whilst this begins to appear quite the complex web of tangled connections, it seems that one common link and hence potentially a good interview subject might be Professor Kristina Hook . She is Professor at Mobile Life, as well as Lab Manager at Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and Professor of Human-Machine Interaction at the Dept of Computer and Systems Science (a joint venture between Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology, Kristina Hook lists research projects in embodied interaction and ‘affective computing’ among her interests. Particularly notable is the research project which has involved Microsoft Research called Affective Diary, which investigates techniques data-mapping diary of galvanic skin response via mobile technologies, and seems to have spawned collaborative projects such as a sound design project which looks at sonification techniques using the data sets generated by Affective Diary.

Youtube video on Affective Diary with Kristina Hook Purchase Lortab

ACT – assemblage for collective thought – is an ongoing conceptual and aesthetic collaboration, an assemblage of technologies and techniques for collaboration. It enables participants to think collectively. By “think” here we do include thinking conceptually. However, following a century that has had to come to terms with thinking through aesthetic processes, we also mean thinking affectively, via images, texts and sounds. More than this, ACT asks what kind of thought is produced in the mix – in the middle of the very act of collaboration, when DJing, VJing, dancing in front of a camera perhaps, are all opened up to the mix. Is there a different quality of thought? A different experience of thinking? An especially collaborative thought?

So much new media composition and production still concerns itself with technological conduits and infrastructure. We wanted to fashion a kind of assemblage that explored new media to produce new concepts. The assemblage, then, had to be mediated via technologies and software such as wikis, distributed media sites and servers and video and audio editing and remixing packages. But none of these are the focus of or rationale for ACT. New media as various systems of technics (that is, the deployment of technologies as part of the constitution of ourselves as humans, sentient beings and subjectivities) are seen as some ‘collaborators’ among others in this project. Although not autonomous, the machines and technologies we deploy in making mediated concepts play a part in changing and shaping the collectivity of ACT’s thinking processes. We found ourselves following particular pathways in the process of collaboration and in remixing all the media material for ACT performances as a result of both the potentialities and constraints of the media assemblages we contrived and which contrived us.

Screenshot from ‘Task 4: Become empirical -
‘radically’ of the ACT wiki

[for video rough cuts without sound - re-assemble the assemblage,
radical empiricism]

ACT began in 2006, using rich and networked media, remix software and techniques. Its first manifestation involved a small group of invited participants who work with text, video, audio and software in and on collaboration: Dragana Antic, Michele Barker, Gillian Fuller, Mathew Fuller, Lisa Gye, Ross Harley, Brett Neilson, Anna Munster, Andrew Murphie, Kate Richards, Trebor Scholz and Mat Wall-Smith. For a two week period during June 2006, this group contributed to a structured wiki by responding to ‘tasks’ concerning collaborative thought, relations and partnerships. Material deposited in the wiki space and in external web publishing portals such as YouTube and Multiply was downloaded, reformatted (text was converted to audio, for example) and taken into VJing and DJing packages. It was then re-presented as two different remixes at the ISEA 2006 (International Symposium of Electronic Arts), ZeroOne San Jose Festival in San Jose on August 12 as the final performance/event of the ISEA Symposium. The mixes took place using the sound system of the large auditorium, along with its three large screens and many flat screen televisions distributed throughout the audience.

In the first mix, brain scans met low-res video of dogs fetching sticks from the water, animated graffiti and a morphed video looping between Immanual Kant and Robert Moog (both champions of synthesis). Carefully modulated computer vocalisations of texts about honey as the result of making collective thought ‘in the hive’ met transmissions caught from Messier74, “a spiral galaxy that makes up part of the Pisces constellation” (Mat Wall-Smith). The latter were caught, “using a satellite dish (mixing bowl) and some custom electronics”.

The second remix of the material followed directly afterwards and included the use of live feeds – camera and microphone available for use by the audience on the day.These were remixed into, and used to trigger different visual effects upon, the ACT material. The audience brought cut-out shapes and textures (such as scrunched plastic), objects (cigarette lighters), their faces, their dancing bodies, into the mix in real time. After the performance, one of the audience members commented on the visual effect of mixing pre-produced material with live audience participation. She noted that this gave a kind of layering effect to the mix, where ‘hi-tech’ met ‘lo-tech’ and that what was interesting about that kind of remixing was they way it visually revealed the material strata of media technologies.

This initial collaboration and performance comprise the first stage in an ongoing production of assemblages that thinks collectively – assemblages through which you think, which think through you, and which “evolve” along with shifts in thought. With this initial event we are dipping our toes into the technozoosemiotic “ether” within which diverse and rapidly mutating semiotic forms, along with diverse mediated and collective practices, have drawn breath. The aim for the future is for divergent forms of ACT to take on a life of their own. Maybe in a DVD-ROM that is infinitely remixable and which helps you take your thoughts places you never expected. Maybe in a shifting online database of media elements, codes, and evolving tags (thanks to Kate Richards for this idea..).

ACT also stages the inevitable tensions raised between “forced collaboration” and “free cooperation” in thought production with other humans and nonhumans. At the same time, in constantly returning the process of collaboration to the mix, it attempts to draw collaboration away from the temptation to freeze the process in one iteration of it. There is a sense in which ACT only occurs within the movement of the images and sounds, the bodies thinking through the encounters within this mix. Collaboration here is indeed forced, but in a very different sense to common network models of collaboration in infocapitalism; that is, where everyone profits by pooling their pre-existing institutional needs for funding and recognition. In ACT, collaborators are propelled into the mix, away from pre-existing stances, assumptions and forms of recognition. Cooperation is free – although here freedom is only the freedom to cooperate in forms of expression here and now. Cooperation is also premised on the project itself – commitment to its continuation, deformation and mutation rather than to obligation to other players. Freedom is also freedom to leave the project and the mix without remorse and regret, to take the project somewhere else, to let the project continue without an individual’s presence.

ACT responds to the stagnation of new media orthodoxies as these rapidly fall back into a sometimes high tech version of old media efficient communications bound up with new forms of property. It is also a response to the provocations of the like of Trebor Scholz, Geert Lovink and Christoph Spehr, concerning new forms of collaboration and the need to open up these within new media. Scholz, Spehr, Lovink and others held a conference on Free Cooperation where the idea of using networks and art to explore processual collaboration was worked through. In a similar way, we hope that ACT will remain responsive to change, to the fact that, as Brian Massumi puts it, “change changes” constantly (Parables for the Virtual: 10).

The processes of making and remaking ACT felt like thinking collectively. Not only ideas, but images evolved, mutated, merged, diverged. The mix was a constant surprise, especially when it involved the audience – there was a real sense that thinking was occurring collaboratively. One could never say – “that’s beautiful and I made it”, only “that’s beautiful” or even, “that’s awful but that’s what happened through the project and in the mix”.

There was some stringency needed to realise a colloborative working space, especially as we wanted to enact it remotely. We had to really think through the tasks in both rigorous and open term and provide formats and ‘rules’ for images, video, length of text and so on. The latter were, of course, ignored from the beginning, although not, we are pleased to say, the former. So whereas rules were transgressed, tasks were committed to – a nice balance. Each task had its own wiki page, with an extra page for an optional related task. Of course, ACT is infinitely open to other tasks, but the recent version had six:

1. Return to Nature

Task 1. Collaborate with the natural world
Find a relationship in nature which assists you to produce thought, image, video or sound. Produce the text, images, video or sound and leave them below.
Task 1.1 optional.
Become either cellular or marine in your mode of collaborating.

(for video go here – this is a rough cut without sound)

2. Be Passionate

Task 2. Be passionate with another
Give vent to any passion that was produced in relation to another living or nonliving thing. Leave your response below.
Task 2.1 optional.
Make it almost monochrome.

3. Work the Abstract

Task 3. Create an abstract collaborative relationship
By this we mean you could also do something very concrete, like using sound to feedback on itself and modify the original signal in order to embody the abstract process of modulation.
Task 3.1 optional
Modulate the modulation.

4. Become Empirical – Radically

Task 4. Work the real, experienced relations in a radical empiricism, as per William James
Only deal with the real relations and the transitional experience involved.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement. (William James, Essays in Radical Experience:42)

Task 4.1 optional
record the changes in your immediate relations.

5. Re-Assemble the Assemblage

Task 5. Re-assemble the assemblage
Create changes in the social and technical assemblages so that all the elements participate differently.
Task 5.1 optional
Make the assemblage cycle.

6. Conserve the Virtual

Task 6. Make a contribution to virtual ecology
Do your bit for conservation – make something that preserves or enriches our relations to the virtual. By the virtual we
mean the real reservoir of relations between all the different potentials in the assemblage.
Task 6.1 optional
…in 3 seconds

ACT is special not in its originality, but in its tendencies – its very own desire to keep changing, to diverge, to find new homes and turn them upside down, to try things out, to break down (the eternal accident of mix technologies as they stretch the assemblage), to reform differently. One of these tendencies is movement away from the proprietal, from funding regulation – towards the new emerging culture of constant co-creation which truly makes mass media redundant. Its politics is something like that of an open source, multi-mediated, cross-signal processing folk culture. But it does not value ‘openeness’ per se. Rather it wants to contribute to an ecology of media practices that respects the interrelations of open and closed systems and the elements that comprise and cut across all of these. ACT is desperate to break out of the academy with its specialisation and management of performance. We think it would work well in clubs where a space and time for thought might just add something to that mix.

This paper emerges from a background project that I have been unsystematically pursuing for the last 3 years or so. Various bits of it appear throughout texts – ‘Theses on Distributed Aesthetics: Or What a Network is Not’ (with Geert Lovink) and a more recent piece ‘Welcome to Google Earth’. In these essays I realise that I have been trying to understand the interplay of two aesthetic forces or vectors in network cultures – the pole of customisation, homogenisation and atomisation and the pole of collective enunciation, production and distribution. Not that these are ever poles apart in contemporary network cultures.

For a while I have thought about this as a project concerned with ‘distributed aesthetics’ but I have more recently begun to conceptualise it as ‘an aesthesia of networks’. This working title gathers into it the ideas of Castells, Terranova and Rossiter who have all argued that networks are constituted in the very tensions between the singular and collective, net and self and intensive and extensive processes and flows. Hence there can be no coherent, global ‘aesthetics of the network’. And yet there are collective and shared experiences – aesthesias – of networks. The most common experience of contemporary networks perhaps being repeated cycling through euphoria and boredom.

There are also recurring patterns that regulate the aesthesias of networks such that their hetereogeneity or singularitiy ends up being siphoned into a neater ‘package’ of network functionality. One of these operates by packaging the network as image and takes the form of the vectoral diagram of networked connectivity. This has come to function as a dominant image of and for networks.

who owns the internet? by Ben Worthen, Bill Cheswick

Lufthansa IT infrastructure

The repetitive and ubiquitous circulation of these kinds of diagrams of connectivity is striking in itself. But it is the aesthetic implications of these in which I am most interested. For I want to suggest that this diagram’s status as a kind of meta-image of networking is literally anaesthetic – numbing and disengaging from the chaotic and experiential engagements in networks. The node-link schematic lulls us into a kind of comotose state about the socio-aesthetic-technical assemblages that ennervate network cultures. What I want to suggest is that the far-reaching distribution of this image of distributed networking operates as a homogenising force that attempts to erase disjunction, relationality and temporality from our perceptions of/in networks.

Luckily, however, network visuality is not such a flatline! There are many examples of how individuals, online groups and environments are providing different approaches to the image in the network. I want to provide some examples of these later in this talk and to revisit the nature of these alternative images. Rather than trying to classify these images through a visual taxonomy, I will instead focus upon their divergent nature. In so doing, I want to invoke Walter Benjamin’s analysis of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. For Benjamin, allegory was not so much something to be found contained within a particular text or image and systematically interpreted. Rather his approach to baroque allegory was to understand it as a mode of seeing or reading predominant throughout the European seventeenth century but also potentially resonating with later historical/cultural conjunctions. Baroque allegory inhabited the sphere of everyday visuality – the domestic, the familiar, the street scene – and unfolded via contingent associations between its metaphorical elements, often moving from one element to another in unexpected ways. He compared this twisting variability of baroque allegory with the function of the symbol in art and literature. The symbol’s function was to preserve representational homogeneity – to always mean the same eternally.

I wonder whether this might not be a useful comparison to import into what I have to say about the ways in which the diagrammatic (rather than Benjamin’s symbolic) and the allegorical differ in network visuality. I think this may be a useful way to think about both the role of network diagrams and the role of alternative imagings of networks that I want to unfold today. These latter imaginings evoke a mode of visuality operating via divergent, disparate, everyday and surprising associative pathways. I think we find this allegorical mode in direct images of the Internet and its cultures, for example:

An allegorical map of online communities

but also in the attempts to stretch the diagrammatic mode to unfold the shifts of connection and disconnection that comprise the political dimension of networks. I am thinking here of the work of the artist Mark Lombardi who famously portrayed the money that filtered from the Bush family oil investments in the US into the Middle East and eventually was redistributed to the Bin Laden familiy’s attempts to rearm and refinance sectors of Iraqi society for their own interests:

george w. bush, harken energy, and jackson stevens c.1979-90, 5th version, (detail)

More recent examples of a ’stretch’ of the diagrammatic mode come through visualisation software such as Digg Swarm, which dynamically updates the clustering of users’ ‘interest’ in stories posted on the Digg social aggregation news site. I think what we have here is a kind of becoming-allegorical of the diagrammatic. Of course it’s also the case that the incorporation of both clustering and tag clouds as attempts to make the diagrammatic more expressive in Web 2.0 design re-asserts a kind of visual homogenisation where the ‘clustered’ and/or buffed-up tag comes to visually dominate and other variables in the image plane easily fade…

I’m also especially interested in a kind of emerging web visuality that develops through a mash-up of the diagrammatic and the allegorical by layering geodata and imaging in conjunction with personal and collective data and imaging:

where’s george? mash-up

It should be clear then that I am using a conception of the allegorical here that broadens Benjamin’s to examine engagements with image-making in network cultures that have an everyday (sometimes even banal), contingent and divergent nature to them. I am aware this may prove to be too broad but I think its better and, in fact, crucial to cast the net wider in the present moment given the kind of grip the purist articulations of the network diagram has on contemporary networked visuality.

What, then, do I see as the problems of the diagrammatic mode for the visual cultures of networks? And why, subsequently, do I think we need to reinscribe the importance of the work of allegory in the age of informatic supra-production? It is not so much that the image of diagrammatic connectivity represents networks in bad or good ways. Rather, I want to suggest that this form of diagram has come to function as a network meta-model, laying out the conditions of possibility for the experience, the aesthesia of networks. Its limits are those that C.S. Peirce noted about the diagram as a form of mathematical notation – that it says nothing about disjunctive information, existential statements (that is the conditions that are fundamental to its operation as a notational system), probability or relationality. In addition Mat (Wal-Smith) has pointed throughout this blog to a number of issues concerning the planar-linear-spatial problems of contemporary network visualisations. Namely that these occlude the folded histories of actual interaction in/of the network. As he suggests in his post on Jess Kriss’ History of Sampling visualisation, the visualisation channels our mode of interacting with the historical data inputted about sampling. The visualisation draws planar graphs of the use of a sample in a piece of music but not how a sample might act as a catalyst for our relationships with the histories of music or to further processes of musical sampling. Hence we end up not with a history of the processes that are sampling but rather a history of samples (bits of trackable data).

What I want to do is think about this kind of processual semiotics endemic to contemporary media work, especially electronic music, as a mode of understanding network imaging. Another way to put this would be to pose the question of how images in networks are constitutive factors in network processes, flows and their regulation. First, I want to look at the domination of the diagrammatic image of distributed communications first sketched out in Paul Baran’s 1964 RAND memo (image to come). The circulation and repetion of this kind of diagram as a network map, mnemonic and actualisation now dominates the visual landscape of networking, informing social network analysis, network visualisation and net aesthetics. And then second, I’ll look at the ways in which the diagrammatic gets redrawn and mashed via allegorical network visuality.

When I talk about the processual semiotics of networks I mean to invoke not so much the tradition of interpretative semiotics that we may be familiar with via Sassure, Barthes and psychoanalytic theory. Rather I want to understand the diagrammatic via, as I have already mentioned, Bertrand Russell and Pierce and the ideas of processual semiosis that appear in the work of Felix Guattari.

I’d like to proceed by looking at Baran’s diagram in the context of his memo to RAND. I then want to make some general comments about how these kind of diagrams function to manage and organise our perception and engagement with networks in the contemporary moment – ie as a way of regulating network aesthesias as ‘an aesthesia’

The mythology associated with this diagram is that it represents the genesis of the digital network as sustainable in the face of nuclear attack. As the story that accompanies ‘the origin of the Internet’ goes: it was this distributed diagram allowing and attack on one node without meaning the whole network would come down. This diagram is often historically associated with the early 4 node hook up that initialised ARPANET in ‘68/’69 and in fact the period and research culture overlaps certainly justifies the association:

Paul Baran’s diagrams of communications systems

Hence the distributed communications system somehow acts as the ‘blueprint’ for the emerging connectivity of academc and military networking in Cold War USA.

However, in an interview between Baran and Stewart Brand in 2001, Baran himself comments on this myth of Internet origins, insisting that it was not the connectivity of network nodes as demonstrated in the distributed communications diagrams that was at stake in sustaining resilience to nuclear attack but rather the flow of information and data via packet switching that would be essential for deciding both sustainability and strikeback capabilities for the network. (See the interview in wired)

This is an important distinction because it indicates that Baran was not so much invested in the realisation of this diagram as a blueprint for the network but rather was focused upon network processes – the capacity of data to divide up, rearrange and reassemble itself as it moved around connections – in other words, packet-switching. There is some authorial revisionism going on here. If we look at Baran’s original 1964 memo, he clearly states 2 criteria for post-attack survivability: both the percentage of ‘stations’ (as he calls them) left after attack and their ‘electrical connectivity’. But perhaps what Baran has in mind in the later interview ‘revision’ is that networkability – what he calls ‘the synthesis of a communication network’ as distributed (and what I am understanding as the technical and social capacity of distributed communications to be constituitive elements in network formation) – is not reducible to the actual physical infrastructure that ‘joins’ the dots in a network.

As has been repeatedly the case in the history of the implementation of information theory – especially in the history of its military applications but also in its migration into other disciplines such as media and communications studies – nodes, senders and receivers have been hypostasised to the detriment of investigating the processual movements of data and peoples. As it turns out, we have to understand Baran’s diagram and memo through both the poles of the hypostatic and processual. On the one hand, he is clearly interested in accounting for the precise ‘level of redundancy’, as he calls it, required in a network for it to function after severe physical attack on actual communications stations. This necessitates pushing the diagram through a series of graphs to calculate what number and level of nodes are needed initially for it to survive a severe attack on its nodes. On the other hand, after a certain amount of reduplication or redundancy of nodes the distributed network survives even a heavy loss of its actual infrastructure because of its array formation:

Baran’s diagram for array formation – a ‘process’ diagram

Baran is, then, equally interested in how the processes of distribution continue in the post-attack scenario. For him, these processes are only possible if the network has already reached a level of production of redundancy allowing the duplicative array formation. And for him, the array formation is simply the precondition for maximum switching of packets of information to occur. The distributed diagram, then, is not a blueprint for how to build a network – although there’s no denying Baran was working to a military brief. Rather it is a set of vectoral preconditions necessary for the process of switching to occur; a process that is, for Baran, sustainable not only in the event of attack but also in the face of everyday network failures: ‘noise’, unreliable links, degradation and overload. It is little wonder that process is constantly overlooked in the visual depiction of networks as diagrams of connectivity. Again and again in Baran’s memos network processes are entwined with a kind of implicit understanding of the aesthesia of networked inefficiency and breakdown. These problems of defective connections and systemic failure are hardly a vision of imperial preparedness for the nuclear age!!

At least part of the problem with the overlooking of the processual in network visuality lies with how we understand the representational status of diagrams and the historico-discursive forces shaping that understanding. In particular, I am thinking of the legacy that diagrams inherit from mathematics and syllogistic logic. Both Euler and Venn diagrams were developed to visually demonstrate syllogistic logic (example). However, as the analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell pointed out in 1923, there is a ‘vagueness’ to the diagram which in endemic to the problem of representation (Russell, 1923). Rather than the diagram simply acting as a one-to-one form of representation (as other forms of representation in mathematics such as algebra might), its spatiality frequently means that it acts in one-to-many mode. Hence for Russell, its ‘vagueness’ or rather its potential to be representative of the multiple and the variable. So, for example, this vagueness means that the spatial relations between objects in a diagram can be used to represent relations between objects in some other domain. Baran’s distributed communications diagram could be a diagram of ARPANET connectivity but it could also be a diagram of Lufthansa IT networking.

The diagram is therefore not a set of instructions – a blueprint – for mapping or building relations between objects. It is instead a representational mode that hooks one class of objects – perhaps links and nodes – to another class, potentially peoples, cultures and their processual relations within networks. This, of course, is why the network diagram is so thrilling – its spatiality and vagueness harnesses the potential to make it work as a representation of something it is not. The problem is that while the potential to transpose from map to ‘territory’ is one of the diagram’s visual attractions, we would do well to remember that this transposition is only a product of representational vagueness rather than accurate correspondence. In other words, if we really believe that the network diagram provides us with an accurate depiction of networks, then we are forgetting the very relationality of both diagram and network.

It’s also important to remember that the history of diagrams within the 20thc development of logic is a contested one. In particular, the interventions of Peirce into diagrams as a mode of logical reasoning can be seen as both a contestation of their representational limits and an attempt to enhance their expressive capacities. He extended the classic Venn diagram

by introducing new symbolic notation that could account for the presence of disjunctive information within a set:

This diagram allows for either the syllogistic proposition ‘All A are B’ or the disjunctive information ’some A is B’ to hold in the one representational space

I don’t have time here to do Peirce’s extensions which also included attempting to extend the diagram to deal with logical existential statements…in fact for contemporary logicians Peirce’s extensions ended up becoming too visually complex and, since the 1990s, work on the diagrammatic mode in logic has had a strong focus on returning to visual simplicity. That’s perhaps unsurprising in the context of the broader visual culture, which I have also been attempting to chart in this talk, and which is underwritten by the seduction of the clean diagram as meta-model.

But what I am also interested in is the possibility that the diagrammatic mode can be deformed and shaken by the processual – and here I mean two kinds of deformation that are never far apart from each other in network cultures. The first I’ll call a kind of intensive deformation, which is catalysed somewhat by the Peircean project but is taken up again in the work of Guattari. Here the diagram tries to unfold its vagueness or what we might also call its virtualities – its potential to become other, its potential to move to other rhythms. In this kind of deformation of the diagrammatic mode what is at stake is the diagram as dynamic, the diagram as process.

A diagram by Brian Holmes that attempts to work with the processual relations involved in the shaping of new subjectivities of collective enunciation

I think this attempt to stretch the diagrammatic in processual ways is a strong direction as network visualisation attempts to come to terms with the intensive dynamicism of Web 2.0. It’s what we see happening in the Digg Swarm visualisation. It’s also what we see happening as node/link diagrams are subjected to weighted/dynamic mapping tools (thanks again Mat for pointing me toward the Middle East Power maps and toward Fidgt).

A snapshot of the Fidgt visualiser, which works by aggregating tags from users’ web accounts such as Flickr and lastFM. Entering your account into the Fidgt visualiser then aggregates other users with the same tags into your map of ‘use’ visualisation once you deploy a tool called a ‘Tag magnet’

I don’t necessarily want to endorse the ’social networking’ claims here nor the questionable ethics of popularity/wisdom of the crowd behaviourist psychology that accompany the topology of tagging and weighting in Web 2.0. But what I do find interesting about what has happened to the diagrammatic here is that there is a notable shift from diagram as notation and representation (with all its attendent problems of spatialisation and location) to diagram as activity and process. What kind of an aesthesia does this embody and generate? A networked aesthesia of plasticity – potentially collaborative, generative of new problems for thinking and engagement but also collapsing, deteriorating under the weight of the endless generation of its own redundancies.

Finally I want to think again of another possibility for network visuality, which I touched on briefly when referring to the idea of web mash-ups of the diagrammatic and the allegorical. In the where’s george? mash up I showed previously, the mash is produced by overlaying the connective diagram with Google Maps. And this is of course where much of the mashing in networked visuality currently occurs – using Google’s API capabilities to embed its maps into user-generated data. Here we have a mash-up of locative data with data flow…and in some ways this is reminiscent of earlier web projects (many of which are archived in the Atlas of Cyberspace site) that attempt to provide a geospatialisation of network generated exchange and interaction.

But these could also be understood as a mash between the everyday and associative relations produced or generated by the collective exchange of peoples in networks, on the one hand, and the vectoral packaging of relationality into the data template on the other. It is in this sense, that I speak about a mash-up of the diagram and the allegory in network visuality (recalling Benjamin’s comments about the incipient wandering and everydayness of the allegorical as well as his ideas about synthesis as the ongoing presence of tensions and of the baroque as amode which comprised extremes in aesthetics). What I think we need to do is work at the potential for both the disjunctive (diagrammatic expanded in the direction of its expressive capacities) and the temporal (allegorical as a mode of unfolding historicity, everyday network realities) to play a more overt and generative role in our images and imaginings in networks. This may help us to actually produce networks that are less templates for relations and more ongoing projects that explore new relational forms for social collectivities in network cultures.

URL: http://www.fondation-langlois.org

Andrew suggested I look to this database and collection of electronic art and expression. Here is a first post based on initial impressions and explorations over the last weeks. I am here commenting on the interface and database rather than the content specifically. The foundation supports and the web site features projects in Digital Media and the collection holds a substantial collection of historic and contemporary works many of which are relevent to this project.

A description from the site itself;

The Daniel Langlois Foundation’s purpose is to further artistic and scientific knowledge by fostering the meeting of art and science in the field of technologies. The Foundation seeks to nurture a critical awareness of technology’s implications for human beings and their natural and cultural environments, and to promote the exploration of aesthetics suited to evolving human environments. The Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D) seeks to document history, artworks and practices associated with electronic and digital media arts and to make this information available to researchers in an innovative manner through data communications.

Description.

The approach to developing a web archive deployed here is very interesting. The design uses Adobe’s Flash to provide a ‘rich’ interface to an multi-modal archive capable not only of cataloging electronic art and expression and related critical work but also connecting the links between critical texts and the featured works. The web site is operated by the Foundation and is a ‘mediated’ database in the sense that it is professionally populated and managed although artists and writers can submit contributions via the Foundations staff who do the cataloging. There is little or no potential for the user to develop a profile or to organize their findings as they peruse the collection – there is a limited history function based on single session ID’s (meaning that my history lasts only for the current session).

The Flash interface is central to the experience of the site but as with any web interface displays both pro’s and con’s. On the ‘pro’ side we find a very rich user experience which allows the incorporation and interspersion of a wide range of digital media including audio playback with full FFT (Fourier) visualization, streaming Video. Both the latter stream seamlessly within the interface. As can be seen in the image included above the site uses nested windows like ‘pop-up’ index cards to display information. This approach can lead to a rather chaotic navigational experience as the index cards often don’t operate as one would expect (clicking on a rear layer can close several upper layers completely – its a hierarchical menu made to look like its not). The interface splits access to the one DB into a ‘multimedia’ index and a ‘database’ search index. The multimedia index plays out into a series of clusters (a series of squares laid out like dominoes). I couldn’t make head nor tail of the organisational structure deployed to arrange these clusters. It looks very pretty though, and certainly made for a exploratory approach (read; random) to navigation. Indeed, there is perhaps to much of an emphasis on aesthetics in this interface – it almost works but occasionally the visual metaphor obfuscates the information architecture. This obfuscation is avoided with the ‘database’ index which uses a somewhat irritating Flash ‘form’ to allow full searches of the DB based on a wide range of parameters. I say irritating because Flash has a couple of really tedious end-user problems. In a form for instance a ‘Tab’ may not take you to the next field (requires a click), text doesn’t always cut and paste as it should (as you would expect it to), buttons are not automatically activated by the usual key, meaning I have to move unexpectedly between keys and mouse, images and sounds are stuck in ‘rendered’ space so that I can’t easily ‘redeploy’ them (obviously Flash was used for this very reason in many projects). These are little problems when your building such an interface but with a big research DB or an interactive DB these irritations amount to a tiresome navigational experience. To return to the Database search index; this allows you full search of the DB as you would expect. In terms of exploratory research I find a DB coupled with such a search function nearly completely useless unless I know exactly what I am looking for. There is no keyword search here and no tagging system as I previously inferred when commenting on the lack of user profiles. These contemporary developments in DB structure are enormously useful in building a dynamic and recursively developing experience of large archive like this and the importance of these additions is the primary lesson to be learnt from examples such as last.fm. There is a prescribed taxonomy – a series of categories that allow an exploratory approach but these are fixed hierarchical categories ( meaning that a project is in one folder not another).

One of the really useful features of this database and interface is its ‘related material’ tabs which see every item connecting to any related material in the DB. An artwork that is commented on in an article included in the DB will be associated through this tab in the interface. This allows a segue between critical commentary and artwork (for example) – the dissapointing thing is that this is never user or machine driven – which is to say that the database structure is always already written/authored. There is no potential to develop a critical dialogue, to connect works via a critical dialogue or an invented taxonomy. These are perhaps more ‘contemporary’ options that the interface predates – Flash, in the face of AJAX has largely been replaced as the dynamic front end of a relational database system (despite the fact that the quintessential examples of a rich db experience were- and perhaps continue to be- flash based ie. theyrule.net). Flash as a proprietary system is a dubious choice of engines as its longevity is far from assured – despite the fact that at the time this dtatbase was produced that application was synonymous with a ‘rich’ browser experience.

I would also suggest that there is a real problem with lack of information here. Its never particularly clear what a particular project is about – for web based projects I have to click through to their ‘home’ sites which means I can’t easily identify projects of relevance to my search. The lack of descriptions for some works, and lack of detailed meta-explanation is probably (as is nearly always the case) the result of having an expert based systems that doesn’t allow for user contribution.

This all sounds like a very negative appraisal – its meant to be critical rather than negative. There are many positive aspects to the approach this site has taken to the design challenges of a rich multi-modal archive, the ease and immediacy of media playback, of keeping related material in a ‘pile’ of index cards as you navigate through them, the well ordered informational structur are all key successes

The content is another thing entirely and the ability to, for example, look and listen through the Latin American Electro-acoustic collection, look at scores, listen to recordings, watch interviews with composers, read some explanation of their work alongside their colleagues, contemporary and ‘historical’ is very effective – all in one browser window without the need for multiple third party codecs – this is something Flash does well..