Media Evoution is funded by the Region Skane, Malmo City Council, and the EU Structural Funds, Region Blekinge, City of Helsingborg and Malmo University. That funding provides for the support of a number of projects including;

- Cross Media Talent – a project aimed at developing individuals who can move freely between areas of media industry, practice and modes of production.
-A project aimed at encouraging dialogue and cooperation between the film and computer game industries in the hope of inspiring new products, new stories, new processes and business models.
-The Nordic Game Conference and related activities
-The Living Lab Kvarteret run by MEDEA, Malmo University- a new media innovation lab/incubator aimed at establishing networks platforms and infrastructure.
- A research and development project at Malmo University looking at the way local media actors access and make use of available research and development.
- Minc Incubator: a business incubator and development network.
- A number of infrastructure projects supporting new media innovation.

The project/network is divided into 8 ‘work packages’ and provides a useful model for how to run large scale project/networks across dispersed institutions. Each work package bar the final meta-administrative package has substantial individual outcomes all of which contribute toward the goal of realising a well developed and tested research methodology, toolset, aggregation, and implementation/extension strategy for the mapping/visualisation and finally, the collaborative mediation, of issues of policy debate/contest.

Bruno Latour is listed as the ‘Scientific Coordinator’ and an Actor Network Theory methodology characterises the project. Here however ANT folds into the concerted development of a strategic approach and governmental technology, the tools to manage that approach, and the communication of that approach to different levels of researcher/antagonist.

As the leader of the team working on Work Package 1 Latour working with Sciences Po (Paris), and a number of parties from MIT have established a web site and called Mapping Controversies (http://www.demoscience.org/)  that collects and directs the implementation of resources to the execution of controversy mapping and has developed a set of courses and course materials that allows Science and Technology students to engage in the research and mapping of controversies in science and technology. Many of the projects developed by students at MIT, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland), and Sciences Po (France), Manchester University, Oxford University (UK), Ecoles de Mines (france) move well beyond the mapping of purely scientific issues (http://medialab.sciences-po.fr/controversies/) and demonstrate the potential of the approach as a generalised strategy of networked issue collaboration/navigation/mediation/governance. The level and presentation of research performed at an undergraduate level via the apporach is particularly impressive and perhaps indicates the potential for a community level implementation of the MACOSPOL approach.

The Mapping Controversies website also collects a wide range of resources for both the investigation/research of controversy, the collection of data, and the presentation of that data. These include a vast set of visualisation softwares designed for the analysis and representation of dynamic social networks. Many of these technologies are simple and accesible (wordle.net) and the despite the project’s pretence to ‘build one platform’ its clear the methodology itdelf is the primary and directive ‘codebase’ – The project presently aggregates and augments  systems and softwares in the service of this methodology. The most successful of the student visualisations tend to be quite technical implementations or iterations of the NetVis Module (http://www.netvis.org/), although the project also directs students/researchers the promising Prefuse -Java/Flash toolkit as well (http://prefuse.org/).

The courses deployed as part of the project empower the students involved to work through the mapping of controversy from the identification and documentation of the Actors and Propositions involved, through to the mapping/visualisation of the networks they describe, and finally, an analysis of potential outcomes implied by the process and their communication online. The initial workpackage  project tests, supports, and illustrates the development and application of both the MACOSPOL methodology and a collection of mostly open access technologies as they are deployed by relatively low level (undergraduate) researchers across a wide range of institutions and cultural contexts.

The other work packages move toward the collection, aggregation, development of technologies in the hope of consolidating the approach demonstrated by work package 1. They involve; The development of visualisation technologies at Ludwig Maximillian University and the University of Oslo (“Risk Cartography: Visualisation of Argumentative Landscapes” http://www.risk-cartography.org/en_index.html), The development of a compatible set of tools tested/proven as effective in WP1 toward their integration as a platform (Govcom.org, University of Amsterdam) and finally The testing of the platform in the government/policy arena.

It is this final element that illustrates the expansive aims and potential for the project. The project’s synopsis gestures toward the aim of developing/demonstrating the project as the ‘elementary building block of a ‘quasi-parliament’ allowing a multitude of stakeholders, interests and other actors – including the public- to effectively navigate a particular issue. The project aims to develop the methodological and technological ground for a ‘technical’ or networked governance – to develop the ‘democratic equipment’ required for such a governance.

While there are any number of government and institutional initiatives concerned with the development of Gov2.0 MACOSPOL is perhaps the first large scale project looking at the way new methodologies and literacies will be central in the realisation of a more networked and distributed governance capable of routing around the need for Big Government as a principle technology for negotiating interests and navigating particular issues.

The Thinkbox collective is based in and around Windsor, Ontario – across the river and border from Detroit – with all of its attendent musical history. The Detroit  based www.metrotimes.com predictably places Thinkbox in the context of Techno’s genesis, development and bifurcation as moving the techno/electronic aesthetic betond the club dance floors to the gallery and museum space.

Given the timing however (2003-2008) it would seem more likely that Thinkbox were rather more influenced by the increasingly ubiquity of (largely eurpoean) post glitch ambient electronica of the form popularised by the likes of Christopher Fennesz or the ‘Artic Ambience’ of Biosphere. That claim appears reinforced by the individual releases of Christopher Bissonnette one of the founding members of the collective.A sound and graphic designer, Bissonnette use of the guitar and field recordings recalls both Fennesz and perhaps Oren Ambarchi and fellow Canadian (Vancouver) Loscil. Other members of the collective include Mark Laliberte (http://www.marklaliberte.com/index2.html) - an independent curator , ‘project-based’ artist and experimental poet – who also performs ambient soundscape/design work – his Pillow Scenes Soundworks marked the first and only CD release for the collective. Mark has been heavily involved with the Zine culture and currently produces the design/pictorial magazine Carousel (http://www.carouselmagazine.ca/) while exhibiting a wide range of intermedia and installation works that are united by the kind of countercultural cool that belies their zine-culture influences. Chris McNamara is a Windsor based video artist who teaches new media at the University of Michigan. Chris also works with collaborator Dermot Wilson under the name Machydem Inc. – mostly producing film and digital video projects.  Steve Roy, Rob Theakston – an  electronic music producer working a similar vein to that of Bissonette -with a slightly more dissonant edge- and Bill van Loo –  an electronic music producer who also works with guitar to produce live ambient electronica (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGgsCV7gh88).

The project was a partnership between the Arts Council England and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology).

OCEAN aims to facilitate collaborative research by design with a focus of improving the human environment. It has produced work ranging from exhibitions of Performance-oriented Design to publications on 3D Audio and Sound-Art. Its diverse group of members hail from a range of countries from Italy to Israel and Australia to the United States, but are based mainly in Oslo, London, Sydney and Istanbul.

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.

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.

A short animated video sums sum up the planning approach and philosophy.

Established by Erin Manning in 2004, the SenseLab is an international network of artists, theorists, researchers, dancers and writers who work together to explore the active passage between research and creation, promoting theoretical and artistic exploration of the sensing body in motion. The SenseLab is physically based in Montreal with space at the Society for Art and Technology . Part of the research agenda of SenseLab is to understand moving bodies and bodies in motion as relational bodies– “the senses are not seen as pregiven biological apparatuses, but as veritable technologies of life that continuously reinvent what the body is and can do, through its interactions with its designed environment and the technical objects populating it.”

The SenseLab interconnects a range of initiatives that each involves the collaborative participation of various members of its network. Bodies-Bits is a bi-monthly speaker series that provides a platform for international presenters to reveal insights into their research-creation works in progress. A series of thematically focused annual events with the title Technologies of Lived Abstraction aim to explore various modes of participation that view thought as a laboratory for creative practice and creative practice as a platform for thought. The 2009 event titled Society of Molecules connected ‘molcules’ of three to ten people as each simultaneously set up and executed a single aesthetico-political action within and between individual locations in eighteen different cities worldwide.

An interdisciplinary book series conceived by Manning and Brian Massumi and spawned from concepts examined during these annual events (also sharing the title Technologies of Lived Abstraction) is published by MIT Press. The SenseLab also publishes Inflexions, an open-access online journal aiming to promote experimental practices that combine research and creation in such a way as to foster symbiotic links between philosophical inquiry, technological innovation, artistic production, and social and political engagement.

NRPA was founded in 1981 with the purpose of supporting and developing radio art, a cultural movement encompassing experimental sound-based practices conceived to operate within the specific parameters associated with broadcast radio. The organization was considered to lie at the international forefront of radio art distribution between 1987 and 1998, during which over 300 works for public radio were commissioned and disseminated via the weekly program series New American Radio.

Taking heed of significant cultural shifts resulting from the expansion and proliferation of wireless and digital modes of communication, the NRPA extended its mandate in 1996 to support the then burgeoning practice of net art by launching Turbulence. The project and its associated website currently remains dedicated to commissioning and exhibiting the work of artists who either use existing applications and technologies or develop new ones to create innovative, hybrid or networked art forms that use the Internet as a primary medium. The organisation’s key channels for facilitating the creation and reception of new works are its Artists’ Studios, Guest Curator, Spotlight and Events programs. Importantly, the Turbulence website houses an online archive of over 160 projects commissioned by the body throughout its 13 year life.

Other NRPA supported projects affiliated with Turbulence include the Networked_Performance research blog (2004 -), a valuable resource that chronicles the wide range of issues and perspectives linked with various network-enabled practices, and the Networked_Music_Review blog (2007 -), which accommodates the present legacy of New American Radio by gathering data on projects, performances, composers, musicians and software tools related with emerging networked musical explorations made possible by computers, the Internet and mobile technologies.

An artist-led group that utilizes networked media to create, explore, nurture and promote the art that happens when connections are made and knowledge is shared – across the boundaries of established art-world institutions and their markets, grass-roots artistic and activist projects and communities of socially-engaged software developers. This is a spectrum that engages from the maverick media-art-makers and small collectives of cross-specialist practitioners, to projects that critique and change dominant hierarchical structures as part of their art process.

Furtherfield

Dorkbot is a worldwide movement characterised by regular open community meetings under the principles of open access, hacking, experimentation, making, community art practice, and collaboration. The Sydney chapter tends to be led by (but not limited to) art practitioners and characterised by an interests in installation, sound and projection experiments.

Cited from the Dorkbot Sydney website, Dorkbot aims:

‘To bring people together from different fields who are interested in doing strange things with electricity; be you artist, engineer, musician, electrician, software developer, hermit, whatever. Regular meetings pose as an opportunity for public discussion, peer review and exploration of ideas, experiments and finished works and also to solidify and invite growth, encouragement and collaboration in a community of curious people.’ Dorkbot Sydney is generally held the last TUESDAY of the month.. Dorkbot Sydney is a non-profit organization and so it is free to come and be a member of the audience or make a presentation although we welcome donations to help with the basic costs of running the event. ]]> http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/events/dorkbot-sydney/feed 0 -33.890418 151.2091862-33.890418151.2091862 http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/networks/interactivity-and-innovation-in-sweden http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/networks/interactivity-and-innovation-in-sweden#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:10:42 +0000 Xavier http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/?p=160 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

Operating nationally and globally for two decades, ANAT has been delivering initiatives which enable connection, collaboration, research and development, fostering enterprise, sustainability, dialogue and exchange across art, culture, science and technology.

By creating opportunities for enrichment & inspiration, ANAT supports emerging and established artists in the fields of media and hybrid arts, networked and distributed practices, sound and performance to develop new concepts and work. The majority of Australia’s prominent media artists, curators and producers have benefited from ANAT’s innovative programs.

ANAT collaborates with science, industry and arts partners within Australia and overseas to initiate opportunities including immersive residencies, databases and emerging technology labs. ANAT also provides quick response competitive grants to assist Australian practitioners to take up professional development opportunities worldwide.

Users can upload and download a variety of raw and processed, unmixed and remixed audio, video, images and text all under various incarnations of Creative Commons. The site is divided into user accounts or profiles which have information and background about the user (much like existing social media sites) and where they upload their work, name, categorise, genrify (well ‘genrification’ is a word) and tag it for perusal by site member and non-members, but also importantly to act as source material for further downloading and reworking and remixing by other members. There are also ‘projects’ which are works in progress at any one time which on site members can collaborate and also the capacity to search members by skills and interest areas for collaboration and networking etc.

There are certainly many interesting questions raised here in the production of open-source new media content and related aesthetic concerns and the ways that these might intesect with a national-scale broadcast media network, and the various kinds of feedback (social, technical, cultural) within the network ecologies that may emerge from or be drawn into this.

Another question to investigate would be how might the relationship between the metadata such as tags, genres, geolocation etc and the actual AV/text content on the site be used in other innovative and interesting and dynamic ways?

There are some interesting people on the project who might be worth talking to:

The Pool Team

Editorial:

Executive producer: Sherre DeLys

“Sherre DeLys has developed playful dialogues with some of her favourite writers and musicians to create radio art which displays an intense regard for listeners’ own imaginative involvement. She has collaborated with sculptor Joan Grounds for more than a decade– their sound sculptures enter into a call-and-response with the botanical environments they inhabit.”

Producers:

John Jacobs – John is an ABC broadcaster, social media activist, electronic and mechanical inventor, bike rider, vegan cook, performer, promoter, composer, and enthusiastic life hacker. He is a founding member of the Indymedia movement and also part of the team that devised and produces Radio National’s weekly remix program, The Night Air.

Gretchen Miller – Gretchen Miller is a writer, radio producer, composer and maker of audio arts. She works at ABC Radio National. Her work has been broadcast in Germany and France and reworked for live performance at the Studio, Sydney Opera House. She has a passion for travelling into the Australian inland, camping rough and collecting sounds from the natural world, tales that float across the landscape.

Pool education consortium:

Ross Gibson, Norie Neumark, Shannon O’Neill, and Darrall Thompson from University of Technology, Sydney; Marius Foley from RMIT; Brogan Bunt and Terumi Narushima from University of Wollongong; Tom Ellard from UNSW College of Fine Arts.

Also: the Production Manager is a person called Peter Jackson – ?

The concept of ‘wildcrafting’ of consumer goods in the work of UK artsits Kate Ruch and Kayle Brandon explores the relationship between information access and the production of commodities, art and social networks as an inter-related set of sustainable or unsustainable processes. An emergent, and potentially sustainable network ecology of relations is realised in and through the process of production.

Mark Garret, of UK network/arts organisation Furtherfield describes the work of Kate Rich & Kayle Brandon who produce an ‘open-source’ cola drink and ‘trade’ it through a ‘social media’ distribution network ‘Feral Trade’ that focuses on non-commercial sustainable network ecologies for material goods – (description from Thing.net blog): ‘cube-cola’

“With a hackivist consciousness or attitude, they are exploring the creation of their own version(s) of Coca-Cola. Both are bar managers at the CubeCinema (Bristol UK), and have actively steered away from selling the ‘real -thing’, due to their feelings about the environmental practises of the multi-national company Coca-Cola. “We’d tried Pepsi and Virgin Cola and various others too,” says Brandon, “but they weren’t really a positive alternative. They were acceptable, but they weren’t Coke. And people really want Coke / We are wildcrafting our own cola from an on-line, open source recipe. A process developed through home-lab experimentation, merging domestic and scientific methadology.”

and from Feral Trade website:

“Feral Trade is a public experiment trading goods over social networks. The use of the word ‘feral’ describes a process which is wilfully wild (as in pigeon) as opposed to romantically or nature-wild (wolf). The passage of goods can open up wormholes between diverse social settings, routes along which other information, techniques or individuals can potentially travel. / Products are chosen for their portability, shelf-life and capacity for sociability: feral trade goods in current circulation include the coffee from El Salvador plus grappa from Croatia, mountain-grown antidepressants from Bulgaria and fresh sweets from the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

An ‘open-source’ recipe for cola which evokes the principles of hactivism and DIY culture and looks at the role of the prosumer in terms of consumer goods and their relationship to social media networks. By ‘wild-crafting’ their own cola from an online ‘open-source’ recipe, the work presents an analogy between the forms of access and control of ‘data’ that relate equally to both ‘secret recipes’ and ‘software code’ within network ecologies. The work comments on the networks of global capital, consumer goods, marketing, and intellectual property, but also the inevitable laments over a homogenised, mass-produced culture of which Coke is emblematic. The open-source cola project and moreover Feral Trade itself is interesting because they seems to offer both critique of the unsustainable ecologies of global networks of capital / consumer culture as well as a tangible and ‘practical alternative’. Where related practices such as the ‘open-source hardware’ movement in audiovisual culture seek to un-black-box AV technologies and re-mediate them as ‘social media’ (post on this coming soon!) the wildcrafting experiements are notable for their reorientation of the role of the ‘prosumer’ away from ‘hi-tech’ social, cultural and information networks and towards the production of sustainable social network ecologies through the most everyday and material of ‘consumables’ – food and drink.

The Feral Trade / wildcrafted cola experiment might also draw attention to other aspects of ‘network ecologies’ – that of the incredibly complex ecology of relations that on the one hand ‘produce’ the Coca-Cola and on the other position it where it is accessible: psychologically, economically and physically. Rather than a ‘black-boxed’ consumer product, ‘Coke’ is decomposed into an networked collection of elements and flows; precariously structured, yet fiercely guarded data flows within a global network ecology of physical, economic, cultural and informational relations. It brings to mind the network of relations that incorporates a phenomenal flow of energy both material (aluminium production, ingredients, brewing costs, shipping costs etc) as well ‘immaterial’ (marketing, logistics, intellectual property and trademark issues, and the general market-domination of the psychological cola landscape). The ‘unsustainablilty’ of this kind of network ecology in both physical resources as well as its impersonality or asociality is rendered starkly ‘material’ in the practical solution of open-source recipe and the use of a social media / local area / community network for the distribution of cola. The emphasis on the production of sociality in and through the process prosumer craftmaking is made tangible in its drinkable, consumable materiality and raises interesting questions about the sustainability of network ecologies and the flows and stoppages of global and local consumerism and marketing, labour and information access and control.

Furtherfield article : ‘Feral Trade Coffee: A New Media For Social Networks’ http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=142

Thing.net blog post : http://post.thing.net/node/1142

Guardian article : http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/jul/28/foodanddrink.shopping

Feral Trade Website : http://www.feraltrade.org/cgi-bin/courier/courier.pl

Cube Cola website : http://sparror.cubecinema.com/cube/cola/

From the Innovation Lab site;

Through a wide and varied range of activities and media, Lab Agents work to translate the latest technological developments into hands-on experiences and meaningful scenarios. Innovation Lab interprets the meaning of technology—and makes technology meaningful for all of us.

A very interesting commercial model, the Innovation Labs has terrific slogans like; ‘Insight is Influence’ and ‘Ideas are born of movement’.

The Katrinbjerg Centre has strong ties to the University of Arhus that appear to be negotiated via the Alexadra Institute which appears central to the mangement of the information networks described above, is based at Katrinebjerg and whose members include various research bodies, university schools, corporations housed at Katrinebjerg, and large organizations external to the Arhus municipality.

The most prominent of the schools/research programs aligned with the Katrinebjerg centre are;

Department of Computer Science – There is a really interesting HCI reserach focus/centre housed here with a number of interesting projects under the banner of Hypermedia, Participatory Design, Augmented Reality, and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (beyond Groupware !*&6!). They do other Math type stuff as well….

The Information Institute – Its all in Danish – feel free to comment on what they do…

Multimedia @ Arhus Uni – Its all in Danish – feel free to comment on what they do…

Centre for Digital Aesthetics - Its all in Danish but I note Matthew Fuller’s name here.

and the most prominent for Katrinbjerg is the

Centre for Pervasive Computing – This research centre deserves a blog entry to itself and I suspect it is the principal research body engaged with the Katrinebjerg centre/city. The amount of research the centre is involved in prevents me from a providing a detailed account. But I might comment individually on some of the projects that are of particular relevance. These can be found via the links below copied from the site. Of particular interest are Centre for Andvanced Visualization and Interaction. Note that there are a number of projects that cross over between partners so that the pervasive computing is a research focus for the Department of Computer Science on Computer Supported Collaborative Work that is listed here as well – so the CFPC appears to manage an area of research interest that runs (and provides a funded node for) projects under that title which each have a different group of partner institutions attached. Super Distributed and very Dynamic the projects become kind’a virtual in the process… (fishing for comment – more ideas to explore here regarding research/development structures – I wonder how this plays out in terms of funding and commercialization/IP)

• Ambient Intelligence with Tangible Objects
• Center for Advanced Visualization and Interaction – CAVI
• Center for Pervasive Healthcare
• Computer Supported Cooperative Work
• Database Technology
• Design Anthropology
• Embedded Systems – Embodied Agents
• Interactive Workspace
• Mobile Systems and Wireless Communication
• Modelling and Validation of Distributed Systems
• New Ways of Working
• Object Technology
• Sound as Media
• Tangible User Interaction

The MDCN has implemented a series of projects aimed at exploring the potential of such netwroks. They are all well documented at the link above (the MDCN web site) and well worth exploring.  I’ll write more on the individual projects when current demands have been met.

The other thing to note at the MDCN is a comprehensive list of resources gathered by MDCN associated researches with regard to related issues, research programmes, and projects world wide. A very useful collection/nest of resources listed under the EMU project – which is the research focussed arm of the Mobile Digital Commons Network  .

Why is this of interest:

See previous entry on Digg ‘Swarm’. Stack is another ‘Flash’ visualisation of activity of the Digg socially aggregated ‘news’ site. In this one users are who ‘digg’ stories are represented by small squares falling through the visualisation from top to bottom. These contribute to the height of stacks (like a standard bar graph) that represent stories.

Popular stories have higher stacks and a varying shade of green. As a user ‘diggs’ a story the headline of that story cascades down in a dynamically updating vertical scroll. You can veiw up to a hundred stories at once or zoom in to a subset. That part of the interface is decidedly chunky though. The time period between opening the visualization and the current time is represented either side of the bar graph. it should be noted that the ‘time’ of aall these visualizations (including swarm) is bracketed by the users interaction with the interface. The three ‘perspectives’ I refered to in the ‘Swarm’ post are here as well and display the same dynamic I noted in that post.

‘Popular stories’ focuses on centres of emergence and might be seen to mimic Digg’s propensity for feeding into a questionable value system. ‘Newly submitted stories’ shows the ‘actual’ topology of Digg in-the-present-moment in that the majority of stories remain unviewed and ‘single-dugg’ – very few submitted stories ‘take’. All-activity shows complex and transient ‘minor’ centers of emergence in a chaotic moment and movement in the unrelenting stream of submitted stories.

Why is this of interest:

A good example of what Anna has called network visuality. Digg (for those living on Mars) is a social news aggregation site that allows users to submit as story and for other uses to rank it in terms of interest by either ‘digging’ the submission either up or down, or ‘burying’ the submission if deemed innacurate or offensive.

Digg ‘swarm’ uses Flash and Javascript to dynamically visualize the submission of stories, the amount of ‘diggs’ they recieve, the frequency of diggs or the activity of ‘digging’ as it occurs, and the activity of the users who are actively ‘digging’ stories. This makes for an evocative image of the Digg network activity. Stories grow into centrally weighted clusters, user activity concentrate around larger clusters, lone stories pop-up, float in limbo or sometimes just disapear.
The Site allows you to choose between visualizations of ‘popular stories’, ‘newly submitted stories’, or ‘all activity’. The visualization represents submitted stories with circles filled with the headline of the story in a standard sized font. While the story has few diggs the headline is largely obfuscated by the boundaries of its circle. As the story receives more Diggs the circle increases in size and reveals more of the headline. Active users are represented by filled cell-like circle and the activity of the user stipulates the size of the cell. These users swarm around the stories circles that they digg, connecting to them momentarily like bees to pollen. As users move between stories their movements forge an association between those stories signified by a momentary vector flashing on screen. Clusters of stories emerge as stories associated by user movement increasingly move closer together. Rolling over a story enlarges the title beyond the bounds of the circle so we can read it and makes all of its ‘associations’ visible. Associations are given a line weight according to the amount of like movements by users. Clicking on a story enlarges it to centre screen allowing the user to read the story, see the number of diggs it has recieved, its full abstract, number of comments, etc. While the story is enlarged all its associations are displayed in static form.

This engine is ripe for analysis I’ll only take a brief swipe at it. The three options I mention above are really interesting when viewed in comparison. Viewing ‘popular stories’ shows Digg to be a vibrant and dynamic community of busy submission digging bees that appear to display all the questionable ‘intelligence’ or perhaps simply ‘emergent properties’ of other tyoes of swarm activity. Form this view Digg looks like a vibrant space of interaction. Cut to ‘newly submitted stories’ and the activity looks quite different. The screen displays the most recent submitted stories floating around in what resembles an almost entropic state – liquid rather then gas; there is no energy available and little evidence of emerging swarms. Single-dugg stories dominate the visualization. This image of the network looks like heat death. Looking at ‘all activity’ provides a nice aggregate of the former two, the network associations are more chaotic here because they are not restricted to just the popular stories, emerging clusters appear to overlap and interact and the stability of clusters and swarm activity over time is much more transient and the activity much more frenetic. This perspective looks like and eternal proto-network where there is plenty of available energy but the emergence of any coherence is transitory. The ‘life’ of clusters and the period of swarms representing a hint of complexity in a sea of chaos.

Why is this of Interest:

Improvisational music software based on a client/server model developed in Australia and which lead to cross-continental performances in real-time between Cold Cut in the UK and DASE Team 5000 in Australia. It is now lost to the network and there is very little reliable history left easily accessible online. The speed at which the development of the network makes models redundant means that we have a very short memory of relatively successful applications and systems that otherwise had much to offer in terms of collaboration. This example is also notable for its local heritage and the links it has with a small but vibrant Australian electronic music community that is local but also very ‘networked’ – perhaps geography forces invention. Kenny Sabir, the developer of DASE may be worth talking to/interviewing; He is a founding member of The Herd – a now very successful hip hop/dub collective, he and the DASE application were contributors to the development of The Powerhouse Museam’s Soundbyte.org, he founded the continuing Sound Summit series of Independent Music Label conferences amongst a number of other notable exploits.

Description:

DASE was one of the first (?) client/server models of collaboration form music/performance on the internet. It was developed by Sydney based software developer, musician, label operator/founder (Elefant Trax), and conference organizer Kenny Sabir. Sometime in the late 1990′s (2000 is the earliest mention I can find) Kenny developed a Java based application that allowed musicians to sequence loops and sequencers of music locally and then to upload those sequences and samples to a central database. This engine allowed users to collaborate in near real-time buy adding loops to a sequence and having them downloaded and played locally in the JAVA application. Because samples were short and mostly looping and sequencer information is small in terms of data-weight the system allowed user to collaboratively develop a pool of sounds and then alter the sequence in near realtime. The client server model dealt relatively well with network contingencies and consequently allowed user to collaborate even over a 56k dial-up connection. The DASE engine became a central part of the Powerhouse Museum’s ground breaking Soundbyte.org project and as far as I can tell development of the software stopped soon after. The powerhouse program is now based on Sony’s Acid and Vegas softwares (hmmmm- i’ll hold my tongue -from Dase to Vegas).The project was never ‘open sourced’ and I can only assume that developers moved on to other things and the project died. The project may also have been a little ahead of its time. Access to the internet in Australia at the time was still via relatively slow dial-up connections. It is easy to imagine that with the ubiquity of broadband and social networking modes such an application might have had greater uptake today had development continued. There are now similar projects operating under engines like Pure Data and Max and perhaps these engines offer greater elasticity for open network collaboration. That said DASE was successfully developed and deployed for use by high school students an outcome hardly possible in the infamously complex MAX/PureData environment.

Why is this of Interest:

Pandora and Last.fm make a fascinating comparative study of relational database design in a network environment. We can think the difference between these two engines as a choice between a topological or typological taxonomy. Thay are both ‘dynamic media’ distribution engines that develop and deploy different kinds of ‘fringe intelligence’ or ‘relational dyanmism’ in order to recursivley populate their respective DB’s.

Brief Description:

The Music Genome Project is a commercial project aimed at developing a database of music information classified according to a defined taxonomy by paid musicians who do the analysis manually. Pandora is a streaming engine that uses this database to link like artists into a user’s playlist. The streamer operates within a browser (flash interface) and has options for labeling a selected track as inappropriate. A user can build radio playlists based on a selction of artists or a single artist. Recent additions have included the ability to search other shared stations adding a degree of social interaction to the streaming side of the project. This data does not feed back into the database which is essentially an ‘expert’ system. There are serious limitations on the user interaction due to radio licensing constraints (6 ‘skips’ an hour) – Only US registration is allowed although easily evaded because there is no check of the user IP.

Development History:

Development began with the Music Genome Project in early 2000. Tim Westergren is the founder and CEO and appears fundamental to the projects ongoing development. The Pandora Streamer was added as a subsidiary to the project but has become a central component in attracting their own user-base. MSN (Microsoft Network) uses Pandora profiles to power its play-listing. The future of Pandora is apparently threatened with a change to web radio licensing that will see the costs of streaming copyrighted material threefold. See the accompanying interview link for more information.

Analysis/Comparison:

Pandora and Last.fm are often considered competitors offering similar functionality and discussion regarding both engines tends to be reduced to which one provides a better listening experience. Few commentators appear to understand the difference between either the functionality or the philosophies of these two projects. I should declare that most users choose one or the other and stick with it and I am a last.fm devotee. Last.fm takes considerable time and input to develop a consistently appropriate playlist and this often means users preference Pandora’s rather simpler ‘user-directed’ approach/experience. Last.fm relies on scrobbling a users listening history and its value is augmented by the diversity of a user’s music library. The listening experience on Pandora is rather more regulated according to the Artists added by the user to their initial choices. This means that Pandora recommendations are based on the classification system, according to their so-called ‘genome’ which is prescribed by staff according to a proprietary schema consisting of over 400 ‘qualities’. Playlists tend to be successful in transcending social contexts to suggest like music regardless of the history, trends, popularity etc. This approach effectively circumvents the traditional recording industry/marketing tilted focus of broadcast radio; 14 year olds might now realize that Wolfmother has more in common with Black Sabbath than they do Eskimo Joe and Jet has more in common with The Kinks than..well..any of their contemporaries. Playlists are also very successful in finding like artists that are otherwise marginalized in a particular genre because they didn’t achieve international distribution or simply didn’t get the marketing support that others did. In my opinion Pandora suffers because its playlist tend to be rather predictable but many find Last.fm far too random for comfortable listening. On last.fm I am likely to have Merzbow followed by Monolake followed by Coltrane while on Pandora the playlists tend to be more consistent due to the Schema and its status as an ‘expert’ system.

Pandora and Last.fm make a fascinating comparative study of relational database design in a network environment. We can think the difference between these two engines as a choice between a topological or typological taxonomy. The Pandora model suffers the traditional problem of having a relatively small slowly developing expert edited DB but on the other hand it tends to avoid the questionable ‘wisdom of the crowd’ and delivers a consistent and efficient recommendations engine. Both engines, Pandora and Last.fm, suffer by varying degrees because they rely in the users input in the first instance; Pandora is unlikely to show you those new genre’s that you didn’t know you were looking for while Last.fm displays a tendency to catch mainstream tastes in mainstream circles. This latter point should alert to the value of a degree of randomness (the elicited yet involuntary balance again) in any attempt to create a generative relational database system.

Other links:

Tim Westergren Interview @ Create Digital Music : An extensive Interview about Pandora and the Music Genome Project.
Follow up about the RIAA changes to webcasting license costs

Brief Description:

Last.fm is an music streaming engine powered by a dynamic relational database that develops according to the listeners music habits.

Why is this of Interest:

Last.fm is a very interesting example of a powerful and recursively populating (and generative) database system. last.fm is a commercial consumer engine that if viewed through the lens collaborative media provides many essential clues to building a powerful collaborative interface and ecosystem. While predating the so-called Web2.0 phenomena it exemplifies the power of the productive exchange of data for functionality. It provides an interesting take on the building a dynamic relational system based a very focussed, immediate and ‘affect’ driven taxonomy (listened,loved,banned) that structures and opens onto a very dynamic media ecology building relationships between users to auto-populate a dynamic and generative topology of music consumption. The ease of populating a relational database with a client based automated submission system is also of real interest.

Development History:

There are two streams to the Last.fm development history. These streams officially merged in 2005 although there integration began around 2003 according to the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/last.fm). The two streams include the development of Audio Scrobbler on one hand and the Last.fm streaming engine on the other. Audio Scrobbler was an application that built a database of a users music consumption habits developed by Computer Science student Richard Jones (University of Southampton). These consumption habits were then folded into a recommendations engine that made connections between artists based on the profiles of the users that ‘scrobbled’ their listening history. An open API encouraged the development of plug-ins that allowed users to ‘scrobble’ listening data automatically via the music software of there choice. The integration of the iPod and the iTunes environment also provided the incipiency for the playing history of the iPod to be ‘scrobbled’ automatically. The ease of uploading data, the ubiquity of compatible music software and hardware, meant that Audio Scrobbler was able to develop a massive relational database and a huge and very active community of ‘scrobblers’. Last.fm is now the ‘face’ of audio scrobbler which has become completely integrated into the last.fm streaming engine.

Last.fm was founded in 2002 by Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel, Michael Breidenbrueker, Thomas Willomitzer. Last.fm is modeled was an internet radio station and recommendations engine that developed user profiles similar to those developed by Audio Scrobbler. The Last.fm engine was however able to actively build a playlist based on those profiles and stream that playlist to its users. The dynamically generated playlist that was essentially beyond the ability of the user to select what they were listening to meant that this model survived the wrath of the RIAA and other copyright stakeholders who objected to user prescribed streams. This will potentially change with a massive disruption to the fee-structure for copyright payments recently announce. Last.fm is a subscription based service that asks for a donation in order to unlock more ‘prescriptive’ play-listing. This revenue pays for radio licensing. While on the original Last.fm developed profiles based on a simple ‘affective’ taxonomy based on categories chosen as the user listened (love, skip, ban) subsequent development of the site/engine has included many elements borrowed from the social networking phenomenon (facebook, myspace, and earlier models). Listening ‘groups’, ‘friends’,'tags’ all began to ‘dilute’ the underlying ‘affective’ taxonomy (see my analysis). The top track this week on Last.fm is Mika’s Grace Kelly it was ‘scrobbled’ 52,147 times this week by 15,685 listeners. The same track has been scrobbled 445,920 times in total.

Operation/Analysis:
Last.fm is based on the fairly simple back end of a relational database in which user’s developing profiles provides links between tracks and artists dynamically. A layer of social networking has developed over the top of this engine and sometimes threatens to obfuscate its original power. There are many lessons to learn in structuring an interactive, transductive, database from last.fm’s development.

The original power in last.fm engine was its ability to move beyond the performance aspect that usually operates in any online identity engine. By ‘scrobbling’ data automatically based on the users actual listening history the engine avoided the usual quirks of a more ‘reflexive’ self-profiling. On the early last.fm/audio scrobbler integrations (before the development of social bookmarking features) you ‘were what you listened to. The addition of the simple last.fm schema of skipped, loved and banned options meant that the data was being ‘scrobbled’ according to an affective reaction to a track, the simplicity of the schema reduced the tendency to ‘intellectualize’ this reaction. This meant that Last.fm escaped the vagaries of a ‘tag’ based network. In a tag based network we as users are moved to log a tag to a object but the tag itself is much more dependent context etc. On last.fm tags were effectively delimited to those three ‘affective’ categories and the relational power of last was built on the connectivity that such a delimited schema provided between profiles and consequently between artists, between individual tracks etc.

Although streaming is obviously delimited to the tracks available to last.fm the DB accepts entries from any artist or recording at all. This makes the engine particularly capable of handling and encouraging cultural diversity. While many engines would simple not be able to deal with obscure data objects Last.fm, simply integrates that data as a connective tissue in the recommendation network. I can now be connected to the ears (through the affective ‘interface’) of the small group of users that listen to Tim Hecker or Ktu despite the fact that prior to the ‘scrobbling’ of that data last.fm had no information on these artists. Because of the simple interfacing this recommendation engine ‘simply works’ there are no ‘false’ submissions.Last.fm works on simple and largely autonomic recursion between listening habits and recommendations. Simply listening generates a profile which folds into the development of a play-list.

The Last.fm engine provides for the ongoing emergence of a dynamic topology of musical listening habits. This stands in direct opposition to the other engine that Last.fm is often grouped with the other important example of dynamic streaming ‘Pandora’. Pandora employs listening experts and an automated algorithm (largely musicians) to break down the characteristics of an audio/music file based on tempo, instrumentation, style and so on (see Pandora entry). Pandora presents another model of database entirely. The opposition is one of typology to topology. My preference is for the latter but it should be noted that the latter is only effective if the ‘topos’ is effectively ‘wrangled’ – if we look at a system like del.icio.us we find a topology literally gone mad in that the difference between tags and ease of tag production makes logical connections between users based on tag contents difficult. Of course del.icio.us is capable of developing a network based purely on the fact that an object was tagged…i.e it largely disregards the subjective categorization which becomes user level.

The power of last.fm lies in its ability to move beyond the assertion of a particular taxonomy or typology. The addition of groups, friends (as opposed to listening ‘neighbours’) and tags reintroduced the ‘subjective’ structuring of musical relations and for many this ‘social’ networking aspect has become the principle element of last.fm. This hasn’t yet threatened the diversity of playlists but has added a degree of peer influence to profile generation. Cliques tend to emerge and people increasingly move into ‘closed’ neighbourhoods with the ability to listen to another members stream etc.

that will do for now…

Why is this of interest:

Musicbrainz is an example of a large community based organization (non-profit foundation) that depends on user submissions to develop a massive database. It provides an interesting juxtaposition both in relation to the CDDB/Gracenote DB system from which it developed as a response to commercialization and to the more dynamic relational databases of ‘entertainment’ and ‘social’ music sites such as last.fm and Pandora (simply in terms of populating a database). It is also interesting in its use of ‘audio fingerprinting’ to match media and user edited metadata. There is an interesting play between automated/autonomous submission and edited submission running through all these music taxonomy models that I think is worth pursuing in any attempt to build a dynamic and recursively populating system.

Description:

Musicbrainz was a project initiated in response to the commercialization of the CD metadatabase CDDB that was built rather haphazardly to account for the need to identify and supply information about the contents of music CD’s to cd-player applications. CDDB began with a single developer, Ti Kan in 1996, who managed email submissions manually from contributors who assumed the information they contributed would remain freely available. This assumption was based on the database source code being license under a GNU General Public User License. The developer of CDDB and his associates later sold the Database to electronics manufacturer Escient. The Database was commercialized and access sold under a commercial license (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB). CDDB became the ubiquitous Gracenote (http://www.gracenote.com/).

In the outcry that followed the commercialization of CDDB a number of determinedly open source and community based database systems were developed. ‘Freedb’ remains the DB of choice for commercial developers and is considered a ‘clone’ of CDDB in terms of functionality (http://www.freedb.org). Freedb is also licensed on a GPL and is committed to remaining free but this hardly seems assured given the CDDB/Gracenote commercialization, the exodus of the original Freedb team from the project, and the subsequent sale to commercial entity Magix. See forthcoming entries on CDDB/FreeDB for more information. Both FreeDB and Gracenote developed form user submissions. As Gracenote was commercialized this aspect of the DB was curtailed. Freedb submissions happen mainly through the frontend of the applications that users organize and append their own music libraries with. Both projects use a ‘nearly’ unique identifier in order to identify CD’s and then tracks according to their published order. The unique identifier is automagically generated according to the file information derived from the desk (song lengths and so on) this allows identification of the disc and the association of metadata. This is of interest because of the taxonomy for meta-data attribution that develops out of this model. Songs are attributable only as albums according to the particular qualities of the Compact Disc on which they were distributed. No doubt both system will need to evolve beyond this identifier.

Musicbrainz was another DB that developed out of the reaction to the CDDB commercialization. It is now based around the structure of a US Not for Profit Foundation (The Musicbrainz Foundation). Musicbrainz is not concerned with mirroring the functionality of CDDB. It uses two different ‘audio fingerprinting’ technologies that, in theory, allow individual tracks to be identified and associated with appropriate metadata according to their audio characteristics. This approach means that the perceived limits of the previously discussed projects, CDDB and FreeDB, are avoided by removing any reference to the original CD architecture. Instead of identifying tracks according to there position within a defined playlist fingerprinting technology allows (in theory) the track to be identified by audio analysis. Musicbrainz uses two technologies. Relatables (http://www.relatable.com/tech/trm.html) TRM (TRM recognizes music) and the MusicDNS system. MusicDNS is a proprietary system owned and operated by MusicIP (http://musicip.com) that assigns the PUID (Portable Unique Identifier) to a track according to the associations the fingerprinting algorithm provides. The MusicIP system is interesting for its end-user application the MusicIP Mixer which is a playlist generator that operates a little like an automated Pandora for those of us who have obscenely large music collections. I will review that application in a dedicated entry.

Musicbrainz uses this technology as a means of operating its Picard software which is designed to allow a user to assign metadata to the track in their music library automatically – repairing files with lost metadata. The Musicbrainz DB is a community centered project that actively calls for participants to enter and assess the validity of the database metadata. It is increasingly moving toward taxonomic categories of a more social dimension. Thes include categories for related artists, and projects: this should be seen as a move to a more relational DB model focussing on music discovery as well as metadata attribution. The non-commercial aspect of Musicbrainz means that development is relatively slow and so projects like Last.fm appear to be developing their database back-ends at a much faster pace unhindered as they are by an archaic infrastructure and mission. There is perhaps more of a reward function in last’s interface and submission process in terms of social interaction, profile development and playlist functionality means that ‘scrobbling’ -which is effectively giving your data away for a return of functionality ( the quintessential web2.0 model) – is a very fast and effective means of building a ‘generative’ relational system. That said MusicBrainz is stuck between its history as an open ‘meta-database’ for catalogeuing and attributing user submitted data and any future development as a useful relational database. The audio-finger printing of audio files does promise a very promising means of developing a powerful relational database with an end-user submission process that is potentially more automated than even last.fm’s ‘scrobbling’ model. It is unlikely a community based project of MusicBrainz history and pedigree will be the source of such an innovation though – its simply beyond their current means or the developer’s focus.