The ‘Going Viral’ research project engaged by principal investigator and Fluxmedia founder Tagny Duff assisted by Antonia Hernandez explores the way contemporary developments in biological and medical sciences provides new ways of thinking about and theorising viruses in their biophysical, technical and socio-cultural manifestations.

The Microscopy Project developed by Brandon Ballengee, AlisonLoader and Tagny Duff combines microscopy and video animation to ‘explore the liminal space between living and undead.’ (http://www.fluxmediaresearch.com/#515798/Microscopy-project). Using an inverted tissue culture microscope and a video camera the project images stained frog specimens aiming to explore and develop techniques for experimental video, (re)animation and still imaging of organisms at the microscopic level.

Researchers associated with Fluxmedia in 2010-2011 include;

Fluxmedia founder Tagny Duff (Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies University of Concordia) and Artist and Researcher exploring and working with medical imaging, biological materials and laboratory cultures;

Artist and Biologist Brandon Ballangee, who combines a fascination with fish and amphibians with the techniques of commercial art photography – his work has concentrated on researching and documenting mutations in amphibian populations, this work includes an almost performative inclusion of the public in the artist’s surveys as a means of engaging public interest. Brandon is visiting scientist at Redpath Museum. McGill University and PhD Candidate of the University of Plymouth;

Filmmaker and animation specialist Alison Loader whose work has explored identity, race and cultural heritage and whose research interests include Stereoscopy, Animated Installation, and Anamorphis;

Antonio Hernanadez whose research has focussed on the intersection between pornography and domestic space motivated by a ‘personal quest for a new ecology of domestic space’;

Britt Wray a Biologist, Artist and Science Communicator whose research interests include ‘biotech criticism, synthetic biology, evolutionary ecology, conservation bio, biomedical ethics, radio broadcasting and documentary’. Britt is workshop coordinator at StudioXX a bilingual feminist digital art centre for technological exploration, creation and critique.

Claire Kenway who has a background in music and sound art and whose research focuses on the intersections between sound, space, experience, and emotion. Claire has performed internationally as a DJ for over a decade although now works with sound in installations.

Geneviève RUEST, is a Montréal based visual artist working with digital print media and installation with medical imageries. Her artistic research focuses on the ‘human body through its transformations and mutations from generation to generation.’ (http://www.genevieveruest.com/html/biography.html)

Interdisciplinary artist Kelly Andres who is ‘fascinated with ecologies and energies from those of cellular species such as plants and animals to those of electronic media such as radio waves and transmission devices’.

Interdisciplinary Artist Vanessa Rigaux whose practice encompasses performance rooted in theatre, live sculpture, contemporary dance, clowning, collaboration and improvisation. Vanessa is interested in the role of the clown and the absurd, dichotomies , nature, and the performer audience relationship.

Mapping Online Publics ‘addresses the problem of scale in online personal communications and the need for disciplinary renewal in media, cultural and communications studies’ (Burgess, 2010). The project is interested in ‘computer-assisted cultural analysis; tacking, mapping and analysing blogs. twitter, flickr, and youtube as ‘networked publics’’ (Burgess, 2010).

Mapping Online Publics is based on the notion that the development of social media sees the convergence of user generated or shared content, online social networks, and communication. The theoretical framework of the project is that personal communicative ecologies constitute public communication. This means that tracking levels of activity, topics of interest, changes over time, and relation to other media, allows the researchers to address questions regarding the formation of communities and network around issues, the dynamic of interaction between issues and networks, and the interplay between personal communication and the formation of ‘networked publics’. (Burgess 2010)

Although the Mapping Online Publics project is in its early stages the project has tested a variety of tools for a multimodal analysis of both blogs and twitter. The researchers use Gawk, Leximancer and Wordstat for textual analysis of posts, have engaged link analysis on blog networks, while using a tool developed inhouse, Twapperkeeper, for crawling and archiving tweets. Gephi the socalled ‘photoshop for graphs’ has been used successfully to demonstrate the potential for a time based visualisation of the ‘life’ of issues as the develop and subside in twitter using both the content of tweets and networks formed of hashtags and replies.

A recent presentation published online by Jean Burgess, and examples posted on the project’s blog show the potential for the rich visualisation of issues playing out in the blogosphere and on twitter during the Australia Federal 2010 election campaign.

The collection and representation of Australian biodiversity information online is currently handled by a range of services and institutions across disciplines and approaches. These include (for example); The Australian Virtual Herbarium, The Online Zoological Collections of Australian Museums, the Australian Natural Resource Atlas, The Biomaps gateway to biodiversity information hled by Natural History Institutions, The Australian Plant Census, The Birdata Atlas of Australian Birds.

The Atlas of Living Australia aims to support, augment and extend the diverse range of existing collections that document Australian biodiversity making that data both extensible and interoperable. A significant part of the project is providing a system capable of aggregating, managing, and developing nomenclature and taxonomic information between across institutions and collections. This decentralised and collaborative approach to metadata will allow a more distributed approach to the work of collecting, identifying, and aggregating information related to biodiversity.

A dynamic approach to the nomenclature and taxonomy has two outcomes – it streamlines and economises the collection and digitisation of biodiversity information while allowing for its more effective re-use and extension across institutions and by the greater public. The Atlas is interested in supporting the work and activities of existing organisations and networks by building the potential for a more agile and participatory collection and digitisation of biodiversity information while at the same time providing for the dynamic aggregation and redistribution of that data in the interest of open and distributed research.

By aggregating biodiversity information the Atlas hopes to make existing work and activities of its various stakeholders available and interoperable with the information and research of the Australian Plant Phenomics Laboratory and the Australian Pacific Network for Global Change Research and ensuring this information is made open and accessible beyond the biodiversity research community – to, for example, the Australian Biosecurity Intelligence Network, the Integrated Marine Observing System, and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network.

The ALA was officially launched in July of 2010 and will become publicly accessible in late 2010.

Partners include the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), The Australian Museum, The Museum and Art Galleries of Northern Territory, Museum Victoria, The Queensland Museum, The South Australian Museum, The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, The Western Australian Museum, Southern Cross University, The University of Adelaide, The Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry, The Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water and the Arts (DEWHA), as well as the representative bodies concerned with the administration and management of biodiversity collections.

The project is funded by the Australian Government under the National Collaborative Research Strategy and supported by the Super Science Initiative form the Education Investment Fund.

References:

Atlas of Living Australia Launch - Infrastructure for Biodiversity Research (Donald Hobern, 28 July 2010) – PDF (8.2MB)

Atlas of Living Australia Website – http://www.ala.org.au/ accessed Friday 8th Oct 2010.

This weekend I experienced two very different works of ‘media’ art united by the fact that writing about them will not only and undoubtedly fail to provide an adequate account but also perhaps undermine their value for the reader’s future experience.

You have been warned.

While I’m here interested in the first of these works, Duncan Speakman’s subtlemob piece As If It Were the Last Time, its relation to the second – James Turrell’s newest Skyspace installation at the National Gallery of Australia, is intriguing. Both are works of experience design. This is not experience design in the sense that we are now seeing as pervasive media tech finds it way into retail spaces and public institutions. This is experience design in the sense that both works are designed for a kind of quiet transformation of the way the viewer perceives the world and our place in it.

Quiet - is key here. Neither of these works are interested in mediation or expression. Even the term modulation seems to indicate a degree of intermediation that simply doesn’t apply. At the least the term ‘modulation’ comes close to the sense of a kind of phase shift in perception that provides for \a new synthesis between bodies and between bodies and their environment.

Turrell’s Skyspace installation is a large scale architectural work in the South Garden of the National Gallery of Australia. The work recalls spaces of contemplation or worship. The Skyspace architecture plays with the perception of space and of natural light. It makes the ‘fabric’ of perception tangible from the scale and frame of the body and its movements through to scale and frame of planet and universe and their movements. There is nothing to say as you leave Turrell’s Skyspace – no interpretation to share, no reading to offer, but something like a necessarily and refreshingly unspoken quietude.

Beyond Flash Mobs.

Speakman’s Subtlemob concept similarly modulates the scale and frame of perception in the service of realising a resonant intensity between bodies.

Subtlemob is based on the concept of flash mobbing. Flash mobbing is a mode of collective performance based on the potential for contemporary technology (mobile phones, internet) to organise a spontaneous collection of anonymous individuals to gather in a public space at a designated time and perform a particular act (normally inane or bizarre).

The invention of Flash mobbing is claimed by Bill Wasik in his excellent account published in Harper’s Bazaar in 2006 (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/03/0080963). In that account Wasik describes the project as essentially self parodying the willingness of its participants to act in transgression of norms only within the unanimity of a group. For Wasik the Flash Mob was a performative critique of ‘hipster’ culture based on the production of an event that was its own sufficient reason.

The Flash Mob concept realised a number of variations and innovations. For the most part the increasing ubiquity of Flash mobs saw them become as mundane as they were inane. The most interesting of flash mobs became more determinedly performative – less based on the spontaneous experience of the mob and more on a deliberate and organised performance. In many cases the presence of as many video cameras recording proceedings as participants begged the question as to who the mob was performing – they appeared like an obstinant child acting-out in front of a mirror. This desire to record Flash Mob culminated in a series of performances the execution and filming of which is so elaborately staged

By 2006 the ubiquity of the iPod added another dimension to the potential of Flash Mobs allowing for ‘Silent Disco’s’ -where participants downloaded a playlist to be played on headphones as they gathered at a predetermined and network-shared (public) space and time. The ‘Silent Disco’ realises the potential of audio to produce a locative, augmented, and social media form without the need for anything but the simplest of consumer media technologies. Its also sees the flash mob move back away from the cynical critique of Wisak and from the pretense of performance. In the process, it hints at a less irony laden experience, an experience more concerned with the implication of a social intensity via the production of shared ‘spontaneous’ experience.

Speakman’s Subtlemob.

Speakman’s subtlemob ‘instance’ As if it Were the Last Time’ extends and capitalises on these later developments. The potential participant is alerted to an immanent subtlemob event by a Facebook group, Email list or via Twitter only days before the event is scheduled. The location of the event is posted the morning prior. For ‘As if it were the last time’ The participant is instructed to download one of two 30 minute audio files based on their birthdate. Each participant is to bring a partner each with their own mp3 player and set of headphones. The content of As if it Were the Last Time seemed heavily biased to a romantic couple- although this wasn’t mentioned explicitly. I’m glad I was their with my wife – rather than a friend – which would have been awkward. The participants amass in the designated space and play the file at the designated time.

Unlike the flash mob -the aim of subtlemob is to remain subtle throughout the event – to not draw undue attention yourself and to follow the instructions delivered in the audio file. Instructions prior to the event explicitly ask participants not to bring video cameras or recording devices. The aim is to be completely absorbed in the moment rather than to be performing for latter recollection or replay. The value of the subtlemob is in the experience itself not in the expressive performance of its participants. Experience of the work is rather akin to being immersed in a cinematic work that has come to life and absorbed the viewers as its protagonists.

As stated, the work consists of two audio files so that roughly half the participants are listening to each file (couples listen to the same file). The files are well produced from an audio perspective with beautifully edited and composed music and professional voice over and minimal (but very effective) additional sound design.

In Experience.

The content of the audio is elusive and ethereal – with snaps of instruction interspersed with near-narrative insights projected onto the people and the space you inhabit. Although these snaps of insight and reflection are very general they become more specific and contextual due to the fact that the actions of the other subtlemob participants fall roughly in sync and are interspersed with the unaware public as they too move through the space.

The content of As If It Were the Last Time isn’t tailored to the space as in an audio tour – its composed to compel your reflection on the space and your place within it, your relation to your partner, and to the other couples, and passers-by that inhabit the space. As participants lean on each other, or look at their reflections, or gaze up at the buildings, or as other people pass by, the narrator will ask you to reflect on what they are thinking and feeling, what possible past, or potential future they each embody in that instance.

The resulting experience is transcendent and dreamlike. I am not usually well-disposed to public performance but in this case it rarely felt like I was performing. I never felt self-conscious during the piece but rather deeply engaged by the work and by the interaction it encouraged with my partner and the space. Like Turrell’s Skypasce installation As If It Were the Last Time never becomes about the content itself, there is no story to take away form the experience other than those that you bring to the space and are invoked by the work. There is no message, only the intense modulation of the relation between bodies and between body and space.

Sydney’s subtlemob was on a friday evening at 6pm in the middle of Martin Place (the middle of post-colonial Sydney). There were 35 couples participating. There is much to be said about the concept of the subtlemob and Speakman’s execution of the concept in the form of As if It Were The Last Time. None of that discussion is really about the experience of the work – beyond the fact that it demonstrates a entirely new form of media art and experience in the use of audio as the basis for truly creative, social, and technically unencumbered augmented reality.

Beyond that -you really needed to be there.

The subtlemob project and the development of As If It Were the Last Time is a project supported by the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol (Who have also supported the amazing Anti-VJ).

Urblove is both a service for the production and staging of location based mobile games and an online community where these games are distirbuted. Urblove provides for users to create their own games and to share their experience in playing them. The project hopes to encourage a sense of urban exploration in the service of creating a more integrated tolerant urban environment.

The project is being developed in collaboration with researchers Pers-Anders Hillgren and Per Linde (Interaction Design) and Karin Brook (Cultural Geography). The project is also developed in cooperation with wireless provider WIP and two community youth organisations RGRA and Tosabidarna. RGRA is a group interested in engaging youth in issues of national and global importance while Tosabidarna is a group supporting female Skaters.

While the project is in the early stages of development it is particularly interesting for its mix of start-up, community support, corporate cooperation, and institutional support.

Myoo Create is being ‘incubated’ by Adventure Ecology – notable because it is the company behind the ‘Plastiki Expedition’. Platiki is a sailing vessel built from completely recycled materials – predominantly repurposed PET bottles – and sailed from San Francisco to Sydney to raise awareness of the plastic waste in our oceans. That expedition was the latest of many projects led by adventurer and environmental campaigner David de Rothschild who is the head of Adventure Ecology and the youngest heir to Rothschild banking family.

The Adventure Ecology website lists Myoo Create as a shift in direction. They cite the ‘philosophy they live by’ as the ‘Equation of Curiosity ; recognising that nothing’s really more powerful, inspiring and game changing than acting upon dreams, undertaking adventures and telling compelling stories in order to raise awareness of environmental and social issues while driving innovative, real world solutions’. Myoo Create however marks a shift from attempts to raise awareness of environmental issues via the production and staging of expedition events that aimed at catching the attention of the mass media to the now familiar web2.0. What is perhaps less mundane in this rather late ‘2.0 manoeuvre’ is the recognition that Adventure Ecology always hoped to inspire and contribute to a ‘Planet 2.0’ way of living but that at ‘the heart of any movement is a committed community of change-makers driving each other forward’. There is an interesting although confounding mix of venture capital, social capital, and social media rhetoric being employed on this still fresh venture. Underneath all that is an interesting acknowledgement that their is a great deal of ‘social capital’ available to projects that garner popular but not necessarily industrial support.

Feelix Growing is a large EU funded project that involves a consortium of institutions and corporations. These include; the Adapative Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire, The Emotion Centre at the French National Centre of Scientific Reserach, The Neurocybernetics team at the Equipes de Traitement de Images et du Signal and attached to the Cergy Pontoise University, The Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, The Centre for the Study of Emotion at the University of Plymouth, The Image, Video and Intelligent Multimedia Systems Lab (IVML) of the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems at the National Technical University of Athens, Entertainment Robotics – a spin off of the Adaptronics Group, and Aldebaran Robotics.

This network provides for an interdisciplinary approach to research in adaptive robotic systems that includes proficiencies across neural networks, ethology, psychology and psychopathology, linguistics and facial coding systems, adaptive control architectures, neuroscience, epigenetic robotics, and commercial and consumer robotics to name but a few.

The Project is led by the University of Hertfordshire Team with Lola Canamero operating as the project coordinator.

Feelix Growing is based on the assumption that robots functioning in interaction with humans beings in areas such as care-giving, patient monitoring, entertainment, or serving as companions, must be capable of ‘adapting to incompletely known and changing environments’ and of personal and personable interactions with their human users and partners’.

The project assumes that this end requires robots that can develop according to their social situation – or rather that the utility of robots in human environments will depend on social integration as an effective, agile, and adapatable mode of development within dynamic environments. In this sense the project represents an interesting vector in robotics – away from the emulation/simulation or reverse engineering of what are perceived to be human like qualities – and toward the engineering of an adaptable social assemblage that includes both robot and human/animal/organism.

The project has worked with commercial developers including the Aldebaran Robotics Corporation and their humanoid robot Nao to test the effect of simulating emotional response and reaction of robots. They have tested the social effects of introducing a emotionally responsive robost to the play environments of both human children and young chimpanzees. The focus on these projects is on the integration of the robot as a component within a wider social assemblage.

The Video and accompanying website and mobile app  is an impressive collaborative effort involving 33 listed collaborators many of whom are commercial motion designers or motion design firms, web developers, and interest groups. The narrative of the film is framed by the failure of the 2009 CopenhagenSummit on Climate Change to finalise an international agreement on the reduction of Carbon Pollution. The film claims that an effective ‘War on Climate Change’ must be also ‘War on Consumerism’ – a war our governments are unwilling and perhaps unable to fight. The film then proceeds to argue that we require a return to the form of Swarm Intelligence that was characterised by the counter-cultural movements of the 60′s that were undermined by their (superficial) reduction to a marketable ‘individualism’. The internet and specifically Web2.0 and Open Source development are figured as providing and demonstrating the potential for a return to the true and marginalised potential of 60′s collectivism. This new found potential will provide the potential for open source solutions to Climate Change.

Six short ‘essays’ accompany each of the films in order to develop its themes and to provide a basis for ongoing discussion. They provide some more detailed insight into the claims made by the film. More importantly they detail the specific qualities and models of web2.0 and Open Source development figured as being the basis for this new counter-cultural efficacy. The film and accompanying essay argues for a three tier architecture for harnessing and motivating a ‘swarm’ intelligence to act on Climate Change. The first of these tiers is an open source, collaboratively developed, Green Knowledge Base – an engine with which to share both simple and complex solutions and contributions to reducing CO2 emissions and approaching sustainability more generally. The model for this tier is the Wiki. The second tier is rather less detailed and appears to be a collaborative engine along the lines of a version control system  - where I ideas could be shared, fleshed out, developed, and implemented in a collaborative environment. The model for the second tier is, rather predictably, Linux. The third tier is a socially driven engine of promotion, networking and information, to quote; ‘This is where green activism 2.0 is expressing itself’. Somewhat disturbingly/tellingly the relevant model here is described as Facebook meets Indymedia.

The film project is divided into the six chapters mentioned above. The release of the film was staggered to promote discussion of each section of the film while the film was still in production. It is clear from the COTW website, however, that this was a social media promotion strategy designed to give consumers a sense of ownership over the film and its ideas and in the service of developing an ‘environmental brand in itself’.

Amongst the mostly UK based designers and producers listed as collaborators the film also lists the Betterment Bureau- a team of likeminded media producers and designers working to ‘make the world a better place through design’, and Ladyverd.com an online magazine ‘that was created to promote inspiring information for organizations and individuals committed in the war against climate change who want to fight for a better world.’

The projects supported by the Pervasive Media Studio are diverse in both their mode of practice and their projected outcomes. A long terms partnership between HPlabs and the University of Western England was concerned with the development of software allowing for the production, distribution and consumption of ‘mScapes’ or mediascapes – They were also central in the development of an ongoing conference series exploring and demonstrating the potential of mScapes. An m(edia)Scape is essentially a mixedmedia production that uses GPS to both record and playback audio, video, or augmented reality style graphics (mapped images on a smart phones camera/video input – dependent on position) as the basis for a particular ‘text’. Most of these mScape were audio centric allowing for recorded audio to trigger as a user moved through a space. In more recent times the ubiquity of phones with gyroscopes, GPS and compass, has allowed for the real time overlay of graphics on a video image- allowing a user to view an augmented reality through the phones camera. The latter development has seen AntiVJ – one of the Pervasive Media Studio’s residents – working with the HPlabs and the University of Western England on the potential for/feasibility of identifying and tracking a plane in 3 dimensions. The facility for mapping and tracking a plane in 3D space supports the mScape project by allowing the augmented/imposed image to move beyond ‘simple’ two dimensional infomatic style augmentation and toward the potential for ‘architectural’ augmentation in 3 dimensions.

The mScpae project has largely fed into the launch of Calvium – a ‘startup’ aiming at the commercialisation and continuing development of the mScape production and playback tools.

The facility for automatically mapping and tracking a plane in 3 Dimensions also serves the project being developed by Anti-VJ as part of their PM Studio Residency. That project involves the development of a ‘Mapping’ Suite of Applications based on the demonstrated potential for projecting a ‘keyed’ image onto a 3-Dimensional object providing for seamless projected live augmentations of architectural space. At present  AntiVJ projects depend on laborious keying of an image or video to a necessarily static surface or plane. Automated identification and tracking of planes would allow for the mapping of projections to dynamic/mobile surfaces effectively allowing a new form of augmented reality (augmented virtuality??). This potential is further extended by another of AntiVJ’s projects stereoscopic projection – the idea here is that keyed projections on a tracked plane in 3 dimensional space would allow for 3D ‘holographic’ projections.

The PM Studio has also supported research into the use of POV cameras in theatre productions. The ‘Extended Theatre Experience’ has explored the potential for attaching cameras to actors and to objects/props provides for a better or extended experience of recorded theatre although increasingly this has led to the development of new modes of mediated performance.

The SubtleMobs project developed by Duncan Speakman as a residence of the PM Studio is a variation and development of the rather tired/dated concept of Flash Mobs – The SubtleMob projects move away from the simple realisation of a social spectacle that became the standard for flashmobs to explore the more interesting performative affordances of that practice. In the simplest terms this has meant ensuring that the ‘mob’ maintains the form of subtlety that ensures the experience of the ‘mob’ – both between members and for the unsuspecting public – retains its submersion-in and subversion-of the everyday. SubtleMobs participants are told not to bring cameras or other recording devices that might subvert the grounded subtlety of the ‘performance’. The participants of one SubtleMob were instructed to download two sets of recorded instructions to an mp3 player. The recorded instructions were to be played only at the site of the SubtleMob performance and carried out with a partner listening to the alternative/paired recording. The ensuing performance emerges between partners, between couples, between the mob and the public – a kind of purely emergent performative practice.

Their are a number of other  interesting projects and collaborations supported by the PM Studio. The Street Art Dealer project is a collaboration between C6.org and Steal From Work – both groups concerned with public and street art and its marginalisation by market driven art practices and cultures. The project use QR codes (the form of barcoding that allows for embedding and collection of metadata via mobile phone cameras) to allow street artists to sign their work and for ‘consumers’ to then locate work identified by artist (or any other applied taxonomy) – it is suggested that this could lead to a form of commercialisation supporting the work of street artists (perhaps via commissions).

The PM Studio also supports; a CyberTherapy project (collaboration between HMC Interactive, Drake Music, and bibic) looking at the development of simple software that provides synaesthetic feedback (voice to visual feedback) as a form of Therapy for autistic children, a project enabling simple browser based recording and sharing of audio between schools students (Audio Enable), a number of augmented reality and cross media narrative projects, development of the IndieMobile social media campaign engine (Complaint Generator) in collaboration with Indie Mobile (an UX agency).

The PM Studio is supported by The University of Western England and their Digital Cultures Research Centre, Hewlett Packard Labs, and the Southwest Regional Development Agency and is part of Watershed @ Bristol.

Much of AntiVJ’s work is positioned against the status quo of club based VJing – in that the works tend to explore a unified theme, question, or project that is driven by the context in which it is performed or presented – one of AntiVS’s artists, Olivier Ratsi describes one of his modes of production as ‘live painting’ and to a certain degree this term describes the type of work AntiVJ do in a more general sense as well – dynamic time based projections that transfigure the site of their projection. AntiVJ consists of artists Simon Geilfus, Yannick Jacquet, Joanie Lemercier, and Olivier Ratsi, Romain Tardy with music by Thomas Vaquie.

The work of AntiVJ has mostly involved large scale intricately mapped projections onto the surface of the built environment. Some of the work extends to or from the club environment but it real power lies in both extrapolating, deconstructing, and playing with the perception of the surface and volume of architecture via the play of projected light (Desherence, Songdo). More recent work has included  large scale stereoscopic work with the electro outfit Principles of Geometry – a 50 minute exploration of a starry 3D space and work with Mexican composer and producer Murcof – confounding projections that seem to hang and move through mid space at will.

AntiVJ’s work displays a unique aesthetic and a previously unseen degree of  precision in terms of projection onto large scale, multi-faced/multidimensional, objects. The mapping is apparently achieved via software developed in house that AntiVJ intend to eventually release publicly.

See the cross referenced projects for more on the Mapping Controversies projects and network.

These courses and their output along with the collection of resources that support those course represent the first ‘workpackage’ of the MACOSPOL (Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics) project. The student work represents a testbed for the collected resources and the communication and development of the ‘Mapping Controversies’ methodology for a public ‘governmental’ stakeholders.

The volumetric representation of data appears to have been drawn from the expertise of the Centre for Medical Image Science at Linköpings university . The interaction/installation/industrial design concept and production appears to be drawn from the expertise of the SII. These two elements of the project come together under the banner of the intriguing Visualisation Centre in Norrköping which includes presentations on Swedish innovation in visualisation, educational workshops, a cinema, and a dome projection system as well as providing an umbrella (in terms of funding and research) for visualisation projects. The Centre is closely associated with the  Visualisation Information Technology and Applications centre at inköpings university who is also involved in the development of the project.

Run Silent, Run Deep is the 2008 Singapore Iteration of the series and involved a mapping of the Marine environment of Singapore harbour onto an immersive and interactive sonic topology that the user can explore via a projected visual interface.

The Audio Nomad project involves the representation of geo-tagged, recorded, media including images, video, sound, juxtaposed with the sonification of geo-spatial information. This reconstitution of this collected data in a sonic topology allows a user to navigate a soundscape in which recorded histories, unseen ecological dynamics, and visceral field recordings are evocatively juxtaposed to reveal otherwise forgotten, marginalised, or assumed networks of relation.

Adrift is amongst the simplest and most linear of Helyer’s works but nonetheless manages to make visceral the complex of relations that characterise and constitute the interactions of human/marine culture.

Eco Located began with a  maiden collaborative residency aboard the MARIN (Media Art Research Interdiciplinary Network) catamaran.

The project took water quality and meteorological readings, geotagged information, made field recordings, and recorded interviews with scientists and the community in and around Belfast Port and during their voyage across the North Sea- concentrating on the ‘Littoral cultures’ – the cultures that develop at the transition or boundaries of (in this case) land and sea.

The information gathered becomes the basis for an immersive surround sound installation that uses the Audio Nomad system to allow a user to enter and navigate an abstract soundscape – a kind of sonic topology constituted of and juxtaposing (sonifying) the information and media recorded during the vessel’s progress across the North Sea.

The Eco-Located project continues a common theme in Helyer’s work that explores the potential for audio to make audible that which be forgotten or unseen – this extends beyond the post modern desire to reveal an underlying or marginalised structure and  to explore the way we might use audio in both new and old technology to realise new networks of relation and remembering between individuals, the communities of which they are part,their ecology, and their histories.

Sub_scape is a series of projects by Australian artists Kate Richards and Sarah Waterson that explores the potential of (and for) noisy intersections between datasets, archives and maps to produce emergent and deeply reflective topologies that upend the desire they express for a controlled and instrumental ‘sense making’. In the original 2004  iteration produced for ISEA Baltic (held on a Baltic ferry) sub_scape took the form of a submarine periscope that allowed the user to explore a datascape synthesised from environmental datasets from the Australian Desert and the Baltic Sea. The aim of the work was to explore the isomorphic characteristics and relations between these two widely differing landscapes as similarly affecting/reflecting deeply inscribed  metaphysical, aesthetics, and political intensities. The second iteration of Sub_scape. sub_scapePROOF (2006) used the same periscope interface used in the previous iteration to synthesise a landscape of political and rhetorical sensemaking to explore the relations between truth, discourse and affect. The third and final interation of sub_scape, subscapeCYCLE, used a recumbant cycle as the interface for navigating a virtual landscape terraformed in real-time by data mapping ‘contemporary, technological, economic and cultural ills – some pre-cached some streaming in real-time from the web.’ In this iteration of the project the user navigates a landscape deformed (and deforming) by manifestation of human folly, idealism and agency. The user’s interaction actually reforms this twisted topology so that the input of energy, the user’s very attention, becomes the basis for a sustainable ecology.

Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters  marks the denial of authorial sense making in the age of networked and participatory media, begging questions as to the function of universality in the realisation of shared spaces of generative interaction. The work might also be read as challenging/exploring the perceived continuities, between new and legacy media systems, and exploring the celebration of the multiple at the preference to the ‘universal’.

According to the description of the artists web page (http://katerichards.net/art/eclipse/) the work explores the universe as a generative system informed by a ‘creative intelligence, ordering principles, patterns, significance and aesthetics’.

The work explores questions regarding our aesthetic relation to the universe and the recurrent generativity it describes between astronomical and scientific visualisation and schematisation, cosmology and folk sciences.

The work is also notable for the way Richards is live documenting the process of the works development on an open wiki. If the work explores the universe as both ‘process and object’ then the work is also a recursive function and modulation of that systemic generativity. (http://darkenergy.wikispaces.com/)

Bystander is a multichannel interactive video, sound and interactive installation by Australian artists Kate Richards and Ross Gibson. Bystander is one of the Life After Wartime suite which includes works; Crime Scene, LAW Live, Darkness Loiters, and the LAW CD-ROM. Bystander is the final work of the suite all of which is based on an unsorted and poorly documented archive of post-war crime scene and police photographs. Richards and Gibson have used these evocative images as the basis for a fictional narrative . That narrative  unfolds according to the participants movement within the installation space and their interaction. A ‘kinaesthetic particle animation’ responds, reflects and feeds back on the relation between body and archive. The development of the narrative is keyed to the quality of movements of bodies in the space. A still and attentive participant unlocks a deeper and more focussed narrative unfolding while the hyperactive participant realise a more fragmented and playful experience.

The work establishes a complex play between a societal perception and response to a diffuse, arbitrary, and perhaps ambient criminality and violence and the more complex and highly contextual set of relations that have produced such an archive. In the process Bystander posits intriguing questions about the nature of the archive, narrative, technology (perhaps including the former two but extending to the institution, interaction, photography), and affect.

The project is multilayered game employing the ‘This is not a game ‘ gambit to evoke a rich immersive game space that allowed the national broadcaster to develop a new intimate relationship with its viewers -’reaching audiences that have left the Sofa for the Keyboard’. The Truth About Marika was based on a traditional TV Drama. Before the premier of the television show a women made the public claim that SVT has stolen the story of her missing friend for the Drama Series and was part of a cover up. Her blog became the online section of the game space as viewers/participants looked for collected and shared clues to the missing girls story which were planted in the Drama Series and in Virtual and Actual worlds – the third plane of the game space. Talk Shows were staged including the shows producers, their accuser, and other protagonists.  Printed QR codes were posted in locations for discovery via mobiles. Geospatial information was gleaned via google mappings of clues.

The project might be seen as model for creating television media, broadcast media, and perhaps narrative media more  generally that is event driven and therefore makes good use of the relative difference that broadcast media displays in relation to network based content delivery platforms.

This might be related to the more simple and serendipitous rise of twitter as a backchannel for television. The real-time qualities of twitter and broadcast media appear particularly well aligned -each adding another dimension to the other.

The project is has so far included projects such as a water conservation systems, and a heightening of the ‘foreignness’ of the house as it becomes increasingly sustainable. Artworks are proposed that become indicators to measure and  increase awareness of the developing sustainability of the house – the aim is to build a house that signals its own use in ‘ magical’ as well as useful ways.

The most notable outcome of the project is perhaps ‘The Game Creator’ development and control platform for pervasive gaming which then became ‘the Creator’. That package was used by SVT and mixed media production company The Company P to produce the Truth About Marika – a participative narrative based on a multiplatform multilayered game space including a television drama, web based media, physical and virtual worlds. The game provided for large scale collaboration and interaction by the public. The Project also developed pervasive game models for mobile phones in conjunction with Nokia and a wide range of other models for pervasive, ambient, locative, ubiquitous gaming and interaction.

Examples show a CNC Lathe/Router and an XY Plotter. This is  rather more community driven attempt at low level Open Source Hardware design that is nonetheless capable of sophisticated outcomes.

STARS  is a web app that brings together a number of ‘semantic web’ tools and interesting audio visual datasets in order to benchtest the potential for developing an open ended space for annotating audio visual material. That said the assets STARs is capable of working with extend well beyond the audio visual.

While STARS seems particularly well suited and uniquely capable for the collaborative annotation of rich media – the possibilites it presents extend well beyond this single facility. The real value of STARS lies in the model it presents for collaboratively mapping and actively developing a dynamic space of richly connected and widely varied assets – rich media, institutions, people, concepts, projects, events, text, taxonomies and folksonomies (annotations).

STARS allows a user to search any of the prescribed datasets via keyword or specified filter. It returns results identified by a neat icon key that identifies them by those varied asset types. The search provides a brief description, an option to reveal an detail description and semantic components, and an option to open a ‘mapping’ of the item.

Opening the map reveals a visualisation of the items semantic connections in a number of varied diagrams (linear, cubic, distrubuted). In each case the map provides an interesting description of the relation between associated asset types. The most obvious example might be a map centered on an institution that has a number of people attached – has links to other institutions through projects –  etc. These maps all open onto semantic descriptions which can be further annotated. I imagine these maps getting much more interesting when video annotations start mapping memes or technical qualities throughout a dataset. The great thing about STARs is that it has kept the annotations, assets and so on on the same level as assets of the order of institution and people. A completely flat ontology like this is incredibly powerful – infinitely generative – because it refrains from prescribing a hierarchy or limit the way things, bodies, concepts, assemblages potentially interact – In fact these very interactions become assets in the database – no longer ‘meta’ – they’ve become differential.

For instance with a system like this it becomes plausible that you might  realise oblique connections between otherwise disparate researchers via the way their varied taxonomies are applied in a set of like media annotations.

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.

Global Minds Project – Global Mind Project is a unique creative venture combining new media art, neuroscience and computer technology. The project was conceived by Karen Casey and undertaken in partnership with software designer Harry Sokol. Together they have developed a means of generating real time video art from brainwaves.
The Melbourne launch of the Global Mind project represents the first stage of an online artistic forum that will creatively engage people through public interaction and collaboration.

Hellyer’s Wireless House project aims to reclaim, or rather ‘resound’ the structure. In the process the Wireless House project reclaims the potential for sound to produce a communal space within the park as public space. There is an intriguing differential evoked here  between the communal and the public.

The installation reacts to people who approach the structure calling on a substantial archive of audio, in part contributed by the National Sound and Music Archives and supplemented by an open call for local citizens to record their own recollections of Glebe’s past. This audio recollections are played back at a level that invites engagement without disturbing the park.

In an interesting twist the Wireless House becomes more than simply a memorial to a media passed. Equipped with an Unwired wireless internet node the site also becomes Sydney’s first (official) free outdoor hotspot. The wireless of today and the forms of sociality, communality, interaction into which it folds begs comparison to yesterdays community gathered around the radio transmitter.

The Wireless House project is supported by the City of Sydney Council and Unwired.

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.

In February 2006, one of Gapminder’s founders Hans Rosling gave a TED talk that demonstrated the most effective aspect of Gapminder’s data visualisation, that is, how data changes over time. In a graph that displayed UN statistics of the number of children per family juxtaposed with life expectancy for a number of countries, Rosling takes us through the changes from 1962 to 2003 like a sportscaster calling a horse race as countries represented by animated, colour-coded dots that grow and shrink as they move across the axes.

The Gapminder site offers both static and dynamic materials in the form of PDFs and clickable flash presentations/applications, but the main draw is Gapminder World, where you can create your own animated data-visualisation by investigating whichever countries and using whatever parameters that interest you.

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.

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.”

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/

As the user goes about their day, the bio sensors capture real-time information on their physical states, including pulse, movement, skin temperature and galvanic skin response. At the end of the day, when the user syncs the collection devices to the tablet, the software interprets the bio data and represents the user’s emotional and physical states as colourful body shapes in positions ranging from fully reclined to upright. The colour of the shapes represent emotional states, with blue for the calm/rested end of the scale, red for the other aroused/agitated extreme, and gradations of purple for the states in between. Whether the shapes are more horizontal or vertical indicates that the user is moving around a lot or a little, respectively. Text messages that the user has received throughout the day, and photos they have taken are also uploaded to the diary from their mobile phone. All this bio and social data is then overlaid on a timeline of the user’s day.

The user can then navigate their diary by scrolling through this timeline and looking at sections of their day and the data associated with it. Photos they have taken are displayed in stacks according to their timestamp, and circular symbols that represent text messages received can be clicked on to reveal their contents. The user also has the ability to write or draw on these sections – perhaps notes on where they were, who they were talking to – adding another layer of narrative.

High-res screen captures can be viewed here and there is a video with more information on how to use the system here.

Affective Diary was developed in the Interaction Lab at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) in cooperation with Microsoft Research. Participants in the project are: Kristina Höök, Martin Svensson, Anna Ståhl, Petra Sundström and Jarmo Laaksolathi, SICS, Marco Combetto, Alex Taylor and Richard Harper.

Given the simplicity via which the service facilitates a bridging of physical and virtual worlds, Pachube has been employed by users in a number of versatile practical and social scenarios world wide, indicating that its potential is virtually endless. Examples range from consumers who connect their home electricity meter to their iPhone in order to calculate their carbon footprint in real-time, or property developers who connect together several buildings to allocate resources and monitor energy consumption, to interaction, graphics, wearables and games designers who wish to infuse their creations with the intelligence of being able to network and foster communities of people who enter/view/wear/play them.

The development and maintenance of Pachube is currently a main focus of British interactive design/architecture centre Haque Design + Research.

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

Based in Montreal, Quebec the Foundation funds a variety of projects by artists and researchers from around the world including art projects and investigative residencies that explore the nexus between art, science and technology. Recent projects included Ælab’s DATA (2004) , a collaboration that explored the representation of the micro and nanometric imagery with the Lennox Lab in the Department of Chemistry at McGill University; and Judith Barry’s 3-D video work Not reconciled: Cairo Stories (2006).

Central to the foundation’s investigation of the aesthetics of our technological environment is the Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D), a media collection devoted to trends and practices in electronic and media arts from the sixties to the present day. The growing collection is an invaluable resource for researchers interested in the history of new media and theory surrounding its documentation. The collection’s web site is an integral part of the Centre’s strategy: In Digital Preservation: Recording the Recoding – The Documentary Strategy, CR+D’s Director Alain Depocas writes “To make accessible – and to access – is to preserve.”

Since 2002, CR + D has funded innovative residencies for curators, artists and researchers interested in engaging with the media collection and investigating the special challenges inherent in preserving and documenting new media. Recent residents have included Australian-based curator Lizzie Muller, Variable Media Network curators Caitlin Jones and Paul Kuranko and, in conjunction with OBORO’s MediaLab , Uraguayan artist Juliana Rosales.

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.

The Digital Artists Handbook is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art.

The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies.

When discussing software, the focus of this Handbook is on Free/Libre Open Source Software. The Handbook aims to give artists information about the available tools but also about the practicalities related to Free Software and Open Content, such as collaborative development and licenses. All this to facilitate exchange between artists, to take away some of the fears when it comes to open content licenses, sharing code, and to give a perspective on various ways of working and collaborating.

download the Digital Artists Handbook pdf.

Cymatics, the study of ‘wave phenomena’, or sound vibrations and their harmonically resonant properties in matter is an area of scientific research which has enjoyed a few brief and spasmodic periods of interest, but often with quasi-scientific and quasi-mystical and spiritual leanings. Whether or not one wants to pursue the relationship of wave phenomena to crop circles, cosmic music, theology and spirituality healing powers, etc etc, the fact remains that cymatics presents a very concrete example of the inextricably material and embodied relationship between the sonic and the visual, between audio and video and the ability of sound to affect and even form physical structures. For this reason it is a very interesting phenomena / research area from the point of view of cross-signal processing, synaethesia and data-visualisation techniques in art and new media. Indeed Robin Fox’s Oscilloscope works and Carsten Nicolai’s audiovisual works with milk employ this very technique of emergent harmonic patterns formed in matter by excitation by sonic vibration.

Cymatics, the study of wave phenomena, is a science pioneered by Swiss medical doctor and natural scientist, Hans Jenny (1904-1972). For 14 years he conducted experiments animating inert powders, pastes, and liquids into life-like, flowing forms, which mirrored patterns found throughout nature, art and architecture. What’s more, all of these patterns were created using simple sine wave vibrations (pure tones) within the audible range. So what you see is a physical representation of vibration, or how sound manifests into form through the medium of various materials. (cymaticsource.com)

Also interesting from a research point of view is this article published in 1982 which sets out to explore the dynamic relationships between sound waves, matter, visual patterns of cymatics in terms of their potential for audiovisual ‘interactive and new media’ environments:

“One of my guiding principles is to create a total sonic and visual music based on archetypal dynamic structures that transcend the cultural deformations of perception. Archetypal dynamic structures result from timeless natural processes that involve the patterns, relationship, interaction and transformations of energy. One such example is the solar system as we refer to it in the planetary, international, social and atomic contexts. Magnetic polarity is another example of a natural energy field. Another is the structure of weather patterns, a model which I have used for the composition of a number of my own interactive environments.

I am sensing on the horizon a truly new field of composition, a field being fostered by the emerging instruments of the electronic arts of sound and light – computers, synthesizers, laser graphics systems, holography and videographics systems. This new field of composition is based on creating totally integrated, nontrivial sound/light compositions from a complex multidimensionally organised wave set – a wave set that will simultaneously speak to the ear and signal to the eye with the life force.”

Cymatic Music: Towards a Metatheory of Harmonic Phenomena: My Interactive Compositions and Environments
# Ronald A. Pellegrino
# Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 120-123

Looking into the author’s history of work, one might have expected his work to have moved further into more current ‘new media’ practices, but there seems to be a recurring theme of limited scope with the study of Cymatics. It appears to be mostly unable to escape the novel other than by way of reference to the mystical – perhaps the relationship between the frequencies and the patterns thus formed are too directly correlative, perhaps surprisingly not dynamic enough in their ability to connect with, and generate new, fields of potential? Perhaps they are too easily captured by a popular cultural pockets of desire for a contemporary quasi-scientific mysticism? I wonder why though, surely there is more to be done here with the relationship between energy waves, sonic and visual patterns and the physicality of matter and bodies themselves?

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/

Screenshot from ‘Assemblage for Collective Thought’ VJ and networked remix project. Performed at International Symposium for Electronic Arts and ZeroOne, San Jose, USA, August 12 2006.

Dynamic Media: Innovative Social and Artistic Development in New Media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990 is an international, ARC funded project that provides information for Australians to more extensively implement dynamic media within a social context. Based at the Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, the project is a collaboration between Anna Munster (CoFA/CCAP), Andrew Murphie (Media, Film & Theatre, UNSW), Brian Massumi (University of Montreal) and Adrian MacKenzie (Lancaster University).The project focuses on the international strategies for social use of dynamic media, and will form the basis of an online database that will profile and be accessible to Australian artists, arts organisations, new media researchers and social innovators. This study highlights the innovation of Australian artists and researchers in the development of dynamic media and positions these internationally.

Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics, College of Fine Arts, UNSW

DataCloud2 is ‘information space containing a vast collection of media-objects’ with their own characteristics, reviewed as metatags. It’s specifically built for idiosyncratic collecting of different media elements, and for the support of community.

I’m hoping to interview Sher later this week.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about publishing as a crucial component of dynamic media – and also as a register of a changes in practices and concepts involving dynamic media. I’ve blogged elsewhere about some of this, and responded to Nat Muller and Alessandro’s interesting introductions to the issues, and there’s some good material on the European LabforCulture site (another discovery courtesy of Documenta12).

Something that I found very interesting however, towards the last third of the podcast “How to Survive the Paper Industry”, which can be downloaded from here, was Simon Worthington of MetaMute‘s detailed discussion of Open Source publishing, print on demand, a complete use of open source applications for everything involved with publication, including for example graphic design, and networked distribution. MetaMute’s initiative in all these areas is OpenMute – interesting also when we consider developing our own form of publishing for this project.

General changes in forms of publishing are occurring across a lot of registers – online and offline, publishing as increasingly cross or inter-media, the different social and commercial arrangements implied (from the problems of the music industry – in which it is now clear that new forms of publishing and distribution, music industry woes aside, have led to a massive increase in diversity of music, and a new health to the live music scene – to the massive transformations now making the print/pixel publishing side of things very interesting). They also arguably make not only for new social forms, but for a new kind of social (so are crucial to consider both in terms of social and artistic innovation). So we need to think about publishing increasingly – especially as more things, processes and events become publishable – imagine open source publishable VR environments and elements, or the publishing of genetic elements … or just of new technics – this is my new saying – “clone and publish your technics for social innnovation”.

To some extent the Dynamic Media project is a collaborative/cooperative publishing project.

There are very many relevant links in the curatorial section of Cont3xt worth looking out for their approach to databases, collections, and etc.

Moral problems are mere technological problems to be solved: this is the theology of Google. We should not doubt but just believe…
All social and cultural theory starts with theology – postmodern and post structuralist theory tries to resist the universal of theology

principle of Google is that it copies everything – this is what a search engine does in order to index. But what Google book search is doing is reaching outside the web into the ‘old world’ of copyright and saying the old world must become like the web.

Google surveillance in data-mining consumer profiling etc is completely different from the panopticon. Discipline comes from being aware of surveillance. Web surveillance is distributed and we are not aware of the level of activity…exact opposite of the panopticon…we are encouraged to do what we want online, to misbehave because the corporation wants the ‘real’ you in order to better profile you…

Tiziana Terranova Everything is everything: Network science, neo-liberalism and security
Foucault’s lectures on market and security as part of a society of control. Marxist perspectives, according to Foucault, tend to think about capitalism from the inside – ie how does it function. We need to get outside of this to get outside of capitalism. Rtaher its better to look at the sigularity of moments of organisation of capital.

Neoliberals – the market is not natural but a game, or rather a thing that needs to be produced and extended to as many fields of the social as possible.
The panopticon fades and this is replaced by the mechanism of security. Security is linked to the problem of the series – events keep happening, a series of users clicking, a series of blogs, a series of downloads. Security addresses itself to this.
perhaps many of the web maps we have are ways of spatially representing this series of events. (However, the series is uneven and discontinuous in actuality…)

Key to Web 2.0 -’harness’ users’ collective intelligence…for O’Reilly. (power of cumulative series of events, uploading, downloading, commenting etc).

What kind of market then is this? for Lazzarato – market is a dispositif for construction and capture of the customer. Net economy directly mobilises social relations for the market. What are these social relations – perpetual state of movement between multiplicities of passwords, ids etc.

Liberal versions of explaining network economies try to explain social relations in terms of economic rationale – e.g. we participate in the web because we invest time and we expect a return (Benchler Wealth of Networks)
Whereas for Lazzarato – participation is a social relationship a process of capturing and being captured.

Wendy Chun Imagined Networks
OED -network as diagram – network as representation goes to network as reality. These move backwards and forwards and hence the notion of the network as diagram is oxymoronic. Yes maybe, but what a powerful oxymoron…

Mapping is part of a web drive that tries to map the net into a more intimate space…this returns us to the ARPANET mapping techniques.

Best way to represent a network is to reject the global – we need to try to imagine how technologies and social interactions are engaged together.

temporality of networks is the ephemeral enduring – the undead of information. Blog entries are uninteresting because they are immobile – ie constant updating – empty homogeneous time.

In some ways it provides a good example of how to do this kind of collaborative research in a formal setting (with lots of projects, lots of participants, and lots of publications, although I know it also had lots of funding!).

Projects involved included the internet and democracy, changes to journalism, new publics, the media in everyday life, and an interesting project on new media in public service. These projects are reflecting the much more extensive and focussed integration of new media in public life in Scandinavia. The project publications are full of quite specific investigations of how this is all working in Denmark at the moment – and since there is so much happening in Denmark in the public sphere which none of believe is even possible in many places, this is very interesting material.

http://www.interfacesmontreal.org/english/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=70&Itemid=193#self

There are abstracts in English.

This is perhaps a great example of visualizing a social creative network, although I was surprised to find the ‘dialogue’ of the sampling community mostly flowing one way….of course this visualization probably doesn’t recognize where the ‘sampled’ is ‘sampled’ so a sample of ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ ends up being attributed to James Brown’s ‘In the Jungle Groove’ – there is something interesting being ignored about the folding of histories here I think. Nice graph though. Along with the Fridg’t interface this is the second impressive dynamic graphic work I’ve seen using Processing. I have seen high end VJ visualizations built in Processing but not many instances where Processing appears as an open source substitute for the proprietary Adobe Flash.

Point History Flow to any directory with a number of document interactions and it will recognize the similarities between iterations and represent the continuities with a solid block of colour along a temporal axis. As the particular block of text are retained across iterations, as the text ‘ages’ those blocks fade to a darker shade. New text is bright and perturbations with a block of text are represented by gaps in the blocks and ‘fades’. History Flow has been substantially updated since I originally looked at it for the Assemblage of Collective Thought and its ability to parse a variety of text directories is much more seamless than the earlier Windows only application. As a Java application with OSX, Linux, and Windows installer History Flow is now available for all major platforms. History flow amiably represents the collaborative development of a large scale text based project – most notably Wikipedia entries. According to my particular bent I found the most interesting aspect of History Flow was its ability to act as a means of navigating the temporal development of document. History flow allows you to navigate the document by running the mouse over particular areas of the ‘graph along me to move down threw the document or ‘back’ through the documents development so I can easily navigated to a relegated portion of the document. Once again I’m more interested in the promise that this provides not just for analysis but for visualizing the document as non-linear and bifurcating and for providing the means of navigating these bifurcations. History promises such a means of navigating the network even if this implementation remains tied to a single thread and the two dimensionality of the representation would require a drastic redesign to facilitate a vision of the network that I have argued as missing in my previous post on the Visual Communication Lab’s work. That is to say that history flow allows us to see and to navigate the temporal dynamic of an incessantly emerging document and potentially a network in contra-distinction to the visuality of the network that knows no temporality, whose past is either replaced, or whose ‘pasts’ and ‘futures’ are forever superimposed in layers that obfuscate that temporality.

One of the most interesting revelations of VCL’s work applying this method to Wikipedia histories is that they find much work is done categorizing alphabetically ordered task lists which visualize as rainbow-like transitions through the spectrum. The VCL authors note a kind of cascading effect in that alphabetical searches fold into the generation of task-lists that Wikipedia administrators then work through. It should perhaps be noted that all of VCL’s work on visualizing Wikipedia is based on a specific subset of wikipedia users. They frame their analysis by only looking to the activity of administrators who tend top work systematically or according to a particular preferred task; say grammatical editing, spell checking or formatting. These users also stick steadfastly to standardized syntax in labelling (meta-tagging) these tasks making the chromogram visualization method particularly effective. By ‘task’ patterns I refer to a visualization pattern that indicates such a particular administrative activity. The recognition of these spectral patterns leads the authors to suggest that perhaps entries that begin with earlier letters of the alphabet draw an ‘unnaturally’ high rate of activity. In most case however the shifting hues simply mark a boundary/difference between disparate forms of revision and for this reason they are effective in illustrating patterns of usage in administration. For instance an administrator that concerns themselves with revisions in a reactive sense will be identified in the chromogram method of visualization as consistently following every other edit. Chromogram is interesting in its ability to provide a visual representation of habits of use encouraged by Wikipedia’s interface and the interactions that this interface encourages in production of a mode of collaboration. The method apparently arbitrary association of colours with the first letters of a field does well to represent the iterative dynamic that has characterized the development of a particular document – it re-invests the copy with a history of development derived from a social/collaborative perspective that focusses on the interactions of users.

Description:

Walk2web is a link visualizer that draws a rather rudimentary link diagram dynamically as the user navigates (clicks on) an original node that is a user submitted URL. The intent of the site is to provide a diagrammatic means of traversing the web.

The link diagram does provide the advantage of providing an instantaneous view of the variety of different paths that branch of a particular node. The interface also includes a miniature site viewing window that displays a fully functional preview of the node.site that the user points to while navigating the map. In this window we have options to mark the site as ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ and to bookmark the site privately or publicly. The map window also provides a means of ‘flagging’ a ‘location’ by placing a little green flag on your map.

The site is fairly impressive in terms of design with the links maps drawn beautifully in flash and ably representing the network as far as the usual 2 dimensional schema allows. The map gradually reveals the ‘next step’ as the user navigates from one node to the next providing for the impression of walking through the web ‘landscape’. Unfortunately this is as much positive spin I can give for an interface and visualization that offers little in the way of expanding on the browser experience except in its ability to trace paths and thus remember the paths not yet explored. I suppose this might be understood as given the user a means of more completely exploring particular link arrays although the ‘specificity’ of the mapping undermines this utility.

The like/dislike categories do not alter the weighting of links – they appear only to publicly flag the fact that I have ‘ranked’ the site. This appears to have neglected a golden opportunity to provide the link map with a certain temporal dynamic as recent posts would generate more recent traffic allowing a design that incorporates a vision of a web currently emerging and an old web receding into the background. Here however the old links are as fresh as the new which means the overall experience is less than satisfactory. The other problem confounding this site is that it appears only/mostly concerned with mapping the domain name level. This means that the site suffers terribly from the movement to at once a more centralized, proprietary and temporally dynamic web. Today’s web is characterized by large domains with much activity ocuring within the directory structure of these domains. This is as much at the level of the individual blog level as it is at the ‘myspace’ scale. At the blog level a single domain carries what we could call a dynamic series, or perhaps more evocatively a ‘stream’, of posts that the domain merely represents as a location. At the ‘myspace’ level the Domain loses all specificity and thus navigational value because of the mass of streams of data the occur under that domain. As i have argued elsewhere this temporal dimension of the web has fundamentally altered its topology making the old metaphor largely redundant – this is no longer a web but an oceanic system of data flows, currents, and eddies. Walk2Web’s method exemplifies this shift as its focus on the domain rarely produces a usefully indication of page level ‘link flows’ and this means that we tend to end up wandering (within one or two steps) into large domains with no specificity (myspace, livetype, blogger, wordpress). These large domains then open rather randomly onto sites under that domain. Systems like Walk2Web need new ways of mapping or rather signifying/presenting these flows and for feeding back into the modulation or agitation of these flows in the service of realizing new potential. As I said the like/dislike or maybe integrating and visualizing traffic flows is a way of achieving this. The last.fm model uses a(n aural) version of both like/dislike and traffic measurement to provide for, and encourage, such emergent dynamism.

Why is this of interest: Improvisation and Mediation in contemporary dance – suggested by Andrew.

A dance company based in Melbourne founded by dancers and choreographers Gideon Obarzanek and Garry Stewart in 1995 (www.australiandancing.org – collaboration not credited on chunky move website).Chunky Moves is listed as the official contemporary dance company of Victoria. The work of the company includes interactive systems (Glow 2006), works inspired by themes of technical and architectural mediation (Singularity 2006, Infinite Temporal Series 2005), empathy and sociality (Infinite Temporal Series 2005, Singularity 2006, I Want To Dance Better at Parties 2004, Ballet for Contemporary Democracy 2002). The common element running through these works is an interest in technical/social/abstract/empathic transduction. Glow uses a recursion between body and a projection that tracks an imposes its output on the body of the dancer (techno-recursive transduction). Singularity is inspired by Bill Viola’s video installation The Passions and reproduces the effect of of that work in magnifying the kinetics of expressed emotion by using slow motion video – here the reproduction is danced and made more intense by the increased empathy the viewer feeel for a dancer caught in a short loop of intensity. Infinite Temporal Series 2005 is a remediation of Borges The Garden Of Forking Pathways that uses architectural elements to play between intimacy and mediation, singular and multiple, and to make manifest incompossible paths of intense singularity. I Want To Dance Better at Parties uses documentary as its starting point providing a means of exploring ‘the australian male’s’ relationship to dance and body through the differential of a professional dancer. Ballet for Contemporary Democracy uses survey data to explore demography and democracy and the difference between the mass, the multiple, and the singular while having a humorous dig at bureaucracy and statistical mediation. According the Closer web documentary (2002) that work takes its lead form Gary Hall’s new media installation Tall Ships and Viola’s Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (1982) playing with empathy and technical mediation/reproducibility. Of particular interest here is the use of technology capable of tracking the movement of Dancers and altering projection media based on the bodies movement (Glow 2006 with Freider Weiss – more on Glow and his EyeCon system for video tracking in other posts). The company also produces ‘web documentaries’ that are really just documentations of the performance although the final of these is perhaps moving toward and extension of the performance. It uses ‘scopitones’ a kind of ‘visual jukebox’ to allow a ‘non linear’ experience of the works themes. These are broken down into video’s of scenes, characters, tools, and interviews with the artists about meaning and content – a good example of documenting a work….

URL: www.attentiontrust.org

Why this is of Interest:

Attention Trust is really a system of accreditation coupled with a browser extension. The intent of the group responsible is based on the notion that Web2.0, or what we should probably just call ‘the web now’, is based on an attention economy. This is different to the attention economy spoken about in broadcast realms in which the attention of the viewer/user is ascribed an economy of inverse supply and demand (The producer demands, the user/viewer supplies). Here we are talking about the actual intellectual property produced by our movements through media. This data, according to the Attention Trust ‘increasingly represents how we browse, what we say, what we read’ and that we should be able to control the data that we produce. I would argue that the attribution of intellectual capital of production here is not so black and white and neither is the question of ownership but I’ll leave that point for a more relevant stage. The attention trust preaches four key principles; property, mobility, economy, transparency. The group ‘accredits’ various attention ‘databanks’ which it then allows end-users to log their web movements to via a browser plug-in. The group is pushing for the adoption of standards that will allow a user to transport the data produced by their interactions online, to move between proprietors, to ‘own’ the data that their attention produces, and to ensure that data is adequately protected.

The notion of ownership and authorship in relational database ecologies is a critical one as databases increasingly become both centralized under proprietary systems and inculcated in the activity, industry, and memory of individual and collective life. Generative systems such as last.fm, Digg, StumbleUpon thrive on an attention economy but they also provide the generative ecology that produces attention – and effectively provides momentum to thought.

This might be of marginal relevance, but its worth considering why MySpace prospered over the greater blogosphere, why YouTube obliterated a ‘thriving’ videoblogging community or a project like ‘mefeedia’. There is currently a fair amount of talk about the possibility of open source models of these commercial spaces but the fact is that in each case there existed ‘open’ or ‘distributed’ versions of the above that failed to provide the kind of uniform communality that is provided by the proprietary versions and which was motivated by the valuation of the attention they provided.

url: thefileroom.org

artist: Muntadas

year: 1994- Present.

Why is this of Interest:

A good example of a simple database the aim of which was/is to ‘generate’ rather than simply archive. The DB provides a framework for documenting the effects of censorship and providing a kind of cultural memory and memorial of what was censored. It was originally populated by the artists who researched and documented acts of censorship from the BC to 1994. Four hundred instances were logged before the DB was opened to contributions through a web interface. The artists openly describe the project as foremost a piece of art rather than an attempt to thoroughly document censorship and the subjectivity and multiplicity of the entries is emphasized as the key aspect of the work. The aim is to plumb the resonant virtualities that censorship denies and that a remembering post-censorship reinvigorates partly because its loses specificity in the censorial act.

From a pragmatic point of view I was interested in the longevity of this project. I half expected to find the amount of entries dwindling after the projects initial exhibition but user contributions saw the work survive and continue to act as a kind of virtualizing mirror that folds censorship back on itself. Searching for post 2001 entries provides many returns – perhaps an indication that in the post 2001 political landscape the project finds a new resonance.

URL: www.aswarmofangels.com

location: UK

A ‘collaborative’ film project based on three phases the first of which is amassing 1000 subscribers at 25 Pound a head to fund an open source film project. The project is headed by Matt Hanson, a self professed ‘cinema futurist’ who wrote the book ‘End of Celluloid’. The project is based around the idea that subscribers paying 25 pound a head are then entitled to contribute to the projects management and production.

Details regarding exactly how this will occur (particularly in terms of production) are a hard to come by perhaps subscribers are privy to greater detail. It strikes me that this is simply a creative way to finance a film project.Hanson remains very much the ‘producer’ of the ‘film’. The funding phase of this project precedes the creative phase. The 2 possible synopses currently under development via a wiki that is open to subscribers – were presented initially by Hanson. It looks as though Hanson will take the position of Auteur or at least executive producer and despite the pretense to ‘open source’ content this should not be taken to mean the development is necessarily ‘open’. The whole notion of charging potential collaborators appears more than a little suspect particularly considering Hanson appears to assume a large degree of control over the projects development. On some investigation there is reference to a forum in which ‘creative decisions’ are made ‘democratically’ – what form this takes or the process that is involved is not made clear on the site.

From a structural/collaborative aspect the notion of digital cinema explored here is heavy on the ‘cinema’ and light on both the digital and the networked. The project is developing two scripts for production both of which are of a traditional ‘thriller with soft sci-fi elements’ mould/genre and which both confrom to cinematic and narrative expectations of form and the standards of the medium and industry. The potential for a truly distributed ‘cinema’ of the kind explored by the video-blogging community that existed prior to Youtube’s absolute redrafting of video online; serial, multilinear,conversational and distributed, is ignored for a model that conforms to traditional modes of cinematic production, form ,funding by simply porting them to the wisdom of the masses and the will of a ‘benevolent dictator’. There is currently no clear collaborative infrastructure for the production – no clear description of the way media or production will be distributed. None of this precludes the project of value – it is what it is – a distributed model for producing cinema (the angel designs are very pretty). We should note however that this is probably a long way from what cinema will look like in the ‘future’ and what it already does look like online……to that end we should perhaps look to Youtube…and perhaps despair a little at the same time.

URL: www.ubuweb.com

Why this is of Interest:

A truly amazing example of what the web enables in terms of open access to media. Ubuweb is developed without regard for anything other than the operators desire to collect this material and make it available where else it would simply disappear or be invisible to the network. Ubuweb has become an unprecedented archive of the Avante Garde and and experimental media arts. With all the talk of database design and interface design this is perhaps a refreshing reminder that perhaps the most pragmatic archives are the least organized, that is they don’t necessarily impose a schema or taxonomy on the user. It is like there is no ‘user’ here – no attempt to organize the experience of the user.

From the site;

UbuWeb has no need for money, funding or backers. Our web space is provided by an alliance of interests sympathetic to our vision. Donors with an excess of bandwidth contribute to our cause. All labour and editorial work is voluntary; no money changes hands. Totally independent from institutional support, UbuWeb is free from academic bureaucracy and its attendant infighting, which often results in compromised solutions; we have no one to please but ourselves.

UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos.

Sounds like a marginal situation? Hardly. We’ve won many prestigious internet awards and are acknowledged web-wide as the definitive source for Visual, Concrete + Sound Poetry. UbuWeb is on the syllabus of countless schools; we’ve gotten queries from Ph.D. candidates seeking information to third-graders researching a paper on concrete poetry. UbuWeb embodies an unstable community, neither vertical nor horizontal but rather a Deleuzian nomadic model: a 4-dimensional space simultaneously expanding and contracting in every direction, growing “rhizomatically” with ever-increasing unpredictability and uncanniness.

Description/My comments:

Ubuweb is one those net destinations/applications/sites that has the propensity to induce a feeling akin to vertigo. There is so much media here of historical importance, in terms of art practice and critical thinking, that one could spend a life just moving from one incredible find to the next; from Barthes’ inaugural lecture at the College de France, to Debord’s film’s including Society of the Spectacle, to Beckett directing Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Krapp’s Last Tapes. There is increasingly a lot of contemporary work here as well and there is no real attempt to mark one from the other. While Ubuweb started as a repository for recordings concrete poetry it has now developed to include massive quantities of Avant Garde composition and sound design (from Varese to Cage to Derek Bailey to Paul Miller), a papers section, and a film section which includes readings, lectures, films, video without so much as a category other than the most general (film,sound, papers) to organize them.

If this interface is nearly as effective and perhaps more interesting than the highly mediated previous example for the Danial Langlois foundation its worth working out why. Firstly, I can explore openly without any impediment bar the density of list of names. Secondly, there is no arbitrary categorization that places walls between types of data. This means that Beckett’s plays stand alongside Debord’s films which stand alongside Irene Moon’s super8 films. The provision of a simple search function allows the user to easily search for things I am looking for. The site is completely non-proprietary and offer the user the opportunity to download large uncompressed versions of most of the material while also allowing the user to access the content as embedded video/audio within the browser. As it discusses in the exert included above the operators care little for copyright permissions and operate on the premise that the content is being published for educational and research purposes and that copyright holders need only ask and content will be removed. The lack of institutional influence is also a kind of defense against the restrictions of a preconceived utility: the ubuweb media is ‘just there’ and this, in the parlance of Murphie and Munster ‘conserves virtuality’. That said, conserving virtuality, is different from ‘harnessing virtualization’. Without imposing my own theoretical stand point on this post (Yeah -Right!) I simply mean to say that such an open and unrestricted archive is a terrific place to start. I wish that there were more ways to map out our travails as users discovering and relating new pockets of the Ubu archive and to remember them both to ourselves in a developing ‘consciousness’ of the media we experience and with others as a means of discovery and explication. Ubuweb needs a layer of interaction that won’t organize the users experience for them but rather allow their experience to generate layers of potential interaction for themselves and for other users.

URL: ccMixter.org

Category: Remix, Music, Production, Database, Social_Media, Creative_Commons

Location: US
Description: ccMixter is a site for remixers, collaborators and sound folk of all shapes and sizes to find, download and upload remix and remixed material. The Site requires you to sign up with a free account and then you have access to a great deal of samples from both big name artists (DJ Vadim, Chuck D, Matmos) and rank amateurs. All sound on the site is licensed under the creative commons license chosen by the artist. Most represented artists use an attribution non-commercial or similar and that is a pattern that seems to follow through to the more amateur contributors. The site is based around a registered user profile that allows you to develop playlists of songs that show remixing promise. It has a very good streaming function that allows auditioning of tracks and many of the shared sounds are broken down and archived for shipping and easy importation and selection. ccMixter uses a tag based system (user configurable) for organization but has no ‘social’ media aspect other than a vibrant commenting and review section – that is to say its not primarily a relational system and really lacks the golden opportunity to create collaborations online between groups of user.

This is a good site for what its worth but not quite dynamic enough for these ears…

I’ll return to this later

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.