Continuing on from my previous post on the usefulness of looking at Flash based models as interesting precursors to Web2.0; basically I wrote that Flash toys are of particular interest when considering the dynamics of net visuality and the interaction of dynamic and mobile forms of networked media and the generative potential of networks.
I got rather carried away with that last post so I will try and stay somewhat concise…and root out the ‘somewhats’ and the meta-commentary and the meta-commentary and the meta-commentary…
My next example was perhaps the most over cited of its day so I’ll suffer the collective maon as I trot it out once again. If nothing else returning to this example demands a return to investigate exactly what Amy Franceschini et al. are up to. The links here have relevance to the Dynamic Media project on a number of levels; database design, network visuality, collaborative frameworks, institutions, dynamic media, and last but definitely not least the potential for collaborative workshopping and practice-led research.
For those that were living on the moon in the early part of this decade Amy Franceschini founded the Futurefarmers collective. The Futurefarmers moniker always promised more than simply a commercial Design Studio and although commercial design, particularly in the first half of the decade, underwrote the collaboration it by no-means defined it. The collective would eventually become celebrated in new media circles for their very effective melding of dynamic and open databases with a dynamic/creative interface that allowed the end-users to engage in a collaborative exploration of the network. The generative potential facilitated by a playful interaction is perhaps the most dominant schema of the work Futurefarmers work both now and in the past.
TheyRule.net (2001 ) is the most prominent of these experiments and was a very early example of the potential for a dynamic flash interface to visualize a network in a manner that let the user tease out relationships in the data, to tease out interesting vectors and relationships in the data-set, to link this vectors and relationships to information both submitted by the user and linked to as external search queries. All this investigation on behalf of the user and there particular interests and perhaps ‘affordances’ could then be save as part of an emerging map of the relationships between the directorships of large companies and there donations to major political organizations and lobbys.
The important leap that was made with theyrule.net was an understanding that all the data concerning these relationships was readily and publicly available and that the density of the material obfuscated the potential to actively and productively explore hi-corporate cultures and their political relationships. The next most important realization of Theyrule.net was that exploration of the data set depended on a visual simplicity/clarity. The visualization should precede the exploration and facilitate it. This is an effective inversion of the usual method of mapping the data-set. Interesting relationships are usually first identified and then made concrete (abstracted from the data-set) according to the representation. Here the visualization encourages a generative interaction and exploration with the data set that throws up all kinds of unexpected relations and vectors of investigation. By allowing the user to save the products of these explorations and their subsequent representation Theyrule.net also realizes a principal quality that would fold into the development and capitalization of the AJAX driven web. Theyrule.net feeds-back the products of a user’s navigation back into the site as a vector of potential further exploration. This facility sees the map and the network fold into each other as a kind of developing and dynamic memory or intelligence.
The other Futurefarmers project that is a useful antecedent to current developments is the Communiculture site that allowed users to easily customize an avatar. The users could then pose simple bipolar surveys represented by a continuum in which other users could place there Avatar and comment via a speech bubble. I’ll not develop an analysis here but there is much to be said with regard to the way in which Communiculture reduces and simplifies the level of engagement in order to focus and provide a momentum to a generative/social engagement. Its always about facilitating a playful engagement. The move towards a simple affective mode of interaction that has an immediate pay-off in terms of the relational definition of the user in relation to a wider ‘social-network’ is interesting and can be readily mapped to the most successful models of post 05 social networking and content management systems.
The Futurefarmers collaborators are now engaged with a number of really interesting projects that attempt to account for the ambivalence of techno-cultures to their ecological costs. In some cases the ‘account’ is settled very literally – a reclamation/regeneration of sites poisoned by the effects of silicon chip production in others the aim is clearly to explore means of making the costs of the cultures present to thought. See the site for more.
Of particular interest to this research space is the blog/link roll published by Amy Franceschini; Free Soil. There are a number of relevant links here in terms of institutions working in social, educational, and intermedia media more generally. All of these links tend to have a futurefarmer’s there is an emphasis of the matrix extant between participatory cultures, networks/technology, and ecology…..
Still to come CAIDA and The Dimes Project