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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The centre includes five research groups – Scientific Visualisation, Information and Geo Visualisation, Computer Graphics and VR, Structural and Civil Engineering and Visual Learning and Communication.

It should also be note that the Centre for Medical Image Science and Visualisation is based at the university teaching hospital and works closely with both VITA and the Norrköping Visualisation Centre.

Research projects include but are not limited to: Volumetric visualisation of large datasets, Data visualisation and Augmented Reality, Haptic Interaction with Deformable Objects, Visual Analytics, Photorealistic computer graphics for virtual and augmented reality, Town Planning, Civil and Structural Design, Learning through Scientific Visualisation.

The Centre for Visual Information Technology and Applications, along with the Centre for Medical Image Science and Visualisation worked in collaboration with the Interactive Institute on The Virtual Autopsy Table project.

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.

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/)

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.

Some of here projects include:

Zoomorph (in development): Plugin filters for Imaging Software and Smartphones – simulating How Animals See. (launch 2011).

Evidence (Days Following: Difference) – A honest attempt to capture a ghost using simple image filtering. Actually about the space/time in between the sample/digit/perception.

Rosten (the Voice): Visualisation of people’s activities who visit the site in question. As with ‘Evidence’ this is concerned with the space/time inbetween people, event, that constitute the web. Commissioned by the Swedish National Public Art Council .

The ACVA’s first exhibition ‘Babelswarm‘ (2008 Nash, Dodds, Clemens), won the Australia Councils inaugural Second Life Artists in Residence aware. (See the project post for more detail on Babel Swarm.)

In 2010 the ACVA will launch ACVALab – an attempt to provide an incubator for emerging practices and practitioner while providing a collective interface for educators, curators and artists to extend and explore the development of virtual art. ACVALab started with a call for artist participants based on the central question; ‘What could a virtual art lab be if it was imagined by artists for artist?’

ACVA also plans to launch a critical journal.

ACVA Labs lists an impressive list of collaborators on the site including;

Coordinators:

Christopher Dodds – Artist and Produce founder of Icon.Inc.

Greg More – Director OOM Creative.

Adam Nash – Artist working in Digital Environments – SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Venic Biennale

Faciltators;

Dr Melinda Rackham – Adjunct Professor RMIT. Founder of – empyre – list/fourm.

Kate Richards – Artist and Lecturer in Convergent Media at UWS.

Guest Presenters:

Dr Justin Clemems: Artist, Lacanian Scholar.

Fee Plumley: ‘Techno Evangelist’ and owner of creative agency ‘the phone book limited‘ – Digital Program manager for the Australia Council for the Arts

Dr Troy Innocent: Senior Lecturer – Department Multimedia and Digital Arts, Monash University Melbourne.

Gillian Raymond:  Online Manager for the National Portrait Gallery (Canberra)

The ACVA and ACVALab projects are funded by the Australia Council for the Arts.

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.

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

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

Mobile Eco-System

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

Embodied Affective Interaction

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

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

Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing

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

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

Youtube video on Affective Diary with Kristina Hook

With a background in interaction design, focused on algorithm controlled animation, sensor driven interactive installations, web applications, broadcast applications and digital design, shiftcontrol applies a united process of design and development to its clients and users.
In 2008 Simon Løvind joined as associate partner, bringing experience from media-art, academia and game developement.

shiftcontrol has already taken on projects for Carlsberg, ZDF, Al Aan, BBC, Danish TV2, PRADA, OMA, AMO, Kontrapunkt and VW.

shiftcontrol works tightly with the team behind Unity – our preferred platform for exploring next generation interactive media, and Markus Schaefer/Hosoya Schaefer Architects – our preferred partner for exploring next generation concepts.

Watz discovered the computer at age 11 and immediately found his direction in life. At age 20 he defected from Computer Science studies to do graphics for raves, using his programming to create organic shapes in 2D and 3D. In parallel to creating his own work, Watz worked as a graphic designer for many years, probing the limits of design. In the years 2000-2002 he ran the studio Products of Play with Erik Johan Worsøe Eriksen before deciding to focus on his art practice.

In 2005 Watz started Generator.x, a platform for generative art and design which so far has resulted in a conference, a blog, a travelling exhibition and concert tour. The Generator.x conference took place at Atelier Nord in Oslo September 2005, while the Generator.x exhibition premiered at the Norwegian National Museum. The exhibition is currently touring until 2007. A concert tour of Norway with generative sound and visuals took place in April 2006, organized by the National Touring Concerts.

In 2005 Watz received an honorary mention for his project Universal Digest Machine. He had previously received a mention for Sense:less (Pendry / Mork / Stenslie / Watz) in 1996. In 2003 he premiered the public art commission Drawing Machine 1-12, a work that was shown for two years on the home page of the Norwegian Government and Ministries of State. In recent years he has created several animated works for projection on building facades such as Neon Organic, which is currently being projected on the Vattenfall headquarters in Berlin.

Watz currently lives in Berlin. His tools of choice are Java, Processing, VVVV and Flash. He continues to edit the Generator.x blog and prepare future Generator.x events, as well as teach workshops in computational design and generative art.

Marius Watz can be contacted at marius@unlekker.net

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

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

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

who owns the internet? by Ben Worthen, Bill Cheswick

Lufthansa IT infrastructure

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

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

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

An allegorical map of online communities

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

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

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

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

where’s george? mash-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Baran’s diagrams of communications systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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