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.