CCAP Research Hub

Networked_art

Anna Munster — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:10:54 +0000

Please find my submission for the Networked_art/Networked_writing project.
This includes author details and CV; followed by 3 samples of networked writing with details about these; and my proposal for a networked writing chapter.

Anna Munster
School of Art History and Art EducationCollege of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales
P.O Box 259Paddington
NSW 2026
Austraiia
A.Munster@unsw.edu.au
www.dynamicmedianetwork.org
+61293850741

Selected Publications, 2000-8

Books
Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, 2006 Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England
Book Chapters
‘Welcome to Google Earth’ forthcoming 2008, Critical Digital Studies Reader A and M Kroker eds, University of Toronto Press: Toronto,
‘Outage, Seepage, Blockage: art and cultural praxis in the network’ forthcoming 2008, Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice, D. Butt, J. Bywater and N. Paul eds, Cambridge Scholars Press, Cambridge, UK, 78–92
‘Bioaesthetics as Bioethics’ 2008, Art of the Biotech Age, M. Pandolowski ed, Experimental Art Foundation/IMA Books, Adelaide and Brisbane, Australia,14–21.
‘Media Art Zones – But Where’s the Media?’ 2006, Zones of Contact: A Critical Reader, N. Bullock and R. Keehan eds, Sydney: Artspace Visual Arts Centre 55–60
‘Digitality – approximate aesthetics’, 2004, Life in the Wires: The CTheory Reader, A. and M.L Kroker eds, Victoria Canada: New World Perspectives/CTheory Books, (15pp) 415–29
‘Returns of the Diminishing Body’, Future Bodies. Visualisierung von Körper in Science und Fiction, 2002, ML. Angerer, K. Peters and Z. Sofoulis eds, Vienna: Springer Verlag, (21pp) 143–60
‘Net Affects: responding to Shock on Internet Time’, 2001, Fibreculture: Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, H. Brown and G. Lovink, et. al. eds, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, (8pp) 9–17

Selected Shows and Work, 2000–8
2007 ‘Struck’, (with Michele Barker) 3-channel DVD installation, Level 2 Contemporary Art Projects, Art Gallery of New South Wales, February 7 – March 22
July 30–September 3, 2007, Kickarts Contemporary Arts Centre, Cairns Queensland
May 17–June 4,
‘Remapped Realities’, March 17–April 30, group show, Eyebeam Gallery, New York.
2006 ‘Struck’ (with Michele Barker) winner National Digital Art Awards, “The Harries”,dynamic category, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, May 17–June 4
December 17 –30, 2006, International Digital Art Exhibition, Beijing Film Academy, Beijing, China
‘Assemblage for Collective Thought’, invited audiovisual remix performance with Andrew Murphie, 13th Intersociety for the Electronic Arts (ISEA2006), San Jose, USA, August 13
2005 ‘The Two of Us’, (with Michele Barker) two channel video and photomedia installation, The Butterfly Effect, group show, Sydney Festival, Australian Museum, January 6-February 28
2002 ‘wunderkammer’, interactive installation Aller Anfang (The Very Beginning), group show, Austrian Museum of Ethnology, Vienna, Austria, April – October
2001 ‘wundernet’, online artwork funded by the Australian Film Commission, http://wundernet.cofa.unsw.edu.au

3 Samples of writing
1. A Pdf file of the article ‘Net Affects: responding to shock on Internet time’,2001, Fibreculture: Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, H. Brown and G. Lovink, et. al. eds, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 9–17
This can be downloaded at http://staff.cofa.unsw.edu.au/~annamunster/people/

This is an article that was published as a print piece in an anthology as its final version. However, the process of writing it took place on the online listserv ‘fibreculture’ during 2001. Regular posters posted and then the list community ‘reviewed’ and provided extensive feedback for development of the pieces into articles. It was an early example of real peer assessment of research writing in practice. The articles were then typeset and a reader was independently published. I have included the Acknowledgements section to give some idea of how the process took place.

For the next two samples please click on title of posts below

2. A post on my research blog
The Image in the Network. This piece has two comments from fellow research bloggers but also solicited a longer response by one of my fellow research bloggers Andrew Murphie
at Networks, Aesthetics and Aesthesia

3. A post on my research blog
Data Nonvisualisation which forms the background for the proposal for this piece for Networked_art.

Proposal for Networked_Art
Data undermining: the work of networked art in an age of imperceptibility

Abstract
The large quantities of data now being generated via networked communications are also being managed, regulated and interpreted into patterns that are comprehensible to humans. The management of data is undertaken by sophisticated sampling, tracking and automated techniques and the results of these are frequently sequestered to become the property of corporations and institutions such as Google or the US military. Even when data flows ‘freely’ through the net, the operations of search engines, databases, digest and feeds such as RSSs increasingly makes this manipulation of data invisible. Techniques such as aggregation smooth out the differentials of data’s constitution and present us instead with a flattened landscape of information. The sources, processes and contexts, which make information meaningful, are rendered imperceptible.

How have networked artistic practices responded to this emerging terrain of the imperceptible conditions for the generation of data? This ‘chapter’ will examine the work of online and offline networked art practices that seek to undermine the broader flow of data toward a general cultural state of imperceptibility. These artists render visible the real technical and social relations that comprise the production of data in networked culture. I hope to collaboratively think through these projects, zigzagging collectively through a mesh of artistic practice that makes the automatisms and aggregation of data palpably perceptible. A number of projects will be suggested for exploration: Antidatamining by the collective rybn.org; Antonio Muntadas’ ‘On Translation: Social Networks’; Eduardo Navas’ ‘Trace blog’; ShiftSpace. It is hoped that new projects will also come to light through networked participation.

Keywords: datamining; data visualisation;networked data management;imperceptibility; Web 2.0; networked art

1000 Word Proposal
The more data multiplies both quantitatively and qualitatively, the more it requires more than just visualisation. It also needs to be managed, regulated and interpreted into patterns that are comprehensible to humans. The labour of extracting pattern and order from data is rarely visualised for screen display in everyday life. The management of data is undertaken by sophisticated sampling, tracking and automated techniques and the results of these are frequently sequestered to become the property of corporations and institutions. Even when data flows do not become private or hidden property, their remixing and recombination in, for example, the web through the operations of search engines, databases, digest and feeds such as RSSs increasingly makes this manipulation of data invisible.

These mounting reserves of data about data, the software used to extract and analyse these and the social and cultural techniques accompanying this increasing trend results in a generalised data nonvisualisation. Whereas data visualisation characterised previous decades of digital culture in terms of tendencies in software development and the importance of the digital image, the invisibility of the processes involved in the manipulation of data is now ascendant. This is not to say that these techniques for aggregating and deciphering data do not use visualisation techniques. In the area of datamining particularly, visual environments can be modelled to make sense of patterns detected in sets of information. What is not visualised are the parameters, relations and arrangements that are used to organise and make sense of data.

The first phase of web development and design from 1995 to 2001 (Web 1.0) required designers and artists to be versed in at least a basic level of the then broadly used scripting language for displaying information online – HTML. In other words, during this early phase of web design there were no pre-packaged methods for formatting the way a web page was displayed. All graphic and stylistic elements had to be laid out in HTML scripting that ‘told’ the web browser how to format the page for online display. For a relatively short period, both artists and designers had a measure of access to the ‘source code’ of the web and this resulted in a lot of play with HTML aesthetics. From the mid-1990s, the artistic duo of Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, known as ‘jodi.org’, became infamous for their collapse of the visual levels of web display into the underlying HTML level of source code.

Jodi.org furnish us with an aesthetic example that resists the contemporary cultural trend toward data nonvisualisation. Rather than using the graphic interface to obscure the underlying operations of computation, jodi.org’s work insists on using visual elements to foreground the complex historical, social and economic factors that lie embedded within contemporary ‘user-friendly’ interfaces. Nevertheless, web design and use has now moved toward less visible engagement – certainly for the everyday user – with the underlying architecture and flow of data through its various nodes and mechanisms.

Web 2.0 is a phrase used to denote the many changes that have taken place in the online environment after online cultures, commerce and everyday users regrouped in the post- dot.com context. At the core of the concept of Web 2.0 is the understanding of the network as an expanded field of interaction, interrelation and semantic generation between users, online infrastructure and software. (See O’Reilly, 2005). Aggregators are a common feature of the information landscape of Web 2.0 as they are: a) automated forms of operations previously carried out by human labour in the Web 1.0 environment; b) methods for dealing with the explosion of online information that followed the growth of blogs from around 2002 onward; and c) able to easily link and function in relation to the straight-to-web publishing environment that has become the mainstay of contemporary online transaction. Hence they provide a veneer of immediacy.

Users deploying such aggregators are usually not aware what the parameters are for extracting and determining pattern. The processes of making data meaningful in particular ways are never visualised or made explicit. Automatic aggregation tends to perform operations that reduce the relations between data to commonalities rather than differences. This may be of crucial importance in the aggregation of news data where conflicting rather than similar perspectives about an item actually comprise the information about it. But techniques such as aggregation smooth out these differentials and present us instead with a flattened landscape of information. The sources, processes and contexts, which make information meaningful, are rendered imperceptible.

How have networked artistic practices responded to this emerging terrain of the imperceptible conditions for the generation of data? This ‘chapter’ will examine the work of a series of online and offline networked art practices that seek to undermine the broader flow of data toward a general cultural state of imperceptibility. These artists render visible the real technical and social relations that comprise the production of data in networked culture. I hope to collaboratively think through these projects, zigzagging collectively through a mesh of artistic practice that makes the automatisms and aggregation of data palpably perceptible. A number of projects will be suggested for exploration: Antidatamining; Trace blog; On Translation: Social Networks; ShiftSpace. It is hoped that new projects will also come to light through networked contributions.

Some of this artistic practice verges on the social-political space of web knowledge generation. Yet it is precisely the question of the aesthetic that is put into play by the common approach of dataundermining the nonvisualised image terrain of contemporary information that these artists and collectives pursue. What these projects demand is a socio-aesthetic domain for data in which users, techniques and flows are not appropriated by a mindless automatism and in which the labour and work of all elements is not rendered imperceptible and, inevitably, irretrievable.

Interactivity and Innovation in Sweden

xavierfijac — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:43:48 +0000

The Interactive Insitute outside Stockholm, Sweden is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. Originally set up by Sweden’s Foundation for Strategic Research in 1998, it is now owned and co-funded by the Swedish Insitute of Computer Science group which also includes the Viktoria Institute and Santa Anna, and is in turn owned by the government body Swedish ICT Research.

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

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

Mobile Eco-System

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

Embodied Affective Interaction

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

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

Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing

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

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

Youtube video on Affective Diary with Kristina Hook

Cymatics - Cross-Signal Processing and Synaethesia?

xavierfijac — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:42:45 +0000

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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?

‘Pool’ - Open-source National Radio and Social Media Project

xavierfijac — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:39:01 +0000

ABC’s Radio National has recently launched an online collaborative social media project entitled ‘Pool’. The project is a collaboration between ABC Radio National and RMIT, UTS and Wollongong Uni (and some involvement from COFA) and uses the open-source Drupal Platform (Content Management / Blogging / Collaborative Authoring Environment). The Pool project is notable, from the perspective of innovation in public/national scale newmedia projects, for the fact that the work focuses quite explicitly on the (perhaps underdeveloped) social aspects of production and engagement with experimental video and sound design, video and sound art, documentary, interviews atmoshperes, and bascially any kind of content that lays outside the musical and video blogging focus of the major commercial social media sites like Myspace and Youtube.

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 - ?

Network Ecologies - Feral Trade, Wildcrafting and ‘Prosumerism’

xavierfijac — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:28:27 +0000

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/

‘foam’ - Collaborative Research Network

xavierfijac — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:10:43 +0000

‘Foam‘ is an trans-national online collaborative research network or ‘distributed laboratory’ that focuses on transdisciplinary research, creative collabortion and the fostering of a diverse and loosely structured community of artists, academics, theorists, designers spanning Amsterdam, Brussels and Singapore. I came across the site whilst researching the work of media artist and researcher Christopher Salter, who is a member / affiliate. Their research and production interests are stated as ‘experimental situations, responsive environments, active materials, generative media, culinary performances and other forms of participatory culture’. Additionally the website states their activities as including the organisation and hosting of workshops and public events as well as the production of co-authored publications, on-line and on-site libraries and archives. The website also includes a forum and an events calender that links to various external events and online resources.

From the website:

[foam] is committed to growing inclusive, resilient and abundant worlds. We do this by providing a context and a structure to research, design and reflect on transdisciplinary creative practices. By seeking out and connecting people in the interstitial spaces between professional and cultural boundaries, we are smoothing the way for a community of ‘generalists’. This diverse community enables its members to tackle complex challenges, in the cultural, as well as technological environments. While facilitating multi-stakeholder workshops, or mixing digital and physical realities, [foam] steers the creative practices towards ethically and environmentally sustainable practices. Our motto, ‘grow your own worlds’ alludes to our mission; to move from wasteful consumption and mindless dependence to responsible participation in all aspects of our lives.

The site appears to be a reasonably good reference for Dynamic Media given their stated aims and approach of facillitating a collaborative research community coupled with the publication of an online database resource. Perhaps most notable is their novel approach to the problems of data architecture and taxonomy (of which we are increasingly aware!): what they call the the ‘Libarynth‘:

“The ever-growing Libarynth is exactly what its name implies – a hybrid between a library and a labyrinth, a maze of pages in various stages of completion. FoAM’s collaborators and friends use the Libarynth as their research diary, sketch-book, or activity log. Some pages are valuable references, on a variety of topics; from visual programming, to inflatables and even vegetarian-friendly restaurants around the world. Others are fully-fledged research reports, or concept documents.”

However there is perhaps too little emphasis on the taxonomy / tagging systems or generally towards producing a dynamism with respect to the data available on the site, particularly from a usability perspective - much of the data seems at least partially obscured by the architecture of the site itself. Ths reiterates the importance of techniques of data visualisation and other approaches in dealing with the complex networks of loose, ongoing and emergent connections between data, various kinds of bodies and organisations. There is a real elusiveness to the solution of simple and elegant design for dealing with a complex and chaotic network of heterogenous structures and forms of data.

data nonvisualisation

Anna Munster — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:21:54 +0000

Over the past two decades the diversity and the quantity of screens in our lives have proliferated. They are a defining feature of contemporary urbanisation and are dotted around city and financial centres, shopping malls, in shops within the malls and in traffic thoroughfares such as motorways and airports. Screens have even been incorporated into the architectural infrastructure of new buildings sometimes comprising an entire wall. An example of this can be found in the façade of the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria where an installation of fluorescent lights sits under the 900 square metres of acrylic glass that comprises the gallery’s eastern ‘skin’. These lights are digitally controlled to form low-resolution text and images, functioning like pixels on a digital screen. Likewise screens have infiltrated our domestic and intimate spaces; computer monitors regularly grace bedrooms and the portability of the mobile phone and iPod means that we now carry screens close to our bodies. With so many surfaces available for information to be displayed it seems more than obvious to call digital culture an age of data visualisation.

However, the more that data multiplies both quantitatively and qualitatively, the more it requires more than just visualisation. It also needs to be managed, regulated and interpreted into meaningful patterns that are comprehensible to humans. The work and outcomes of extracting pattern and order from data are rarely visualised for screen display in daily life. Indeed this management and interpretation of data flows is undertaken by sophisticated sampling, tracking and automated techniques and the results of these are more frequently sequestered to become the property of corporations and institutions. Even when data flows do not become private or hidden property, their remixing and recombination in, for example, the web through the operations of search engines, databases, digest and feeds such as RSSs (Really Simple Syndication) increasingly makes this manipulation of data invisible.

I will here refer to these mounting reserves of data about data, the software used to extract and analyse these and the social and cultural techniques accompanying this increasing trend as processes of data nonvisualisation in digital culture. By looking in some more detail at two areas in which data nonvisualisation processes dominate – Web 2.0 and data mining – we can begin to see how this marks an increasing trend in the way digital culture is organising data. At the same time, these newer less visible processes of aggregating and regulating data begin to reorganise contemporary digital culture. Whereas data visualisation characterised previous decades of digital culture in terms of tendencies in software development and the importance of digital imagery in both the arts and sciences, the invisibility of the processes involved in the manipulation of data is now ascendant.

This is not to say that these techniques for aggregating and deciphering data do not use visualisation techniques. In the area of data mining particularly, visual environments can be modelled to make sense of patterns detected in sets of information. What is invisible or rather not visualised are the parameters, relations and arrangements that are used to organise, interpret and hence make sense of the data. Additionally, the visualisation of data patterns has taken on a particular aesthetic – that of the vector/line. Examples of this can be found in abundance throughout the contemporary aesthetics of digital culture as social networks, relations between documents, corporate organisational relationships and even complex ideas are visually rendered as connections between lines and nodes. This visual style represents a type of thinning out of the visual plane of the image in contemporary culture – an attempt to streamline only the essential information-based elements of the image and eliminate ‘noise’ from the image scape. We might also think about the growing dominance of these minimal line images as a tendency toward reduced visuality within data visualisation.

An important cultural response to the proliferation of visualised data throughout the 1990s and early 2000s came from artists who re-worked scientific and medical images. The presumption that data imaging was a neutral or accurate portrayal of scientific facts has been variously investigated in the work of Aziz and Cucher, Justine Cooper, Michele Barker, Catherine Richards and others. But if we now increasingly occupy an aesthetic and social space in which the processes of making and organising data are largely invisible, what would be an appropriate aesthetic response to this trend? It may be the case that online and software artists will need to consider future artistic practices that are not visually based in order to respond to these processes of data nonvisualisation.

The ‘blackbox’ of data processing
Katherine Hayles has suggested that the use of computers for visualisation purposes has radically altered not only the ways in which mathematical operations are performed but contributes toward a new kind of knowledge that is visually intuitive:

…with computers, a new style of mathematics is possible. The operator does
not need to know in advance how a mathematical function will behave when it is iterated. Rather, she can set the initial values and watch its behaviour as iteration proceeds and phase space projections are displayed on a computer screen…The resulting dynamic interaction of operator, computer display and mathematical functions is remarkably effective in developing a new kind of intuition (Hayles, 1990: 163)

Sherry Turkle’s early analysis of the shift to online explorations of identity through chat and text-based virtual worlds indicated that interaction with digital machines became more ubiquitous the less people knew about the technical operations of those machines (Turkle, 1995). She compared the 1984 release of the MacIntosh operating system and its relatively easy yet opaque ‘desktop’ interface with a previous generation of ‘nerds’ and programmers who had interacted with computers using text-based commands (Turkle, 1995: 34). The command-line interface for a previous generation of computer-human interaction encouraged its human users to tinker with the underlying code of the interface in order to simply get the machine to work. In a sense, then, the operation and performance of computational systems had been more visible – although to a smaller and more elite group of people – if more cumbersome to operate.

There have been many debates about how graphics function in interface design, especially at the level of the Graphic User Interface (GUI). Some designers suggest that graphic representation of computational processes – the desktop as a representation of the computer’s operating system, for example – can confuse and obsfucate interaction with the computer (Norman, 1990: 216). Others have emphasised the importance of the GUI in communicating to users the complex tasks and functions that data undergoes in computation (Marcus, 1995: 425). But the use of graphics to represent both data and the processes performed upon data now definitively guides everyday interaction with computers.

By the late 1980s – and certainly by the introduction of GUIs for the web in 1994 – we were already less overtly aware of the inner processing of data and its pathways through the underlying architecture of digital machines. Computers had become the exemplary black box machine – you put something in and you get something out – and most users never really understood what happens in the middle. By the late 1990s, data visualisation, especially the animation of changes to data over time, was likewise being applauded by interface designers as a technique for making computation more human-centred:

New ways of representing data, especially changing data, allow users to gain new insights into the behaviour of the systems they are trying to understand and make the computer an invaluable tool for understanding and discovery as well as for interpretation and mundane calculation (Dix et. al., 1998: 598)

During the period of the rise of computer graphics, important areas of social and economic life such as financial markets and entire disciplines such as the life sciences, geographical systems and meteorology were adopting and developing various kinds of data visualisation. In the development of these applications, data visualisation followed two main directions: the digital visualisation of information held previously in analogue form such as printed maps or of numerical data such as statistics about climate; and the creation of information spaces as visual spaces. Geographical Information Systems (GISs) – an example of the first direction – began their life in the 1960s with the development of the Canadian Geographic Information Systems by Roger Tomlinson for the Canadian government’s Department of Energy, Mines and Resources in 1963. The digitisation and visualisation of geographic data has allowed query, analysis and editing of data using visual means and within a visual environment. During the 1980s and 1990s, GISs were standardised across a smaller number of computer operating systems and were being accessed across the internet. This greatly increased the ease and amount of user interaction. There are now a number of online applications that allow public access to certain kinds of GISs – map locators such as MapBlast and the virtual globe environment of Google Earth.

The second direction – the rendering of ‘pure’ information spaces – includes a multitude of projects for mapping cyberspace in which complex and invisible information flows and intersections such as website traffic are visualised (See Dodge and Kitchen, 2000). An example of this kind of data visualisation can also be found in the interactive three-dimensional real time rendering of the New Stock Exchange trading floor completed by the architectural design firm Asymptote in 1999. Traders in the exchange use this virtual information environment to, for example, visually track stock performance by individual companies and graphically detect the effect of incidents on performance. Asymptote’s Lise Ann Couture and Hani Rashid state that the complexity of data interrelations in stock markets was precisely the rationale presented by the New York Stock exchange for commissioning the spatial visualisation of its information (Asymptote, 2006).

The fascinating paradox of all these trends toward the visualisation of data – the screen interface of the desktop computer, the dominance of GUIs in web browser design and the construction of entire information spaces as both two- and three-dimensional image-scapes – is that the structures, operations and circuits through which data move become increasingly invisible. It is often the case that during initial periods of a digital medium’s or set of technologies’ development a period of greater accessibility to these underlying structures and processes occurs. This period of experimentation, in which technical and design protocols are less established, is often also characterised by artistic and cultural exploration of the medium/technology.

The first phase of web development and design from 1995 to 2001 (sometimes referred to as Web 1.0) required designers and artists to be versed in at least a basic level of the then broadly used scripting language for displaying information online – hypertext mark-up language (HTML). In other words, during this early phase of web design there were no pre-packaged methods for formatting the way a web page was displayed. All graphic and stylistic elements had to be laid out in HTML scripting that ‘told’ the web browser how to format the page for online display. For a relatively short period, both artists and designers had a measure of access to the ‘source code’ of the web and this resulted in a lot of play with HTML aesthetics. From the mid-1990s, the artistic duo of Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, known as ‘jodi.org’, became infamous for their collapse of the visual levels of web display into the underlying HTML level of source code. Their early piece ‘http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/’ used the visual potential of HTML (using the actual ‘language’ to create a diagram of a hydrogen bomb) rather than HTML’s functionality as a piece of executing computer code (see Lunefeld, 2001: get page number). This very simple act of using the web’s language to sketch out an image of the hydrogen bomb was jodi.org’s reminder to us of the military origins of digital computing and indeed of the internet.

In fact, jodi.org furnish us with an aesthetic example that resists the broader cultural trend toward data nonvisualisation. Rather than using the graphic interface to obscure the underlying operations of computation, jodi.org’s work insists on using visual elements to foreground the complex historical, social and economic factors that are embedded within contemporary ‘user-friendly’ interfaces. Nevertheless, web design has now moved toward less visible engagement – certainly for the everyday user – with the underlying architecture, data structures and flow of data through its various nodes and mechanisms. This is so much the case that many people are unable to clearly distinguish between the web and the net or have no sense, for example, of how different search engines operate to retrieve and display their end results. In the next section, I want to briefly examine some of the information mechanisms within the Web 2.0 environment that contribute to this increasing trend toward data nonvisualisation.

Data as pattern, automation and aggregation
After the infamous dot.com crash, the web environment dramatically changed. One of the key criticisms of earlier web interaction and transaction had been that pre-existing commerce, institutions and communications were simply relocated into the domain of cyberspace. Models and modes of interaction suited to and developing out of the web environment has not really emerged in its early phases of growth.

Web 2.0 is a phrase used to denote the many changes that have taken place in the online environment after online cultures, commerce and everyday users regrouped in the post- dot.com context. It marks a ‘new’ generation of services and relationships that are internet-based and indeed can only develop in the online context. At the core of the concept of Web 2.0 is the understanding of the network as an expanded field of interaction, interrelation and semantic generation between users, online technical infrastructure and software. (See O’Reilly, 2005).

Newsblaster is an automatic news weblogger developed by the Natural Language Processing Group at Columbia University, New York, USA. The project began in 2002 and is a good example of a Web 2.0 tool. Newsblaster ‘reads’ a range of news items (from approximately 14 different sources) and, using artificial intelligence techniques, produces summaries of these stories. The tool is an example of an ‘aggregator’ – software that draws together and re-presents data in a digested and reduced form. Aggregators are a common feature of the information landscape of Web 2.0 as they are: a) automated forms of operations – such as producing digests of information – previously carried out by human labour in the Web 1.0 environment; b) methods for dealing with the explosion of online information that followed, the growth of blogs from around 2002 onward; and c) able to easily link and function in relation to the straight-to-web publishing environment that has become the mainstay of contemporary online transaction.

But Newsblaster is also an example of data mining techniques – automatically extracting embedded patterns and invisible connections – to produce news digests based on keyword and common phrase relationships in the stories that it culls from online searches. It represents a textual instance of the aesthetic of making visible the invisible connectivity of data. However, what remain invisible in Newsblaster’s automated, aggregate functionality are two key aspects. First, users deploying such aggregators are not aware what the parameters are for extracting and determining pattern and hence the processes of making data meaningful in particular ways are never visualised or made explicit. Automatic aggregation tends to perform operations that reduce the relations between data to commonalities rather than differences. This may be of crucial importance in the aggregation of news data where conflicting rather than similar perspectives about an item actually comprise the information about it. In reviewing the ‘newsworthiness’ of Newsblaster New York Times journalist Susan Reed notes that:

in summarizing reports about President Bush’s plan for greater scrutiny of corporations, Newsblaster did not include criticism that the plan failed to call for increased financing for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would carry out the effort. (Reed, 2002)

Aggregation therefore rests upon and contributes to the ‘image’ of networked information based upon similarity and close proximity as determinants of interconnectivity. It shares this propensity with other Web 2.0 tools and environments such as Friendster, which function by creating clusters of connections (friend and/or semantic networks) between closely proximate linked data and/or users.

Second, the historical, cultural and institutional contexts in which a tool such as Newsblaster operates are not so apparent in its every day use. The Newsblaster project was funded by the US government’s National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Although the project had been in development from 1998, nonetheless NSF and DARPA funding to a range of data mining projects increased in the heightened emphasis upon security and intelligence in the post-9/11 context. Newsblaster was funded due to a perceived need by US intelligence analysts wanting to explore the potential of data mining for homeland security applications. According to the NSF, data mining large sets of information from television broadcasts and web pages may uncover underlying invisible relations between events and increase the predictive capacities of intelligence agencies (NSF Press Release, 2002). What is important here is not the specific development of Newsblaster but rather the boost to the Web 2.0 environment afforded by US military funding. Coincidentally or not both the dot.com crash and 9/11 occurred in 2001 and it is after this period that the rise of Web 2.0 occurs. What, then, are the less visible forces at work driving the imaging and understanding of data as pattern and deep connectivity?

It comes as no surprise that the search for the invisible patterns and organization of data should be driven by military requirements. Data mining is an operation that can only take place in a context where vast quantities of data are produced and circulate and where much of this data is in fact meaningless or rather redundant. The automated mining of data sets for underlying pattern supposedly sifts through redundant information and extracts only relevant information. But it is precisely redundant information – or rather the potential for redundancy – that is at the heart of the original military diagram for networked connectivity. Paul Baran, an engineer working for the American nonprofit research agency RAND, wrote a memorandum in 1964 that became the basis of the thinking and imaging of networked communications (Rand, 1964). Sponsored by the US Air Force, the memorandum details a plan for a digital communications system that could survive the event of an attack on any of its parts. It is often remarked that the distributed and mesh-like character of the diagrams Baran used to illustrate how this system would function serve as an abstraction of advanced internet connectivity. However, more fundamental to Baran’s system is the ratio of its redundancy of links and nodes to actual links and nodes needed for communication of data (Baran, 1964: 8–9). By building in a degree of redundant links and nodes, Baran sought to allow switching of information packets to alternative communications routes in the case of either systemic failure or enemy attacks carried out upon the system.

Although it is now the case that the contemporary internet has outgrown its original military origins, redundancy of information is perhaps the most characteristic attribute of contemporary online communications. Everyone has experienced this phenomenon in the fruitless searches conducted for an item that lead nowhere or in being the recipient of bulk or spam email. And it is precisely this prolific redundancy of data – built into the original thinking and imaging of distributed communications – that today motivates the activity of data mining; that is, producing invisible pattern from the overwhelming chaos of too much information. It is as if we have come full circle in the 40 or so years since the inception of networked thinking to the point where what was conceived as a line of protection for the US military – the production of redundant connections, links and flows of information – now sustains the intelligence arms of this same institution. Perhaps the future of networks lies not so much with their visualisation but with what lies beneath them – the institutional and intellectual cultures of their past. In order to understand the increasing trend toward the nonvisualisation of the processing and manipulation of data, then, we also need to understand the institutional, intellectual and cultural histories of data’s flows.

Recommended Readings:
Baran, Paul (1964) “On Distributed Communications: Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks”, Memorandum RM-3420-PR, Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation

Dodge, Martin and Kitchen, Rob (2000) Mapping Cyberspace, London: Routledge

Hayles, N. Katherine, (1990) Chaos Bound, Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Lunenfeld, P. (2000) Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press

O’Reilly, Tim (2005) “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”, O’Reilly weblog, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?CMP=&ATT=2432

References
Asymptote website (2006) ‘NYSE 3D Trading Floor’, http://www.asymptote.net

Dix, Alan, Finlay Janet, Abowd, Gregory and Beale, Russell (1998), Human-Computer Interaction (Second Edition), London: Prentice-Hall Europe.

Dodge, Martin and Kitchen, Rob (2000) Mapping Cyberspace, London: Routledge

Hayles, N. Katherine, (1990) Chaos Bound, Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Lunenfeld, Peter (2000) Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press

Marcus, Aaron (1995) ’Principles of Effective Visual Communication for Graphical User Interface Design’, Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000 (Second Edition), Ronald M. Baecker, Jonathan Grudin, William Buxton, Saul Greenberg eds, San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann missing page numbers

National Science Foundation Press Release 02-64-1 (2002) ‘NSF, Intelligence Community to Cooperate on “Data Mining” Research’, July 30, http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/02/pr0264.htm

Norman, Donald A. (1990 ) ‘Why Interfaces Don’t Work’, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, ed. Brenda Laurel, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 209–19.

O’Reilly, Tim (2005) “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”, O’Reilly Blog, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?CMP=&ATT=2432

Reed, Susen E. (2002) “A News Cocktail Mixed by a Software Genie”, New York Times Electronic Edition, March 28,
http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9C04E5DF113BF93BA15750C0A9649C8B63

Turkle, Sherry (1997) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,
London: Phoenix

Review of ‘Impossible Geographies’, an exhibition by Petra Gemeinboeck

Anna Munster — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:17:12 +0000

It’s a wet and cold afternoon in early spring as I slip through the doors of the Tin Sheds on Sydney’s roaring City Road. The physical geography of so many thoroughfares in this city is ugly and anti-pedestrian – long waits between multiple traffic lights to cross the road; bus stops exposing commuters to the force of the elements; semi-trailers thundering past and pelting out smog. What a delight, then, to enter into an utterly different terrain: the unhurried, luminous and imperceptible spaces of Petra Gemeinboeck’s exhibition, Impossible Geographies. Here we encounter two installations that stretch and fracture screen space, stitching and splitting image projection, surface and interaction. Installations that amplify the weird radiance of digital light – to the point where it becomes the material substrate constituting the works’ visual field. Installations that mesmerise in the minutiae of their movements or in the slow image disintegration that they perform.

The two installations that form the topology of this other space – Memory and Urban Fiction – both depend on maintaining a relation to physical, encountered and imagined spaces outside the refuge of gallery walls. Memory is a restaging of an installation that Gemeinboeck exhibited previously in Singapore, the US and UK. This was its Australian premiere – this alone attesting to the lag we still experience in curating and facilitating access for audiences here to experimental new media arts. Memory captures audience members’ images as we pass into its net of ‘Mission Impossible’ style laser beams. These ethereal bounding mechanisms trigger image captures, which end up both spread across the work’s fractured and layered screens and deposited in a databank. We join up with the ghosts’ of audiences long past and become slot’s in the computer’s memory bank to be accessed according to its algorithmic and rhythmic processing. That space of computational processing – utterly impossible for human memory to inhabit – nonetheless returns on the installation’s screens. For we find our own real time gallery movements conjoined with the traces of previous visitors and with traces of movements we might have made in the gallery only five minutes before.

We expect a mirror, conversation or cause and effect response as we interact with Memory. We are met instead with distribution, fragmentation and tracing of the relations between image/trace, computer/embodied human and processing/thinking. What is delightful and pleasurable about Memory is that these are impossible spaces to navigate, if by navigation we mean to steer or move in a purposeful manner toward obtaining a goal. But this impossibility makes the interaction all the more enjoyable, provoking us to experiment with the relations between virtual and actual space and action. We are also tiptoeing through another impossibility in Memory – time. Although digital media have long been flaunted as ‘nonlinear’, much of our experience of them tends to really be multilinear. We branch through options in an interactive story; we go forwards, backwards, even sideways but advance through levels in gaming. Memory, however, gives us no such pathways: our and visitors’ images from the installation’s past are entangled in a visual dynamic and as the software’s dynamically processes its present and prior captures. There are gaps and syntheses between the present and past here and the installation’s future only materialises from this interplay.. Memory is one of those rare interactive experiences where we momentarily perceive the impossible temporality of the nonlinear.

A fracturing aesthetic and experimentation with dynamic human-machine interaction connect the installations Memory and Urban Fiction, within the gallery. What threads together the two works visually is the distribution and layering of screen spaces. Rather than just a convenient wall to absorb projection, Gemeinboeck treats screens viscerally. They are the fabric and fabrication place of digital production, to be ripped, stitched, piled upon and scattered. In Urban Fiction three screens are stretched in mid-air, catching their projections but also letting the edges of the moving image spill out onto the floor. Everything is beautifully positioned and executed but simultaneously unshackled.

But what are we actually looking at? Pulsations become patterns; dots march imperceptibly across the screen space; deforming lines and grids slowly unravel. This feels like a fragment from a map of planet ‘Information’ or the twisted, skeletal wire-frame of 3D-generated space or computer code run through a visualiser of the imagination. If Urban Fiction is a map, then it is not of familiar territory and it defies all formal cartographic conventions. And yet, the barely moving images are all generated through engagement with the surrounding geography of Darlington. Participants use customised mobile phones to walk in the vicinity of the gallery. The installation also logs signals from unwitting mobiles on the same network within specified parameters surrounding the gallery. These signals aggregate via custom software into forces and tensions that interfere, are sutured into and deform the images.

As we stand in the gallery, we begin to realise we are watching the formation of vast movement-patterns beyond singular instances of navigation through urban space. We keep time instead with collective city rhythms beyond immediate visibility. Indeed we see more than we would when looking at a map or image of the city. For here the surrounding buildings block, refract and lose network signal and these processes affect the absorption of signal into the data capture process. An image scape emerges of the urban landscape we think we know but to which many histories, forces and traces also belong. What emerges is not cartographic but topological – the nonphysical yet ever-present ground of shifting relations between people, between people, buildings and urban cultures, buildings and signals, signals and signs, all contributing to contemporary urbanity.

Petra Gemeinboeck is one of those rare new media artists whose work is equally aesthetic and intellectual. The sensation of inhabiting her impossible geographies is visceral but also a jolt that provokes thought: the thought of inhabiting the impossible. Like that of Jorge Louis Borges’ writing fragment The Garden of Forking Paths, Gemeinboeck’s ‘impossible’ is actually a space and time of infinite possibilities.

Synaesthesia: total artwork or difference engine?

Anna Munster — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 04:51:09 +0000

I want to start to explore and develop the relations between neurological understandings of synaesthesia and sensory modalities on the one hand, and some recent developments in new media arts/aesthetics and cross-processing digital signal, on the other. I think that there are certain similarities between the ways in which neurologists explain synaesthesia and the ways in which new media theorists explain the convergence of data. In making this statement I need to qualify this by noting this applies to some neurologists and some new media theorists. And yet, these are both leading and established neurological and new media theories. And this in turn leads me to posit the suggestion that in both cases particular conceptions of sensation and data are inter-operating between these spheres. Conceptions that produce totalising notions of the sensory and the computational and consequently re-embed the synaesthetic and the aesthetic within the late Romantic project for the Gesumtkunstwek proposed by Richard Wagner in 1849.

I want to suggest that there is also something at stake in the remake of new media as a quest for ‘total’ artwork or for an engagement with the artwork via total sensory immersion that is not merely Romanticist but belongs to a contemporary politics of digital proto-fascism. If new media, and especially new media art, does elicit a kind of synaesthetic re-organisation of sensory modalities, then how might this be understood as productive of new/different rather than given/existing sensory interrelations? How might new media open up and onto the immanent relation that sensation carries to something outside itself? I am clearly not interested, then, in understanding new media syn-aesthetics on the current ‘model’ of neurologically-based synaesthesia, especially if we understand synaesthesia here as an originary integrative state or process. And yet I am interested in invoking a transdisciplinary understanding that gets at a certain ’stickiness’ between the digital and cognition and perception. In pulling out the threads of this ’stick’, we might get at ways in which to understand distributive forces and relations as transformative within digital aesthetics and as fundamental modes of organising cognitive-perceptual systems. Having said as much, I am not offering any contributions to neurological knowledge here; instead I want to enact the slippage of neurosciences and digital aesthetics via other vectors than unitary ones.

There may be a different way of understanding both synaesthesia and data relationally rather than according to a totalising imperative. By taking this approach, the neurological and the digital might inhabit each other rather differently. But this necessitates first understanding synaesthesia via a rethinking of Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the different processes and expressions of synthesising – connective, disjunctive and conjunctive and their interrelation (rearticulated with reference to Brian Massumi and Jose Gil’s work on synaesthesia). In particular, I am interested in understanding the ’syn’ in synaesthesia as accumulation, operations of joining and of the transduction of sensory modalities and data formats rather than the presumption of an originary unity that organises either the sensory and/or informatic fields.

Data, too, needs to be seen equally as a relational field especially with respect to its immanent capacity for programmability.That is to say, there is no pure data – data exists only in a relation to software, or as Florian Cramer puts it:
‘There is, after all, no such thing as data without programs, and hence no digital arts without the software layers they either take for granted, or design themselves.’
To understand both the synaesthetic and new media aesthetics relationally, then, is to move away from the desire and economy for primary perceptual unity or total artwork and to seek instead another arena for understanding relationality – that of the difference engine.

We can proceed by looking at the extent to which an overlap exists between prominent neurological conceptions of the synaesthetic and dominant models of the movement and flows of data articulated within new media aesthetics. Contemporary research in the neurosciences generally accepts synaesthesia as a real and anatomically based phenomenon of human perception that is located in some form of neurobiological architecture. While there is variation in the ways in which synaesthesia manifests in perception - coloured-hearing, coloured-graphism, visual-smelling and so forth – most neuroscientists agree that synaesthesia involves the human involuntary and repeated invocation of one sensory modality by another in response to a perceptual stimulus. (See R. Cytowic). Recent neurological research into synaesthesia can be ’sorted’ into two prevailing approaches: the idea that ordinary neural ‘pruning’ in human development fails to occur leaving in place an originary synaesthetic brain; the idea that different sensory modalities and their functions are located in separated areas or modules of the brain, which are ‘cross-activated’ in synaesthetes. (Hubbard and Ramachandran, 2005)

There are two major competing neurological hypotheses for synaesthesia: Cross-Modal Transfer (CMT) and Neonatal Synaesthesia (NS). In fact, one derives from the other but makes more radical neurological claims. The CMT hypothesis is slightly older, gaining ground during the late 1970s and 1980s and was developed by Meltzoff and Borton. and posits that infants have the ability to recognise objects in more than one sensory modality. So, for example, something that a baby has only touched can nonetheless be visually recognised by it. Although the process involved in this common infantile experience involves the transfer of sensory ‘data’ across modes – haptic to visual – the recognition has, at its basis, an ability to abstract representations of objects by infants (observed in as early as a 29-day old infant). And it is this capacity for abstraction that points to a potential arena for the joining – the ’syn’ – of all the sensory modalities. The CMT hypothesis rests upon the proposition that synaesthesia is primarily a function of inherent cognitive capacities for abstraction and representation in the human brain.

The NS hypothesis – more recent and supported by neurologists such as Simon Baron-Cohen – asserts, instead, that synaesthesia is a primary and originary state of infantile perception rather than cognition. Up until about 4 months, the ’state’ of sensory input is undifferentiated and cross-modal. It is neurological development from this period on that then begins the process of ‘normal’ sensory differentiation into separate modes. However, some human brains do not fully differentiate, leaving these originary ‘cross-modal’ pathways active. In these cases, adult synaesthesia will persist and a person may experience the typical ’symptoms’ of involuntary call-up of colours in conjunction with hearing certain sounds. The NS hypothesis rests upon the notion that the originary totality of perception can be sought in the idea of neonatal sensory nondifferentiation.

In the CMT model, it is only abstraction which makes cross-modal between the senses possible; in the NS model it is totalisation that supports interrelations of sensory pathways. There is a fundamental symmetry, then, between the competing hypotheses even though they differ as to their developmental positioning and neuro-systemic location (cognition vs. perception) of synaesthesia. In other words, at the heart of both understandings of the synaesthetic lies the ‘ground’ of an originary unity of the individual brain - either fundamentally perceptual or cognitive. A number of neuroscientists have attempted to explain the basis for this unity - locating it in genetic factors or via an understanding of neural architecture as modular (See, Mark E.S. Bailey and Keith J. Johnson, ‘Synaesthesia: Is a genetic analysis Feasible?’ Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings,John E. Harrison and Simon Baron-Cohen eds, Blackwell: Oxford, 1997,pp.182–207; Gabriel M.A. Segal, ‘Synaesthesia: Implications for Modularity of Mind” Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings,pp211–23). Others stay put at the presumption of the originary infantile unity as a kind of precondition for synaesthesia. At any rate, whether explained by this unity or by some preceding unit - the gene, the module – unity is deemed sufficient cause. The problem I wish to return to here is that it is precisely the unity that requires explanation and explanation cannot be furnished by recourse to some smaller unit and its concerted interrelations with other units in either genetic or modular neural networks. For in fact what we are seeking is an understanding precisely of the sensory, perceptual or cognitive actions of unification (or rather of joining) by investigating synaesthesia in the first place…

This of course brings us to the problems posed by classical models of ontogenesis, which, as Gilbert Simondon pointed out, attempt to explain a process via the outcome of that process (’The Genesis of the Individual’ Incorporations, Zone Books, MIT Press, 1992). Hence the ‘unity’ of synaesthesia (emergent outcome) becomes an explanation for how it is that the senses join or cross. The latter, I am suggesting by referring this problem to the question of individuation that Simonodon raises, are therefore processes not simply outcomes. I will return to this point later in this post when I attempt to understand current artistic experiments in cross-processing digital signal syn-aesthetically. What I want to suggest is that similarly we cannot approach the digital as exemplary of synaesthetic experience, if by this we mean that interfacing with digital art presents us with a totality of sensory engagement. If we are to deploy a digital syn-aesthetics, this must be sought in the extent to which artwork incorporates us into its unfolding as processual transformation(s). But this may also necessitate giving up the idea of the artwork as a totality to be had in the realm of experience, where it seems to have shifted since losing its objecthood. New subjectivations must follow from this – not only for ‘the artist’, ‘the viewer’ but also for ‘art’. It would seem obvious that if we are to take the idea of a network society seriously, then we must also take seriously the distributed forces and formations through which cultural and aesthetic experience and engagement are also making themselves. We need to look not for art in the net but the networks that inhabit art and that produce its deformations.
To be continued…

DataCloud2

Andrew Murphie — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:16:59 +0000

Sitting in a Montréal hotel room, reading the excellent Sher Doruff’s (of KeyWorx, for one thing) article on collaboration and emergence, I came across a reference to DataCloud2. This might be a useful tool for our own database building.

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.