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Tuesday, January 31, 2006 |
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Linx3d |
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Margarete Jahrmann and Max Moswitzer's linX3D game consists of a modification of a 3D-shooter, which does two things at the same time: By shooting virtual enemies the user fires on targets in the game environment. At the same time the game also works as an email client. Whenever the user shoots an enemy, an email with a protest message is sent to the White House in Washington: Stop the War! Politically motivated mail functionality and shoot'em up fun is merged into one. The relationship between the two linked functions might seem arbitrary and unrelated, but for the artists these two functions belong to a wider network of social interaction and social activity related to each other. - artificial.dk
Perversity! Art that makes band aids out of paper cuts. The game is available as a download without any reference to the email function of the game, which makes it an actual, subversive political action instead of a simple art project "about" subverting the game/war connection.
One minor point about the project, though: Sending an email to the President? Really? I'm not sure I'm satisfied with that. Call me suspicious of the Government, but I sincerely doubt that the White House even bothers assigning a summer internship position to the president@whitehouse.gov address any more. Something that might have made this project more subversive is to attack the power centers that still bother bending to outside pressure, such as a media outlet. Or, for that matter, why not send an email to a video game company everytime someone in the game gets killed? Send it as a request for more information about an individual killed in the line of duty they were doing on behalf of their enterprise.
It might be a bit absurd, giving a random name, history, and a request to notify next of kin to the throngs of dead "enemies" we encounter in game play. I suggest simply using the ingenious literary talent of the UCE text generator that assumes names like "Aboralis P. Pencilsharpener" to its bastard salespitch driven existence. But does it create a deeper reflection on the war->game connections for the general public than a discarded email to the President would?
Posted by
Eryk @
3:32 PM
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RSS Is a Leisure Class Activity |
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Warning: Meta Blogging To Follow
Immediately after posting this blog address to the recently liberated (in my mind anyway) rhizome, I received two emails telling me I needed an RSS feed. Because I am a fan of the ease-of-use culture, I am going to state very simply that I chose atom instead of RSS simply because atom is turned on by changing a blogger setting to "on" and RSS is set up to take me through a labyrinthine series of site analyzers, code checkers and other ridiculous things I don't have time for. And yes, I highly doubt any of them are actually neccesary, but that's a sorting task I don't have much time for these days.
So, RSS people, does atom do the same thing? And why is setting up an RSS feed so ridiculously tedious? Seriously, I'm doing my first round of visual basic and found that to be cake compared to getting my site up to a standard that feedburner would treat with a shred of dignity.
If you want an RSS feed, end user, then you are going to have to use the comments to explain it to me like I'm a 12 year old. Hearts will come through the computer monitor to the person who shows me the way to a functional RSS feed. But otherwise, there's an allegedly functional atom feed for you at the top of my links list, ripe for your appropriation.
Posted by
Eryk @
3:20 PM
(2) comments
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Sunday, January 29, 2006 |
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Fight The Web |
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From BBC News, we find out about a newly declassified document, signed by Donald Rumsfeld himself, that outlines military uses for the internet- including its use as a feedback loop to infiltrate Americans with propaganda legally, and even weirder, it's seeking the ability to destroy the entire internet, as well as television systems, phone lines, and anything else "dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads. "Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
So, while the Pentagon acknowledges the need for American Media not to relay these operations, it doesn't bother to outline a strategy for avoiding it. While they dream out loud about an e-bomb of global proportions, keeping propaganda out of American Media is just too difficult a problem to solve:
"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.
Onward to nuking the web. The Pentagon strategy is summed up with the money quote:
"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system."
It also goes on to talk about the increasing sophistication of hackers and spies, something I am sure we'll see a lot of in the media as we get ready for funding a military defense of cyberspace, on par with the Star Wars nuclear defense shields militarization of plain old outer space.
It's possible these kinds of "defense" authorizations- sure to be called for by congress as soon as a malicious hacker turns the power off in a hospital somewhere- will set the military up nicely for its final destination, the capacity to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum" should it be needed.
Posted by
Eryk @
9:03 AM
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Monday, January 23, 2006 |
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Vin Crosbie, What is New Media? |
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Reading through Vin Crosbie's article, "What is New Media?" I came across this paragraph:
Imagine that when a person visits a newspaper Web site, he sees not just the bulletins and major stories that he wouldn't have known to request information about but sees the rest of that edition customized to his own unique needs and interests. Rather than every reader seeing the same edition, each reader sees an edition that has simultaneously been individualized to his interest and generalized to his needs.
Which reminds me of Epic 2014, a mock timeline of the creation of the most empowering and dangerous new media technology I can personally imagine. Epic raised some of the questions that woke me from my "blogging is the future of news" slumber I was in after the blogger triumph in the early Dean campaign days.
While we're looking at Vin Crosbie, there's a few points in his essay I have issues with. Granted that this was written in 1998, which is an ice age in new media time, so we won't hold Crosbie responsible unless he wants to be.
This is it:
No longer must anyone who wants at once to communicate [a] message to a mass of people be unable to individualized [sic] totally the content of that message for each recipient.
I don't know if he is thinking in the dramatically long term, but the fact is that the above statement is only true if we accept that the "individual" is really no more than a collection of data that can place you within the confines of a demographic. Ie, I am a college student, therefore I must love pizza (true) and the American Pie series (false). I don't accept that as anything besides targeting channels of potential viewers, as in the broadcasting model: throw a net over a particular segment of the spectrum (MTV, for example) and you will catch a lot of very eager fish (college kids) but you will have to throw some back. As the dolphin trapped in the tuna net most of the time, I guess I don't like this particular point because it seems to assume the perspective of the side that wants to communicate their message/brand/v1agr4 on an individual basis, not the perspective of a person who wants to receive or construct communications on an individual basis.
It undermines the entire notion of bottom up authenticity and the generative qualities that separate new media from other, old testament media. I wish I would stop seeing new media articles that try to understand it from a hierarchical perspective, and more that would analyze the best uses of a grassroots medium for grassroots uses. Everyone wants to look at the trees and no one wants to look at the soil.
Posted by
Eryk @
11:20 AM
(2) comments
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Sunday, January 22, 2006 |
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Murray and Manovich |
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Reflections on the Introductions to "The New Media Reader", written by Janet H. Murray and Lev Manovich, assigned by Joline Blais for NMD 206
1. Janet Murray, Inventing the Medium
(excerpt)
Murray lists four defining qualities of computers: They are procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial. These traits bear some resemblance to our natural surroundings, most likely because our computers were designed to reflect our natural understanding of our environments. Our brains have evolved with a predisposition to mental maps and navigation. That the new media environment is highly participatory only elevates the sense that what we perceive is a "natural" environment, though it is important to remember that any representation of reality is bound to build in misrepresentations of reality.
Particularly since the web, as we currently know it, is still a text based medium, it is conducive to misrepresentation in a way that observable, physical reality isn't. For all that is said about the participatory nature of the media, it is a far cry from saying that human beings will easily adapt to the participation element of the media. If a text looks initially verifiable and accurate, that is, at best, the last stop on a Google search before the question is filed away as resolved, and at a worse level, the last document glanced at by a judge in determining the validity of a search request on an American citizen.
Murray also talks about the "Second Self" as described by Sherry Turkle (Murray, p.9) in describing the psychological and social interactions taking place between an individual and a computerized environment. While complex social networks do develop, these are a far cry from actual, physically realized social networks. Is a second life really all that desirable, no matter how complicated and rich it might be, if it is lived in an isolated location? Surely it can provide a relief to those who are already isolated, but not in a way that is preferable to actual interaction. It would seem that one of the challenges of a progressive, humanist New Media is to degrade the spectacle of false community and interaction it has spawned. Consider the distancing effect that traditional media, such as print and television, had prior to the introduction of "interactivity", as Murray writes, "exercising even greater holding power over consumers, further alienating them from the 'real' world" (Murray, p.7).
Is "interaction" just embracing a more satisfying distance from ourselves?
Certainly, the interactive element of new media has opened up new venues for creative play, which is liberating in and of itself. But the actions of interactivity in a coded environment can still impose a set of conditions, or limits, on the user which can merely encourage the user- particularly in "reality based" participatory media, like social networks, chat groups, or mailing lists- to share and perpetuate a projected delusion of one's environment. Popular video games do a great deal to indoctrinate militarism as a cultural tenet, even some being designed and distributed as training vehicles for youth. Rarely do these participatory games or environments allow us to actually interact with ourselves. Solitude is never mentioned as a core component of New Media, but it's a vital element of a sane society.
The difference now is that we do not create this new media in a vacuum. The nature of the network is what changes "the voice on high" of old testament media declaring our cultural and individual commandments into a chorus of options. That is why access to the web is not nearly as important as literacy in the tools for producing the webs content - if we allow the chorus to be heard, we can create a light to shine in the darkness of professional, mediated culture that is thriving under the guise of community and interactivity. We each have to liberate ourselves from the spell of technology on our own, or we don't do it at all. A chorus of authentic voices creating alternatives and critiques is bound to help.
2. Lev Manovich, New Media from Borges to HTML
(excerpt)
American culture is driven by the idea that we have earned our wealth through hard work. This "hard work" is afforded sparse dignity in the aristocratic cultures that thrive on it, and mostly consists of repetitive tasks. Luxury is defined in terms of what we can afford, rather than we can afford to think. Art in America gets little support because it betrays all of these concepts: artists don't engage in endlessly repeating tasks, and they serve no one by questioning the endlessly repeating task. What art does is ask people to think as a recreational activity, something that is shunned by the working class as a leisure activity reserved to the savaged ruling class, and something the working man, in reality, cannot afford to do without losing the myth of dignity afforded to work by those who profit from it. Art does, indeed, have a market in the United States, when it serves practical uses. Consider the commercial success of artists such as Thomas Kinkaide, whose paintings reinforce the work ethic, or the success of landscape painters who serve the middle class by reminding them of their vacations.
New Media in the early 90's, as Manovich points out, was integrated very quickly into American culture, where competition and its practical revolution made it an instant background hum in living rooms and kitchens from coast to coast, sparing the reflection and cynicism that Europeans had time for due to higher costs and slower speeds (Manovich, p 13). New Media flourished as a field of academic interest in Europe thanks to institutions like the Soros Foundation, who saw New Media as a way of reaching out to the recovering Soviet Bloc countries. The artists working in this period, and whom are considered the hub of the net.art "group" (when that false distinction is applied), were all European: Jodi, of Belgium/Barcelona, Vuk Cosic, of Slovenia, Heath Bunting of the UK, Alexei Shulgin and Olia Lialina of Russia. The European artists flourished in an academic context, while American artists- reflecting their contexts- were neatly packed into the "design" world (Superbad, for example).
As Manovich points out, the academic and intellectual study of net.art created a "ghettoization" of these artists who were, after all, not linked by a particular ideology so much as they were linked by a common technology. As the technology became more and more integrated overseas, the new media utopianism (or cynicism) failed to rally around any collective theory of information. When the "Web Stalker" program was designed by I/O/D, Alexei Shulgin told them, "You've killed net.art." But what software did was shift the dialogue from net.art, and art production, to software and the tools of production. In its best cases, the tools of production were easier to use and access.
I feel like Manovich tries to get a little too revolutionary when he calls inventors of software out as the only "truly important" (Manovich, p.15) artists of our time. It seems a bit too romantic a notion to declare radically designed, participatory artists tools to be art in and of themselves, a shift in semantics that works neatly but doesn't say very much. Of course, every human creative endeavor has some element of art within it. But surely, Final Cut Pro is not "the greatest avant garde film" (Manovich, p.15) any more than oil paint is not the greatest painting. I don't mean to minimize the importance of software or engineering, but why must we fall into the very American trap of justifying the greatness of art by its utilitarian value? Artists may use these tools to ask questions and instigate a dialogue, but the tools themselves do not. Instead, I would say the most vital tools created by new media to empower authentic and spontaneous acts of creativity and understanding are works of art second, so much as they are triumphs of psychology and democracy primarily. New Media is really science of widespread media empowerment, a psychology that embraces a participatory environment, for better or for ill. Google may be an elegant work of art, but it is primarily a democratic tool, a universal library. To call it art merely because it is a work of genius is similar to calling Einstein's e=mc2 a work of art. It may be true, but we have also designed a particular term to embody his accomplishment more accurately, and that is physics.
The question of whether software is art is secondary to the dissemination of tools that make creative play exciting and worthwhile for artists and closet artists alike. What new media can create is a landscape where creativity can seep into all elements of life. From art, yes, and very importantly so. But also in work and recreation, allowing individuals to empower themselves into a position of true humanity and creative, united problem solving as opposed to their designation as a numbered "worker". Is that the greatest work of art ever created? It probably is. But for this particular task, it requires the complete loss of any distinction between art production and every day life. Creativity needs to be, if not liberated from art, then borrowed and brought into the world of every day experiences. It is about inspiring solutions rather than delegating them through an instruction manual. Artists, it seems, need to stop being so possessive of claiming every work of genius as part of their own work environment!
Posted by
Eryk @
4:52 PM
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Saturday, January 21, 2006 |
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Waxing Poetic About New Media |
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New Media is not only about the use of new technology to create new products, it's the use of technology to create new models of dialogue. New Media is a new conversation only because it allows us access to conversations once held out of reach. New Media is always grassroots, new media is always me and you and no longer them. There is no longer a "they", as in, "They say it's gonna rain today." It rains, and we know it rains because we can show it to one another. New Media is about talking back: when the weatherman says it will rain, we can tell him he's wrong. We can demand a better weatherman. But most importantly, we can become the weatherman. New Media is a new way of speaking. Words like "we" and "us" are more commonplace, replacing the "you" that came from on high, declaring my tastes and fabricating my interests. Now there is an "us", a group of "I", only in unison so much as we're speaking at the same time. We're a cacophony of digressions, dissent, and dialogue. New Media is faith in the idealistic theory that creativity is an innate, latent human ability in need of liberation from the printing press and television screen. New Media, for me, is the hope that all we need to cure the world's ills is to invite more people into the conversation.
Posted by
Eryk @
10:17 PM
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