A totally indulgent & self-referential work that I've been wanting to do for some time

I finally, after talking about it for so long, wrote the block of code that can interpret XML files to control various video parameters in Processing (thank you, proXML library for being so handy). Jonny and I had this convo about a year or so ago, discussing how rad it would be if an art object was somehow conscious of how popular/valuable it was, and was then able to react accordingly. If it wasn't doing so well, it would spruce itself up to get your attention. Conversely, if it was doing extremely well, it could flaunt it. This would be an exercise of pure cynicism in the face of "net.art" and its convoluted market, and would explore the tension between the facets of a networked art object that are participatory (or require active participation from the viewer) and those that are autonomous to the object itself (i.e. its aesthetic).

I will post some vids or other visual proof-of-existence once there's more to look at; I've been using a boring-looking video to do my testing. But, now that the engine is up and running, I can start populating it with beautiful images. Also, I have to think about the indices I'd call upon to continually test the object's value. Last year, Maegh (a Marxist scholar who studies art movements through a socialist lens) and I started thinking about what a Mei Moses index for net.art would look like. This is a difficult question, because the object in itself, by definition, exists in a place that is accessible at all times by anyone. In a traditional art market, collectors pay for an object that is a stand in for the artist's "genius" and non-alienated labor. But in net.art, the prospect of ownership gets nullified (although the genius+non-alienated labor combo is still there); the net.art object requires a shift/reorganization of the market forces.

I'm still on the fence about how to quantify such an object's worth, though. I guess the clearest indicator is whether or not the artist has gained the stamp of approval from the various cultural institutions. But is there more than that?

BTDubs, I just had a dream in which a novel was written about Olia Lialina. I saw a commercial for it on TV, and jumped up to go buy it. Then I woke up, sat down at the computer, and for some reason, my code started working... Creepy!

...thus spake Momus

Momus has this amazing blog called Click Opera that I read so regularly it's made its way to my Netvibes. Today's post is about the seemingly recent dearth of new bukkake porn (is that redundant: bukkake+porn?) that has made the spring dry after a good wet twenty years, and he makes the following analogy:

"A Kafka short story describes how leopards broke into the temple and drank the holy wine. They did it again the following year, and before long it became part of the ceremony."

I <3 you, Momus.

Media Makers Conference at MIT's Media Lab

Went to a great conference organized by the MIT Media Lab's Media Fabrics group yesterday. The group's director, Glorianna Davenport, chaired a great series of talks about the group's legacy in multimedia, outlined the particular challenges in multimedia production, and introduced some notable alumni who've gone on to found start-ups that continue to tackle some of these challenges.

The overview of the group's legacy, starting from Davenport's days as a graduate student in the 70's, was impressive. I was especially surprised to see how many of the projects her group pioneered wound up in my classroom as an elementary school student in the early 90's. Their use of HyperCard (hypertext creation software) as an artistic medium informed the way I created media when I was a kid. Their exploration of interactivity in film (as seen through the Aspen Project ) paved the way for those great educational tools on laser disk, like à la rencontre de Philippe (where you tore around the streets of Paris bumming Gauloises in cafes, and looking for a place to crash, if memory serves!)

Davenport then introduced Confectionary, a multimedia publishing tool that is not unlike YouTube. There are several key differences that I find charming and disconcerting at the same time. The tool has a great-looking interface; fully enveloped in the classy, arthouse aesthetic of some of the older net.art practitioners. (Courier font, the grey and white simple interface, a sendup to the old Macintosh days of the mid-90's.) Its look is very anti-YouTube, and although the idea is the same, Confectionary's goal is to provide a social media publishing environment without all the noise, thoughtlessness, and irrelevance of YouTube. It dawned on me that this group is dedicated not only to exploring themes of social media, but also exploring the relationships between the object produced and the aesthetic choices of the interface. By repackaging YouTube as something more formidable, even intimidating, the produced work is repurposed. This is a space where the mundane becomes art and the "prosumer" transcends to become an aesthete.

I looked up Davenport when I got home, and started reading a whitepaper of hers, "Improvisational Media Fabric", that fully captured the spirit of her presentation (despite having been written in 2002). One key quote:

"...digital cinema is freeing itself from its linear celluloid base; it is evolving into a "meta-cinema" where one's own memories, perceptions, actions, and desires connect with others through a continuous process of communicating, interweaving, and reconfiguring tradeable bits within a universal media environment."

The ability of the media maker to be a collector, a scrapbooker, in addition to storyteller, is what's most important here. It is in the glorification of what Davenport called the "improvised collection" that our stories become art. Technically, the creation of that art is aided by its interface, its frame, or presentation. This is an electrifying idea to explore: is the interface through which we interact with the story just as integral to the narrative as the story itself?

Overdue reflections on ROFLcon

ROFLcon. You had to have been living in a nuclear bunker if you hadn't heard of it: essentially, a conference spanning several days where the internet elite met at the Harvard Berkman Center to discuss the theoretic significance of "internet culture". The event was ostensibly "the internet made flesh", and included many microcelebrities such as Tron Guy, Tai Zonday, etc., and also included new media hard-hitters like Alice Marwick (whose analysis grounded the discussion, lending it academic credence).

Marwick theorizes that the internet democratizes the star system in that anyone with DSL can garner fame, even corporate recognition, if their product is viral enough, if it catches the internet's attention, if it gets enough hits (and we have counters for that). She recalled Andy Samberg's "Lazy Sunday" video as the vehicle that rocketed him to fame on SNL. Henry Jenkins cited Soulja Boy's chance to parlay his amateur music video into an undeniable You Tube hit and then a legitimate record deal. (And we all remember the Arctic Monkeys, Tila Tequilla, and the rest of the MySpace hit factory.) What Marwick touches on, that Jenkins ignores, is that, because these systems of distributions are owned by large media conglomerates (Viacom, Fox, Google...), the owners of these systems see considerable "profit". That there is profit to be had is another ball of wax altogether (we still don't know how too effectively monetize YouTube and MySpace...). But what remains is the distinct possibility that as [potentially] money-making media outlets, these channels of distribution are subject to the same mores, codes, and hierarchies of traditional media outlets. To put it another way, these new media channels are but an extension of existing and heavily entrenched media outlets: as Marwick states, "these [microcelebrities] who bubble up to the top fit an existing image" (and then her slideshow clicks to the infamous "You're a Fag!" image). She follows up with the question: Is new media culture actually upholding the status quo?

I break here. Marwick implores the ROFLcon audience to think about the discourses that are upheld and those that are silenced on the internet, and challenges them to be activists in furthering discourses that diverge from the predominating culture. This is a fair challenge to put the audience to, especially from their standpoint. However, I find a fundamental flaw in her reasoning, and in that of ROFLcon altogether. Her address claims that "internet culture" ignores certain voices; only earnestly supporting certain discourses. "Internet culture" glosses over multiplicities of racial identity and sexual preference (and insists it's video girls be blonde & big-breasted). However, she fails to account for the one intrinsic structural quality of the internet that makes it a plane of almost boundless expanse: it's (relatively and conceivably) unlimited bandwith.

In saying “internet culture ignores discourse X in favor of Y” is wrong. “X” is out there, somewhere, just not on her, or any of the event's participants, browser. Furthermore, this indictment only belies a firm and inescapable belief that "internet culture" has effectively PROCLAIMED the net for its own. The internet is not at fault here, what is at fault is a sense of entitlement that allows people like the ROTFLcon-ers the ability, the inalienable right, to claim media (all media) for its own, and in its own image. This proclamation, however cautionary (because I truly believe that Marwick "gets it"), is circular: spurring the audience on to activism on behalf of some Other establishes the very existence of an Other to "internet culture".

By illustrating the link between participatory culture and larger media industries, Marwick has effectively asserted that "internet culture" is part of a capitalist factory of production. Just as money is a stand-in for [something] in a captalist society, hits, page views, "Whuffies", have been introduced to "internet culture" as a yardstick by which one can quantify one's worth in comparison to others. This "internet culture" is a new incarnation of capitalist society. One cannot help but to harken back to Theodore Adorno's "Culture of Industry," which elucidates the impossibility of a cultural product to break free of a society-sanctioned nexus of signification, and thusly all attempt at subverting its paradigm falls short as merely parody. As Adorno writes:

"Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system."

The FCC Net Neutrality hearing at Harvard Law

Today, I attended the FCC public hearing on Net Neutrality at Harvard Law School as a videographer for FreePress.net and CCTV. The event provided a pretty excellent opportunity for anyone to learn more about the issue from different perspectives: panelists included Daniel E. Bosley, State Representative of Massachusetts, David Cohen, the executive vice president of Comcast, David Clark, from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and a whole host of other professors, engineers, and policy makers who tried to sway the commission in either one direction or another on the topic.

Here's what I thought were the day's highlights:

There is an upcoming "bandwidth crisis" due to the popularity of video uploading/downloading. And we're not only talking about YouTube: this crisis looms large, especially as the internet is quickly becoming the channel of distribution for TV and film. Also contributing to the crisis are VOiP services and apps that allow for precise synching of live audio and visual data (i.e. the swanky 8-way video conferencing apps big corporations are so fond of...)

The way the ISPs are currently structured is, if you're just surfing the internet while your neighbor is bit-torrenting, you-tubing, or netflixing or something, you're suffering, because he/she is sucking up the available bandwidth on the network. So, according to the talking heads at the ISPs, you should be mad that you're paying the same amount of money as the next person, but are receiving diminished service due to their "abuse" of the network.

So, bearing that in mind, certain ISPs and their proponents propose a tiered internet, where the ISPs limit certain applications from sucking up the resources on the network. Which boils down to everyone having capped access to applications and services (already practiced by some ISPs in a sense: it's called "network management"). And also, the proposed system includes forcing commercial web services to pay premiums to allow the consumer easier access to their sites. So under this system, you'll be able to access YouTube (hopefully), but it'll be a lot slower than, say, Hulu or whatever else NBC is sponsoring. They expect the consumer to chose to patronize the sites that are easiest for them to access-- a fair assumption.

But is this by any means just? No, not quite. When listening to David Cohen, the VP at Comcast, speak, it was quite clear whose interests he had in mind. First off, why does his camp claim the right to impose this new system? Because "competitive broadband providers have responded with massive private investment in broadband infrastructure... with no goverment subsidies, and no assurance of success". So... we owe them a favor? So... we should just lie down and let them restructure the internet after TV's existing (and failing) model?

The anti-neutrality camp was very quick to vilify certain services and apps; those whose very existence pose a great threat to established media conglomerates. Here's his entire testimony before the commission. It's kind of dry, and not much to look at, so I tried to fill the vacuum with shots of audience members with wacky haircuts as well.



YouTube is a threat to the big broadcasters, Skype is a threat to telephone companies, and of course, they all love to jump on BitTorrent's back for being a virtual speakeasy for pirated movies, tv shows, music, and software. Given the ISPs' heavy stake in media distribution, it's only natural that their proposed tiered internet will punish those services who pose the greatest threat. Other engineers and professors testified that there are more reasonable alternatives to tackling this problem, including better network structure, or just basically allowing the consumer to decide which apps or services get priority on their network (which is the idea I like the most).

As for the citizens who were willing to testify for our cameras, a lot of them showed deeper knowledge of the debate than I would have expected. Going into it, I thought I might encounter a lot of people whose main gripe is that they won't be able to download stuff for free. (A prevailing view among many, really!) However, today's group brought up some issues that were both informed and local in scope. One man I interviewed brought an interesting perspective on how these proposed actions would hurt small businesses that rely on e-commerce to keep their overhead costs down. (On a personal note, his daughter runs a small business selling yoga mats over the internet. She wouldn't be able to stay afloat if she had to pay up to make her site as easily accessible as a competitor's with deeper pockets.)



So yeah, exciting stuff! I'm sure there is/will be more coverage all over the internets (including all of the interviews filmed by CCTV, SCAT, and Boston Indy Media on vuze.com), so please check it out if you're interested. Full coverage of the event can be found here at FreePress.net,
and at CCTV, where Susan did a great job making all that information comprehensible!

OMG: The Totally Wired panel at the Brattle yesterday

Yesterday evening, I went to go see a panel hosted by the MacArthur Foundation and MIT Press, heralding their new 6-book volume laying the foundation for that shiny new pedagogy: Media Literacies. Participating in the panel were king of kings, Henry Jenkins of MIT's formidable Comparative Media Studies Program, Howard Gardner, the man who taught our generation's teachers to teach (and held his own on the topic pretty well despite being a self-professed luddite), and Katie Salen, who is not only a game designer, educator, and media literacy advocate, but one of those strange and beautiful creatures born as the seamless fusion of all three. Suffice to say, it was a very stimulating discussion, and I'm very excited that I was there for the "ceremony" where media literacy as an official educational discourse had finally "come out" to the rest of academia.

Henry started out by making an interesting correlation: he brought up the (somewhat cliché) image of the "good parent" who takes his/her kids out to art museums, fosters dinnertime conversation, etc., and compared that to the image of this century's "good teacher". We understand; the deeper an investment one makes in stimulating a child, the better formed that child will ultimately be.

When Jenkins made that leap, I immediately thought of that chapter in Stephen D. Hewitt's Freakonomics about the formula for "good parenting". The question was raised: if you bring your child to the art museum on a regular basis, will they be more successful than a child who was never taken? Ultimately, the Freakonomists concluded that a "good parent" doesn't get points for taking the kid to the art museum; a "good parent" is one whose natural notion of parenting is built around including their children in activities that they can enjoy as a family, that will stimulate the child to take part in family discussion, and that ultimately socializes the child in the world around him/her. I believe the quote is: "it isn't what the parent does, it's who the parent is" that makes the difference.

Similarly, you can't give a teacher some new software to teach, or a new device, or a Facebook group, and expect them to make a miracle out of it. A "good teacher" will use their unique ability to see possibilities in the contemporary, insanely digitized world, and use those in a way that will bolster a positive classroom environment. The panel did seem to do a good job of making this distinction. However, there's always the danger that this notion of greater investment could translate directly into "how about I make a game out of MySpace?" or something. (I don't want to do the whole night the disservice of glossing over the key issue; don't get me wrong, it was more nuanced than that. But, there's always that risk.) I can only hope their audience "got it". Some of the questions from the audience made me doubt. ("Have you seen these Webkinz your grandchildren are playing with?")

Sitting there, I wondered if twelve years ago these same people would have been talking about how Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is going to bridge the achievement gap. Or if, twenty-five years ago, they would have been singing the praises of Sesame Street. In any case, it boils down to an attempt by an older generation to intercept and rework the younger generation's attachments and associations with media. Older discourse has always been too quick to call this kind of enterprise "the Answer", and it's always misleading because there are some places adults cannot go, some spheres of play that can never be controlled, harnessed, or emulated. However, I have faith that the panelists are very much invested in this discourse, and will drive it in the direction it needs to go.

More on Facebook. Okay, I'm done now. It's out of my system.

Noah opted not to respond to Tuesday's anti-Facebook rant, but decided to comment in person, saying that it was unfair/naive of me to expect Facebook not to try to make money. Obviously, I know that people (programmers in particular) don't do things without expecting other things in return. So yeah, money is definitely the goal for Facebook developers, and they're entitled to it. However, what Facebook is doing is, simply, destroying the vibe that their community was founded upon. Once that's destroyed, why would you want to continue to hang out there?

From the perspective of a consumer, and not a FB user, I don't believe that the method Zuckerberg et cie. have developed is a bad one at all. They've successfully given a readable identity to a previously anonymous consumer. It will most definitely revolutionize the way advertisers target us, and put the products we want easily within our grasp. However, the social networking scene is NOT where that belongs. Aggregated consumer data juxtaposed with individual profiles on a social networking site has the look and, most importantly, the feel of living in an Orwellian nightmare. They should have known better.

As much as I was trying to cast my grievances in a humorous light the other day, I am seriously disappointed in FB for this new set of changes they've implemented over the past few months. We, the participants, are what makes that scene, not Blockbuster's ad revenues. And sure, there's always space for site developers to reign in some cash from corporate sponsors, but they have to find a model that does not intrude in the unique experience that site provides. Facebook has not done that.

And you know what? As much as I prefer Facebook's crisp, clean, aesthetic (or did), it's MySpace that actually succeeds at being a social networking platform that maintains its particular vibe while making plenty of money in ad revenue. MySpace, ugly as it is, never forgot that it was a community first, and as it expanded in scope, it did it in ways that were consistent with its user base and original goal. MySpace became a forum: for independent music, for political debate, for camwhores seeking the limelight, etc. And although some of the fruits were deplorable (Tila Tequila?!), they were lucrative, and still showed respect for the community.

And lo, the Beacon Ad campaign has been abandoned! Hooray!