The article Urban Sensing: Out of the Woods by Dana Cuff, Mark Hansen and Jerry Kang is very relavent to my final project. Our group started out with an interest in GPS systems. The article discusses  GPS, “In combination with the embedded networked sensors, such systems have greatly reduced the technical barrier to visualize data in real space, to construct maps of layered information, and to analyze locational phenomena over time” (26). We didn’t end up using GPS in the end, however we used google maps to situate ourselves on Toronto Island and provide a context for our data collecting. In our final project we are also collaborating with seven different people. The article discusses how “many eyes” help collect social data analysis and create experience design. It goes on to talk about the Data Commons, “By this, we mean a data repository generated through decentralized collection, shared freely…” (29). This is linked to the public sphere. The article says that the public sphere must be accessible to diverse members, provide opportunity for multiple uses, encourage some sort of exchange among participants (sharing and consumption of information), and be recognizable as such a place. These are all key points for our final project, “A data commons is valuable because it allows all of us to engage each other about what we newly ‘see’ in the places and communities we inhabit” (30). The article also discusses the interface, “Part of the success of blogs can be attributed to extremely simple tools for creating and publishing content. Perhaps more important than the content creation, the simplicity of sharing this information is key, as are distribution mechanisms” (31). We experimented with many different options for interfaces and went very simple, which I think worked well. Urban sensing is about, “making the invisible visible” which connects directly with the documentary practice.

For all other information on my final project please go to my page Final Project: 21 Tags.

 

I worked at the Banff Centre for the Walter Phillips Gallery from 2004 to 2005 as a Gallery Project Assistant. One of the exhibitions that I helped work on and organize was called Database Imaginary. It included 33 artists, such as David Rokeby and Lev Manovich. I think the website for this exhibition would be of great interest to some. It has lots of links and info.

http://databaseimaginary.banff.org/index.php

Database Imaginary

Co-curated by Sarah Cook, 
Steve Dietz, and Anthony Kiendl 
November 14, 2004 - January 23, 2005

Database Imaginary explores artwork and emerging cultural forms by artists who use databases to comment on their uses and to imagine unknown uses. The exhibition contains 23 projects by 33 visual artists from around the world including Hans Haacke, Antonio Muntadas, Edward Poitras, Lisa Jevbratt, and Thomson & Craighead, working in all media, from wooden sculpture to interactive mobile phone-generated field guides.

David Rokeby Giver of Names

Victoria Vesna in her article, Database Aesthetics: Of Containers, Chronicles, Time Capsules, Xanadu, Alexandria and the World Brain, says that we are “Information Architects.” She writes, “Crucially, we must begin to think about the relationship between consciousness and our organization and dissemination of data. And once again we must reconsider how the organization of data reflect our collective shifts in perception and our relation to information and knowledge?” (Vesna 1).

In his book Identity, Zygmunt Bauman discusses the notion of identity in the modern world. He talks about the insecurity and uncertainty of ‘liquid modernity.’ People are liquid and free-floating, but want security, however to be ‘fixed’ and ‘identified’ is impossible. In the modern world our identities are undergoing a process of continual transformation. With globalization people have weaker connections to their homeland. Bauman says the idea of identity developed from the need to belong, “One becomes aware that ‘belonging’ and ‘identity’ are not cut in rock, that they are not secured by a lifelong guarantee, that they are eminently negotiable and revocable; and that one’s own decisions, the steps one takes, the way one acts—and the determination to stick by all that—are crucial factors in both” (Bauman 11). Bauman says that identity is something that is invented rather than discovered, and that we have to build our own identities, “Few if any of us are exposed to just one ‘community of ideas and principles’ at a time, and so most of us have similar trouble with the issue of l’ipséite (coherence of whatever distinguishes us as persons)” (Bauman 13). People continually reconstruct their identities to understand the world they live in.

We can apply these ideas of liquid identity and modernity to the practice of new media. New Media is about process, reconstruction, transformation, uncertainty, the impossibility of being fixed and trying to understand the world we live in.

I was very interested in what Alex mentioned about the word avatar coming from the Hindu avatara. On Wikipedia an avatara in Hindu philosophy is described as the ‘descent’ or incarnation of a divine being or the Supreme Being, onto Earth (Vishnu). It usually implies a descent into lower realms of existence for special purposes. An avatara is an embodiment, a bodily manifestation of the divine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vishnu as a Fish

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar

Translating that to the virtual world, Wikipedia says that an avatar is a computer user’s representation of himself or herself, whether in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games, a two-dimensional icon or picture used on internet forums and other communities. It is an ‘object’ representing the embodiment of the user.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(virtual_reality)

In Second Life when a user creates an avatar, they become God-like. Is this one of the appeals of Second Life, this power of re-creation? Should we all have a special purpose in our Second Life? Do we understand ourselves more or less through avatars?

Simon Penny in his article, The Virtualization of Art Practice: Body Knowledge and the Engineering Worldview, writes, “The roboticist Hans Moravec has envisioned a future in which we upload our consciousnesses into galactic gas cloud digital databanks and live as immortal disembodied digital entities. But he neglects to observe just how similar this idea is to ‘going to heaven’ ” (Penny 31). He talks about body-knowledge in terms of simulation, “The downside of this process is that it includes a bodily monoculture; it destroys cognitive diversity, the complex ecology of body-knowledge… we may be killing off diverse body-knowledge before we know what they are good for” (Penny 35).

My avatar is a fox like creature wearing a tight pink suit.   ????

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lilka Szczepanski at Animal Island

In terms of documentary, I think that the ability to take photographs of your experiences in Second Life is interesting, you are taking digital documents of a digital space? There are also many spaces within Second Life to display different types of media, and view these displays.

How does the context and content of documentary change in Second Life, the virtual world?

 

In theory, Second Life is very compelling. Images are not just seen but are experienced, there are multiple and alternative points of view, and it provides a place for the exploration of ideas and narratives. There are also possibilities to gain empowerment and to do things that could not be done in reality. It brings new meaning to the terms intertextuality and phenomenology. Intertextuality refers to any text or document that references additional texts or documents. This happens in abundance in Second Life, everything is referencing something else. For example art galleries created in Second Life. Phenomenology is the relationship between states of individual consciousness and social life. Second Life is certainly playing with our perceptions of what reality is. 

Eugénie Shinke, in his article Corporealis Ergo Sum: Affective Response in Digital Games writes, “There are new realities to be met with in our interactions with games; realities which can be revealed by examining such technologies not simply as instruments, but as embodied and affective praxes. It is not simply as didactic tools or ideological vehicles that digital games can foster political change, but in the way that they open up a space for the emergence of new relations between body, mind, and technology” (Shinkle 33). Does Second Life encourage change rather than just simple role-playing?

In practice, personally, whenever I venture into Second Life I get a headache in my First Life. As other people have noted the graphics are really outdated, which I find very problematic in becoming part of this world. I have also had a lot of problems with the system freezing. 

Since I am doing my thesis on Polish culture, I decided to check out some Polish places in Second Life. I wanted to see how Second Life plays with the construction and replication of space and place. I came upon a miniature Krakow (Second Krakow). However, it was deserted, like a ghost town. 

 

 

At the beginning of the semester Steve mentioned the article in NOW magazine, Is Analog Photography Dead? by David Jager. The article discusses the pros and cons of film versus digital photography. I think this ongoing debate has a lot to do with the new media practice.

The film photographer Toni Hafkenscheid says, “The whole photographic process is moving from a very tactile experience to looking at a computer screen” (Jager 76). Hafkenscheid argues that film has more soul, it has a hands-on authenticity and spontaneity. He also says that it produces surprises and that the unpredictable nature of film can create ‘happy accidents.’

The digital photographer Cheryl Soukes says, “I love the quality of what you call old-fashioned photography, but new technology seems to possess an irresistible allure” (Jager 77). She argues that digital photography offers new ways in describing the world. It provides immediacy and broader access.

Does digital become an equalizer? And how does this relate to new media?

http://www.nowtoronto.com/art/story.cfm?content=162859

The exercise where we had four clips that could be arranged in a non-linear way and still tell a narrative showed that there is not just one meaning, and that the meaning may continue to change depending on the order of the clips. Something that is probably difficult for many traditional artists, is that they share the control and outcome of their work with their audience.

Michael Rush, in his book New Media in Art writes, “The value of interactivity as art is in its exploration of multiple points of view, without fear of the challenges of non-linearity or unusual modes of perception. To this extent, the new medium, if we may call it that, extends both modernist and post-modernist agendas of radically transforming how art is made and experienced” (Rush 213). Art becomes about the experience. Eduardo Kac writes, in his article Telepresence Art, “At its best, interactive art implies less stress on form (composition) and more emphasis on behavior (choice, action), negotiation of meanings, and the foregrounding of the public who, now transformed into “participants,” acquire a prominent and active role in shaping their own field of experiences” (Kac 1). Again, the experience. Kac goes on to talk about reciprocity in new media as opposed to mass media which comes from one source, shifting the power balance.

In class, Alex said that new media is the birth of a new language and culture. Together we are all learning a new system. New media environments are immersive and are made of many different environments. It seems that through non-linear narratives and participation, artists are providing a platform for us (the audience, the participants) to discover new possibilities in the way we think about the construction of our world. We all become a part of the process where the outcome is unknown. There is uneasiness in this, in not having a clear end product.

Our class section didn’t have too much time with the exercise where we had to project photographs onto different objects. I have some family archive photographs of my great-grandmother and grandmother. I would have liked to try and project their face onto my own face. How would the surface of my face, the colour of my skin look with the photographs on it? If I moved my face, how would the images change? How does the context of my face change the meaning of the images? It would create a sense of trying to connect, of physically trying to connect to the past, to my ancestors with my own body. It would also look at familial resemblance within our facial features. It would certainly play with time, space and reality. These photographs taken generations and generations ago would come to life through me. These images would be transformed and so would I. 

A photograph is said to capture and preserve a moment in time, however through these physical projections and the virtual images we have put on the web they become spaceless and timeless, collapsing the normal barriers of past, present and future. Eduardo Kac, in his article Telepresence Art, says that we are in the age of ‘paradoxical logic,’ where images are created in real time, “This new kind of image gives priority to speed over space, to the virtual over the real, and therefore transforms our notion of reality from something given to a construct” (Kac 6). Altering space and time, alters reality.

Documentary, and the ongoing debate about the ‘truth’ within it, has a whole new meaning within new media. Michael Rush in his book New Media in Art, describes the notion of the ‘real,’ “Life as we have known it, including the memories that our lives have formed, will be forever changed as the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ become increasingly indistinguishable. Perhaps memories and dreams will become one” (Rush 239). 

  

my great-grandmother              my grandmother

(both on my mothers side of the family)

“In other words, everything now involves images in one way or another. Not necessarily images in the traditional sense of representation, but images of light that are part of the contemporary landscape as electricity invaded towns in the late nineteenth century, an ‘electronic lighting.’ ”

 - Eduardo Kac Telepresence Art