Congratulations to our colleague Amber Case, whose geocoding services company Geoloqi has just been acquired by Esri, “the world’s leader in mapping technology and geographic systems, to bring powerful next-gen location and mapping technology to the mobile and web app community.”
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The academic of the 21st century is arriving and setting up camp. Their understanding of analytics, cultural and social consumption both in the meat and jacked in has a fluidity that supersedes what was previously thought of as crude to the progression of western European academic narrative…
A new narrative has begun. Academia has consumed itself to a point of becoming a co-modification no longer holding the traditional intrinsic capitalistic value once used as a lure.
Academia has been forced to become more. More then a place to exchanged knowledge. More then a place for research. More then a need for institutional affirmation.
Academics of the 21st century currently come from a training of the 20th but with an outlook that sees beyond the book, linearity, the need for closure.
The capture of our narratives are intrinsically being replicated and distributed throughout the Network.
What is so exciting about the 21st Academic is a new journey to redefine education, learning, community and participatory spaces.
Whether it is learning to hug again, love again, program embedded devices, work in the clouds, embed yourself in a culture, society, an augmented reality has commenced to a point of reality.
These types of cybernetic work represent a transgression from the meat to being jacked in that has served as a model for the understanding of the new Academic.
Are you a new Academic? Do you see a new Academia evolving in the 21st Century?
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Video shot via Google Glass – with Dian von Furstenberg wearing the glasses during New York Fashion Week. “Diane is a champion for innovation and effortless design, so it’s unsurprising that Glass fit seamlessly into her production. In the week leading up to her Spring 2013 show in New York, and during the show itself, everyone from stylists and models to Diane herself used Glass to capture never-before-seen footage of the creative process.” (Via ZDNet; thanks to Gregory Foster for the pointer!)
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Steve Mann formally defined wearable computing in terms of its three basic modes of operation and its six fundamental attributes.
Mann points out that “The most fundamental issue in wearable computing is no doubt that of personal empowerment, through its ability to equip the individual with a personalized, customizable information space, owned, operated, and controlled by the wearer. While home computers have gone a long way toward empowering the individual, they only do so when the user is at home. As the home is perhaps the last bastion of space not yet touched by the long arm of surveillance – space that one can call one’s own – the home computer, while it does provide an increase in personal empowerment, is not nearly so profound in its effect as the wearable computer which brings this personal space – space one can call one’s own – out into the world” (Adapted from Steve Mann’s address Wearable Computing as Means for Personal Empowerment Keynote Address for The First International Conference on Wearable Computing, ICWC-98, May 12-13, Fairfax, VA. Originally found at EyeTap Glossary).
There are three operational modes in this new interaction between human and computer.
The computer runs continuously, and is always ready to interact with the user. Unlike a hand-held device, laptop computer, or PDA, it does not need to be opened up and turned on prior to use. The signal flow from human to computer, and computer to human runs continuously to provide a constant user interface.
Traditional computing paradigms are based on the notion that computing is the primary task. Wearable computing, however, is based on the notion that computing is NOT the primary task. The assumption of wearable computing is that the user will be doing something else at the same time as doing the computing. Thus the computer should serve to augment the intellect, or augment the senses.
Unlike hand held devices, laptop computers, and PDAs, the wearable computer can encapsulate us (Fig. 1c). It doesn’t necessarily need to completely enclose us, but the concept allows for a greater degree of encapsulation than traditional portable computers. There are two aspects to this encapsulation:
It can function as an information filter, and allow us to block out material we might not wish to experience, whether it be offensive advertising, or simply a desire to replace existing media with different media. In less severe manifestations, it may simply allow us to alter our perception of reality in a very mild sort of way.
Mediation allows us to block or modify information leaving our encapsulated space. In the same way that ordinary clothing prevents others from seeing our naked bodies, the wearable computer may, for example, serve as an intermediary for interacting with untrusted systems, such as third party digital anonymous cash “cyberwallets”.
There are six informational flow paths associated with this new human-machine synergy. These signal flow paths are, in fact, attributes of wearable computing, and are described, in what follows, from the human’s point of view:
(The Wearable Computer) does not cut you off from the outside world like a virtual reality game or the like. You can attend to other matters while using the apparatus. It is built with the assumption that computing will be a secondary activity, rather than a primary focus of attention. In fact, ideally, it will provide enhanced sensory capabilities. It may, however, mediate (augment, alter, or deliberately diminish) the sensory capabilities.
Is ambulatory, mobile, roving; “you can do other things while using it”. E.g. you can type while jogging, etc.
Can get your attention continuously if you want it to; within reasonable limits (e.g. that you might not see the screen while you blink or look away momentarily) the output medium is constantly perceptible by the wearer.
The system must be controllable by the user in the idea that one can grab control of it anytime they wish and can be used as a communication medium when you want it to.
It is environmentally aware, multimodal, multisensory. (this ultimately increases the user’s situational awareness). Communicative to others: it can be used as a communications medium when you want it to.
It allows the wearer to be expressive through the medium, whether as a direct communications medium to others, or as means of assisting the production of expressive media (artistic or otherwise).
Allows the wearer to be expressive through the medium, whether as a direct communications medium to others, or as means of assisting the production of expressive media (artistic or otherwise).
Always on, running, and ready. May have “sleep modes” but is never “dead” (unlike a laptop computer, which must be opened up, switched on, and booted up before use).
Human and computer are inextricably intertwined.
You can adapt to it so that it acts as a true extension of mind and body; after time you forget that you are wearing it.
Resists, if you wish, prohibition or requests by others for removal. This is in contrast to a laptop, in briefcase or bag, that could be separated from you by the “please leave all bags and briefcases at the counter” policy of a department store, library, or similar establishment.
Others can’t observe or control it unless you let them.
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Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts demonstrate Aurasma, a new augmented reality tool that can seamlessly animate the world as seen through a smartphone. Going beyond previous augmented reality, their “auras” can do everything from making a painting talk to overlaying live news onto a printed newspaper.
Augmented reality is the process of adding layers of information onto the world we see, viewable only through technology. In this space, the Aurasma Lite app uses a smartphone and camera to lay “auras”–3D images, games, animations–onto real-world places. Point your phone at a movie poster on the street and launch a trailer; point at a building to pull up an interactive map… or create your own “aura” and upload it to the virtual space for anyone to see. Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts both joined Aurasma when it launched in June 2011.
They say: “This is the next step on from simply browsing the internet because now the digital content we discover, create and share can be woven seamlessly in to the world around us.”
“We love paper and we love technology … so, this hybridization is the result!”
Ethel Baraona Pohl, architecture writer, commenting on Domus’ recent collaboration with Aurasma
Quotes by Matt Mills
““Technology’s allowing the phone to start to see and understand much like how the human brain does.””
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Is the system you’re making augmenting reality or occluding reality?
These are notes from a panel I was on with Charlotte at Sony Ericsson campus in Lund, Sweden.
“Very often, when you’re designing things, you’re thinking about the typical user. The typical user may have good visual ability, good hearing, no cognitive problems, good motor and tactile ability”, says Magnusson.
“The problem is that a lot of people think about the typical mobile context, where everything works, instead of the contexts in which all of the sudden things no longer work. Everyday circumstances can result in problems seeing and attending to the screen, noisy shaky environment, you might have gloves, other things held, difficult to touch the device”. If you need very fine motor control environment, you’re probably not very happy if you need certain motion controls. (Back of a car, etc.)
“And if, in addition, we try to do AR — information overlaid by the device easily occludes the real world. Onscreen info vs. what you see, audio/voice vs. what you hear. Touch/vibrations vs. what you feel”.
You may look through the device — but if you’re looking at something through a device the whole time, you’re not really in the environment. You’re using the device as a viewfinder through the environment.
In traditional augmented reality, there is a lot of emphasis on the visual channel. One thing that is missing is emotion and physicality.
But in reality there are directions, areas, points, distances. Designers need to learn to design multi-modally for people, contexts and situations.
Piano Stairs (good template video) – Stockholm, Sweden. — 66% more people chose the stairs than the escalator. Fun can obviously change behavior for the better.
Inception the app – Martin Roth, RJDJ, AndroidOnly! Malmö, 2011″.
Archeology of Time Machine
An Audio-Geiger counter, because as you use it, it sounds like a Geiger counter. You get a very dull sound when pointing in the wrong direction, and very bright sound when pointing in the right direction.
Audio augmented reality – a sound window in time – Activity Sounds, Carriages, Focus.
Sound AR (bubbles) less sensitive to jitter/impressions.
Using this sound to listen to events in the city in the past, i.e. listening to horses and not looking at a screen while you walk down the street.
Go to a site and get pictures and sounds of the past based on your location. (cool!)
Showed a video of a lot of people in a field looking around with headphones getting the past audio-ed to him.
Animal hunt — audio-based for kids. Animals have been taken. Difficult DoFi http://www.do-fi.se/site/ — a small company in Malmö — they are doing this in collaboration with them.
Fun! Actor design important (great actor voices and people going around the area with them — a sentry or a baker, etc. that children with headphones walk around a site and visit with them), free exploration — provides one with a feel for spatial locations, screen info problematic in sunny and windy conditions, size of sound bubbles important.
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It’s been months since Bruce Sterling delivered his endnote talk at SXSW, and there have been furious conversations about The New Aesthetic. If we take the replies by Watz et al on the Thecreatorsproject blog as an indication, there is a bit of dismissal of the idea from my interpretation. However, I am still drunk on the kool-aid, but why? I still believe that a cultural chord was struck that is a result of extant developments in contemporary digital art of the 2000’s that lead right to The New Aesthetic blog, or something like it. Where I and others argue that The New Aesthetic might be a non-movement, I would like to re-imagine that it is actually indicative of other cultural phenomena and New Media proto-movements. These have to do with issues of curation, precedents in New Media “movements”, and the shape of culture in New Media society. Where I think Bridle et al might have done a disservice to the idea of NA is through a partial superficiality in the case of a subject, while ephemeral, is not superficial at all.
Why? It is for the reason that in the current day and age, ephemerality is often mistaken for superficiality. Net.culture by default is mercuric, and technoculture is typified by the fact that things like the iPad and tablets have become nearly ubiquitous within two years of the technology’s emergence. This is reflected in online culture, through the torrent (pun intended) of images spilling through social media like blogs, Facebook, image boards, and tumblrs like The New Aesthetic. Love or hate it, what Bridle describes with some inarticulation is a phenomenology of this torrent of images as an aesthetic and their generation by technology.
“I’ll just leave this here” Machine Vision, New Forms of Curation, and The New Aesthetic
What do I mean by this? There are two aspects of NA that are germane to describing it – the machine eye and a particular form of human curation. The first is well documented by Bridle and the comments on thecreatorsproject – there are several flavors of machine creation or acquisition of images. As mentioned elsewhere, this includes surveillance, drone images, intentional corruption of digital media (“glitch”), and generative images, to name a few. I would also like to add the phenomena encountered through the use of search engines to correlate images, which can be considered as a form of meta-vision. All of these have been aptly described as sets of practices that are more akin to driving a nail as culture continues to fly in a ballistic arc than taking a definitive all-encompassing stance. The second has to do with mass curation in social media, a subject that has been the subject of recent books. But there is an intersection of two key elements, which I will pin together next.
Models of these forms of social curation include Facebook, “surfing clubs”, and even imageboards like 4chan.org. While considering 4chan and its reputation as being the home of the memetic dregs of the Internet, it also represents one of the purest forms of net.curation, and that is the curation of anonymity. “I’ll just leave this here” is a common comment posted by 4chan denizens who post images, but two things are manifest when this occurs. First, something is being left, and that thing was chosen as being intrinsically of some interest or provocation, thus implying intent of interest or value and therefore creates a curatorial gesture, even if it is banal. Human selection is not random, despite claims to randomness. This is evident in New Media art projects called “Internet Surfing Clubs”, which are predecessors to the NA tumblr, and so on.
The Curatorial model that the NA tumblr seems to be based on, albeit singularly rather than group, lies in collectives like Nastynets and Double Happiness. These are/were “Internet Surfing Clubs”, which drew from New Media art phenomena like Dirtstyle, early Glitch, and Digital Minimalism. These take memes, 8-bit graphics, “blingy” graphics (a hallmark of Dirtstyle) and document them in an endless blogroll, typifying the stated torrent of various images. The curatorial practice of the found varies from Nastynets archiving of memetic and glitchy graphics to Cory Arcangel’s exhibition of a “found” Photoshop preset in the “Younger than Jesus” exhibition at the New Museum. In addition, Nastynets’ blogroll was also featured in the Sundance Festival’s New Horizons exhibition in 2009. This sets up a recent precedent for Bridle, and also shows the rapid, fluid nature of social curation as a model for the first decade of the 2000’s. Another key point to consider is that when considering 4chan, Youtube, Nastynets, and so on, curation is not dead. Curation has furcated and multiplied, varying from the more traditional sorts to purely anonymous, “like” and thread-based curation, which is of a radically different form from extant models. Perhaps the “Let me just…” model of curation is divergent enough from the conventional that is sets up a cultural dissonance.
Nastynets, Double Happiness, Dirtstyle and others have purported to locate themselves as movements (the first two as “surfing clubs”, and the latter as a movement in itself), and are precedents for The New Aesthetic as a movement, although a movement that documents an ephemerality. This is in line with Marius Watz’ issue with “The Problem With Perpetual Newness” that echoes concerns with the use of “new” in a movement, including New Media and the Neue Sachlichtheit (New Objectivity), the latter of which is over 80 years old of as of this writing. New as a quality and new as a designator are often in dissonance with one another, and n this writer’s opinion are a result of a conflation rather than a misnomer. It’s a problem to call something “New” with the understanding that what one is describing is eventually going to be “New” for perpetuity.
Lastly, there seems to be a problem with the idea of NA as a movement that curatorially follows the model of “Let me just leave this here…” Historically, movements like Futurism or Surrealism are thought of as weighty, manifesto-laden projects that engage in radical social agendas. Surfing Clubs, Dirtstyle, and The New Aesthetic look comparatively frivolous. I think that the comparison between the First and what I have called the Third-Wave Avant Garde of New Media (the Second Wave being Pop, AbEx, et al) do not reveal inconsequentiality but the shape of culture.
The differences between the fin de siècle and fin de millennium are fundamental, as are those between the 50’s and 60’s and the 2000’s. What is being compared is the monolithic aesthetics of High Modernism, shifting to the shattering of those protocols by people like Hamilton and Warhol. This progresses to where there is almost a cultural plethora of brief movements and groups that pop up and evaporate. Vast concurrences and pluralities in net.culture and the hit-and-run aspect of its nature, begging us to refer once again to the difference from the monolithic nature of the museum to the rhizomatic nature of the Web, mainly reflects the shape of culture in the age of The New Aesthetic. It is ephemeral, or provides assaults/streams of images in the hundreds or thousands at a time. But there is something worth considering.
The New Aesthetic did not come out of the blue, as Watz put so well. It is the result of a series of cultural shifts and artistic projects that have been codified in Bridle, et al’s project. As I have said before, net/techno culture is developing so quickly at the turn of the millennium it has an inherently ephemeral nature, and “movements” as such represent that, as movements reflect the cultural contexts of their time. Therefore, while much of the commentary regarding The New Aesthetic hits the mark, I feel that there is also much more to it than, “Let me just put this here…” However, the nature of movements are far less monumental, as even things like Relationalism (Borriaud) and Superflat (Murakami) seem like projects. Movements like Surfing Clubs and Dirtstyle merely exhibit an ephemerality that are indicative of the cultural context of the technological acceleration of the time.
I think that is why I am still interested in The New Aesthetic. Perhaps I should remain curious for the conceptual year after the Sterling address to reflect the year that Bridle managed his blog. It seems oddly appropriate.
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Occupy Wall Street AR by Manifest.AR (Space Invaders by P. Lichty)
At the risk of sounding brusque or curmudgeonly, I have always felt that asking or being asked, “What is art?” has been a bane ever since art school, because the answer is so complex. People often ask that question in order to plumb the shape of culture at a given time, or in order to “know what art is” so they know what to make to be accepted by a community, gallery, etc. Perhaps I am a bit cynical.
I find that art is a set of cultural and aesthetic practices that have many categories and cultural functions. It is driven by position, context, history, and community – all of these things. It is a dim mirror for the human condition, and an early indicator of trends in culture.
There are many kinds of art and corresponding cultural functions for these forms. There are the independents, of whom Gregory Sholette states constitute the “dark matter” of the art world; there are the artists who to it for therapy, there are décor artists like Peter Max and Thomas Kinkade, there are “art fair artists”, and there are ones who do it for the joy of making art. Keep in mind that categorically speaking, we are just scratching the surface.
The most interesting ones are the sort who knowledgeably try to move the art historical discourse forward through experimentation and challenging of cultural norms. This is what can be considered as the current state of the ‘avant’ and the real drivers of the art conversation. The reason for couching myself in these terms is that in many media, and especially electronic media, there is such seduction for technology, because of its novelty or beauty, artists who work in novel or technological media often feel what they make is groundbreaking only to find that fifty are doing it on sites like deviantart.com. The best work questions form and practice, and springboards from historical frames. This is my biggest problem with communities that use software technologies like Bryce, Poser, and Second Life, as it is relatively easy to make work that “looks like art” when they are ostensibly saying nothing new or challenging nothing. New Media does not necessarily mean new ideas. On the other hand, there are artists like Cao Fei, and Gazira Babeli, in Second Life who pushed distinctive aspects of the medium in its Golden Age (2006-2008), to paraphrase Antin. To go further into this is an essay into itself, and I only make such a specific reference to Second Life art because a Second Life Artist posed the initial question.
Another aspect of the question of “What is Art?” is often conflated with the question of, “What is HIGH Art?” This is art that gets into Art in America, Flash Art and the museums, and that is a very specific question. This is the actual question that is really asked asked many times when people ask, “What is Art?” It actually translates to “What kind of art gets recognized by the art world establishment, or what will a gallerist or curator find acceptable?” This is where we get to the foundations of the matter – are you making art because you love making, or do you want to be an art star?
In the latter case, High Art is the locus of an ecosystem of power, money, fashion, and history driven by curators, critics, collectors, museums, and other institutions. It is a circuit of power, money and influence that began to resemble the current milieu in the early to mid-20th Century, especially through figures like Peggy Guggenheim, Jackson Pollack, and the New York scene of the 50’s. The problem with this is that is reduces the question of what art is to being what curators, collectors, and critics accept as art through the systems of taste and desire that are currently defined. This is far from a clear definition, but a Cleveland gallerist, William Busta, once gave me a key insight into what “High Art” is merely by looking at my portfolio when I was beginning, turning to his bookshelf, pulling out copies of Parkett, ArtNews, Art in America, et al. He spread these before me and said, “Buy these. Read them. Understand what the conversation is about. If you are still here in ten years, I would love to talk to you.” Perhaps that is what I am trying to say – art is a conversation, and his demonstration was the most useful thing anyone has ever done for me in regards to my development as an artist aspiring to interface with the High Art world at all.
As for art in the 21st Century, perhaps what has become most interesting is the emergence of social practice as extension of performance art. The best examples of this is Creative Time’s groundbreaking exhibition, “Living As Form” and Gregory Sholette’s book, “Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture”. These sources show that Bourriaud’s Relationalism is now behind the curve as of 2012 as process and content have merged without any definite desire for material product, and traditional performance art is relatively dead, as Marina Abramovic continues to emphasize through her decontextualizations of the genre. What seems to be at the edge of the Avant is a set of social processes as conceptual art put forth by groups like Theaster Gates, Temporary Services, 16 Beaver, Critical Art Ensemble and many others. Probably the closest progenitor of this line of thought is Joseph Beuys and his concept of “social sculpture” and Kaprow, et al’s idea of the Happening. The new genres of the 21st century seem to be based around autonomy, social collectivism, and general weal.
To close, as this question was put forth to me by an artist working in Second Life, and that my root practices are in New Media, it might be surprising that I have made so little mention of technological art, and this is intentional. Why? This is due to my observations that the linkage of the idea of the trope of the 21st Century as linked to cultural production automatically calls into play so many other agendas like technology, “innovation”, and “creativity”. This invokes a circuit of other agendas of technological and industrial seduction that want to disguise themselves as art but are ostensibly about technophilia and corporate culture. It is so easy to be seduced by the tools and their flexibility that they can masquerade as content. But my favorite analogy is the famous soliloquy uttered by Bruce Lee when he was disciplining a pupil that is focusing on technique rather than content, feeling, and gestalt. He smacks the student, points to the moon, and says (I paraphrase) “Do not look at the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory…” The finger is the seduction of techne, and the moon is the connection to humanity that art provides.
This is why as a New Media artist and practitioner who works in media like Second Life and Augmented Reality, I am particularly conscious of the seductions and absurdities of my own practices, and use those as part of my process. There is nothing specific to Second Life, or AR, or physical computing that makes my art any more compelling, as art still comes down to looking into that smoky fun-house mirror of human experience. In asking what art is in the 21st Century, I think what is important is that we not be distracted by the seduction of our shiny toys, but perhaps reflect on why we might use a given medium and practice and how it reflects the current condition.
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Cyborg Lives Amber Case | caseorganic Tyger Jon Lebkowsky
