February 2009
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[photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times]
Reading from the last few days:
- Alex Pham's Los Angeles Times article on the design and logistics of motion capture in sports gaming, specifically baseball. An interesting read, if for no reason other than to learn the fact that "people who play our game really notice when the angle of the bat is 5 degrees off".
- Bryan Boyer sketches out how the city can be considered a prototyping engine, a test bed for "material accumulations, abstract systems and ways of life" as well as an iterative process.
- Alyssa Gregory posted a fun design and branding flavoured survey of favicons on Sitepoint. The short post includes 88 choice examples and scanning this index reveals exactly how much one can do within the confined space of a 16x16 pixel canvas.
- Geert Lovink's summary of Joline Blais/Jon Ippolito and Roberta Bosca's presentations at a new media symposium associated with the ARCO contemporary art fair in Madrid.
- Yesterday's coffee break reading fodder was Adrian Mackenzie's microchapter on codecs in Software Studies: A Lexicon - concise and extremely informative.
Full-Spectrum Dominance
As evidenced by the above embedded video, local chum Markus Heckmann (aka Wüstenarchitekten) was just in Berlin as a representative of TouchDesigner to collaborate with Carsten Nicolai in the performance of Nicolai's unitxt project at Club Transmediale 09 (CTM.09). Alongside Olaf Bender, Nicolai runs Raster-Noton records, a label that has had considerable success in extending their aesthetic, brand and identity into a "total design project" with signature packaging, integrated AV performance and even installation work. Raster-Noton and the TouchDesigner team used the CTM.09 event to showcase their new Rhythm_Screen project where the "interplay of sound, light, form and rhythm creates a spell-binding spatial experience that gives visitors the impression of being in an infinite dancehall". These lofty ambitions were realized through TouchDesigner powered collaborations with the Raster-Noton crew and SND [The SND workflow is quite well documented here].
While these performances are quite stunning I want to zoom in on a specific sequence from the unitxt collaboration. About a third of the way into the video there is a moment when the "full bleed" visuals pull back and reveal that the graphic we were looking at is actually just one of many, nested in a larger interface.
Last summer I wrote a bit about interface nostalgia and mentioned an older post by Vade at Create Digital Motion in which he praised the UI virtues of nato+0.55 because in that application "there is no distinction between the video screen, and buttons, patchchords, preview screens, menus. It’s just beautiful, and reminds us how important a user interface can be, how it effects our aesthetics - or, how it can *be* our aesthetic." These words, and subsequent recollections of nato+0.55 have reverberated in my memory for months and have now been evoked once again. I love these wide angle views where visual performance acknowledges its underlying systems of organization - this could almost be described as visualist marginalia. In moments like this, integrated AV performance is transformative and turns clubspace into a situation room, a self-monitoring synesthetic feedback loop.
I'm curious as to what other (performance oriented) environments and workflows are out there that operate in this manner - suggestions?
If you're intrigued by this line of thought please note the following links for further reading and inspiration.
- Jost Muxfeldt's Audio Kinematics
- Mitchell Whitelaw's Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals
- Michael Betancourt's Technesthesia and Synaesthesia
Winter Bidness
The above image of the downtown Toronto roofscape speaks to my activities over the last few weeks and also explains the related radio silence. I was invited to participate in developing a proposal to design the new facility for the Ontario College of Art and Design (aka OCAD) Digital Futures Initiative. This venture was organized by Michael Taylor of Taylor_Smyth Architects and he assembled a team which included Cohos Evamy Integrated Design and Forge Media. Our proposal hinged on exploring the notion of media architecture (versus the ubiquitous media facade) and I participated as a new media consultant to help brainstorm dynamic systems for tracking interior movement and local urban conditions with aspirations to create visualizations and ambient displays which are inflected by these information streams. We pitched the virtues of our team bright and early this morning and my fingers are crossed for positive results.
Interestingly enough, I was asked to participate in the above venture based off my writing here as well as my involvement with In the Air. I can only take this as encouragement to keep heading down the same ill-defined (but cheery) path as it appears in front of me.
All of this said, I thought I'd take this opportunity to list some plans for upcoming content as well as some activities elsewhere.
- Reviews are in the works for Alan Liu's Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database, Gerlinde Schuller's Designing Universal Knowledge and the most recent issue of Pidgin.
- Road Trip! My better half and I have decided to make the trek to Postopolis in Los Angeles at the end of March. This will undoubtedly result in a spate of posts on the state of the art(s) in geography, urbanism and design as programmed by the exceedingly capable minds at ArchDaily, BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, Mudd Up!, Subtopia and We Make Money Not Art.
- I've got some exciting material in development for Rhizome, starting with a piece on digital fabrication which will be published next week.
- Last but not least, we have formalized our wee design studio and Mission Specialist is now my full time gig. I've committed to work through mid-April, but am looking for spring/summer opportunities - drop me a line if you've got a project you think we could collaborate on.
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Links of the moment:
- Megan Taylor at MediaShift has provided an overview of TimeSpace, a news browsing interface (pictured above) recently launched by The Washington Post.
- I'm currently making my way through William J. Turkel's Some Winter Reading for Humanist Makers which contains loads of inspiration for homebrew fabrication and electronics. William just retired his excellent Digital History Hacks online writing project - the archives are chock full of great content.
- Mainstreaming Information is an info-culture and visualization studio currently being taught by Lisa Strausfeld and Christian Marc Schmidt at ITP - documentation and a great list of precedents are available on the class site.
- Two for techno nostalgia - Dan Bruno on the basslines in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and Tom Moody on why Robocop > Iron Man.
Tim Knowles - Vehicle Motion Drawings
Last week Victor Brunetti posted some tantalizing imagery to his blog as part of a brief blurb on the Vehicle Motion Drawings of Tim Knowles. Knowles is an artist based in London with a penchant for creating generative systems to record motion and mark the passage of time. He's worked with the postal service, balloons, insect flight paths and the movement of trees to create unique process pieces that sit slightly left of centre to what we might conventionally refer to as drawing machines. Over the course of the last decade, Knowles has jury-rigged a number of cars into drawing devices equipped with a gantry and stylus that records the forces experienced within the vehicle. In Knowles own words "a system of sliding rails and elastic holds a pen on to paper... as you break the pen moves forward, you turn left the pen moves right". The above photograph documents the installation of one of these rigs in the trunk of a Jaguar E-Type.
The Vehicle Motion Drawings have explored a variety of factors related to driving which include topography and landscape, allusions to cinema and large format output where a drive to the gallery yields the work to be displayed. Perhaps the most interesting of these experiments is evidenced in the above Monaco Grand Prix Track Drawing (2001), which records the force and gesture of racing. The display of the work reveals its genius as the "recording" of a drive is hung alongside a much tinier plan of the track - you can read the exercise at both macro and micro scales but the emphasis is clearly on subjective experience. Knowles' Vehicle Motion Drawings capture the linearity and curvature of auto culture and cartographic delineation and suggests a middle ground between these realms.
CM Guide
When I was very young I had a perverse fascination with the TV guide that came bundled with the Toronto Star. Every weekend when it arrived I would scour the mini-magazine and comb through the schedule grid for each night to the point where my hands were covered in newsprint. There was something fascinating about seeing these programming streams all lined up, blocks of time running concurrently and into one another, sitcom plots summarized in twelve words - such order!
Television was a much simpler 57 channel universe back then and it was possible to consolidate an entire evening of programming onto a single page.
This nostalgia for the structure of the TV guide as a printed artifact (rather than screen-based menu system) is at the center of Eleanor Cleverly's CM Guide. With this project Cleverly has used the "graphic standards" of the TV guide to chart recorded human history - from cave drawings through Barack Obama's presidential victory. The work was produced last fall at The New School and Cleverly describes her goals for the undertaking as
...wanting to describe the changes and evolution of media' impact in a way that did justice to the essence of my generation. We are a generation sat in front of the television set... The TV Guide offered a way to schedule our lives around media and media around us. To chart our relationship with sitcoms and news hours and soap operas throughout the week. It was, at the same time, both static and ever changing, as is the complex history of communication.
This detail view is almost legible. You can see that, beyond the expected chronology, Cleverly has categorized certain events and individuals as P (influential person), G (pertaining to the government) and T (technological development).
Cleverly has a brief post on CM Guide on her blog with a link to a large browsable version - take a closer look.
Lisa Jevbratt: OCAD Lecture
I had the good fortune to hear new media artist Lisa Jevbratt speak about her work at OCAD last week and she used this public lecture to provide an engaging overview of her creative practice over the last decade. Jevbratt, a Swedish artist based at UCSB, is widely known for her 1:1 project (1999/2002), which has become one of the "greatest hits" of data visualization. The work condenses every location on the Internet into a gestalt whereby the numerical data of IP addresses are translated into RGB values. The piece (pictured above) provides a painterly overview of the web in the dot.com era - colour coded, and concise. Jevbratt stressed the fact that, to her, visualizing data is an exploratory venture - "make to learn, not to illustrate". She situated 1:1 in relation to her other early online experiments like A Stillman Project for the Walker Art Center (1999) which qualified opinion and experience while mapping that information within the confines of a browser display. As an early practitioner of net.art Jevbratt's other work from this era, which included Mapping the Web Infome (2001) and Syncro Mail - Unconscious Collective (2001) were quite attuned to the mass collaboration and networked culture that have defined the last decade.
[The Infome Imager - the results of a crawl originating at serialconsign.com]
When positioning her work, the manner in which Jevbratt framed The Infome Imager (2002-2005) suggested that it may be the project that bridges her earlier and more recent line of investigation (which I'll get to shortly). The Infome Imager is an interface for creating web crawlers that scour the net from a specific point of departure and collect data
...such as the length of a page, when a page was created, what network the page resides on, the colors used in a page and other design elements of a page etc. It glances down into the subconscious of the Web in hopes to reveal its inherent structure, in order to create new understandings of its technical and social functionalities... The result of an Infome Imager "search" is an image with all collected data, potentially a vast amount of information, presented in a way in which the human brain, not the computer, is put to work on what it does so well - creating intuitive understandings of large quantities of information.
The statement for, and name of this work situates the undertaking in a domain similar to genetics - "infome = information + ome (- suf., all, the totality of, as in genome)". This desire to create comprehensive indexes has taken a very drastic turn in recent years and Jevbratt is now exploring the cognitive and perceptual systems of animals.
[Human vision (top-left) and simulated bee vision (lower right) of the same flower]
Jevbratt has been using interspecies collaboration as a pedagogical tool for a few years now and she just received a major grant for ZooMorph, a series of plug-in filters for Photoshop that "allow viewers to experience the world through the eyes of another species." One one hand this shift of focus to the animal kingdom seems radical, perhaps even a little confounding, but I think it is an example of the transposition of the skill set associated with data visualization into another domain. Beyond this, digital imaging software such as Adobe Photoshop is essentially a "representation machine" not unlike the systems she's developed for graphic communication in the work discussed above. The fact that she's selected a commercial, proprietary platform in which to develop this work is another discussion but Photoshop is unquestionably a universal point of reference in imaging technology.
With ZooMorph, Jevbratt has embarked on will undoubtedly be a wild, extended multidisciplinary adventure that attempts to simulate animal anatomical and cognitive systems within a software environment. She showed a variety of sketches that suggested how distinct species might interpret the same image quite differently and alluded to figures such as Temple Grandin and the practice of shamanism as leads to investigate when researching human-animal empathy and synergy - this project does not lack in ambition.
A few days ago I found myself defending ZooMorph to a peer who was quite dismissive of the scope of the work. I'm curious to see where the research leads though as I don't think I'll be hearing another data visualization artist talk about the significance of Joseph Beuys anytime soon.
Parsing Online Presence
[photo: Joseph Carr]
I've been lurking on the -empyre- mailing list for the last several years and it consistently serves up some of the best art and theory discourse on the net. The topic of discussion for January 2009 was New Years Resolutions for Digital Futures and moderators Renate Ferro and Tim Murray invited speculation and insight on the coming year from a wide range of artists, curators and scholars. I was particularly interested in the following goal from Alessandro Ludovico's list.
Seriously investigate the relationship between offline and online content production. Not only on a theoretical basis, but also trying to figure out how to arm independent producers with both new software tools and abstract models in order to survive and develop despite the old production model crisis and the hyped economical crisis.
These comments (and dwelling on my Web Inventories piece for Rhizome) have inspired some thinking about the "value" of online activity. I'm don't have any aspirations to position online publishing and networking strictly in relation to economics and the market - Burak Arikan, Engin Erdogan (and others) are already illustrating these parallels quite nicely. What I would like to do is broadly qualify online presence in relation to terminology, inhabitation and value. What follows is a series of quick and dirty observations on online production. Some of these list items will be the seeds of more involved blog posts, others will inform some "offline activity" (design) and some might even inspire a response.
Terminology
- In a 2007 interview Cati Vaucelle (of Architectradure) described herself as a "knowledge shopper". I immediately bastardized this and started using the term "info broker" to describe my online activities. Shopping alludes to a certain leisure, while broker seems more instrumental. Under what umbrella terms might we describe online work? We employ words like "blogger" or "networked artist" - what other terminology is there out there?
- David Cohn in an interview here on Serial Consign in November 2007: "Social news sites have yet to develop niches. Instead what we have are the big four (mentioned above) who are really like large national papers. I see Digg as the large national gossip magazine, Propeller is more like USA Today, StumbleUpon (which has an interesting algorithm to determine what's hot, not Digg-like voting) is the local major metropolitan with national appeal" Does online social bookmarking function as a sort of journalism? Regardless of the answer to that question, 14 months later it is clear that the (floundering) newspaper industry is learning from self-organized online publishing and information sharing networks. Also, see Dave's Spot.us experiment in micropayment powered journalism.
- Antiquated precedent: Blogger or online publisher as switchboard operator - frenetically rerouting a network of patch cords. Online content management as signal routing: information cutting across networks, redundancy inevitable but ok.
[Michael Surtees / A Blog Post Loop]
Inhabitation
- Online presence as creative practice. See Michael Surtees as an example of the networked designer who synthesizes his dayjob, personal work, outlook and experience into an accessible and engaging stream of content. Another great example is Anne Helmond's research and blogging practice (note her new The Traces of a Networked Life project).
- Tina Roth Eisenberg (aka SwissMiss) describes blogging in relation to her creative practice: "My blog, which started as a personal visual archive turned into the best marketing tool I could have ever imagined. I now find most of my new clients through my blog, or let's say, they find me... blogging has become a part of my business model".
- Online presence as "temporary structure" to facilitate academic research for an individual or act as a forum for a class - note the countless abandoned thesis blogs.
- More cynically, online presence as co-branding. I.e. book specific blog to promote author, score speaking engagements and dote on media mentions.
Value & Compensation
- A tweet by Geoff Manaugh last month: "The new media dream: piece together a series of overlapping micro-sponsorships as alternative to full-time employment + seek out constantly".
- There was rumblings of a blogger union last year. Potential action: Bloggers restrict their food purchases to what they can afford with their AdSense revenue - a hunger strike. Would this protest be an example of a first world tragedy or a networked labour movement?
- The User Labor overview statement: "...we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web." If adopted the User Labor data structure could counter the strip mining of social capital by corporations - how many people who use Facebook are even aware (or care) that it exists?
- Online publishing as playing the lottery. Example: a post on an ad-laden site gets Boingboinged or enjoys the Slashdot or Digg effect. Blog earns 50 times its normally daily ad revenue.
- Blogger or social network star as mimic of the technology startup. Extensive free or undervalued labour in hopes of eventual funding and IPO windfall - there can only be so many Tila Tequilas or $350,000 book deals.
I'll develop some of these thoughts further in the coming months.
Addendum: For some inexplicable reason I can't find a link to the -empyre- message by Alessandro Ludovico that inspired this post. To that end, I have posted it in its entirety in the comments. Beyond Ludovico's perspective I highly recommend browsing through the January archives of -empyre- as they are chock-full of provocative outlooks on this coming year.
Figure, Type and Annotation
Every so often I come across design that I'm really excited about that simultaneously vexes me because it is difficult to translate that fascination into words. Such is the case with the work of Cristiana Couceiro, an artist based in Lisbon with a penchant for vibrant, sophisticated illustration. Pictured above is a I CAN LOOK OUTSIDE MYSELF which contains key elements that appear repeatedly throughout her body of work: figure, type and annotation.
Each of Couceiro's illustrations read like a miniature stage set. Black and white photographs of individuals float in space accented by coloured highlights and overlaid with carefully curated marginalia. References to Modern typography abound but these are generally neutralized by a variety of "found" text. These elements are seamlessly combined to produce documents which are hard to classify - they almost seem to sit outside time.
I don't feel as if I know you (above) contains a great example of Couceiro's annotation. Mathematical scribbles anchored in a flock of transparent blue squares drift away from the head of a pensive lass - it reads like a thought bubble. I wonder if the image is a self-portrait of Coucerio thinking about her next illustration?
Coucerio publishes her work on her blog which is populated with tonnes of great illustration and photography. [via but does it float]
